It is a relief to turn from this painful, and we doubt not, unveracious anecdote, to the beautiful words in which the death of Pope has been described by Mr. Thackeray, and so appositely does the quotation fall in here, that no apology need be made for citing a familiar passage:

"As for his death, it was what the noble Arbuthnot asked and enjoyed for himself-a euthanasia-a beautiful end. A perfect benevolence, affection, serenity, hallowed the departure of that high soul. Even in the very hallucinations of his brain, and weaknesses of his delirium, there was something almost sacred. Spence describes him in his last days, looking up and with a rapt gaze as if something had suddenly passed before him. He said to me, "What's that?" pointing into the air with a very steady regard, and then looked down and said with a smile of the greatest softness, ""Twas a vision!" He laughed scarcely ever, but his companions describe his countenance as often illuminated by a peculiar sweet smile.

"When,' said Spence, the kind anecdotist whom Johnson despised, when I was telling Lord Bolingbroke that Mr. Pope, on every catching and recovery of his mind, was always saying something kindly of his present or absent friends, and that this was so surprising, as it seemed to me as if humanity had outlasted understanding, Lord Bolingbroke said "It has so," and then added, "I never in my life knew a man who had so tender a heart for his particular friends, or a more general friendship for mankind. I have known him these thirty years, and value myself more for that man's love than-" Here,' Spence says, 'St. John sunk his head and lost his voice in tears.' The sob which finishes the epitaph is finer than words. It is the cloak thrown over the father's face in the famous Greek picture, which hides the grief and heightens it."*

* English Humourists,' p. 518. Smith, Elder, and Co.

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The sympathy that must always exist between great men of letters is illustrated by these words of Thackeray. He forgets for the moment, as it is meet he should forget in the solemn presence of death, all that was weak and worse than weak in the poet's conduct, and thinks only of the high virtues that ennobled him his courage, his resignation, his generous affection, his tenderness for those whom he loved! The example afforded by this admirable humourist and critic may be of service to anyone who, like the present writer, ventures at a far wider intellectual distance, to estimate the moral worth or the mental greatness of a master spirit in literature.

It is more than unfortunate that the memorials left by Pope at Twickenham, his house, his grounds, the monuments he raised in his garden, should have been ruthlessly removed to suit the whims and requirements of persons who would, save for these acts of barbarism, be wholly unknown to posterity. After the poet's death Sir William Stanhope enlarged the house and spoilt the grounds; the next tenant, the Right Hon. Welbore Ellis, showed more reverence for Pope's memory; at his death the estate was sold by auction to Sir John Briscoe, and on his decease it came unhappily into the hands of the

Baroness Howe, who "razed the house to the ground, and blotted out entirely every memorial of the poet." The latest historian of the village writes:

"All then that Twickenham has preserved of her greatest resident is in the church, a grave wherein his remains rest (and these Mr. Howitt would say mutilated and imperfect) impenetrably sealed up, and all traces of its exact site entirely hidden from view; two words on a tablet, and a date, and last of all a monument remarkable for the pre-eminent bad taste of the inscription; from this, during the restoration of the church in 1859, the whole of its marble laurel wreath was chipped off bit by bit by wretches who wanted to possess a piece of Pope's tomb. Outside the church nothing remains but his grotto, now despoiled of most of its former adornments."*

The statement of Mr. Howitt that Pope's skeleton was mutilated, and another skull put in the place of the poet's, was denied at the time, and has not been confirmed since. Yet there is a strange contradiction in the tale as related by Mr. Proby, the vicar, and by the stonemason who opened the vault, the one asserting that a cast of the skull was taken by his permission, and the other that such a thing would have been impossible, as the skull would only just hold together.

There were three things dear to Pope upon this earth-his parents, his friends, and his fame; there was one thing he hated persistently with the whole

*Memorials of Twickenham, Parochial and Topographical.' By the Rev. U. S. Cobbett, M.A. Smith, Elder, and Co.

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force of his mind, namely, the criticism whose weakness opposed itself to his strength. We never find in him what we find in his great contemporary Bishop Berkeley, a noble, self-denying enthusiasm ; he had no special hatred of moral evil, but he was a thorough good hater of anyone who ventured to question his sovereignty in the realm of letters. This was neither amiable nor wise, but the fault is softened down when we consider the age and the man. hacks of literature-and the town swarmed with them indulged in the grossest personal attacks. Nobody was spared unless he were fortunate enough to be obscure, or unless he had too strong an arm and too stout a cudgel to be insulted with impunity. Nothing was too sacred to be exempted from attack. The figure, the features, the voice, the man's private habits, were held up to laughter, and everyone was considered fair game whose religion or politics was opposed to that of the libeller, or who had excited envy by literary success. A cripple, whose bodily weakness was so extreme that he required an attendant to dress him, who professed a faith that was proscribed by law, and who without a university education rose by dint of study and genius to be one of the most conspicuous men in England, was not likely to escape detraction. Pope, however, eager for the fray, was the first to throw down the glove.

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He rushed into the arena before he had received a challenge, and from the day when, as a young poet, he provoked Dennis in the Essay on Criticism,' until the day-it was not very long before his death -that he published the latest edition of the 'Dunciad,' he lived as a man to whom literary warfare was as the breath of life. The pen of Grub Street was not his only enemy. When he satirized Philips-"namby-pamby Philips"-in the 'Guardian,' that worthy is said to have hung a rod up at Button's with which to castigate the poet-dwarf, and it is related that when Pope took his wonted walk at Twickenham he carried pistols and was accompanied by a large dog. One of the coarse lampoons of the time relates that Pope received a whipping while walking near the river, and this announcement was followed by a pretended advertisement supposed to have been inserted in the Daily Post,' June 14, 1728.

"Whereas, there has been a scandalous paper cried aloud about the streets, under the title of A Pop upon Pope,' insinuating that I was whipped in Ham Walks on Thursday last-This is to give notice, that I did not stir out of my house at Twickenham all that day; and the same is a malicious and ill-founded report.-A. P."

* "Pope and Philips," says Johnson, "lived in a perpetual reciprocation of malevolence."