partial as it stands, we cannot yield our preconceived idea of Addison, who, a courtier, and a man of the world, was little likely to make such a sorry figure in a dialogue, or to reproach Pope gravely, by telling him how much Steele had improved a

certain line for him

"From every eye he wipes off every tear.” Pedantic as the age was, we cannot credit this of a Secretary of State, and must set down Ayre's account as garbled and partial, however true in circumstantial points.

In thus detracting from the very, the ridiculously high character which Pope assumed and gave himself, as a moral censor, and which his friends have taken up, and claim still for him-for he really sat himself up as a kind of supreme pontiff, or vicegerent of the Almighty, in distributing rewards and punishments here below; witness his "Heaven-directed hand," and his pride,

we do not meditate any injury to Pope or to his memory, nor did Mr. Bowles. It is merely just to reduce him to the common standard of honesty. He was not a bad man, far from it; on the contrary, he cannot be denied to have been a most independent and honourable private character. For as to the thousand pounds from the Duchess of Marlborough, we no more credit this story, to the shame of Pope, than we do so many others to his magnification. Neither does Mr. Bowles at all prove what he had advanced, respecting his avarice, his "money-getting passion." In filial affection, in friendship, even in charity, Pope's life was an exemplary one. But allowing all this, he cannot be trumpeted as an unenvious literary character, as a poet without bile, that never made his pen subservient to his malice, but regulated his satiric couplets by the nice laws of justice and retribution. What satirist and poet has ever done so? Not one; and Pope is no exception. He must have written, like all poets, more under the influence of inspiration than of impartiality; nor can it be denied, that his headstrong muse carried him into one or two scrapes, out of which he sneaked ignominiously. From his attacks on Chandos and Halifax he could not clear himselfhis having praised them elsewhere is no counter-plea; and that the Duke of Chandos was not satisfied, though he pretended to be so, we have the noble Lord's son's word for it. His mean retreat from the anger of Hill is his greatest weakness, perhaps : no special pleader ever argued more subtilely to escape from the damning evidence he had heaped against himself; and instead of the downright contradiction, which conscious innocence would

have dictated, the poet, in his exculpation, endeavours to make Hill satisfied with the way in which he was mentioned:

"Next- tried; but hardly snatched from sight,
Instant buoys up, and rises into light;

He bears no token of the sabler streams,
And mounts far off among the swans of Thames."

a pane

But we "As to

Pope endeavours to persuade Aaron Hill that this was gyric, and Mr. Roscoe would persuade us the same. rather think Hill just in his reasons for resentment. your oblique panegyric," writes he to Pope, "I am not under so blind an attachment to the goddess I was devoted to in the 'Dunciad,' but that I knew it was a commendation, though a dirtier one than I wished for-who am neither fond of some of the company in which I was listed, the noble reward for which I was to become a diver, the allegoric muddiness in which I was to try my skill, nor the institutor of the games you were so kind as to allow me a share in."

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What can account for Pope's enmity to Cibber, unless the story of Cibber's jest at the farce of Three Weeks after Marriage,' to which Pope contributed; and is there justice in the enormous retaliation? What but the blindest malice could have prompted him to put the author of the Careless Husband' on the throne of dullness, or to abuse the player, personally, with distiches about his "Lord and We.” In this contest, we agree altogether with D'Israeli, and think the player had the better of the poet. We back the Apology against the Dunciad, and esteem it a master-piece of good-humoured exculpation. 66 A satirical slander," says Cibber," that has no truth to support it, is only a great fish upon dry land: it may flounce and fling, and make a fretful pother, but it won't bite you; you need not knock it on the head; it will soon lie still, and die quietly of itself."

That part of Pope's life, which has lately proved the most amusing subject of contention, is his amatory foibles, his connexion with Lady Mary Wortley Montague, and the Miss Blounts;-amusing, we say, not that of itself it could be so, nothing appearing to us more serious or sacred than the feelings of love, especially in the breast of poets;-but most amusing, from the blind and angry discussions which it has given birth to some time since. Mr. Bowles was certainly very prudish in his remarks on this subject, and richly merited all the raillery of Byron about his gallantry and his wine and water: the reverend Editor grew quite a literary duenna, in talking of Pope's amours, and is really more savage than any spinster of seventy could be on the point: we should indeed have expected other sympathies

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from the warmth of Mr. Bowles' genius. But prudery seems to be taking, and what is most amusing, Mr. Gilchrist, Roscoe, &c. seem to have caught up all Bowles' horror at the poet's innocent flirtations. If Mr. Bowles, as the Quarterly Review' charges him, did really assert (and we have not time to go through all his notes) that Pope offered violence to one, or all of these ladies, he certainly went a little too far with his prudery in his joking. Poor Pope! with thy long, long years of smothered hints and side-long looks, how much would thy nervousness have been increased, could it then have foreseen all the commentaries that have arisen upon thy timorous passion, and the expressions of it that escaped thee. Alas! we believe, that Egeria must have been thy true mistress; and that although at times

"The nympholepsy of thy fond despair"

became embodied in a mortal object once or twice, yet we cannot believe that such a person as thine could have carried the confidence that attends such hallucination, so far to outstep the bounds of decorum so flagrantly as all this comes to. No-whatever be thy faults, the crimes of Wilmot or Wharton were scarcely thine.

At accusations such as these, the only answer should be a smile; but Mr. Roscoe is imperturbable, and gravely gives Mr. Bowles a rap on the knuckles majestically at every note, that seems to hint at more than the most decorous gallantry. The fact is, we have no documents wherewith to form a conclusion in this matter; the letters, garbled and disputed as they are, are dateless, and from them nothing but conjecture can follow. In the fidgettiness of his affection, he certainly offended both Lady Mary and Miss Blount, and much in the same way. What the nature or extent of that offence was, is impossible to determine. The following sentence in one of Pope's letters is all we have to judge from respecting his insult to Lady Mary:

---

"It is not in my power, dear Madam, to say what agitation the two or three words I wrote to you the other morning have given me. me. Indeed, I truly esteem you, and put my trust in you. can say no more, and I know you would not have me.

A similar letter to Teresa Blount, informs us of his having ventured too far in the same way with her :

you;

"Dear Madam-It is really a great concern to me, that you mistook me so much this morning. I have sincerely an extreme esteem for and as you know I am distracted in one respect, for God's sake do not judge and try me by the method of unreasonable people. Upon the faith of a man who thinks himself not dishonest, I meant no disrespect to you," &c.

Some obloquy has fallen upon these two sisters, not from the

hastily-assumed opinions of Mr. Bowles respecting them, but from the coldness and caprice with which they treated the poet. But considering the little stability of Pope's devotion towards the fair, his affection seems to have been returned as fixedly and sincerely as it was bestowed. In fact, the Miss Blounts seem, with the natural acuteness of their sex, to have understood and seen through the poet, and to have given but a just allowance of credit to his professions. Pope thus writes to Teresa :—

"You told me, if such a thing was the secret of my heart, you should entirely forgive and think well of me. I told it, and find the contrary. You pretended so much generosity, as to offer your service in my behalf. The minute after, you did me as ill an office as you could, in telling the party concerned, it was all but an amusement, occasioned by my loss of another lady.”

This was pretty home of Miss Teresa, and, we fear, truly divined. Luckily for the public, who, in that case, would have had another volume of conjecture and commentation to wade through, Pope never quarrelled with the Blounts, as he did with Lady Mary. But we have dwelt long enough on these "Miscellaneous Quarrels" of his, as D'Israeli calls them.

Of Pope's rank as a poet we have already spoken. By the side of Milton or Shakspeare he cannot be placed, especially in this age, when the number of that superior rank has been swelled by spirits far above Pope, if we err not. In satire and burlesque he stands amongst his compeers unrivalled; but for a poet of passion and invention, even with the Epistle from Eloisa in his hand, he wants credentials. In the passionate parts of that Epistle, those solitary claims of Pope to feeling in his verse are manifestly borrowed from the original Latin letters of the unfortunate Eloisa. His argumentative, pedantic age, 'tis true, that half smothered even poetry in criticism, may have contributed to repress the development of the passionate part of his nature; the good fortune, too, and good company that attended him through life, may have assisted; but we have no right to suppose him in possession of powers that he did not exercise. He owned, himself, that he wanted invention; and, we believe, he would have confessed a similar want of passion, if he knew of such a thing, or had heard it mentioned or discussed, which it never was in that didactic and moralizing age. It was the head that was contemplated and fathomed in those days-not the heart: ethics, instead of love, became the inspiration of the poet-and philosophy, distilled into maxims through the alembic of the couplet, passed for poetry, at a time when Shakspeare's was declared " bad style," and Milton's verse "exotic." Pope, as Lord Byron says, is the poet of civilization;" his Lordship was one himself, not only of civilization, but of rude nature-and, were his merit

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confined to his morality, a part of poesy on which he seems to lay so much stress, we fear he would take up but a mean position on Parnassus. In opposition to Byron, we really know of no component part of poetry so perishable as its moral part; even ephemeral satire and epigrams on contemporaries last longer. Do not an hundred people read satirical, for one that reads didactic poems? In fact, there is nothing which passes so fast and so surely into common-place as morality; and who, at this time of day, does not look down upon the school-boy philosophy of the Essay on Man,' that seemed so bold, so original, to Bolingbroke and Pope. Instance his Lordship's own example, Lucretius, that he so belauds. What lines of the epicurean poet live; what moral sayings of his are remembered? None, except those that are put into some famous mouth, and have become dramatic by such a connexion; their charm lies not in their ethics, but in their dramatic force,-not in their truth, but in their application: so Lucan,

"Victrix causa Diis placuit, sed victa Catoni."

The sententious sayings of heroes are remembered,—but more for the sake of the hero, than for the moral.

The strictly private character of Pope for uprightness, for honour, and warm-heartedness, must ever, we think, be unsuccessfully impeached. Few friendships are recorded in literary history as stronger, than his to Gay, to Bolingbroke, to Swift: it is really carrying suspicion to an outrageous length, to impeach his sincerity, because he is said to have remarked that Rowe had no heart; or at once to proclaim his dishonesty, from Walpole's story of the Duchess of Marlborough's bribe. On these points we are far from seeking to defend the injustice of Mr. Bowles; but the same unblemished character can scarcely be considered the poet's, in his public life and opinions, if the free expression of his sentiments or satire may be so denominated One would think, indeed, that it was incumbent on a person who considers himself as a kind of moral censor, and who exercised that office in all the plenitude of poetical power, to inform himself fully respecting those points which constitute the honesty, or dishonesty, of public men—that it behoved him to learn something of political question and principle, and to make choice of one of the contending parties to side with; or, at least, if he meant to remain neutral, to define, clearly and openly, the grounds and basis of that neutrality. But Pope gave himself no such trouble; he forbore to fathom the turbid ocean of politics, and chose his friends indiscriminately from either party. "Your happiness," writes Swift to him, "is greater than your merit, in choosing your favourites so indifferently from among either party." Neutrality of this VOL. III. PART II.

Y