to offer to call at their houses to satisfy them; and so it dropped."

"Whether the production you mention came from the lady or the lord," replied Swift, "I did not imagine that they were at least such bad versifiers. Therefore, facit indignatio versus is only to be applied when the indignation is against general villainy, and never operates when some sort of people write to defend themselves. I love to hear them reproach you for dulness; only I would be satisfied, since you were so dull, why are they so angry? Give me a shilling, and I will ensure you that posterity shall never know you had one single enemy, excepting those whose memory you have preserved."

Lord Hervey was not content with his half-share in the "Verses to the Imitator of Horace." Later in the year he opened battle again on his own account with his "Letter from a Nobleman at Hampton Court to a Doctor of Divinity." The Doctor was Dr. Sherwin, who had addressed a Latin letter to his lordship. Hervey begins by an apology for the ignorance of himself and men of his class, who had forgotten nearly all they learnt at school. course of a diatribe on false wit, he observes:

Guiltless of thought, each blockhead may compose
This nothing-meaning verse as fast as prose.

And Pope with justice of such lines may say,

"His lordship spins a thousand such a day."

In the

Such Pope himself might write, who ne'er could think;

He who at crambo plays with pen and ink,

And is called poet 'cause in rhyme he wrote

What Dacier construed and what Horace thought.

After remarking that Pope has no more claim to

be called a poet than a dictionary has to be called a wit, and that whenever he wants to write he is forced, like a schoolboy, to go and "beg a little sense," the noble author continues :

But had he not, to his eternal shame,
By trying to deserve a sat'rist's name,
Proved 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 if he trust his own?

Had he in modern language only wrote

Those rules which Horace or which Vida taught,
On Garth's or Boileau's model built his fame,

Or sold Broome's labours printed with Pope'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 by genius fired,
By schoolboys quoted, and by girls admired.

Pope wrote a prose reply to this satire called "A Letter to a Noble Lord," which was not printed in his lifetime, though he advertised in the newspapers that such a reply would be published, if the Noble Lord did not, in a week, deny the original letter to be his, or contradict the aspersions therein contained. Lord Hervey did not deny or retract, but Pope told Swift: "There is a woman's war 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 some people, suppressed it; otherwise, it was such as was worthy of him and worthy of me."

The Epistle may have been worthy of Lord

Hervey, but, though it has found admirers, it is not worthy of Pope. There are, however, one or two smart hits in it, notably where he says:

"I never heard 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, etc.,—that any of these, 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 themselves."

I

The lines on "Sappho," again, he declares that he meant only of such modern Sapphos as imitate more the lewdness than the genius of the ancient one, and he points out how impossible it was that he should have intended them for the lady who had taken them to herself. The insult to his person evidently stuck in his throat, for he observes: "It is true, my lord, I am short, not well-shaped, generally illdressed, if not sometimes dirty. Your lordship and your ladyship are still in bloom, your figures such as rival the Apollo of Belvedere and the Venus of Medici, and your faces so finished that neither sickness nor passion can deprive them of colour."

CHAPTER XLIII

1733

The "Essay on Man”

”

was

THE HE first part of the "Essay on Man published anonymously in February, 1733. By this time Pope had become quite a past-master in the art of advertising his works by tortuous methods. In a prefatory note to the first edition he suggests, at the same time that he deprecates, the idea of rivalry between the unknown poet and himself. Thus, he observes that, as the author imitates no man, so he would not be thought to vie with any man in these Epistles, least of all with the author of two lately published. Pope's many enemies, we may suppose, eagerly seized upon the work in the hope of discovering a new genius who might eclipse the bard of Twickenham.

As we have seen, Pope had been at work upon the "Essay" during the past two or three years. On August 2, 1731, Bolingbroke had asked, in a letter to Swift:

"Does Pope talk to you of the noble work which, at my instigation, he has begun in such a manner that he must be convinced by this time I judged

better of his talents than he did? The first epistle, which considers man and the habitation of man, relatively to the whole system of universal being; the second, which considers him in his own habitation, in himself, and relatively to his particular system; and the third which shows how

A universal Cause

Works to one end, and works by various laws

how man and beast and vegetable are linked in a mutual dependency, parts necessary to each other, and necessary to the whole; how human societies were formed and derived; how God has made our greatest interest and our plainest duty indivisibly the same,-these three epistles, I say, are finished. The fourth he is now intent upon. It is a noble subject. He pleads the cause of God (I use Seneca's expression) against that famous charge which atheists in all ages have brought against the supposed unequal dispensation of Providence-a charge which I cannot heartily forgive your divines for admitting. You admit it indeed, for an extreme good purpose, and you build on this admission the necessity of a future state of rewards and punishments."

Pope's original design had been conceived on a vast scale. The "Essay on Man," as we know it, was intended to be to the whole work what a scale is to a book of maps. The second book was to treat of Knowledge and its limits, the third of Government, civil and ecclesiastical, and the fourth of Morality in eight or nine of its branches. For

In the "Essay on Man" the lines run:

A universal Cause
Acts to one end, but acts by various laws.