resembles in places that of the Epistle to the Doctor of Divinity,' which is certainly Lord Hervey's. In each the sentence, or clause of the sentence, is often carried beyond the couplet; in each there is a frequent use of the triplet; in each a disregard of the cœsura. Parts of the Satire, apparently referring to Lady Mary herself, must plainly have been the work of a male hand, for example, the lines—

"Not even Youth and Beauty can control
The universal rancour of thy soul,

Charms that night soften Superstition's rage,
Might humble Pride, or thaw the ice of Age."

But however the authorship is to be assigned, the writers knew well where their enemy was most vulnerable. After heaping every kind of insult on Pope's character and intellect, and proclaiming the motive of his satire to be universal malignity against mankind, the verses conclude:

"Nor thou the justice of the world disown,
That leaves thee thus an outcast and alone:
For though in law the murder be to kill,

In equity the murder is the will.

Then while with coward hand you stab a name,

And try at least to assassinate our Fame,

Like the first bold assassin be thy lot,

Ne'er be thy guilt forgiven or forgot;

But as thou hat'st be hated by mankind,

And with the emblem of thy crooked mind

Marked on thy back, like Cain, by God's own hand,
Wander like him accursed through the land."

Not long afterwards the attack was renewed in 'A Letter from a Nobleman at Hampton Court to a Doctor of Divinity,' a feeble performance, wanting almost entirely in point and wholly in design. The writer pleads, in excuse for answering in a 'homely way' a Latin letter addressed to him by the Doctor, that since he found himself the titled heir to an estate,' he had taken pains to forget all the Latin he had learnt at school. This, says he, is the way with people of fashion, and he thereupon falls into a long rhapsody on

false wit, which brings him naturally to Pope, against whom, through the remainder of the Epistle, he inveighs as a mere pretender to poetry. The following is a favourable specimen of his satire:

"But had he not to his eternal shame,

By trying to deserve a satirist's name,
Prov'd he can ne'er invent but to defame:
Had not his Taste and Riches lately shown
When he would talk of genius to the Town,
How ill he chooses when he trusts his own :

Had he, in modern language, only wrote

Those rules which Horace and which Vida taught:

On Garth or Boileau's model built his fame,

Or sold Broome's labours printed with P-pe's name:
Had he ne'er aimed at any work beside,

In glory then he might have lived and died;
And ever been, though not with genius fired,
By school-boys quoted, and by girls admired."

This poor stuff was written by John, Lord Hervey, eldest son, since the death of his brother Carr, of the Marquis of Bristol, and Vice-Chamberlain to the Queen. He had been an early acquaintance of Pope, and is mentioned by Gay among those who welcomed the poet on his return from Greece, his name being coupled with that of the 'beautiful Molly Lepel,' to whom he was married later in the same year (1720). He was a great friend and ally of Lady Mary at the time of her rupture with Pope, a fact which probably procured him the first ill-will of the poet. The latter, however, had made no attack upon him before the appearance of the 'First Imitation of Horace' in which he introduces the 'beatus Fannius' of the original in the couplet,

"The lines are weak, another's pleased to say:
Lord Fanny spins a thousand such a day.”

The point of the name was derived from a suggestion made in a pamphlet of Pulteney's, which had reflected on Hervey's effeminate appearance and epicene habits,' and the lines, though

'A Proper Reply to a late Scurrilous Libel,' 1731.

contemptuous, were not malignant. They were keen enough, however, to exasperate Lord Hervey, who rushed into the fray with such weapons as may be imagined from the specimen cited above.

Pope now saw his opportunity for a severe retaliation. His adversaries had challenged him openly on ground where they were no match for him, and he made haste to convince them of the inequality of the combat. In November, 1733, he inserted in the newspapers the following advertisement:

"Whereas a great demand hath been made for an answer to a certain scurrilous Epistle from a Nobleman to Dr. Sh-r-n; this is to acquaint the public that it hath been hitherto hindered by what seemed a denial of that Epistle by the Noble Lord in the Daily Courant of Nov. 22, affirming that no such Epistle was written by him. But whereas that declaration hath since been undeclared by the Courant, this is to certify, that unless the said Noble Lord shall this week in a manner as public as the injury, deny the said poem to be his, or contradict the aspersions therein contained, there will with all speed be published a most proper reply to the same. 1733."

The proper reply is preserved in A Letter to a Noble Lord,' dated November 30, 1733. Though Lord Hervey does not appear to have made the required retractation, Pope's letter to him was never published. Horace Walpole says that it was suppressed at the desire of his uncle, who had obliged Pope by getting an abbey for his friend Southcote. More probably the poet was moved by considerations of prudence:

"There is a woman's war," he writes to Swift on January 6, 1734, "declared against me by a certain Lord. His weapons are the same which women and children use: a pin to scratch, and a squirt to bespatter. I writ a sort of answer, but was ashamed to enter the lists with him, and after showing it to some people, suppressed it; otherwise it was such as was worthy of him and worthy of me."

He had, however, thought it worth while to reprint, in the Grub Street Journal' of December 6th, 1733, a scene from Ben Jonson's 'Poetaster,' which he considered applicable to the slanderous charges brought against him by Lord Hervey. He had also published on November 5th, 1733, the Versifica

tion of Donne's Fourth Satire, under the title of 'The Impertinent or a Visit to the Court. A Satire by an Eminent Hand,' which is obviously aimed at the Vice-Chamberlain.

Johnson says of the 'Letter to a Noble Lord' that "to a cool reader of the present time it exhibits nothing but tedious malignity," but Johnsen, to whom the character of Sporus appeared the meanest part of the 'Epistle to Arbuthnot,' was not a fair judge where any of the family of Hervey were concerned. The letter is, in fact, a remarkable piece of satire, interesting, if not in itself, at least from the light it throws on Pope's character and feelings; it also deserves special consideration as the prose prelude to the 'Epistle to Arbuthnot.''

The writer begins by ironically confessing himself Lord Hervey's inferior in all but one respect, which however he is surprised to find is precisely the ground on which the latter has chosen to contend with him on equal terms. "When I speak of you, my Lord," he says, "it will be with all the deference due to the inequality which Fortune has made between you and myself, but when I speak of your writings, my Lord, I must, I can do nothing but trifle." Reverting to Lord Hervey's rank, he recalls the expressions affectedly depreciating the manners of the aristocracy, in the letter to the Doctor of Divinity, and deals with them in a passage of scathing satire foreshadowing the style of Junius.'

"I should be obliged indeed to lessen this respect if all the nobility (and especially the elder brothers) are but so many hereditary fools, if the privilege of lords be but to want brains, if noblemen can hardly write or read, if all their business is but to dress and vote, and all their employment in Court to tell lies, flatter in public, slander in private, be false to each other, and follow nothing but self interest. Bless me, my Lord, what an account is this you have given of them? and what would have been said of me had I immolated in this manner, the whole body of the nobility at the stall of a well-fed prebendary."

He then considers what offence he can possibly have given Lord Hervey to make him rush into such an unequal contest.

For the Letter in full, see p. 423 of this volume

Perhaps, he suggests, Lord Hervey's rancour may have been due to the fact that he himself had voluntarily discontinued the acquaintance with his Lordship and Lady M. W. Montagu, because they had too much wit for him. As to the report that had reached him of their being angry at his satire,

"I never heard," says he, "of the least displeasure you had conceived against me, till I was told that an imitation I had made of Horace had offended some persons, and among them your Lordship. I could not have apprehended that a few general strokes about a lord scribbling carelessly, a pimp, or a spy at Court, a sharper in a gilded chariot, &c.,—that these, I say, should ever be applied as they have been by any malice, but that which is the greatest in the world, the malice of ill people to themselves."

In other words, no one was obliged to wear the cap of 'Lord Fanny' or 'Sappho' unless their conscience pricked them. By the name of Sappho he protested that he could have meant no harm to Lady Mary; but his protestation has a note of irony. "Certainly, I meant it only of such modern Sapphos as imitate much more the lewdness than the genius of the ancient one; and upon whom their wretched brethren frequently bestow both the name and the qualifications thus mentioned." As for Lord Fanny, the name is clearly only a translation of Fannius' in the original, and since Lord Hervey avows that he has forgotten his Latin, Pope will tell him who Fannius was.

"This Fannius was, it seems, extremely fond both of his poetry and his person, which appears by the pictures and statues he caused to be made of himself, and by his great diligence to propagate bad verses at Court, and to get them admitted into the library of Augustus. He was moreover of a delicate or effeminate complexion, and constant at the assemblies and operas of those days, when he took it into his head to slander poor Horace:

Ineptus

Fannius, Hermogenis lædat conviva Tigelli;

till it provoked him at last just to name him, give him a lash, and send him whimpering to the ladies,

Discipularum inter jubeo plorare cathedras,"

The denial of particular personality, therefore, to the