22nd March, 1730-1, “Lady M-r, they say, is quite well, and so as in common justice she can no more be detained as a lunatic; but she is obstinately averse from appearing in Chancery, that the sentence may be taken off. Her sister probably will oppose her liberty, because thereby she would lose and Lord M. in effect gain £500 yearly, and the poor lady being in her custody, and under her management, had need to be very firmly recovered, for the guardian may at present so vex, tease, and plague her, that it would turn any body mad." Grange had a pecuniary interest in procuring the liberation of the Countess, who, with £2000 yearly out of the estate, was he said in the hands of his foes, and there was no remedy but to get a pardon for Lord Mar, who could then legally claim his own wife, and her estate. He succeeded in getting the deranged lady into his hands, but on the road to Scotland she was seized by the Lord Chief Justice's warrant, procured on the affidavit of Lady Mary, that her sister was insane. After many "wimples and turns," as Grange expresses it, a settlement was made with Lady Mary, and some grants obtained for Lord Mar's family. Walpole fixed the sum to be given to her ladyship for the custody of her sister, at £500 yearly, "though he swore," adds Grange, "that he did not believe she would lay out £200 on Lady Mar." These details explain if they do not fully justify the poet's satire. There were harsh unfeminine traits in the character of Lady Mary; but her beauty and vivacity, and the charm of her published correspondence, invest her name with interest. Her pictures of Eastern scenery and manners, her wit and penetration, outweigh her avarice and scandal. In the intervals between the publication of the successive volumes of the Iliad, Pope engaged in lighter literary tasks. One of these was assisting Gay, in conjunction with Arbuthnot, in the production of the comedy, "Three Hours after Marriage," produced in 1717. Gay had previously produced a slight dramatic piece, "a tragi-comi-pastoral farce," as he terms it, entitled, "What d'ye call it ?" in POPE ASSISTS GAY IN HIS PLAYS. 147 which Pope was also believed to have had a share, and which provoked the dramatic scribblers of the day. This farce was looked upon as a satire on the tragic poets, being a travesty of the style of the lofty buskin, and is mostly in rhyming couplets. We can trace Pope in none of the scenes, but he may have helped Gay to the last touches of that beautiful ballad in the farce, which begins 'Twas when the seas were roaring With hollow blasts of wind, A damsel lay deploring, All on a rock reclined. It is certain, however, that Pope and Arbuthnot joined with Gay in the composition of "Three Hours after Marriage," and the tripartite adventure was a most unsuccessful one. The whole action of the piece turns upon a low intrigue, and the incidents are forced and unnatural. Fossile, the husband, was designed to ridicule Dr. Woodward, and Sir Tremendous was Dennis. A female character, Phoebe Clinket, was said to represent the Countess of Winchelsea, and Gay's early patroness, the Duchess of Monmouth, was believed to be satirised under the name of the Countess of Hippokekoana. So much personal satire, with contemptuous allusions to authors and critics, was sure to give wide offence, and the piece called forth two replies: "The Confederates," a farce, with a frontispiece, representing Arbuthnot, Pope, and Gay; and a "Complete Key to the new farce called 'Three Hours after Marriage." Gay, in a preface to the play, acknowledged that he had received assistance from two friends, a circumstance they would very willingly have buried in oblivion; and Pope's hand is distinctly visible in the sketch of Dennis. First Player. Suffer us, sir, to recommend to your acquaintance the famous Sir Tremendous, the greatest critic of our age. Plotwell. Sir Tremendous, I rejoice at your presence; though no lady that has an antipathy so sweats at a cat as some authors at a critic. Sir Tremendous, madam, is a gentleman who can instruct the town to dislike what has pleased them, and to be pleased with what they disliked. Sir Tremendous. Alas! what signifies one good palate when the taste of the whole town is vitiated? There is not in all this Sodom of ignorance ten righteous critics, who do not judge things backward. Clinket. I perfectly agree with Sir Tremendous: your modern tragedies are such egregious stuff, they neither move terror nor pity. Plotwell. Yes, madam, the pity of the audience on the first night, and the terror of the author for the third. Sir Tremendous's plays indeed have raised a sublimer passion, astonishment. In this piece, Pope makes Sir Tremendous say that Dryden had nothing but "a knack of versifying," a phrase which Curl afterwards applied to Pope himself. The audience had with difficulty borne with some scenes of this heavy pleasantry and indecency; but when, in the course of the intrigue, two of the characters were introduced, one as a mummy and the other as a crocodile, (an allusion to Dr. Woodward's passion for natural history and antiquities,) the house rose and fairly hissed the performance. The incident is worthy of remark, as it led to the quarrel and enmity between Pope and Colley Cibber, which was only extinguished by Pope's death, and which fills so large a space in his satires. Cibber, in accounting for the poet's persevering hostility, states, that when the play of the Rehearsal was revived, by command of the Prince of Wales, the part of Bayes fell to his share. "To this character there had always been allowed such ludicrous liberties of observation upon anything new or remarkable in the state of the stage as Mr. Bayes might think proper to make." Accordingly when the two kings of Brentford descend from the clouds to the throne, Colley, instead of delivering what his part directed him to say, made use of these words:"Now, Sir, this revolution I had some thought of introducing by a quite different contrivance; but my design taking air, some of your sharp wits, I found, had made use of it before me; otherwise I intended to have stolen one of them in the shape of a mummy, and t'other in that of a crocodile." The audience greeted the satirical sally with a roar of applause; but Pope, who was present, was enraged at the actor's impudence. ----- QUARREL WITH CIBBER. 149 In the swelling of his heart (says Cibber), after the play was over he came behind the scenes, with his lips pale, and his voice trembling, to call me to account for the insult; and accordingly fell upon me with all the foul language that a wit out of his senses could be capable of. "How durst I have the impudence to treat any gentleman in that manner?" &c. Now let the reader judge by this concern who was the true mother of the child! When he was almost choked with the foam of his passion, I was enough recovered from my amazement to make him (as near as I can remember) this reply: "Mr. Pope, you are so particular a man, that I must be ashamed to return your language as I ought to do; but since you have attacked me in so monstrous a manner, this you may depend upon, that as long as the play continues to be acted, I will never fail to repeat the same words over and over again." Now, as he accordingly found I kept my word for several days following, I am afraid he has since thought that his pen was a sharper weapon than his tongue to trust his revenge with; and however just cause this may be for his so doing, it is, at least, the only cause my conscience can charge me with."1 As all satire, misdirected, recoils upon its authors, Pope suffered both in dignity and in peace of mind by his contest with Cibber. The above commencement of the lifelong feud illustrates the poet's own confession,— But touch me, and no minister so sore: And the sad burthen of some merry song.12 11 Cibber's Letter to Mr. Pope. There was another cause for the poet's enmity. Cibber's play of the Nonjuror, produced in 1717, was expressly designed to satirise the Catholics and Nonjurors who had stirred up the insurrection of 1715. He turned the Tartuffe of Moliere into a modern nonjuror. "Upon the hypocrisy of the French character," he says, "I engrafted a stronger wickedness; that of an English Popish priest, lurking under the doctrine of our own Church, to raise his fortune upon the ruin of a worthy gentleman, whom his dissembled sanctity had seduced into the treasonable cause of a Roman Catholic outlaw." The play was highly successful, having a run of eighteen nights, and it procured Cibber a grant of £200 from the King, besides paving the way for his appointment as Poet Laureate, in 1730. 12 Imitations of Horace. Book ii. Sat. i. Another and much more ignoble adversary sprung up this year, in the person of the renowned Edmund Curll, the bookseller. Curll was the most unscrupulous publisher of those unscrupulous times. He was notorious for offences against decency and propriety-for printing private letters, libels, and lampoons; and from his practice of issuing miserable catchpenny lives of every eminent person, immediately after his decease, Arbuthnot wittily styled him one of the new terrors of death." In 1716-17 there appeared a slight publication called "The Court Poems," containing three town eclogues by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and said to be "published faithfully as they were found in a pocket-book taken up in Westminster Hall, the last day of Lord Winton's trial." Curll was not the publisher. They proceeded from a certain J. Robarts, in Warwick Street, who states in an advertisement, prefixed to the pamphlet, that, upon reading the poems over, at St. James's Coffee House, they were attributed by the general voice to be the production of a lady of quality; but at Button's, the poetical jury pronounced Mr. Gay to be the man, while a "gentleman of distinguished merit, living at Chelsea, said they could come from no other hand than the judicious translator of Homer." On the appearance of this brochure, Pope had an interview with Curll. He sent for him to the Swan Tavern, in Fleet Street, in company with Lintot, to inquire after the publication of the Court Poems. Curll said they were published by Oldmixon (afterwards satirised in the Dunciad), to whom they were given by one Jacobs, a dissenting teacher; and that he, Curll, and another bookseller named Pemberton, had shares in the work with Oldmixon.13 Then comes the ridiculous 13 How the poems came into the hands of this Jacobs or of Oldmixon has not been explained. Lady Mary was then abroad. Pope writes to her"Your Eclogues lie enclosed in a monument of Turkey, written in my fairest hand; the gilded leaves are opened with no less veneration than the pages of the Sibyls: like them, locked up and concealed from all profane |