but apparently this was not the case with Patty, for Pope writes:

"Pray ask the Duchess of Queensberry (if you can ask her without seeing her) what she means by forgetting you are as good a dancer as some she invites. And ask my Lady Marchmont to carry you to see how well her lord performs."

At Widcombe Pope found a haven of rest, and the best chance of restoring his health. His word was law with his simple hosts, his theories of gardening being accepted in humble faith, and carried out to the letter; while any benevolent scheme he might have in his head was sure of support from "low-born Allen."

"At Widcombe," he tells Bethel, "I shall live, read, and plant away my time, leaving the madness of the little town beneath, as I've done the madness of the great town behind me. I am only sorry I could not bring a few righteous people along with me. . . . I wish Mrs. Blount, to whose health it would certainly conduce, would have been here, where she might find more quiet and better countenances than in her own family. A few honest people is all the world is worth; but you shall never find them agree to stand by one another, and despise the rest; which, if they would, they would prevail over all the follies and the influence of the world. But they comply with what is round about them, and that being almost sure to be folly or misery, they must partake of it."

FOR

some months past Pope had been trying to befriend the unhappy Savage, who had come to the end of his resources, and had wearied the patience of patrons and comrades. The death of the Queen had lost him a pension of £50, which he received from her for an annual poem, published under his assumed title of Volunteer Laureate. Lord Tyrconnel, who had protected him for a couple of years, had cast him off.1 Sir Robert Walpole had failed to keep some vaguely worded pledge to find him a place, and his friends were tired of subscribing for an edition of works that was never published. As a last hope, he proposed to rewrite his tragedy, Sir Thomas Overbury, and bring it upon the stage. The only objection to this course was that he had nothing to live upon while the work was in hand.

1 Lord Tyrconnel, out of compassion for Savage's misfortunes, had taken him into his house, and made him an allowance of £200 a year. But this arrangement only lasted two years. At the end of that time Lord Tyrconnel's patience was worn out by Savage's disorderly habits.

Savage's distress being now publicly known, some of his few remaining friends concerted measures for his relief. It was proposed that he should retire to Wales, and live there upon an allowance of £50 a year, of which Pope, it appears, guaranteed £20.1 Savage accepted the offer, but not in the same spirit that it was offered. His friends intended. that he should spend the rest of his life at Swansea, while he proposed to remain in retirement only till his tragedy was finished.

Pope had written to Allen in the early summer of 1739 that a journey to Bath at that time would be incompatible with some offices of friendship.

"One of these,” he continues, "is what I intend to make you partake in, the sending a man to be saved, both in this world and the next (I hope). He is to cost me £10 a year as long as he thinks fit to live regularly, and if you will let me cost you as much, we shall want few further aids, and I believe you don't care how long our benevolence may last, though I think it can't many years. I told you of him last spring, and he sets forth from this world for a better; that is, from London to a remote country in Wales, in a fortnight; but we are to advance him nothing but by an agent of mine in that neighbourhood, quarterly, after he is settled there.

2

Savage left London in July 1739, with fifteen guineas in his pocket; but at the end of a fortnight

1 Johnson and others suppose that Pope allowed Savage £20 a year out of his own pocket, but, from the unpublished letters to Allen, it appears that he was personally only responsible for £10. From the unpublished MS.

he was still upon the road, and, having spent all his money, could not proceed farther without a remittance. His friendly subscribers sent him more money, and he reached Bristol, where, not being able to obtain a passage at once to Swansea, he made friends among the merchants, and, finding himself caressed and treated as a famous man, he gave himself up to social pleasure, and thought no more of Swansea or the tragedy. At the same time he complained so bitterly of the conduct of his friends in London that many of them withdrew their subscriptions, and little was left him but the £20 paid by Pope.

During his visit to Bristol in November 1739, Pope had written to Mallet1 that Mr. Savage was still to be found there, but he could not persuade himself to find him, thinking that it would give the exile some confusion to meet a friend to whom he had broken his word. "But I wrote him a very sorrowful letter, which he answered in a higher key than I deserved, and a much harsher than his other friends deserved; however, it ended in a promise to go in a few days to Swansea. I replied in sober strain, and laid hold (only) on that circumstance, as the one upon which I could fix any good to himself. And I have renewed my orders since for prompt payment of my part of the subscription for his retirement (for so he calls it) to his own hands.

1 David Mallet, dramatist and miscellaneous writer. He had just made a success with his tragedy, Mustapha. The arrangements for paying Savage the subscription seem to have been chiefly in the hands of Mallet and Thompson. It may be noted that Mallet flattered Pope in his lifetime and abused him after his death.

this Christmas. For he declares against all measures by which any of us pretend to put him into a state of infancy, and the care of another."

On January 25 Pope wrote again to Mallet that he feared "nothing can be said to, or done for, this poor unhappy man, who will not suffer himself to have a friend. But I will immediately send him another £10 (besides my own which is paid him), and take what money you can collect in repayment. . . . I have really taken more pains not to affront him than if my bread had depended on him. He would be to be forgiven, if it was misfortune only, and not pride, that made him captious. All I can say is, I wish Providence would be kind to him in our stead; but till then he is miserable.”

Though Pope published nothing in 1740, his brain was hard at work planning great schemes for the future. He contemplated writing a History of the Rise and Progress of English Poetry," and even drew up a kind of synopsis, dividing the poets into different schools or classes. He also had an idea for a great epic poem, of which Brutus was to be the hero, besides two moral poems on the evils of arbitrary power and the folly of ambition.

Among the papers left at his death was found an unfinished satire called "Seventeen Hundred and Forty," which was probably begun in 1739, after the secession of the Opposition from the House of Commons, as a protest against Walpole's parliamentary methods. Inspired, like his other political satires, by Bolingbroke, this fragment breathes the language of disappointed rage, and pours vituperation on Carteret, Pulteney, the Jaco