In 1713 was published a pamphlet entitled The Narrative of Dr. Robert Norris on the Frenzy of J. D. It contained an imaginary report pretending to be written by a notorious quack mad-doctor of the day; and was anonymous. It cannot be assumed with certainty that Addison was at first aware of the identity of its real author. In any case he directed Steele to write a note to its publisher, expressing Mr. Addison's disapproval of the treatment to which Dennis had been subjected. Thus to his inexpressible mortification, Pope found himself placed in the intolerable position of a disavowed champion, reprimanded for his officiousness by the very individual whom he had put himself forward to serve.

The pamphlet itself is, in my opinion at least, quite unworthy of Pope. It is a palpable imitation of Swift's immortal hoax upon Partridge the prophet; but the extravagance of its supposition falls far short of that in the latter, and the commonplace character of the joke is unredeemed by any genuine humour in its execution. In any case Addison was fully justified in disavowing a proceeding otherwise certain to be attributed in some degree to his own inspiration, abhorrent though it was from every principle observed by him in the conduct of his literary life. On the other hand, if he was aware that Pope was the author, Addison showed at once timidity and discourtesy in the indirect method of blame adopted by him. But whether he was so aware, remains very uncertain1. A painful soreness was naturally enough created in Pope's mind. But before Addison's conduct in the transaction is stigmatised as it has been, it should be shown that an interpretation which leaves it unimpeachable deserves to be rejected.

This episode produced a twofold result. Although Pope continued to remain on friendly terms with Addison (his Epistle to the latter, occasioned by his Dialogues on Medals, was written in 1715), yet an angry feeling had been aroused against the latter in Pope's mind which, if charged with the sense of any additional energy, could not fail to explode. He was thus naturally rendered more amenable to the attractions of another coterie to which Addison gave no laws, and where his satellites were treated with open scorn. And, in the second place, it established Dennis in the position of a foe with a grievance quite sufficient in his case to lead to permanent hostility.

John Dennis was one of those old campaigners who can boast more scars than laurels; but with whom a long experience in the wars goes to supply the want of regular training or native capacity. As an original author, he occupied a place among the rank and file of his contemporaries. He wrote or altered nine dramatic pieces, among which two comedies are said by an indefatigable and conscientious searcher of such wares to display considerable merit. As a critic, he undoubtedly possessed certain characteristics which would have ensured him the prominence he coveted even in our own times. He was free from that sentiment which with the generality

Dennis made two statements on the subject, thoroughly contradictory to one another. See Carruthers' Life of Pope, where an opposite conclusion is suggested to that preferred above 2 Geneste.

of critics so fatally interferes with a due exercise of the judicial faculty—a respect for success. Indeed he avowed it as his guiding principle in the choice of his victims, to select leading instances of unmerited popularity. His Remarks on Cato had not failed to exemplify his ability of occasionally hitting the nail on the head amidst a series of random blows. Pope's burlesque of his characteristics had failed to crush him by its exaggerated ridicule. In 1716 Dennis retorted by his Character of Mr Pope, in which the latter was abused for an imitation of Horace which he had never published; and in 1720 he saluted the completion of Pope's Iliad by a discharge of minute cavils, of which as usual a certain proportion were by no means defective in point. Finally (for it is necessary to omit the subsidiary passes in this prolonged duel) Dennis found his place in the Dunciad, and lived to receive from Pope the sneeringly-bestowed alms of a prologue written for his benefit in his blind old age. He died shortly afterwards in 1734, secure of a certain kind of immortality.

Pope's first acquaintance with Swift, destined to ripen into an intimacy of paramount influence upon the younger of the pair, connects itself with the publication of Windsor Forest early in 1713. In the summer of the same year Swift returned to Ireland, after performing services of inestimable value to the Tory party, but disappointed in his just hopes of episcopal preferment. Later in the year he paid another visit to England, in order to heal if he could the breach widening from day to day between the Tory chiefs Oxford and Bolingbroke. In the succeeding winter commenced a correspondence between him and Pope which was continued for a quarter of a century, until Swift's mind was at last overwhelmed by the dark cloud of which it had long foreseen and dreaded the approach. In 1713 Swift was at the height of his influence among the party to whose side personal resentment had originally driven him over. But if the subtle flattery conveyed in the courtesy, frequently descending even to obsequiousness, of his lordly friends had helped to attach him to their service, yet when they fell it was his own proud nature which caused him to adhere with equal stedfastness to a hopeless cause. Swift gradually introduced Pope to the entire clique of politicians and writers who were deluding themselves by the intricacies of their own devices. Thus Pope became acquainted with Robert Harley Earl of Oxford, the lord treasurer, an arch-intriguer who had only attained to power in order to prove his incapacity for its exercise, and whose supporters had begun to doubt the political sagacity with which they had credited his artful manipulation of national difficulties. Thus too he was made known to one whom he was afterwards to venerate as his guide and philosopher,—to Henry St John Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope's literary conscience prevented him from accepting Bolingbroke as a brother poet; in every other capacity he was willing to offer homage to this dazzling and unsafe leader. Connected with both Dean and Secretary, though by a courageous consistency of character elevated above either, was Atterbury bishop of Rochester, the representative scholar of Oxford University; the one Jacobite who was found ready for action at the critical moment of Queen

Anne's death; and afterwards (in 1722) the principal conspirator in a desperate plot. Among the literary notabilities of the same circle were, besides their leader Swift, Thomas Parnell, an apostate from the Whigs and a lyrical poet of genuine merit, whom intemperate habits were believed to have hurried into a premature grave (in 17181), and Matthew Prior; but the latter was at this time absent as ambassador at Paris from the meetings of his friends and boon-companions. A higher esteem was justly enjoyed by Arbuthnot, a man of principle as well as wit, a physician who in Swift's phrase 'knew his art but not his trade,' and a satirist who could work with Swift and Pope on their own ground, and be acknowledged as their equal by both. With Gay, who cheerfully oscillated between political camps as to whose tenets he was indifferent, while his vivacious satire was of inestimable advantage to those at whose service it was placed, Pope had already become intimate in 1711; and their friendship continued unabated till Gay's death in 1732, which was mourned by Pope with a depth of feeling such as he rarely cared to manifest3.

Most of these men, both politicians and authors, had long associated together in clubs where the political element predominated-above all in the October Club; but as the party became disorganised by the rivalry of Oxford and Bolingbroke, the harmony of these meetings suffered, and the establishment of a pre-eminently literary club seemed to offer the means of easier converse. The Scribblerus Club was so named in honour of Swift, for whose name Martin had been substituted as a humorous synonym by Lord Oxford, whence the appellation of Martinus Scribblerus. The burlesque writings with which this club amused itself were subordinated to a very felicitous design, that of parodying all the vagaries of literature in the form of the memoirs of a representative Dunce. Swift (the original notion of whose Gulliver is contained in the Memoirs of Scribblerus), Arbuthuot and others contributed with Pope to the execution of the scheme, which afterwards suggested to Pope his Treatise on the Bathos (1727), and thus connects itself with the great satire of the Dunciad itself.

But the indulgencies of club life as it was then conducted were ill-suited to the delicate constitution of Pope, and threatened at one time seriously to interfere with the project of a literary magnum opus with which he had already familiarised himself. For his experiment of becoming a painter, under the tuition of Jervas, had been soon abandoned after its commencement in 1713; and he had returned with renewed energy to his proper studies. It was Swift who encouraged him to persevere in the arduous undertaking of translating the Iliad, and who, before the hopeless collapse of the Tory party in 1714, had by his personal exertions obtained for him a subscription-list of

This is Pope's own account: Johnson had heard Parnell's death attributed to grief for the loss of his son, or of his wife.

2 On the strength of a caricature it has been supposed that Pope was jealous of the success of

the Beggar's Opera! See Wright's Caric. Hist.
of the Georges, Chap. III.

3 Epistle to Arbuthnot, vv. 255 ff.
4 Carruthers.

unprecedented length and splendour. Yet Pope had never sufficiently identified himself with the Tory party to forfeit the encouragement of the Opposition magnates as well. When the Tories had fallen, when Bolingbroke after his ephemeral tenure of supreme power had fled in disgrace, when Oxford was under arrest, and Swift had retreated with dignified slowness into his Irish deanery, Pope was courteously entreated by one of the Whig ministers of the new sovereign, Lord Halifax, to accept a pension at his hands. This offer, as we have seen, Pope declined; and the brilliant success of his Iliad, of which the first four books appeared in the summer of 1715, rendered him for the future absolutely independent of patronage.

IV.

The publication of Pope's Homer constitutes one of the most noteworthy episodes of his entire career. It thoroughly established him in the foremost rank among the writers of his age, it brought him a competent fortune, it secured him a circle of friends which he could henceforth widen at his own choice, it involved him in the bitterest and most lamentable dispute of his life. Anticipating, therefore, in some points the regular order of this sketch, place together at once such circumstances as it seems desirable to recal in connexion with the various stages of the publication. Gay, in a charming occasional poem Alexander Pope his safe return from Troy (which will be found in nearly all the biographies of Pope and to which frequent reference is made in the notes of the present edition) congratulated his friend upon the completion of the Iliad in the name of a host of sympathising associates and admirers; but even then the Homer was only half complete, and a second equally prosperous voyage awaited the poet, though on this his vessel was to be partly worked by hired mariners.

In 1714 Pope had published specimen passages from the Odyssey in one of Lintot's Miscellanies; and soon afterwards, and during the greater part of the following year, he was engaged upon the translation of the Iliad. In the autumn of 1714 he visited Oxford in order to benefit by her libraries, and in 1715 the subscribers received their copies of the first four books. The volumes completing the Iliad were published in 1717, '18 and '20; and the stamp of completeness set upon the whole by the wellknown dedication to Congreve. The translation of the Odyssey occupied Pope and his conductors from 1723 to '5, by which latter year the whole work (including the Batrachomyomachia by Parnell) had been absolved. The proceeds of the Iliad brought to Pope a sum exceeding £5000, even after deducting the payments for the assistance which he had received in the notes. The Odyssey produced between £3000 and £4000 in addition, in which are not comprehended the sums

paid to Fenton and Broome, who had contributed half the work. Pope's dealings with his coadjutors, like most of the pecuniary transactions of his life, have been exposed to much angry comment, and even later writers have echoed the exaggeration according to which Fenton was requited only by a small gratuity and a stolen epitaph. These squabbles concerning literary honoraria rarely admit, and are still more rarely deserving, of being decided by posterity. Whether Fenton and Broome were sufficiently paid or not, their names may be without danger forgotten in connexion with Pope's Homer. To their employer they were absolutely indebted for manner and style; and Fenton's verse is in reality as much Pope's as Pope's own. For (as will be suggested below) Pope was imitable; and herein he offers a salient contrast to Dryden, whose own touches in the second part of Absalom and Achitophel in every case are distinctly discernible as they diversify a dead level of Tate. Such was the gradual progress towards completion of Pope's famous work. But the publication of its first instalment was attended by an event for ever memorable in our literary history. At the same time as the version by Pope of the first four books of the Iliad, appeared another of the first book by Tickell.

Thomas Tickell was known as an Oxonian and man of letters who had after a youth of very unripe Toryism developed into a full-blown Whig. In former days he had ventured to produce a rival play to Addison's Cato; but the success and virtue of the great Whig author had in the end made a complete conquest of the honest man. Though it is inadmissible on the strength of Pope's unproved insinuations to describe him as Addison's dummy, he shared with Ambrose Phillips the distinction of being universally regarded as one of the âmes damnées of the dictator at Button's. It might fairly be supposed that nothing which he now undertook was undertaken without the sanction of his acknowledged leader. Otherwise his venture might have been regarded as nothing more than an ordinary instance of the competition common among the publishers of the day (particularly as it only consisted of a single book, to which Tickell never added any more, though his workmanship is not without decided merit of its own). But Pope, who professed to have undertaken his own translation at the instigation of Addison's most intimate friend, Steele, and whose mind was only too ready to admit any apparent confirmation of the suspicion which it harboured against Addison himself, was enraged beyond all bounds. His wrath increased when he was told that Addison had declared Tickell's translation to be the best ever put forth in any language. His indignation, accountable indeed, but wholly inexcusable in the wilfulness of its conclusions and the licence of its expression, first found vent in a letter to Secretary Craggs, a common friend of Addison and himself. In this he declared Tickell to be the 'humblest slave' among Addison's followers at Button's. And then his fury found a wider outlet in the famous lines which were afterwards,