XXI. How loved, how honoured thou! Yet be not vain! And what rewards his grateful country pay? tainly all the persons alluded to in the last four verses of this stanza. There were two Thomas Stonors among Pope's acquaintances, one of Twickenham (alluded to in Pope's letter to Digby of Sept. 1, 1722), and The latter the other of Oxfordshire. CHAPTER IX. LIFE AT TWICKENHAM. Lord Bathurst-Villa at Twickenham-The South Sea Bubble-Atterbury's Plot-Edition of Shakespeare-Translation of the Odyssey. 1720-1726. THROUGH the translation of Homer Pope had become, relatively speaking, a rich man, and his thoughts appear to have been much occupied with the manner in which he could invest to the best advantage a portion of the large sum he had earned. 'Mawson's Buildings' was no longer a residence suitable to his ideas. In June, 1718, he tells Caryll that he had been brought to London on business, "of which building a house in town was not the greatest," and a letter addressed to him by James Gibbs, the well-known architect, shows that the plans had been actually prepared. From this design he was diverted in a very characteristic fashion by the advice of one of his friends. 1 Allen, Lord Bathurst, was among the twelve peers created by Harley in 1711 to form a Tory majority in the House of Lords. Though keenly interested in politics, as in every form of human activity, he played no prominent part in them, and was far more distinguished for his love of gallantry and for his vigorous enjoyment of country life. Burke describes him towards the end of his life-he lived till ninety-four-as possessing "virtues which made him one of the most amiable men of his age." Lord Lansdown writes of him to Mrs. Pendarves: "Lord Bathurst can best describe to you the ineffable joys of that country where happiness only reigns: he is a native of it, but it has always been a terra incognita 1 Vol. VI., p. 263. 2 Letter from Gibbs to Pope, Vol. IX., 510. to me." Every line of his letters to Pope breathes the gaiety and high animal spirits which lasted down to the day when his son, the somewhat precise Lord Chancellor, having retired from the dinner-table with some moral reflections on the advantages of early hours, he proposed to his guests, 'now that the old gentleman had gone to bed, to crack another bottle.' Few compliments, in fact, paid by the poet, seem to have been better deserved than the fine lines addressed to Bathurst in the Third Moral Essay: "The sense to value Riches, with the art Oakley, near Cirencester, Lord Bathurst's seat, was at no great distance from Oxford, and thither Pope came in June, 1718, either just before or soon after he settled down to work at Stanton Harcourt. He had a genuine taste for landscape gardening, which was also one of Lord Bathurst's accomplishments, and he took especial delight in the woods at Oakley, where he had a 'bower' which he called his own, and which in Bowles's time was still in existence. The opening of his first preserved letter to Bathurst expresses the pleasure he found in his company: "To say a word in praise either of your wood or you would be alike impertinent, each being in its kind the finest thing I know and the most agreeable. I can only tell you very honestly, without a word of the high timber of one, or the high qualities of the other, that I thought it the best company I ever knew and the best place to enjoy it in."3 1 'Autobiography of Mrs. Delany,' vol. i., p. 419. 2 Compare Moral 178: Essay, iv. "Who plants like Bathurst or who builds like Boyle?" 3 Letter from Pope to Bathurst of July 5, 1718. When Bathurst heard from Pope of his designs of building a house in London he wrote him a letter in which he very delicately gave him a hint of the expense he was about to incur, and it is to be inferred that Pope relinquished his intention in consequence of his advice. "I have only been disturbed," the letter says, "with the noise of saws and hammers, which has no other ill-effect whatsoever attending upon it, but only that it is apt to melt money sometimes. It may be proper for you to consider of the phenomenon against you begin to employ these engines about your palazzotto at London. Neither Aristotle nor Descartes can find a method to hinder the noise from having this effect, and though the one should tell you that there was an occult quality in those machines which operated in that manner upon gold and silver, and the other should say there were certain atoms which flow thence adapted to the pores of those metals, it would be of no manner of use to you in preserving the coin, but we that lay out our money in the country have the sanction of Horace upon our prudence, who says, 'Vos sapere et solos ais bene vivere, quorum Conspicitur nitidis fundata pecunia villis.' "I have consulted Dr. Bentley, and I find that he is of opinion that 'fundata pecunia' means money which was in the funds."1 In the autumn of the same year the poet was again at Oakley, delighting in its woods and in the company of its owner. The following passage from a letter addressed to Martha Blount on October 8, 1718, is interesting, both as a picture of the country life of the period, and as revealing in Pope a sensibility to the beauties of nature beyond what he usually displays: "I am with Lord Bathurst at my bower; in whose groves we had yesterday a dry walk of three hours. It is the place of all others that I fancy; and I am not yet out of humour with it, though I have had it some months; it does not cease to be agreeable to me so late in the season; the very dying of the leaves adds a variety of colour that is not unpleasant. I look upon it as upon a beauty I once loved, whom I should preserve a respect for in her decay and as we should look upon a friend with remembrance how he pleased us once, though now declined from his gay and flourishing condition. : "I write an hour or two every morning, then ride out a-hunting upon the Downs, eat heartily, talk tender sentiments with Lord B., Letter from Bathurst to Pope of August 14, 1718, or draw plans for houses and gardens, open avenues, cut glades, plant firs, contrive water-works, all very fine and beautiful in our own imagination. At night we play commerce, and play pretty high: I do more, I bett too, for I am really very rich and must throw away my money, if no deserving friend will use it. I like this course of life so well that I am resolved to stay here, till I hear of somebody's being in town that is worth coming after." Moved perhaps by the companionship of Bathurst, Pope, having given up the idea of building in London, resolved in 1719 to invest a portion of the fortune he had derived from his Translation in the purchase from Vernon, a Turkey merchant, of the long lease of a house at Twickenham with. five acres of land, the improvement of which occupied a great part of his thought for more than a year. It appears from the old prints that the house was in those days flanked by the cottages which Pope mentions in his letter to Bethel of March 20, 1743, one of which was no doubt occupied by John Searle, his gardener, the 'good John' of the 'Epistle to Arbuthnot.' From these it was separated by a path running up from the river into the road from Hampton Court to London, which divided the house from the larger portion of the grounds. All the ingenuity of Pope's brain was devoted to the development of this outlying part of his little estate. Horace Walpole writing to Sir Horace Mann in 1760, and lamenting the changes which Sir William Stanhope, the new owner, was making, says: "It was a little bit of ground of five acres, enclosed with three lanes; and seeing nothing. Pope had twisted and twirled and rhymed and harmonised this, till it appeared two or three sweet little lawns opening and opening beyond one another, and the whole surrounded with thick impenetrable woods." The plan of the garden drawn by John Searle after Pope's death shows that by this 'twisting and twirling' the grounds were ultimately made to comprise a shell temple, a large mount, two small mounts, a bowling green, a vineyard, a quincunx, an obelisk in memory of the poet's mother, as well as hot-houses and gardeners' sheds. All 1 1 Letter from Horace Walpole to Mann of June 20, 1760, |