memory, and those were at the service of the
trade. The facts he knew, or which were brought
to his door, he recorded, but research was not
in his way. Was he not already endowed —
with a pension, which, with his customary in-
difference to attack, he wished were twice as
large, in order that his enemies might make i
twice as much fuss over it ? None the less —
nay, perhaps all the more — for being written
with so little effort, the Lives of the Poets are
delightful reading, and Pope's is one of the
very best of them.* None knew the infirmities
of ordinary human nature better than Johnson.
They neither angered him nor amused him ; he
neither storms, sneers, nor chuckles, as he
records man's vanity, insincerity, jealousy, and
pretence. It is with a placid pen he pricks
* Not Horace Walpole's opinion. ' Sir Joshua Rey-
* nolds has lent me Dr. Johnson's Life of Pope, which Sir
'Joshua holds to be a chef ' cTceuvre. It is a most trum-
' pery performance, and stuffed with all his crabbed
' phrases .and vulgarisms, and much trash as anecdotes.' —
Letter$ % vol. viii., p. 26.
}â–
So POPE.
the bubble fame, dishonours the overdrawn
sentiment, burlesques the sham philosophy of
life ; but for generosity, friendliness, affection,
he is always on the watch, whilst talent and
achievement never fail to win his admiration ;
he being ever eager to repay, as best he could,
the debt of gratitude sure T y due to those who
have taken pains to please, and who have left
behind them in a world, which rarely treated
them kindly, works fitted to stir youth to emula-
tion, or solace the disappointments of age.
And over all man's manifold infirmities, he
throws benignantly the mantle of his stately
style. Pope's domestic virtues were not likely
to miss Johnson's approbation. Of them he
writes :
1 The filial piety of Pope was in the highest
'degree amiable and exemplary. His parents
' had the happiness of living till he was at the
1 summit of poetical reputation — till he was at
| ' ease in his fortune, and without a rival in his
' fume, and found no diminution of his respect
'or tenderness. Whatever was his pride, to
1 them he was obedient ; and whatever was his
' irritability, to them he was gentle. Life has,
'amongst its soothing and quiet comforts, few
1 things better to give than such a son.'
POPE. 6 1
To attempt to state in other words a para-
graph like this would be indelicate, as bad as
defacing a tombstone, or rewriting a collect.
Pope has had many editors, but the last
edition will probably long hold the field. It
is more than sixty years since the original
John Murray, of Albemarle Street, determined,
with the approval of his most distinguished
client Lord Byron, to bring out a library edition
of Pope. The task was first entrusted to
Croker, the man whom Lord Macaulay hated
more than he did cold boiled veal, and whose
edition, had it seen the light in the great his-
torian's lifetime, would have been, whatever its
merits, well basted in the Edinburgh Review.
But Croker seems to have made no real progress;
for though occasionally advertised amongst Mr.
Murray's list of forthcoming works, the first
volume did not make its appearance until 187 1,
fourteen years after Croker's death. The new
editor was the Rev. Whitwell Elwin, a clergy-
man, with many qualifications for the task, —
patient, sensible, not too fluent, but an intense
hater of Pope. 'To be wroth with one you
1 love,' sings Coleridge, ' doth work like mad-
4 ness in the brain ;' and to edit in numerous
volumes the works of a man you cordially dis-
b2
POPE.
like and always mistrust has something of the
same effect, whilst it is certainly hard measure
on the poor fellow edited. His lot— if I may
venture upon a homely comparison founded
upon a lively reminiscence of childhood — re-
sembles that of an unfortunate infant being
dressed by an angry nurse, in whose malicious
hands the simplest operations of the toilet, to
say nothing of the severer processes of the tub,
can easily be made the vehicles of no mean
torture. Good cause can be shown for hating
Pope if you are so minded, but it is something
of a shame to hate him and edit him too. The
Rev. Mr. Elwin unravels the web of Pope's
follies with too rough a hand for my liking;
and he was, besides, far too apt to believe his
poet in the wrong simply because somebody has
said he was. For example, he reprints without
comment De Quincey's absurd strictures on the
celebrated lines —
' Who but must laugh if such a man there be ;
Who would not weep if Atticus were he !'
De Quincey found these lines unintelligible,
and pulls them about in all directions but the
right one. The ordinary reader never felt any
difficulty. However, Mr. Elwin kept it up till
old age overtook him, and now Mr. Courthope
POPE. 63
reigns in his stead. Mr. Courthope, it is easy
to see, would have told a very different tale had
he been in command from the first, for he keeps
sticking in a good word for the crafty little poet
whenever he decently can. And this is how it
should be. Mr. Courthope's Life, which will be
the concluding volume of Mr. Murray's edition,
is certain to be a fascinating book.
It is Pope's behaviour about his letters that is â–
now found peculiarly repellent. Acts of diseased
egotism sometimes excite an indignation which
injurious crimes fail to arouse.
The whole story is too long to be told, and is
by this time tolerably familiar. Here, however,
is part of it. In early life Pope began writing
letters, bits of pompous insincerity, as indeed
the letters of clever boys generally are, to men
old enough to be his grandparents, who had
been struck by his precocity and anticipated his
fame, and being always master of his own time,
and passionately fond of composition, he kept
up the habit so formed, and wrote his letters as
one might fancy the celebrated Blair composing
his sermons, with much solemnity, very slowly,
and without emotion. A packet of these
addressed to a gentleman owning the once
proud name of Cromwell, and who was certainly
64 POPE.
1 guiltless of his country's blood ' — for all that is
now known of him is that he used to go hunting
in a tie-wig, that is, a full-bottomed wig tied up
at the ends — had been given by that gentleman
to a lady with whom he had relations, who
being, as will sometimes happen, a little pressed
for money, sold them for ten guineas to Edmund
Curll, a bold pirate of a bookseller and pub-
lisher, upon whose head every kind of abuse has
been heaped, not only by the authors whom he
actually pillaged, but by succeeding generations
of penmen who never took his wages, but none
the less revile his name. He was a wily ruffian.
In the year 1727 he was condemned by His
Majesty's judges to stand in the pillory at
Charing Cross for publishing a libel, and thither
doubtless, at the appointed hour, many poor
authors flocked, with their pockets full of the
bad eggs that should have made their breakfasts,
eager to wreak vengeance upon their employer ;
but a printer in the pillory has advantages over
others traders, and Curll had caused handbills
to be struck off and distributed amongst the
crowd, stating, with his usual effrontery, that he
was put in the pillory for vindicating the blessed
memory of her late Majesty Queen Anne. This
either touched or tickled the mob — it does not
POPE. 65
matter which — who protected Curll whilst he
stood on high from further outrage, and when his
penance was over bore him on their shoulders to
an adjacent tavern, where (it is alleged) he got
right royally drunk.* Ten years earlier those
pleasant youths, the Westminster scholars, had
got hold of him, tossed him in a blanket, and
beat him. This was the man who bought Pope's
letters to Cromwell for ten guineas, and pub-
lished them. Pope, oddly enough, though very
angry, does not seem on this occasion to have
moved the Court of Chancery, as he subse-
quently did against the same publisher, for an
injunction to restrain the vending of the volume.
Indeed, until his suit in 1 741, when he obtained
an injunction against Curll, restraining the sale
of a volume containing some of his letters to
Swift, the right of the writer of a letter to forbid
its publication had never been established, and
the view that a letter was a gift to the receiver
had received some countenance. But Pope had
so much of the true temper of a litigant, and so
loved a nice point, that he might have been ex-
pected to raise the question on the first oppor-
tunity. He, however, did not do so, and the
volume had a considerable sale — a fact not
# Howell's State Trials, vol. xvii., p. 1159.
S
POPE.
likely to he lost sight of by so keen an author r.s
. to whom the thought occurred, ' Could I
' only recover all my letters, and get them pub-
1 Lished, I should be as famous in prose as I am
'in rhyme.' His communications with his friends
now begin to be full of the miscreant Curll,
against whose machinations and guineas no
letters were proof. Have them Curll would,
and publish them he would, to the sore injury
of the writer's feelings. The only way to avoid
this outrage upon the privacy of true friendship
was for all the letters to be returned to the
writer, who had arranged for them to be re-
ceived by a great nobleman, against whose
strong boxes Curll might rage and surge in vain.
Pope's friends did not at first quite catch his
drift. 'You need give yourself no trouble/
wrote Swift, though at a later date than the
transaction I am now describing ; ' every one ot
' your letters shall be burnt.' But that was not
what Pope wanted. The first letters he re-
covered were chiefly those he had written to
Mr. Caryll, a Roman Catholic gentleman of
character. Mr. Caryll parted with his letters
with some reluctance, and even suspicion, and
was at the extraordinary pains of causing them
all tc be transcribed ; in a word, he kept copies
POPE. 1 7
and said nothing about it. Now it is that Pope
set about as paltry a job as ever engaged the
attention of a man of genius. He proceeded to
manufacture a sham correspondence ; he garbled
and falsified to his heart's content. He took a
bit of one letter and tagged it on to a bit of
another letter, and out of these two foreign parts
made up an imaginary letter, never really
written to anybody, which he addressed to Mr.
Addison, who was dead, or to whom else he
chose. He did this without much regard to
anything except the manufacture of something
which he thought would read well, and exhibit
himself in an amiable light and in a sweet, un-
premeditated strain. This done, the little poet
destroyed the originals, and deposited one copy,
as he said he was going to do, in the library of
the Earl of Oxford, whose permission so to do
he sought with much solemnity, the nobleman
replying with curtness that any parcel Mr. Pope
chose to send to his butler should be taken care
of. So far good. The next thing was to get the
letters published from the copy he had retained
for his own use. His vanity and love of intrigue
forbade him doing so directly, and he bethought
himself of his enemy, the piratical Curll, with
whom, there can now be no reasonable doubt,
5— *
6S POPE.
he opened a sham correspondence under the
initials ' P. TV ' P.T.' was made to state that he
had letters in his possession of Mr. Pope's, who
had done him some disservice, which letters he
was willing to let Curll publish. Curll was as
wily as Pope, to whom he at once wrote and
told him what ' P.T.' was offering him. Pope
replied by an advertisement in a newspaper,
denying the existence of any such letters.
1 P.T.,' however, still kept it up, and a mys-
terious person was introduced as a go-between,
wearing a clergyman's wig and lawyer's bands.
Curll at last advertised as forthcoming an edition
of Mr. Pope's letters to, and, as the advertise-
ment certainly ran, from divers noblemen and
gentlemen. Pope affected the utmost fury, and
set the House of Lords upon the printer for
threatening to publish peers' letters without
their leave. Curll, however, had a tongue in his
head, and easily satisfied a committee of their
Lordship's House that this was a mistake, and
that no noblemen's letters were included in the
intended publication, the unbound sheets of
which he produced. The House of Lords,
somewhat mystified and disgusted, gave the
matter up, and the letters came out in 1735.
Pope raved, but the judicious even then opined
SOPE. 69
that he protested somewhat too much. He
promptly got a bookseller to pirate Curll's
edition — a proceeding on his part which struck
Curll as the unkindest cut of all, and flagrantly
dishonest. He took proceedings against Pope's
publisher, but what came of the litigation I
cannot say.
The Caryll copy of the correspondence as it
actually existed, after long remaining in manu-
script, has been published, and we have now the
real letters and the sham letters side by side.
The effect is grotesquely disgusting. For ex-
ample, on September 20th, 17 13, Pope un-
doubtedly wrote to Caryll as follows : —
1 1 have been just taking a walk in St. James's
'Park, full of the reflections of the transitory
'nature of all human delights, and giving my
'thoughts a loose into the contemplation of
'those sensations of satisfaction which probably
1 we may taste in the more exalted company of
'separate spirits, when we range the starry
1 walks above and gaze on the world at a vast
1 distance, as now we do on those.'
Poor stuff enough, one would have thought
On re-reading this letter Pope was so pleased
with his moonshine that he transferred the
whole passage to an imaginary letter, to which
7 o pope.
he gave the, of course fictitious, date of Feb
ruary ioth, 17 15, and addressed to Mr. Blount;
so that, as the correspondence now stands, you
first get the Caryll letter of 17 13, 'I have been
'just taking a solitary walk by moonshine,' and
so on about the starry walks: and then you
get the Blount letter of 17 15, 'I have been
'just taking a solitary walk by moonshine ; : and
go on to find Pope refilled with his reflections
as before. Mr. El win does not, you may be
sure, fail to note how unlucky Pope was in his
second date, February ioth, 17 15 ; that being a
famous year, when the Thames was frozen over,
and as the thaw set in on the 9th, and the
streets were impassable even for strong men,
a tender morsel like Pope was hardly likely to
be out after dark. But, of course, when Pope
concocted the Blount letter in 1735, an d gave
it any date he chose, he could not be expected
to carry in his head what sort of night it was on
any particular day in February twenty-two years
before. It is ever dangerous to tamper with
written documents which have been out of
your sole and exclusive possession even for a
few minutes.
A letter Pope published as having been
addressed to Addison is made up of fragments
POPE. 71
of three letters actually written to Caryll.
Another imaginary letter to Addison contains
the following not inapt passage from a letter to
Caryll : _
' Good God ! what an incongruous animal is
1 man ! how unsettled in his best part, his soul,
'and how changing and variable in his frame of
' body. What is man altogether but one mighty
' inconsistency ?'
What, indeed ! The method subsequently
employed by Pope to recover his letters from
Swift, and to get them published in such a way
as to create the impression that Pope himself
had no hand in it, cannot be here narrated. It
is a story no one can take pleasure in. Of such
an organized hypocrisy as this correspondence
it is no man's duty to speak seriously. Here
and there an amusing letter occurs, but as a
whole it is neither interesting, elevating, nor
amusing. When in 1741 Curll moved to dis-
solve the injunction Pope had obtained in
connection with the Swift correspondence, his
counsel argued that letters on familiar subjects
and containing inquiries after the health of
friends were not learned works, and conse-
quently were not within the copyright statute of
Queen Anne, which was entitled, 'An Act for
12 POPE.
1 the Encouragement of Learning ;' but Lord
Hardwicke, with his accustomed good sense,
would have none of this objection, and ob-
served (and these remarks, being necessary for
the judgment, are not mere obiter dicta, but
conclusive):
' It is certain that no works have done more
'service to mankind than those which have
' appeared in this shape upon familiar subjects,
'and which, perhaps, were never intended to be
' published, and it is this which makes them so
' valuable, for I must confess, for my own part,
4 that letters which are very elaborately written,
'and originally intended for the press, are
1 generally the most insignificant, and very little
'worth any person's reading' (2 Atkyns, p.
357)-
I am encouraged by this authority to express
the unorthodox opinion that Pope's letters, with
scarcely half-a-dozen exceptions, and only one
notable exception, are very little worth any
person's reading.
Pope's epistolary pranks have, perhaps, done
him some injustice. It has always been the
fashion to admire the letter which, first appear-
ing in 1737, in Pope's correspondence, and
there attributed to Gay, describes the death by
POPE. 73
lightning of the rustic lovers John Hewet and
Sarah Drew. An identical description occurring
in a letter written by Pope to Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu, and subsequently published by Warton
from the original, naturally caused the poet to
be accused of pilfering another man's letter, and
sending it off as his own. Mr. Thackeray so
puts it in his world-famous Lectures, and few
literary anecdotes are better known ; but the
better opinion undoubtedly is that the letter was
Pope's from the beginning, and attributed by
him to Gay because he did not want to have it
appear that on the date in question he was
corresponding with Lady Mary. After all,
there is a great deal to be said in favour of
honesty.
When we turn from the man to the poet we
have at once to change our key. A cleverer
fellow than Pope never commenced author. He
was in his own mundane way as determined to
be a poet, and the best going, as John Milton
himself. He took pains to be splendid — he
polished and pruned. His first draft never
reached trie printer — though he sometimes said
it did. This ought, I think, to endear him to
us in these hasty days, when authors high and
low think nothing of emptying the slops of their
*
74
POPE.
minds over their readers, without so much as a
cry of â– Heads below !'
Pope's translation of the Iliad was his first
great undertaking, and he worked at it like a
Trojan. It was published by subscription for
two guineas ; that is, the first part was. His
friends were set to work to collect subscribers.
Caryll alone got thirty-eight. Pope fully entered
into this. He was always alive to the value of
his wares, and despised the foppery of those of
his literary friends who would not make money
out of their books, but would do so out of their
country. He writes to Caryll :
1 But I am in good earnest of late, too much
1 a man of business to mind metaphors and
'similes. I find subscribing much superior to
' writing, and there is a sort of little epigram I
1 more especially delight in, after the manner
'of rondeaus, which begin and end all in the
4 same words, namely — ' " Received " and " A.
'" Pope." These epigrams end smartly, and each
'of them is tagged with two guineas. Of
'these, as I have learnt, you have composed
1 several ready for me to set my name to.'
This is certainly much better than that
trumpery walk in the moonshine. Pope had
not at this time joined the Tories, and both
POPE, 75
parties subscribed. He cleared over ^5,000
by the Iliad. Over the Odyssey he slackened,
and employed two inferior wits to do half the
books ; but even after paying his journeymen
he made nearly ^4,000 over the Odyssey. Well
might he write in later life —
' Since, thanks to Homer, I do live and thrive.*
Pope was amongst the first of prosperous
authors, and heads the clan of cunning fellows
who have turned their lyrical cry into consols,
and their odes into acres.
Of the merits of this great work it is not
necessary to speak at length. Mr. Edmund
Yates tells a pleasant story of how one day,
when an old school Homer lay on his table,
Shirley Brooks sauntered in, and taking the
book up, laid it down again, dryly observing :
• Ah ! I see you have Homer's Iliad ! Well,
*I believe it is the best' And so it is.
Homer's Iliad is the best, and Pope's Homer's
Iliad is the second best. Whose is the third
best is controversy.
Pope knew next to no Greek, but then he
did not work upon the Greek text. He had
Chapman's translation ever at his elbow, also
the version of John Ogilby, which had appeared
76 POPE.
in 1660— a splendid folio, with illustrations b}
the celebrated Hollar. Dryden had not got
farther than the first book of the Iliad, and a
fragment of the sixth book. A faithful rendering
of the exact sense of Homer is not, of course,
to be looked for. In the first book Pope
describes the captive maid Briseis as looking
back. In Homer she does not look back, but
in Dryden she does ; and Pope followed
Dryden, and did not look, at all events, any
farther back.
But what really is odd is that in Cowper's
translation Briseis looks back too. Now,
Cowper hnd been to a public school, and con-
sequently knew Greek, and made it his special
boast that, though dull, he was faithful. It is
easy to make fun of Pope's version, but true
scholars have seldom done so. Listen to
Professor Conington* : —
1 It has been, and I hope still is, the
'delight of every intelligent schoolboy. They
1 read of kings, and heroes, and mighty deeds
1 in language which, in its calm majestic flow,
• unhasting, unresting, carries them on as irre-
1 sistibly as Homer's own could do were
4 they born readers of Greek, and their minds
* In Oxford Essays for 1858.
POPE. 77
1 are filled with a conception of the heroic
'age, not indeed strictly true, but almost as
'near the truth as that which was enter-
'tained by Virgil himself.'
Mr. D. G. Rossetti, himself both an
admirable translator and a distinguished poet,
has in effect laid down the first law of
rhythmical translation thus : ' Thou shaU not
'turn a good poem into a bad one.' Pope kept
this law.
Pope was a great adept at working upon
other men's stuff. There is hardly anything in
which men differ more enormously than in the
degree in which they possess this faculty of
utilization. Pope's Essay on Criticism, which
brought him great fame, and was thought a
miracle of wit, was the result of much hasty
reading, undertaken with the intention of ap-
propriation. Apart from the lima labor, which
was enormous, and was never grudged by Pope,
there was not an hour's really hard work in it.
Dryden had begun the work of English criticism
with his Essay on Dramatic Poesy, and other
well-known pieces. He had also translated
Boileau's Art of Poetry. Then there were the
works of those noble lords, Lord Sheffield, Lord
Roscommon, Lord Granville, and the Duke of
7 8 POPE.
Buckingham. Pope, who loved a brief, read all
these books greedily, and with an amazing
quick eye for points. His orderly brain and
brilliant wit re-arranged and rendered resplendent
the ill-placed and ill-set thoughts of other men.
The same thing is noticeable in the most
laboured production of his later life, the cele-
brated Essay on Man. For this he was coached
by Lord Bolingbroke.
Pope was accustomed to talk with much
solemnity of his ethical system, of which the
Essay on Man is but a fragment, but we need
not trouble ourselves about it. Dr. Johnson
said about Clarissa Harlowe that the man who
read it for the story might hang himself; so
we may say about the poetry of Pope : the
man who reads it for its critical or ethical
philosophy may hang himself. We read Pope
for pleasure, but a bit of his philosophy may
be given :
' Presumptuous man ! the reason wouldst thou find,
Why formed so weak, so little, and so blind ?
First, if thou canst, the harder reason guess,
Why formed no weaker, blinder, and no less ?
Ask of thy mother Earth why oaks are made
Taller and stronger than the weeds they shade 1
Or ask of yonder argent fields above
Why Jove's satellites are less than Jove V
POPE. 79
To this latter interrogatory presumptuous science,
speaking through the mouth of Voltaire, was