bourhood of Pope, at his earnest solicitation. She also sat for her portrait to Sir Godfrey Kneller, at the request of our author, who, on the completion of the picture, expressed his satisfaction with it in extemporaneous couplets. Gradually, however, Lady Mary and Pope became alienated from each other; but the cause which made their intimacy decline has never been ascertained. It has been conjectured, that thinking his admiration of her was growing too fervent, she avoided his society, and that he was mortified and angry at her indifference. To her sister, the Countess of Mar, then at Paris, she writes thus from Twickenham, 1720: "I see sometimes Mr. Congreve, and very seldom Mr. Pope; who continues to embellish his house at Twickenham. He has made a subterranean grotto, which he has furnished with looking-glasses, and they tell me, it has a very good effect. I here send you some verses addressed to Mr. Gay, who wrote him a congratulatory letter on the finishing his house. I stifled them here; and I beg they may die the same death at Paris, and never go further than your closet." The

1"My father had a traditionary recollection in his mind, that the celebrated quarrel or coolness between her ladyship and Pope, originated there [at Twickenham] in the return of a borrowed pair of sheets unwashed; but which was the lender, and which the borrower, in this case, I do not remember."- Anecdotes, Biographical Sketches, &c., by Lætitia M. Hawkins, 1822, p. 75.

verses which accompanied the letter just quoted

were these touching lines;

"Ah, Friend, 'tis true-this truth you lovers know;
In vain my structures rise, my gardens grow;
In vain fair Thames reflects the double scenes
Of hanging mountains, and of sloping greens;
Joy lives not here, to happier seats it flies,
And only dwells where Wortley casts her eyes.
What are the gay parterre, the chequer'd shade,
The morning bower, the evening colonnade,
But soft recesses of uneasy minds,

To sigh unheard in to the passing winds?
So the struck deer, in some sequester'd part,
Lies down to die, the arrow at his heart;
He, stretch'd unseen in coverts hid from day,
Bleeds drop by drop, and pants his life away."

Between Pope and Lady Mary no open quarrel had as yet taken place.

Parnelle died in 1717, and during the following year, Pope was deprived of two other valued friends. Writing to Jervas, Dec. 21, 1718, he says: "Poor Parnelle, Garth, Rowe! You justly reprove me for not speaking of the death of the last: Parnelle was too much in my mind, to whose memory I am erecting the best monument I can. What he gave me to publish, was but a small part of what he left behind him; but it was the best, and I will not make it worse by enlarging it. I would fain know if he be buried at Chester or Dublin; and what care has been, or is to be, taken for his

monument, &c. Yet I have not neglected my devoirs to Mr. Rowe; I am writing this very day his epitaph for Westminster Abbey. After these, the best-natured of men, Sir Samuel Garth, has left me in the truest concern for his loss. His death was very heroical, and yet unaffected enough to have made a saint or a philosopher famous. But ill tongues, and worse hearts, have branded even his last moments, as wrongfully as they did his life, with irreligion. You must have heard many tales on this subject; but if ever there was a good Christian without knowing himself to be so, it was Dr. Garth.”

The fourth volume of the Iliad appeared in 1718, and the fifth and sixth volumes, which completed the work, were given to the world in 1720. This great labour, so successfully brought to a conclusion, moved the spleen of Dennis and of the Grub-street tribe, who assailed it in a variety of publications. These, together with many other criticisms on his works in general, proceeding from the same source, Pope afterwards collected and bound into volumes; prefixing to the mass of dulness and malignity a motto from Job; Behold, my desire is that mine adversary had written a book. Surely I would take it on my shoulder, and bind it as a crown to me. The applauses of those whom he respected and loved were not withheld on the occasion. Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, expressed his approbation of the English Iliad in a copy of

verses; and Gay composed Mr. Pope's Welcome from Greece (imitated from the opening of the xlvith Book of the Orlando Furioso), an effusion of great spirit and simplicity, in which the different friends, male and female, of the poet, are represented as hailing his return to the shores of Britain, after an absence of six years. The last mentioned piece is remarkable for being in ottava rima, then very seldom used by the writers of this country: it had been a favourite measure of our bards in the reigns of Elizabeth and James; and has recently become familiar to every reader by the popularity of Don Juan.

From the infatuation respecting the famous South-sea scheme, with which nearly all England was at this time seized, Pope was not free. On the bursting of the bubble, he writes to Atterbury, Sept. 23, 1720: "As for the few who have the good fortune to remain with half of what they imagined they had (among whom is your humble servant), I would have them sensible of their felicity, and convinced of the truth of old Hesiod's maxim; who, after half his estate was swallowed by the directors of those days, resolved, that half to be more than the whole."

In 1721, Pope published a selection from the writings of his deceased friend Parnelle, and inscribed it to the Earl of Oxford, in, perhaps, the finest dedicatory verses that ever flowed from a poet's pen.

He now turned his thoughts again to Homer,

and issued proposals for a translation of the Odyssey.1 Gay writes thus to Swift, January 24, 1722; "He has engaged to translate the Odyssey in three years; I believe rather out of a prospect of gain, than inclination; for I am persuaded he bore his part in the loss of the Southsea." The work did not fill him with the apprehensions to which the Iliad had given rise, for he had two coadjutors in the present task of translation, Fenton and Broome.

Between the years 1722 and 1723, Pope entered into a correspondence with a lady whose name is not known, but whom, in some verses which he addressed to her he terms Erinna. Twelve of his letters to her have been printed. It appears that she was a woman of talents; that she intrusted some of her poetry to his correction; and that she was in habits of friendship with Mrs. Howard, afterwards Countess of Suffolk.

The change which came over the fortunes of Atterbury was a cause of bitter sorrow and vexation to Pope. In 1723, the Bishop was brought to trial before the House of Lords, accused of being concerned in a conspiracy for placing the Pretender on the throne. Pope, at the request of his friend, attended to give evidence.

"When I was to appear," said he to

1 The work was in five volumes quarto, for five guineas. Of the eight hundred and nineteen copies which were printed, five hundred and seventy-four were subscribed for. Pope sold the copyright to Lintot for six hundred pounds.