Pope's letters to Teresa and Martha Blount prove (that is, if Stella and the Blounts may be regarded as representative women) that the delicacy which should guard such an intercourse was in those days unknown.

Pope's relation to the Blounts, both of them beautiful young women, has been regarded as questionable by some writers, and especially by Bowles, who, in his capacity of biographer, continually hints a fault, and throws out a suspicion, and has a fatal facility of misinterpretation. "A friendly but indefinite connection," he says, "a strange mixture of passion, gallantry, licentiousness, and kindness, had long taken place between himself and the Miss Blounts," a statement for which he relied probably on the rumours circulated in Pope's lifetime. Bowles, however, might have been deceived, but this seems unlikely, by the conventional gallantry displayed in the correspondence. "Scandal alone," says Mr. Ward, "(or hyper-conscientious biography), has contrived to pervert the character of Pope's relations towards the ladies of Mapledurham ;" and Mrs. Oliphant writes, with a womanly appreciation of the position:

"He was not a man whom it was possible to marry; a fact which, in itself, though not complimentary to the hero, was, as it continues to be, a wonderful recommendation to female friendship. It is indeed the only thing wanting to make that much

disputed possibility-a true and warm friendship between man and woman without any mixture of love-irto a real and pleasant fact. Fools will scoff no doubt, and critics of impure imaginations revile; but it must be a very lively fancy indeed which can suppose any closer bond between the little poet and these two beautiful sisters. . . . Martha Blount made up to Pope for the sister whom he had not, for the wife whom he could not have, and yet was unlike both wife and sister. The link is one so fine, so delicate, so natural, that it is next to impossible to define it; and all the more so as vanity on both sides so seldom permits any realization of this touching and consolatory bond."

The Caryll letters, 150 in number, have been published since these words were written, and from them we gain some information about Teresa and Martha Blount not previously known. In the early days of their friendship Pope appears to have been even more attached to Teresa than to her younger sister. Afterwards he regarded her with extreme aversion, and in his letters to Caryll does his utmost to blast her character, and accuses her of intriguing with a married man, an insinuation which rested, in Mr. Elwin's opinion, upon the idle talk of neighbours and the malicious gossip of discarded servants. Teresa is also accused of cruelty to her mother beyond all imagination, "striking, pinching, pulling about the house, and abusing to the utmost shamefulness," a statement to which Mr. Elwin gives no credit, and yet it seems impossible to believe

that the particulars given by Pope to Martha's godfather were wholly without foundation. Again and again he returns to the subject, and observes that it is the theme of public talk both in London and in the country. Was it simply in raillery that Swift called Teresa the "sanctified sister"?

Pope, like Cowper, was little of a traveller. He was generous enough to propose joining his friend Bishop Atterbury, in exile; and once, also, he talked of making a journey to Italy to meet Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; but he never left England, and his acquaintance with his own country was extremely limited. He frequently made short excursions, and at Bath his little figure was familiar to fashionable loungers; but he never saw a mountain, or took a coast voyage, and knew nothing of our finest scenery. The removal from Binfield to Chiswick was regarded as one of the grand eras of his life, and when, two years afterwards, he took the lease of a house and played the part of a landscape gardener on five acres at Twickenham, it probably caused him as much excitement as an Englishman of our day would feel upon leaving his native land for Canada or New Zealand. Of the villa he was proud, for he owed it to his poetry as Scott owed Abbotsford to the Waverley novels, and one cannot but regret that a

house so closely associated with the genius of Pope does not still exist to enshrine his memory. Landscape gardening was not studied in those days as it has been studied since, and much of the poet's work on his estate was of a meretricious kind. He spent above 10007. on his grotto, and was evidently delighted with his achievement, which most men now-a-days will regard as utterly contemptible; and Mr. Carruthers publishes a correspondence in which the poet, not four years before his death, thanks Dr Oliver, of Bath, and two of his friends for their contributions to his "plaything." The Doctor in his reply writes after this quaint fashion:

"Sir, you make this month tedious by promising to see me in the next. I hope to meet you in a state of health likely to keep you many years above ground; but whenever the world is robbed of you where can you be better deposited than in your own grotto? for I know you have no ambition to be laid near kings, and lie where you will, your own works must be your everlasting monument."

Many pleasant glimpses are given us of the poet in connection with his small estate at Twickenham, and some which are not pleasant or favourable to his memory. Pope affected to live the life of a recluse; but his was the seclusion of a man of letters, able to gather round him all who were illustrious in

We

the world of literature, and many of the aristocratic personages who ruled in the world of fashion. forget the poet's bickerings and literary dishonesties when we see him at his villa in the society of warm admirers and friends. 66 Pope," said Warburton, after spending a week at Twickenham, "is as good a companion as a poet, and, what is more, appears to be as good a man." In 1726, the year that witnessed the completion of 'Gulliver's Travels,' Swift paid him a visit of four months, and the two friends went in company to the little court of the Princess of Wales at Leicester House and at Richmond Hill. A brilliant scene must that Court of the Opposition have presented when Gay and Swift, Arbuthnot and Pope chatted in the saloons or gossiped with Mary Bellenden, "soft and fair as down," and "youth's youngest daughter, sweet Lepell," in the gardens of the palace. Sometimes the pleasure of a lonely ramble with a beauty of the court charmed the poet's fancy, if it did not affect his heart. "Mrs. Lepell," he once wrote to Teresa Blount, "walked with me three or four hours by moonlight, and we met no creature of any quality but the king, who gave audience to the vice-chamberlain all alone under the garden wall."

In 1727 Swift came over again from Ireland,