WRITES HIS PASTORALS.

23

one Abbé Southcote, who, on receiving Pope's valedictory communication, went immediately to consult Dr. Radcliffe, an eccentric but able physician. Radcliffe's prescription was a very simple one-the young man was to study less and ride on horseback every day. With this recipe the Father posted to Binfield; and Pope having the good sense to follow the prescribed course, speedily got well. The good Father's timely aid was not forgotten. Twenty years afterwards, the poet hearing of a vacant Abbey at Avignon, wrote immediately to Sir Robert Walpole, requesting his influence with Cardinal Fleury to obtain the appointment for Southcote. Walpole applied to his brother Horace, then British resident at the French Court, and Southcote was made abbot. The incident is a pleasing one, and honourable to all parties.

Pope in his sixteenth year was engaged on his Pastorals. Dreams of the golden age and of rural innocence, which have long since faded even from our poetry, were congenial to the young classic student in Windsor Forest. The ideas and images he found in Theocritus, Virgil, and Spenser, "whose works," he says, as I had leisure to study, so I hope I have not wanted care to imitate." The versification was his chief object, and he elaborated it with such attention to the sweetness he prized in Virgil and Waller, and with such exactness and nicety in the construction of his lines, that even in advanced life, when poetry had long been his trade, he considered the Pastorals the most correct and musical of all his works. The manuscript was submitted to the perusal of his neighbour, Sir William Trumbull, who may be considered as Pope's earliest patron, though in his case patronage never degenerated into absolute dependence or servility. The paternal cell and limited fortune at Binfield secured independence. Sir William Trumbull was a benevolent and accomplished man. After long public and diplomatic service, first as ambassador at the Ottoman Porte, and subsequently as Secretary of State to King William III., he retired in the year 1697 to his native

village of Easthampstead, and formed an acquaintance with the Popes at Binfield. He read the manuscript of the Pastorals in the year 1704; and notwithstanding the disparity in age and circumstances, the acquaintance between the travelled knight and the retired young poet soon ripened into a cordial intimacy. They rode out together almost daily, read their favourite classic authors together, and when absent kept up a correspondence. Sir William was the first to suggest to Pope that he should undertake a translation of the Iliad. Some years later, when Pope had been drawn into the vortex of gay and not very select society, the old statesman, with paternal anxiety, wrote to him, earnestly beseeching that he would get out of all tavern company, and fly away tanquam ex incendio. a misery is it for you to be destroyed by the foolish kindness (it is all one whether real or pretended) of those who are able to bear the poison of bad wine, and to engage you in so unequal a combat!"

One half was heard, the other lost in air.

"What

Sir William Trumbull introduced Pope to Wycherley, the "earliest of the chiefs of our prose drama," as his latest and best editor, Mr. Leigh Hunt, terms him, and whom the weight of sixty-four years, and a life as careless and as strangely diversified as that of any of the fine gentlemen in his comedies, had neither sobered nor depressed. He was still a wit and beau, but in ruins. the author of the Plain Dealer, the friend of Dryden, and the once-fashionable and irresistible courtier, Wycherley had powerful attractions for young Pope. In town, he says, he " ran after him like a dog," and in his letters he overflowed with elaborate expressions of humility and gratitude. His first glimpses of town life and coffee-house society were opened up by this acquaintance. Wycherley, in his turn, was willing to profit by the literary talents of his new friend. "I am," said the dramatist, "like an old rook who is ruined by gaming, and forced to live on the

good fortune of the pushing young men whose fancies are so vigorous that they ensure their success in their adventures with the Muses." And acting in the spirit of this self-abasing declaration, he submitted his poems to his pushing young friend for correction. Gil Blas was not then written, and Pope undertook the perilous office. At first he appears to have succeeded to the satisfaction of Wycherley, who longed to reap a fresh harvest of poetical honours. "You have," he said, "pruned my fading laurels of some superfluous, sapless, and dead branches, to make the remainder live the longer; and thus, like your master Apollo, you are at once a poet and a physician." The next application was of a sharper and less palatable description. Pope said he had contracted some of the pieces, as we do sunbeams, to improve their energy and force;" some he took quite away, "as we take branches from a tree to add to the fruit;" and others he "entirely new expressed and

turned more into poetry." The somewhat mortified wit grumbled forth thanks. As to the verses, he said, “let them undergo your purgatory;" and, by way of sedative, he threw out a hope that his critic's "great, vigorous, and active mind would not be able to destroy his little, tender, and crazy carcase." The "infallible Pope" proceeded, and letters were interchanged full of forced wit and hollow professions of great regard, till at length the young critic boldly suggested, that with regard to some of the pieces, it would be better to destroy the whole frame, and reduce them into single thoughts in prose, in the manner of Rochefoucault's maxims. This staggered Wycherley, and brought the farce of poet and critic to an end. The unfortunate manuscripts were recalled, and Pope about the

WYCHERLEY.

same time wrote to say, that as merely marking the repetitions on the margin would not get rid of those repetitions,

nor

rectify the method, connect the matter, or improve the poetry, it was his opinion and desire. that his friend

should take the

papers out of his hands! There is a dash of petulance in this closing epistle,

and Mr. Leigh Hunt's summing-up is the correct one: "Of the two, Wycherley appears to have been less in the wrong,

LAST ILLNESS OF WYCHERLEY.

27

but then his experience left him the smaller excuse for not foreseeing the result." The correctness of Pope's judgment was fully verified by the posthumous publication of Wycherley's poems; but Wycherley had actually reduced many of his pieces into prose maxims. In the poetry, Pope's corrected or contributed lines are easily discernible. He brought the skill of the artist to the observation and wit of the man of the world, who, even in his dotage, was no ordinary thinker. The dramatist lived five years after the close of this correspondence. By the help of common friends a reconciliation. was effected, and Pope visited Wycherley in his last illness. Of this serio-comic scene he has given a description in one of his letters to Mr. Edward Blount :

Jan. 21, 1715-16.

I know of nothing that will be so interesting to you at present, as some circumstances of the last act of that eminent comic poet, and our friend, Wycherley. He had often told me, as I doubt not he did all his acquaintance, that he would marry as soon as his life was despaired of. Accordingly, a few days before his death, he underwent the ceremony; and joined together those two sacraments, which, wise men say, should be the last we receive; for, if you observe, matrimony is placed after extreme unction in our catechism, as a kind of hint of the order of time in which they are to be taken. The old man then lay down, satisfied in the conscience of having by this one act paid his just debts, obliged a woman, who (he was told) had merit, and shown an heroic resentment of the ill-usage of his next heir. Some hundred pounds which he had with the lady discharged those debts; a jointure of four hundred a-year made her a recompense; and the nephew he left to comfort himself as well as he could, with the miserable remains of a mortgaged estate. I saw our friend twice after this was done, less peevish in his sickness than he used to be in his health; neither much afraid of dying, nor (which in him had been more likely) much ashamed of marrying. The evening before he expired, he called his young wife to the bedside, and earnestly entreated her not to deny him one request, the last he should make. Upon her assurances of consenting to it, he told her, " My dear, it is only this, that you will never marry an old man again." I cannot help remarking, that sickness, which often destroys both wit and wisdom, yet seldom has power to remove that talent which we call humour. Mr. Wycherley showed his, even in this last compliment; though I think his request a little hard, for why should he bar her from doubling her jointure on the same easy terms?