POPE, AND HIS MISCELLANEOUS QUARRELS. POPE adopted a system of literary politics--collected with extraordinary care everything relative to his Quarrels-no politician ever studied to obtain his purposes by more oblique directions and intricate stratagemssome of his manoeuvres-his systematic hostility not practised with impunity-his claim to his own works contested-CIBBER's facetious description of POPE's feelings, and WELSTED's elegant satire on his genius -DENNIS's account of POPE's Introduction to him-his political prudence further discovered in the Collection of all the Pieces relative to the Dunciad, in which he employed SAVAGE-the THEOBALDIANS and the POPEIANS; an attack by a Theobaldian-The Dunciad ingeniously defended, for the grossness of its imagery, and its reproach of the poverty of the authors, supposed by POPE himself, with some curious specimens of literary personalities-the Literary Quarrel between AARON HILL and POPE distinguished for its romantic cast-a Narrative of the extraordinary transactions respecting the publication of POPE's Letters; an example of Stratagem and Conspiracy, illustrative of his character. POPE has proudly perpetuated the history of his Literary Quarrels; and he appears to have been among those authors, surely not forming the majority, who have delighted in, or have not been averse to provoke, hostility. He has registered the titles of every book, even to a single paper, or a copy of verses, in which their authors had committed treason against his poetical sovereignty.* His ambition seemed gra * Pope collected these numerous literary libels with extraordinary care. He had them bound in volumes of all sizes; and a range of twelves, octavos, quartos, and folios were marshalled in portentous order on his shelves. He wrote the names of the writers, with remarks on these Anonymiana. He prefixed to them this motto, from Job: "Behold, my desire is, that mine adversary had written a book: surely I would take it upon my shoulder, and bind it as a crown to me." xxxi. 35. Ruff head, who wrote Pope's Life under the eye of Warburton, who revised every sheet of the volume, and suffered this mere lawyer and singularly wretched critic to write on, with far inferior taste to his own-offered "the entire collection to any public library or museum, whose search is after curiosities, and may be desirous of enriching their common treasure with it: it will be freely at the service of that which asks first." Did no one accept the invitation? As this was written in 1769, it is evidently pointed towards the British tified in heaping these trophies to his genius, while his meaner passions could compile one of the most voluminous of the scandalous chronicles of literature. We are mortified on discovering so fine a genius in the text humbling itself through all the depravity of a commentary full of spleen, and not without the fictions of satire. The unhappy influence his Literary Quarrels had on this great poet's life remains to be traced. Museum; but there I have not heard of it. This collection must have contained much of the Secret Memoirs of Grub-street: it was always a fountain whence those "waters of bitterness," the notes in the Dunciad, were readily supplied. It would be curious to discover by what stratagem Pope obtained all that secret intelligence about his Dunces, with which he has burthened posterity, for his own particular gratification. Arbuthnot, it is said, wrote some notes merely literary; but Savage, and still humbler agents, served him as his Espions de Police. He pensioned Savage to his last day, and never deserted him. In the account of "the phantom Moore," Scriblerus appeals to Savage to authenticate some story. One curious instance of the fruits of Savage's researches in this way he has himself preserved, in his memoirs of " An Author to be Let, by Iscariot Hackney." This portrait of "a perfect Town-Author" is not deficient in spirit the hero was one Roome, a man only celebrated in the Dunciad for his "funereal frown." But it is uncertain whether this fellow had really so dismal a countenance; for the epithet was borrowed from his profession, being the son of an undertaker! Such is the nature of some satire! Dr. Warton is astonished, or mortified, for he knew not which, to see the pains and patience of Pope and his friends in compiling the Notes to the Dunciad, to trace out the lives and works of such paltry and forgotten scribblers. "It is like walking through the darkest alleys in the dirtiest part of St. Giles's." Very true! But may we not be allowed to detect the vanities of human nature at St. Giles's as well as St. James's? Authors, however obscure, are always an amusing race to authors. The greatest find their own passions in the least, though distorted, or cramped in too small a compass. It is doubtless from Pope's great anxiety for his own literary celebrity that we have been furnished with so complete a knowledge of the grotesque groups in the Dunciad. "Give me a shilling," said Swift, facetiously, "and I will insure you that posterity shall never know one single enemy, excepting those whose memory you have preserved." A very useful hint for a man of genius to leave his wretched assailants to dissolve away in their own weakness. But Pope, having written a Dunciad, by accompanying it with a commentary, took the only method to interest posterity. He felt that Boileau's satires on bad authors are liked only in the degree the objects alluded to are known. But he loved too much the subject for its own sake. He abused the powers genius had conferred on him, as other imperial sovereigns have done. It is said that he kept the whole kingdom in awe of him. In "the frenzy and prodigality of vanity," he exclaimed Yes, I am proud to see Men, not afraid of God, afraid of me!" Tacitus Gordon said of him, that Pope seemed to persuade the nation that all genius and ability were confined to him and his friends. He adopted a system of literary politics abounding with stratagems, conspiracies, manoeuvres, and factions. Pope's literary quarrels were the wars of his poetical ambition, more perhaps than of the petulance and strong irritability of his character. They were some of the artifices he adopted from the peculiarity of his situation. * Thrown out of the active classes of society from a variety of causes sufficiently known, concentrating his passions into a solitary one, his retired life was passed in the contemplation of his own literary greatness. Reviewing the past, and anticipating the future, he felt he was creating a new era in our literature, an event which does not always occur in a century: but eager to secure present celebrity, with the victory obtained in the open field, he combined the intrigues of the cabinet: thus, while he was exerting great means, he practised little artifices. No politician studied to obtain his purposes by more oblique directions, or with more intricate stratagems; and Pope was at once the lion and the fox of Machiavel. A book might be written on the Stratagems of Literature. as Frontinus has composed one on War, and among its subtilest heroes we might place this great poet. To keep his name alive before the public was one of his early plans. When he published his "Essay on Criticism, anonymously, the young and impatient poet was mortified with the inertion of public curiosity: he was almost in despair. Twice, perhaps oftener, Pope attacked Pope;‡ and * Pope, in his energetic Letter to Lord HERVEY, that "masterpiece of invective," says Warton, which Tyers tells us he kept long back from publishing, at the desire of Queen Caroline, who was fearful her counsellor would become insignificant in the public esteem, and at last in her own, such was the power his genius exercised;-has pointed out one of these causes. It describes himself as "a private person under penal laws, and many other disadvantages, not for want of honesty or conscience; yet it is by these alone I have hitherto lived excluded from all posts of profit or trust. I can interfere with the views of no man." The first publisher of the "Essay on Criticism" must have been a Mr. Lewis, a Catholic bookseller in Covent-garden; for, from a descendant of this Lewis, I heard that Pope, after publication, came every day, persecuting with anxious inquiries the cold impenetrable bookseller, who, as the poem lay uncalled for, saw nothing but vexatious importunities in a troublesome youth. One day, Pope, after nearly a month's publication, entered, and in despair tied up a number of the poems, which he addressed to several who had a reputation in town, as judges of poetry. The scheme succeeded, and the poem, having reached its proper circle, soon got into request. He was the author of "The Key to the Lock," written to show that he frequently concealed himself under the names of others, for some particular design. Not to point out his dark familiar "Scriblerus," always at hand for all purposes, he made use of the names of several of his friends. When he employed SAVAGE in "a collection of all the pieces, in verse and prose, published on occasion of the Dunciad," he subscribed his name to an admirable dedication to Lord Middlesex, where he minutely relates the whole history of the Dunciad, "and the weekly clubs held to consult of hostilities against the author; and, for an express introduction to that work, he used the name of Cleland, to which is added a note, expressing surprise that the world did not believe that Cleland was the writer!* "The Rape of the Lock" was a political poem, designed to ridicule the Barrier Treaty; [so called from the arrangement made at the Peace of Utrecht between the ministers of Great Britain and the States General, as to the towns on the frontiers of the Dutch, which were to be permanently strengthened as barrier fortresses. Pope, in the mask of Esdras Barnivelt, apothecary, thus makes out his poem to be a political satire. "Having said that by the lock is meant the Barrier Treaty-first then I shall discover, that Belinda represents Great Britain, or (which is the same thing) her late Majesty. This is plainly seen in the description of her, "On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore.' Alluding to the ancient name of Albion, from her white cliffs, and to the cross which is the ensign of England. The baron who cuts off the lock, or Barrier Treaty, is the Earl of Oxford. Clarissa, who lent the scissors, my Lady Masham. Thalestris, who provokes Belinda to resent the loss of the lock or treaty, the Duchess of Marlborough ; and Sir Plume, who is moved by Thalestris to re-demand it of Great Britain, Prince Eugene, who came hither for that purpose." He concludes 32 pages of similar argument by saying, "I doubt not if the persons most concerned would but order Mr. Bernard Lintott, the printer and publisher of this dangerous piece, to be taken into custody and examined, many further discoveries might be made both of this poet's and his abettors secret designs, which are doubtless of the utmost importance to Government." Such is a specimen of Pope's chicanery.] Its innocent extravagance could only have been designed to increase attention to a work, which hardly required any such artifice. [In the preface to this production, "the uncommon sale of this book" is stated as one reason for the publication; "above six thousand of them have been already vended."] In the same spirit he composed the "Guardian," in which Phillips's Pastorals were insidiously preferred to his own. Pope sent this ironical, panegyrical criticism on Phillips anonymously to the "Guardian," and Steele not perceiving the drift, hesitated to publish it, till Pope advised it. Addison detected it. I doubt whether we have discovered all the supercheries of this kind. After writing the finest works of genius, he was busily employed in attracting the public attention to them. In the antithesis of his character, he was so great and so little! But he knew mankind! and present fame was the great business of his life. * Cleland was the son of Colonel Cleland, an old friend of Pope; he and his son had served in the East Indian army; but the latter returned Wanting a pretext for the publication of his letters, he delighted CURLL by conveying to him some printed surreptitious copies, who soon discovered that it was but a fairy treasure which he could not grasp; and Pope, in his own defence, had soon ready the authentic edition.* Some lady observed that Pope hardly drank tea without a stratagem!" The female genius easily detects its own peculiar faculty, when it is exercised with inferior delicacy. But his systematic hostility did not proceed with equal impunity in this perpetual war with dulness, he discovered that every one he called a dunce was not so; nor did he find the dunces themselves less inconvenient to him; for many successfully substituted, for their deficiencies in better qualities, the lie that lasts long enough to vex a man; and the insolence that does not fear him: they attacked him at all points, and not always in the spirit of legitimate warfare.+ They filled up his asterisks, and accused him of treason. They asserted that the panegyrical verses prefixed to his works (an obsolete mode of recommendation, which Pope condescended to practise), were his own composition, and to which he had affixed the names of some dead or some unknown writers. They to London, and became a sort of literary jackal to Pope, and a hack author for the booksellers. He wrote several moral and useful works; but as they did not pay well, he wrote an immoral one, for which he obtained a better price, and a pension of 100l. a-year, on condition that he never wrote in that manner again. This was obtained for him by Lord Granville, after Cleland had been cited before the Privy Council, and pleaded poverty as the reason for such authorship.-ED. * The narrative of this dark transaction, which seems to have been imperfectly known to Johnson, being too copious for a note, will be found at the close of this article. A list of all the pamphlets which resulted from the Dunciad would occupy a large space. Many of them were as grossly personal as the celebrated poem. The poet was frequently ridiculed under the names of "Pope Alexander" (from his dictatorial style), and "Sawney." In "an heroic poem occasioned by the Dunciad," published in 1728, the poet's snug retreat at Twickenham is thus alluded to: 66 Sawney a mimic sage of huge renown, To Twick'nam bow'rs retir'd, enjoys his wealth, And cover'd arbours, dreams his hours away." A fragment of Pope's celebrated grotto still remains; the house is destroyed. Pope spent all his spare cash over his Twickenham villa. "I never save anything," he said once to Spence; and the latter has left a detailed account of what he meant to do in the further decoration of his garden if he had lived. As he gained a sum of money, he regularly spent it in this way.-ED. |