correspondence now printed tells the whole story, and proves that Pope, who could at all times equivocate pretty genteelly," did in the present instance lie, as his friend Warburton suggested. "I fear," writes Broome to Fenton, " Mr. Pope will not give us our due share of honour. He is a Cæsar in poetry, and will bear no equal." This fear was justified; Pope grudged his assistants the praise to which they were entitled. He paid them meanly, and treated them more meanly still. Broome was especially indignant. He called Pope "wicked and ungrateful,” declared that he was no master of Greek, and added pompously, "I will dismiss him with the sullen silence of Ajax, but will leave such memorials behind me when I die that posterity shall be acquainted with his history." Yet long before he thus wrote Broome had "parted with the right to complain," and had himself acted a base part towards Fenton, for whom he professed the warmest friendship. At Pope's suggestion he had appended a note to the Odyssey,' in which he stated, as if with the concurrence of his friend, that the merit of the work was due to Pope's daily revisal and correction, declaring, which was equally false, "our mutual satisfaction in Mr. Pope's acceptance of our best endeavours." Nor was this all, Broome "lied," to use the expressive

phraseology of the period, with regard to the amount of work the two assistants had done, crediting Pope with five books he had himself translated, and with two translated by Fenton. No wonder that Fenton was indignant, and termed this, "a license that deserves a worse epithet than I have it in my nature to give it." It seems strange that he did not publicly make known the facts of the case, and so put both Pope and Broome to shame; but he was a man of the easiest disposition. "The lazy Mr. Fenton," is Broome's description of him to Pope, and he adds:

"I will tell you a true story: when he was with me at Sturston he often fished; this gave him an opportunity of sitting still and being silent; but he left it off because the fish bit. He could not bear the fatigue of pulling up the rod and baiting the hook."

Soon after the publication of the first volume of the 'Iliad' Pope had removed with his parents to Chiswick, and here his father died in 1717, loved and reverenced by his son, who has left an affectionate tribute to his memory:

"Stranger to civil and religious rage

The good man walked innocuous through his age;
No courts he saw, no suits would ever try,
Nor dared an oath, nor hazarded a lie.
Unlearned, he knew no schoolman's subtle art,
No language but the language of the heart.

C

By nature honest, by experience wise,
Healthy by temperance and by exercise;

His life, though long, to sickness past unknown,
His death was instant, and without a groan.

Oh grant me thus to live, and thus to die!

Who sprung from kings shall know less joy than I."

A few months after this loss, which he deplored with sincere affection, the poet bought a small estate at Twickenham, which is as closely associated with Pope as Rydal Mount is with Wordsworth, or Abbotsford with Scott. The serene happiness which filled the days of Wordsworth, the hearty, wholesome, out-of-door life led by Scott before his great trial came upon him, were altogether unknown to Pope. The breath of the mountains was a delight unfelt by him, and so also was the splendid physical and mental health which these two illustrious men enjoyed. His love of nature must have been feeble, for it yielded no fruit in poetry, and his intellect, in spite of assumed contempt, was influenced in a far higher degree by Grub Street critics, and by rivals who envied his genius even more than they admired it. The record of Pope's life, from 1718 to 1744, when he passed away from men, is a record of strong friendships on one side, and of bitter hatreds (how bitter let the Dunciad' declare) upon the other. Moreover,

it was during this period of high reputation that he indulged in many of those artifices which are the perplexity of his biographers. How much that we deplore in his life was due to constitutional infirmity it is impossible to say, but M. Sainte-Beuve probably hits the truth when he says:

"L'histoire naturelle de Pope est bien simple; les délicats, a-t-on dit, sont malheureux, et lui il était deux fois délicat, délicat d'esprit, délicat et infirme de corps; il était deux fois irritable." *

This irritability of temperament, and the consciousness of physical infirmities, may account for one striking characteristic of his verse. The poetry of Pope is emphatically poetry for men. Few women appreciate his genius; no woman that we know of has ever written of him impartially. The reason is obvious. The poet's "false and scandalous charges against the sex," as Miss Mitford terms them, are likely to alienate all good women. He is the only English poet of high mark who has not treated the better half of mankind with chivalry and homage. Some of our poets have sinned grievously as writers of licentious verse, but the worst of them have

Mr. John Forster takes another view of the subject. "Genius," he writes, "often effects its highest gains in a balance of what the world counts for disadvantage and loss; and it has fairly been made matter of doubt if Pope's body had been less crooked whether his verses would have been so straight."

shown fealty to the purity and dignity of woman. Pope, although he had a mother whom he loved with tenderness, has done nothing of the kind. On the contrary, he has struck at women with his keenest weapons, has libelled them, sneered at them, raised the laugh against them, and displayed a capacity for insult that has never been surpassed. We should remember, however, that the age was one of coarse vices and mean aims, and it may be questioned whether any of the Queen Anne men, excepting Sir Richard Steele, whose compliment to. Lady Elizabeth Hastings deserves to be immortal, ever paid to women the homage which they deserve. We should recollect, too, that in accordance with the spirit of the time were the "toasts" who ruled the town. Women of rank spoke, wrote, and even acted in a way of which any modest woman would now be ashamed, and it must be owned that the vices and follies of fashionable life afforded ample ground for satire. We have but to read Lord Hervey's Memoirs, the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and the correspondence of the Countess of Suffolk, to see the loose views with regard to the relation of the sexes which then prevailed; and while the exquisite raillery of Addison and Steele shows us how women appeared in society, Swift's letters to Stella, and