posing of the calumny afterwards revived by Bowles. A letter from Mrs. Caryll to Martha Blount, preserved at Mapledurham, also expresses the fullest conviction of that lady and her husband of the groundlessness of the accusation.' Whether Pope was justified in concluding that Teresa Blount was the propagator of the scandal it is impossible to say, though it can have been circulated only by one who was intimately acquainted with both Caryll and Pope. Teresa's character seems to have been bolder and more masculine than Martha's; her temper, as far as we can gather it from Pope's correspondence, was haughty and capricious; she was apparently inclined to be a devotee in religion; and, if Pope's letters to her in 1717 have been rightly interpreted, she had rejected with disdain his proposal to her for the hand of her sister. It is difficult, however, to suppose that she would have been so base as to injure Martha's reputation out of spite to Pope, and it consists better with probability and the poet's own character to conclude, that his belief as to the authorship of the scandal was mere suspicion springing out of a long and rooted dislike.

Amidst all his labours and anxieties his charity was not idle. His correspondence with Caryll at this period contains frequent mention of a Mrs. Cope, in whose unhappy history he was deeply interested. This lady was the wife of Captain Cope, an officer who had served under Marlborough, and was afterwards stationed with his regiment at Port Mahon. Mrs. Cope remained in England, and her husband contracted a bigamous marriage abroad with one Eulalia Morell. deserted wife, with the assistance of her friends in 1720, made two journeys to Port Mahon to endeavour to obtain recognition from her husband, but in vain, and on her return home the second time she was obliged to settle in a very destitute condition in France. Here she was supported by the kindness of a few friends, among whom Pope was the most active. She had been introduced to him in 1711 by Caryll, whose first

1 Carruthers' Life of Pope,' p. 230.

The

cousin she was, and he was charmed with her wit, vivacity, and good sense.' He seems to have contributed to help her £20 a year from the time of her settlement in France till her death; and not content with aiding her himself, he exerted himself warmly to interest others, notably the Abbé Southcote and Robert Arbuthnot, in her behalf. She lingered on in great necessity and suffering-she had cancer in her breast till May, 1728, when she died at Bar-sur-Aube, the expense to which she was put for surgeons and necessaries in her last illness having been defrayed by Pope.

In 1726 the poet lost his friend Robert Digby. He was the second son of the fifth Lord Digby, and was for some time heir apparent to the title; but his health was always wretched, and from Gay's poem on Pope's return from Greece we gather that anything like loudness or coarseness was intolerable to his fastidious refinement. A member of Magdalen College, Oxford, he had rooms there in which Pope lodged in his frequent excursions to the University, while he was engaged on the translation of Homer. Like Lord Bathurst he had an intense love of the country, but a love of the meditative, philosophic kind, very different from the vigorous delight in the open air characteristic of the sporting and planting proprietor of Oakley. One of Pope's best letters,-that to Martha Blount describing Sherborne,—was written from his house,' and it is noteworthy that in the letters to Digby are to be found the two passages in Pope's writings which disclose the most genuinely poetical feeling for Nature. One is the description of Spring at Twickenham :

"Our river glitters beneath an unclouded sun, at the same time that its banks retain the verdure of showers; our gardens are offering their first nosegays; our trees, like new acquaintance brought happily together, are stretching their arms to meet each other, and growing nearer and nearer every hour; the birds are paying their thanksgiving songs for the new habitations I have made them." 3

Letter from Pope to Caryll of July 19, 1711.

2 Vol. IX., p. 300.

VOL. V.

3 Letter from Pope to Digby of May 1, 1720.

P

The other is in praise of Autumn, and shows that the lessons he had taken in painting had not been lost upon his taste:

"Do not talk of the decay of the year; the season is good when the people are so. It is the best time in the year for a painter; there is more variety of colours in the leaves; the prospects begin to open, through the thinner woods over the valleys, and through the high canopies of trees to the higher arch of heaven: the dews of the morning impearl every thorn, and scatter diamonds on the verdant mantle of the earth; the frosts are fresh and wholesome what would you have? The moon shines too, though not for lovers these cold nights, but for astronomers."

A fervent admiration for Pope breathes through all Digby's letters, which the poet repaid with real affection. There is genuine feeling in the epitaph which he inscribed on the monument in Sherborne Church to the memory of Robert and his sister Mary. The former died on the 19th or 20th of May, 1726; Mary, a favourite sister, whose activity and gaiety are alluded to in the correspondence, survived him till 1729, when she died of the small-pox.

1 Letter from Pope to Digby of October 10, 1723.

CHAPTER X.

THE WAR WITH THE DUNCES.

The Miscellanies'-The Origin of the Dunciad '-Its motives as described by Cleland and Savage-Its real motives-Pope's causes of quarrel with the various persons satirised-The Grub Street Journal.

1726-1737.

POPE's career up to this point had been a signal proof of the growing power of literature in English society. By his religion he was completely barred from all advancement in the path of politics, which had brought Addison and other men of letters to various degrees of fortune and position. He had early perceived that whatever success he might ultimately obtain must be won by pleasing the public taste and imagination, and towards this object he had pressed with admirable patience and resolution. His labours on the translation of Homer had brought him a pecuniary return hitherto unexampled in the history of literature. The son of an obscure tradesman, he was welcomed as a friend and equal by the most distinguished members of an aristocracy as proud as any in Europe. But a triumph so unprecedented could hardly be won without an almost equivalent amount of loss and vexation. The men of letters who had failed to secure equal favours from the public were naturally disinclined to ascribe Pope's success entirely to his superior merit. Some of them could carry their recollections back to the time when Oldham had written his 'Satire dissuading from Poetry'; when the author of Hudibras' had died in want of the necessaries of life; when Milton had received the merest pittance for Paradise Lost'; and when Drvden had been forced to support himself by the fawning flattery of noble patrons.' Some again disliked Pope 1 Dennis's Remarks on Pope's Homer, 1717.

on account of his religion: others had received from him some personal cause of offence: all of them were ready to make use of any weapon which could lower his character or genius in public esteem. On the other hand, the poet's self-love and ambition had been enormously increased by success, and a temper, from childhood impatient of opposition, was now super-sensitively alive to all criticism which was calculated to make his countrymen's judgment of his merits less favourable than his own. Though, like many other men of similar disposition, he had a profound conviction of the excellence of his own motives, his rancour against his enemies was doubtless embittered by a sense that there was an element of justice in the criticism passed on his edition of Shakespeare, and on his conduct to his partners and to the public in the translation of the Odyssey.' Thus with Genius, Vanity, Spleen, and Suspicion on one side, and Failure, Envy and Malignity on the other, all the materials were accumulating for the outbreak of the great literary war which culminated in the publication of the Dunciad.' The history of the war is full of incidents illustrative of human nature, and of the respective characters of Pope and his enemies.

Evidence is not wanting to show that the first conception of the Dunciad' had been formed as early as 1720; and it is certain that in 1725 Pope had completed a satire in which, under cover of correcting the taste of the town in wit and criticism, he made severe personal attacks upon his critics or rivals. Swift, then in Ireland, questioned the wisdom of these sallies. "Take care," said he, "the bad poets do not outwit you, as they have the good ones in every age, whom they have provoked to transmit their names to posterity. Mævius is as well known as Virgil, and Gildon will be as well known as you if his name gets into your verses." The poet appeared to be convinced. "I am much the happier," he replied, "for

1 See Pope's letter to Swift, October 15, 1725.

2

2 Letter from Swift to Pope of November 26, 1725.