CHAPTER XIV.

TOPE AND THE PARLIAMENTARY OPPOSITION.

Death of Peterborough-Despondency of Swift-The Political SituationThe Third Moral Essay-The Opposition and the Prince of WalesIntroduction of Pope to the Prince-'Epistle to Augustus'-'Seventeen Hundred and Thirty-eight-Secession of the Opposition from Parliament-Conferences at Pope's Villa-'1740.'

1733-1740.

If anything were needed to excite compassion and indulgence for Pope's abnormal craving for fame, the materials would be found in the glimpses afforded in his correspondence of the state of his health and feelings at this period. He did not exaggerate when in the Epistle to Arbuthnot' he spoke of that 'long disease my life.' His letters tell a tale of constant headaches, perpetual sickness, chronic sleeplessness; and passages here and there in them show how deep was his sense of the contrast between his ideal and his actual self.

"In sincere truth," he writes on one occasion to Lord Bathurst, "I often think myself (it is all I can do) with your lordship; and let me tell you my life in thought and imagination is as much superior to my life in action and reality as the best soul can be to the vilest body. I find the latter grows yearly so much worse and more declining that I believe I shall soon scruple to carry it about to others; it will become almost a carcase, and as unpleasing as those which they say the spirits now and then use for frightening folks. My health is so temporary that, if I pass two days abroad, it is odds but one of them I must be a trouble to any good-natured friend and to his family; and the other, remain dispirited enough to make them no sort of amends by my languid conversation."

He found some relief in perpetual change of scene, and every year was accustomed to make a round of visits to the

1 Letter of Pope to Lord Bathurst, No. 23. Vol. VIII., p. 359.

.

seats of his chosen friends, beginning with Lord Cobham and Stowe, whence he would proceed first to General Dormer's at Rousham, then to Lord Bathurst's at Cirencester, afterwards to Bath, ending his travels at Bevis Mount, the home of Lord Peterborough, near Southampton, or sometimes with Caryll at Ladyholt. In 1735 he paid his last visit to Bevis Mount.

"Lord Peterborough," he writes in November, 1735, "I went to take a last leave of at his setting sail for Lisbon. No body can be more wasted, no soul can be more alive. Poor Lord Peterborough ! there is another string lost that would have helped to draw you hither!"

Peterborough died at Lisbon on October 25, 1735. Swift, to whom the above was written, was fallen into an even more melancholy condition than Pope. Deafness, giddiness, and a sense of desertion weighed heavily upon him, and the tone of acute suffering and affection in which he writes to Pope in the following year is tragically pathetic.

"What Horace says, Singula de nobis anni prædantur, I feel every month, at farthest; and by this computation, if I hold out two years I shall think it a miracle. My comfort is, you began to distinguish so confounded early that your acquaintance with distinguished men of all kinds was almost as ancient as mine. I mean Wycherley, Rowe, Prior, Addison, Parnell, &c., and in spite of your heart you have owned me as a contemporary; not to mention Lords Oxford, Bolingbroke, Harcourt, Peterborough. In short, I was the other day recollecting twenty-seven great ministers or men of wit and learning who are all dead, and all of iny acquaintance within twenty years past: neither have I the grace to be sorry that the present times are drawn to the dregs as well as my own life. May my friends be happy in this and a better life, but I value not what becomes of posterity when I consider from what monsters they are to spring."1

Pope, in his correspondence with the Dean, says, as is fitting, comparatively little of his own ailments, but mentions with a delicate sympathy his consciousness of a decline in his creative powers.

"My understanding, indeed, such as it is, is extended rather than diminished; I see things more in the whole, more consistent, and more

1 Letter from Swift to Pope of December 2, 1736.

clearly deduced from, and related to, each other. But what I gain on the side of philosophy I lose on the side of poetry; the flowers are gone when the fruits began to ripen, and the fruits perhaps will never ripen perfectly."

He endeavoured to draw Swift over to England by expressions of his desire to receive and care for him, and by describing the more hopeful state of political life. "Here are a race sprung up," says he, "of young patriots who would animate you." And again

"I have acquired, without my seeking, a few chance acquaintances of young men, who look rather to the past age than the present, and therefore the future may have some hopes of them. If I love them it is because they honour some of those whom I and the world have lost, or are losing. Two or three of them have distinguished themselves in Parliament, and you will own in a very unconimon manner, when I tell you it is by their asserting of independency and contempt of corrupttion." :

And, in another letter:

"Though one or two of our friends are gone since you saw your native country, there remain a few more who will last so till death, and who, I cannot but hope, have an attractive power to draw you back to a country which cannot be quite sunk or enslaved while such spirits remain. And let me tell you there are a few more of the same spirit, who would awaken all your old ideas, and revive your hopes of her future recovery and virtue.”

In these allusions we find the first references to Pope's close connection with the Parliamentary Opposition; and in order to understand the full force of Swift's savage invective against the age, of Pope's praises of the rising patriots in Parliament, and of the satires which he produced at this period of his life, it is necessary to appreciate with some exactness the existing political situation. For many years Walpole had enjoyed something like a monopoly of power. One after another he had seen the statesmen who were qualified to dispute his supremacy-Stanhope,Sunderland, Carteret-removed from his path by death or

1 Letter from Pope to Swift of March 25, 1736.

2 Letter from Fope to Swift of

December 30, 1736.

Letter from Pope to Swift of March 23, 1736-7.

failure, while latterly, by the retirement of Townshend, his old ally and recent rival, he was left almost alone in the confidence of the King. This position he owed mainly to his own consummate address and sagacity, but partly also to a concourse of favouring circumstances, especially the unfailing support afforded him by the Queen, the distracted state of the Opposition, and the disputes of the European Powers, which prevented a coalition on behalf of the Pretender.

The great end of his policy was the safe establishment on the English throne of the Hanoverian dynasty, which object he sought to secure by extending the commerce of the country and by preserving the peace of Europe. The sagacity of his aims is now generally acknowledged; to him, perhaps more than to any other statesman, England is indebted for the foundations of an imperial greatness, laid in the midst of unsettlement and revolution. But the means which he was forced to adopt in the execution of his policy show the difficulties with which he was beset. Abroad he preserved the peace of Europe and extended the commerce of the country by shifting his alliances just as the expediency of the moment seemed to dictate. At home he was obliged to work as the servant of Sovereigns who had but sinall sympathy with purely English interests, and by means of a Party which had no hold on the public imagination. To secure the stability of his Ministry he had recourse to an unblushing system of bribery, both in the House of Commons and in the electorate, and he employed without hesitation, low and venal writers to influence public opinion. Hence his conduct of foreign affairs, though distinguished by extreme adroitness, seemed wanting in principle, while his management of Parliament was open to the charge of cynicism. The nation settled down quietly under the House of Brunswick, but without any love for its Sovereigns; it enjoyed the fruits of liberty, but was uneasy at the sight of a wide-spread corruption; it felt the advantage of European peace, but was angry that it appeared to be purchased with dishonour.

All these sources of weakness were noted and utilised by

Walpole's most able adversary. Though Bolingbroke was indebted to the Minister for his amnesty, he hated him because he had failed to reinstate him in his political privileges, and he was passionately desirous to drive him from office. Ever since his return to England this had been the object of his intrigues. With George I. he had failed completely. The high hopes which the Opposition had entertained on the accession of George II. had been disappointed, partly by the address of Walpole, supported by the influence of the Queen, and partly through their own mistake in believing that the King's confidence could be secured through his mistress, Lady Suffolk. Bolingbroke now saw that the only way in which Walpole could be overthrown was by uniting against him the various sections of the Opposition in Parliament, and by arousing a hostile opinion in the electorate. He laid his plans in both these directions with his usual ability. Through his influence with Sir William Wyndham, the leader of the Tories, he brought about a co-operation between that party and the discontented Whigs, led by Pulteney, Sandys, and Sir John Barnard, and he supported the action of this Parliamentary coalition by weekly attacks on the Ministry in the 'Craftsman,'

This paper was started on the 5th of December, 1726, the year following the Treaty of Hanover. In it Bolingbroke, under the signature of Caleb D'Anvers, with the occasional assistance of Pulteney, dressed in the most. brilliant colours of wit, eloquence, and reasoning, all the arguments calculated to injure Walpole in the opinion of the country. His purpose was to represent the Minister as an unscrupulous and avaricious adventurer, bent on raising himself to absolute power by means of constitutional forms. Every action of the Government was interpreted in the 'Craftsman' in the light of this hypothesis. Walpole himself was compared week after week to the various corrupt Court favourites in Roman and English history. His foreign policy was assailed, now for its servile subordination of English to