But this worship is not for very long; there comes a quarrel, which is so sharp and bitter, and with such echoes in ode or satire, as to become the scandal of the neighborhood.
What brought it about cannot be so distinctly told. Lady Mary persisted in saying that the crippled sensitive poet had forgotten himself to so impudent an avowal of love that she had repelled him with a shout of laughter, and so turned his heart into gall.
That his heart was all gall toward her thereafter there needed no proof beyond his stinging couplets; and though he denied her tale with unction, he never told a story of his own in respect to this affair which made her character seem the worse, or his the better.
In an evil hour her ladyship (who had written verse already, which for her fame's sake it were better she had never written), undertook, with the aid of her friend Lord Hervey, to reply to the lampoons of Pope. Thereupon the shrinking, keen-smarting poet made other burning verses, by which the Hervey and the Montagu were both put to the torture. It must have been uncomfortable weather for her ladyship at Twickenham in those days. True, Hervey, Peterborough, Bolingbroke, and many of the courtiers were at her service; and she was a favorite of George I.—so far as any respectable woman could be called a favorite of that gross creature; but Pope's shafts of ridicule had a feather of grace about them that carried them straight and far. Mr. Montagu himself was a husband who loved London and his coal-fields without her ladyship, rather better than Twickenham gardens with her ladyship.
Twenty years of gay "outing" she lives, between London and its suburbs; happy, yet not happy; courted and not courted. She writes to her sister Lady Mar[14] in these times:
"Don't you remember how miserable we were in the little parlor at Thoresby? We then thought marrying would put us at once in possession of all we wanted.... One should pluck up a spirit and live upon cordials, when one can have no other nourishment. These are my present endeavors, and I run about though I have five thousand pins and needles running into my heart. I try to console myself with a small damsel [her daughter, afterward Lady Bute] who is at present everything I like; but, alas, she is yet in a white frock. At fourteen she may run away with the butler."
And when this maiden in white had married (better than the mother dared hope), and her son, a vagrant, had gone out into the world and the night, Lady Mary—believing in "cordials"—gathered her robes about her, and took her fading face into the blaze of the Continental cities.
Her reputation for wit, and daring, and beauty has gone before her, and she writes piquantly and with great complacency of the attentions and greetings that meet her in Venice, Florence, and Milan. The appetite for this life grows with feeding; so it becomes virtually a separation from her husband, though cool, business-like letters regularly pass between them. Her son, though grown up into an "accomplished" man, is a scoundrel—drifting about Europe; and when they encounter the mother insists that he shall drop his name, and deny relationship.
Twenty-two years she lives in that Continental exile, writing all the while letters to her daughter, which she loved to compare with the letters of Madame de Sévigné. They are witty and sparkling and have passed into a certain place in English literature, but they are not Sévigné letters. Toward the last of her residence abroad she bought an old ruinous palace in Lombardy, not far from Lago di Guarda, equipped three or four of its rooms, and with a little bevy of servants, lived in retirement—busied with reading, with her ducks, her pigeons, and her garden.
She writes her daughter:
"The active scenes are over at my age; I indulge, with all the art I can, my taste for reading. If I could confine it to valuable books; they are almost as scarce as valuable men.... As I approach a second childhood I endeavor to enter into the pleasures of it.... I am reading an idle tale, not expecting wit or truth in it; and am very glad it is not metaphysics to puzzle my judgment, or history to mislead my opinion."
She is well past sixty and has lost all her old graces when she falls into this misanthropic spirit; has grown strangely neglectful of her person too; she says that for eleven years now she has not looked in a mirror.[15]
But presently Mr. Montagu dies leaving an immense fortune; there are business reasons demanding her return; so she brings back that shrunken, unseemly face, and figure of hers to London; takes a house there and fills it with servants. A cousin, speaking of a call upon her, says:
"It is like the Tower of Babel; a Hungarian servant takes your name at the door, he gives it to an Italian, who delivers it to a Frenchman. The Frenchman to a Swiss, and the Swiss to a Polander; so that by the time you get to her ladyship's presence you have changed your name five times, without the expense of an Act of Parliament."
Horace Walpole pays her a visit, and says, "she was old, dirty, tawdry, and painted." But he did not like her: I do not think she liked him.
Could it be that this old lady—past seventy—with her fine house and her polyglot of service and her flush purse, thought to call back the old trail of flatterers? I do not know. I know very well she did not, and that within a twelvemonth she died.
There is in Lichfield Cathedral a cenotaph representing Beauty weeping the loss of her Preserver; it was placed there by some grateful person to perpetuate the memory of the Lady Mary's benevolence in introducing inoculation; and I think it is the only eulogy to be found on any memorial tablet of this strange, witty, beautiful, indiscreet, studious, unhappy, disappointed woman.
Alexander Pope.
Alexander Pope.
We close our chapter with some mention of that proud, shy, infirm poet of whom we have caught shadowy glimpses in the story of Wortley Montagu. There are scores of little crackling couplets floating about on the lips of people well known as Pope's.[16]
"A wit's a feather and a chief's a rod,
An honest man's the noblest work of God."
"Know then, this truth, eno' for man to know,
Virtue alone is happiness below."
"Honor and shame from no condition rise,
Act well your part; there all the honor lies!"
These must be familiar; and your school must differ from most schools, if some of these or other such, from the same author, have not one time done service as snappers at the end of a composition, or as a bit of decoration in the middle of it.
All know, too, in a general way, that Pope was an infirm man, without perhaps a clear idea of what his infirmity may have been; some of those fierce lampoons already alluded to, which went flying back and forth around the shades of Twickenham, speak of the poet as an ape, a hunchback, a monster. The truth is that he inherited from his father a feeble and crooked frame with some spinal weakness which did give a measure of excuse to the coarse and brutal satirists of those days. His height was much below that of ordinary men, so that cushions or a higher chair were always necessary at table to bring him to the level of his friends; his legs were thin and shrunken and he walked feebly; his countenance was drawn and pinched; yet he had good features, with the delicate complexion of a woman, and a great blue eye, full of expression. His toilette was always a serious affair for him—specially when he went abroad or would appear at his best (as he always wished to do)—involving the assistance of one or two attendants to adjust his paddings, his stays, his canvas jackets, and his twice doubled hose.
I have dwelt with more particularity upon his personal aspect, because it serves to explain, or at least largely to qualify, a great many apparent mysteries in his social career.
He was a London boy, born of Romish parents; his father being a small trader in the city, but retiring, about the time of this weakly boy's birth, to a home at Binfield—a country parish lying between Windsor and Reading, where they show now a grove of beaches which was a favorite haunt of the boy poet. He caught schooling in a hap-hazard way, as Romanists needed to do in those times; but had a quick, big brain, that made up for many shortcomings in teachers. Before twelve he had his Latin with some Greek, and had written verse; and after that age was his own master—sucking literary sweets where he could find them.
Before twelve, too, he had made many London visitations—partly to study French there and partly to find his way to Will's coffee-house, and catch sight of old John Dryden, then drawing near to the end of his worldly honors. And this thin, white-faced, crippled boy looking stealthily up at the master, even then had wild ambitious dreams of the day when he too should have his dignities and lay down the law for English letters.
Out by Binfield he happened upon good friends. Among others a Blount family to which belonged two daughters Blount—sympathetic companions to him then and long afterward; scores of letters, too, there were, to which now Teresa Blount and now Miss Patty Blount were parties: He seeming in those romantic days (upon the edge of Windsor Forest) sometimes in love with one and sometimes the other; and they, in this mixing of letters getting probably as confused as he, and a great deal more vexed; and so came coldness and short-lived quarrelling, making one thing pretty sure—that when a young man or woman begins to play with the different tenses of the verb "I love," a single correspondent is much better than two. However, his friendship with Miss Patty Blount lasted his life out.
An old baronet of the neighborhood, who had been diplomat in James I.'s day, took a fancy to this keen-thoughted lad and made a companion of him. He came to know old Wycherly too, and scores of men about town; even Jacob Tonson, the famous publisher of those times, had written to Pope before he was twenty, asking the privilege of printing certain pastorals of his writing, which had been handed about in the clubs; and thought them—what they really were—astonishing for their literary finish.
His Poetic Methods.
Poetry of Pope.
But young Mr. Pope does not think much of the pastorals, save as stepping-stones; they paved his way to a large acquaintance with the London wits; and it would seem that at one time he thought of living at the dreadful pace of these gentlemen—in bottles and midnight routs; perhaps he tried it for a while; but his feeble frame could stand no such neck-breaking gallop. He can, however, put more of wearisome elaboration and pains-taking skill to his rhymes than any of the verse-makers of his time. He has by nature a mincing step of his own—different as possible from the long, easy lope of Dryden—and that step he perfects by unwearied practice, and word-mongering, until it comes to the wondrous ten-syllabled movement, which for polish, and rhythmic tric-trac is unmatchable.
The Essay on Criticism, Windsor Forest, and the Rape of the Lock, all belonged to those early years at Binfield, and I give a test of each; first, from the Essay:—
"Where'er you find 'the cooling Western breeze,'
In the next line, it 'whispers through the trees:'
If crystal streams 'with pleasing murmurs creep,'
The reader's threatened (not in vain) with 'sleep;'
Then, at the last and only couplet fraught
With some unmeaning thing they call a thought,
A needless Alexandrine ends the song,
That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along."
Next this bustling bit, from Windsor Forest:—
"See, from the brake the whirring pheasant springs
And mounts exulting on triumphant wings.
*****
Ah! what avail his glossy, varying dyes,
His purple crest, and scarlet-circled eyes,
The vivid green his shining plumes unfold,
His painted wings, and breast that flames with gold."
And again, this, from the Rape of the Lock:—
"Just then, Clarissa drew with tempting grace
A two-edged weapon from her shining case;
So ladies in romance assist their knight,
Present the spear, and arm him for the fight,
He takes the gift with reverence, and extends
The little engine on his fingers' ends;
This just behind Belinda's neck he spread,
As o'er the fragrant steams she bends her head.
Swift to the lock a thousand sprites repair,
A thousand wings, by turns, throw back the hair;
And thrice they twitched the diamond in her ear,
Thrice she looked back, and thrice the foe drew near."
And yet again—this worthier excerpt from the same dainty poem:—
"Fair nymphs, and well-drest youths around her shone
But every eye was fixed on her alone.
On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore,
Which Jews might kiss, and infidels adore.
Her lively looks a sprightly mind disclose,
Quick as her eyes, and as unfixed as those;
Favors to none, to all she smiles extends;
Oft she rejects, but never once offends."
Ten pages of extracts would not show better his amazing attention to details—his quick eye—his gifts in word-craft, and his musical exploitation of his themes. I know that this poet works in harness, and has not the free movement of one who gallops under a loose rein; the couplets fetter him; may be they cramp him; but there is a blithe, strong resonance of true metal, in the clinking chains that bind him. No, I do not think that Pope is to be laughed out of court, in our day, or in any day, because he labored at form and polish, or because he loved so much the tingle of a rhyme; I think there was something else that tingled in a good deal that he wrote and will continue to tingle so long as Wit is known by its own name.
The good word spoken for him in the Spectator—the great printed authority in literary matters—brought him into more intimate association with the Literary Guild of that paper; he wrote for the Spectator on several occasions. An early contribution is that of 1712 (November 10th), where he calls attention to the famous verses which the Emperor Adrian spoke on his death-bed; he says:—
"I was in company the other day with five or six men of learning, who agreed that they showed a gayety unworthy that prince in those circumstances;" and he quotes the lines:
Animula vagula, blandula
Hospes Comes que Corporis
Pallidula, rigida, nudula, etc.
"But," he says, "methinks it was by no means a gay, but a very serious soliloquy to his soul at the point of his departure."
And out of this comment and thought of Pope's, contributed casually (if Pope ever did anything casually) to the Spectator, came by and by from the poet's anvil, that immortal hymn we all know,—
"Vital spark of heavenly flame,
Quit, oh quit, this mortal frame;
Trembling, hoping, lingering, flying,
Oh the pain, the bliss of dying!"
The Rape of the Lock.
Rape of the Lock
I cited two significant fragments from the Rape of the Lock, a poem belonging to Pope's early period, and which is reckoned by most poets and critics,[17] as well as biographers, his masterpiece, and a beautiful work of the highest literary art. I recognize the superior authority, but cannot share the exalted admiration; at least, it does not beget such loving approval as brings one back again and again to its perusal. It does not seem to me to furnish very inspiring reading.
The setting of this little poem is not large; the story is of a stolen lock of hair, and of the resentments that follow; and if one might venture upon a synopsis of so delicate a feat of workmanship, it might run in this way:—Belinda, the despoiled heroine, sleeps; sprites put dreams in her head and give warning of impending woe. "Shock" (her dog) barks and wakes her; she betakes herself to her toilet—the fairy-fingered sylphs assisting:
Some thrid the mazy ringlets of her hair;
Some hang upon the pendants of her ear,
—all pictured like carving on a cherry-stone. At last, fully equipped, she goes to a fête upon the Thames; pretty glimpses of the river scenes follow; a crazy baron covets a lock of Belinda's hair. The zephyrs play; day fades; cards come; crowding sprites pile into the game, and twist all into a fairy cable. The covetous baron snips off a lock of Belinda's hair, while she bends over the tea-pot. The nimble sylphs bring from the "Cave of Spleen" a stock of shrieks, and tears, and megrims. Sir Plume ("of amber snuff-box justly vain") champions Belinda, and demands satisfaction of the ravisher—which he does not win; so the battle rages—"Fans clap, silks rustle, and tough whalebones crack," and in the hurly-burly the stolen lock gets wafted into "lunar spheres," and comet-like, closes the shining tale:
"This lock the muse [thus] consecrates to Fame
And midst the stars inscribes Belinda's name."
Yet Belinda's sovereignty is of an ignoble sort; her tiara made up of pins and pomades; indeed the women all are as small as the sylphs; toy creatures, and creatures of toys; no nobility, in or about them; and very much to make an honest, self-respecting woman of our time fling down the silvery poem with a wearisome distaste.
All this is said with a thorough recognition of its art—its amazing dexterities of verse—its playful leaps of fancy—its bright shimmer of over-nature; and yet those gossamer gnomes seem to me like an intrusion; I cannot forget that they were an afterthought of Pope himself; I cannot bring myself to think of the charming fairy-folk of Fletcher, or of Drayton's Nymphidia, or of the Midsummer Night's Dream wallowing in pomades, and straining at whalebone stays! These live through an eternal frolic in the air; those—of the Rape of the Lock—lie in a literary show-case, like a taxidermist's trophies.
In the sobered time of life, when the iris hues have only fitful play, I think a man goes away from these earlier poems of Pope (if he reads them) with new zest, to those wonderful metric condensations of old truths, which flash and burn along the lines of his moral essays. There could be few more helpful rhetorical lessons, for boy or girl, than the effort to pack some of Pope's stinging couplets, or decades of lines, into an equal number of lines in prose; the difficulties would be great indeed and would vitalize the lesson; and the lesson, I think, would be far fuller of profitable ends, than the old "parsing" exercise, and syntactic analysis and description of sentences according to the nomenclature of Mr. Lindley Murray or of Mr. Somebody-else.
Pope's Homer, and Life at Twickenham.
Homer of Pope.
Notwithstanding his much writing, Pope in those early days under the beeches of Windsor forest, was not winning such financial rewards as his friends thought he deserved. The Spectator did not pay much money for little poetic trifles—such as the Messiah; and Jacob Tonson was the screw which some publishers are. There can be no doubt that the poet, with his fine tastes, felt the restraints of a limited income; his old father, who perhaps did not carry sharp business habits into his retirement, had been compelled to leave the country house of Binfield, and had gone over to a suburban street dwelling near to Chiswick. In this emergency, (if emergency it were,) was it not the oddest thing in the world that his friends should have advised a translation of Homer?
Yet they did; and so this dauntless young fellow, not over-critical in his Greek knowledge, but with an abounding sense of the marvellous beauties that lay in the old Homeric hexameters, sets about his task; and after five years' toil accomplishes it in such a way as makes it probable that there can never be an English Homer that will quite match it. There are juster ones; there are faithfuller ones; but not one that has been so enduringly popular. Steeping himself in the mythologies and the Trojan traditions, he has grafted thereupon his stock of British word-craft: Ajax, Achilles, and the rest range to their places in the martial clank of his couplets, with a life and charm which, if not imbued with Homeric limpidities and melodies, possess an engaging picturesqueness that belongs to few long English epics.
And the poem took: that trenchant Dean Swift strode into the ante-rooms of the great men of Court, and swore that he must have a hundred or a thousand pounds subscribed for the new Homer of Mr. Pope; and he got it; Mr. Pope was the fashion.
Up to that time in the whole history of English literature there had been no such payment for literary wares as accrued to the author of the new Homer—the sum reaching, for both Iliad and Odyssey, some £9,000; with which the shrewd poet bought an annuity (cheaper then than now) of some £500, and a long lease of the Twickenham house and gardens; where, thereafter, amidst his willows and his grottos, he lived until his death.
The house[18]—if indeed any part be now the same—has been built over and enlarged, and has a jaunty suburban villa pretension that does not look Homeric; but the grotto, or tunnel, which he cut under the high road running parallel with the Thames, and through which he might pass unobserved from garden to garden and from his house to the river, is still to be seen there; and trees of his planting still hang their limbs over the pretty greensward that goes down in gentle slope to the Thames banks. He put the same polish upon his grounds he did upon his verse: his grotto flashed with curious spars, glass jewels, and prismatic tinted shells; his walks were decorously paved and rolled and his turf shorn to a nicety. He entertained there in his thrifty way, watching his butler very sharply, and by reason of his infirmities, was very measured in his wine-drinking. Swift, who used to come and pass days with him, may have made the glasses jingle: and there were other worthy friends who, when they came for a dinner, kept the poet in a tremor of unrest. The Prince of Wales, after the Georges of Hanover had come in, used sometimes to honor the poet with a visit; and the rich and powerful Bolingbroke—what time he lived at Battersea—used to come up in his barge, landing at the garden entrance—as most great visitors did—and discuss with him those faiths, dogmas, truisms, and splendid generalities which afterward took form in the famous Essay on Man.
Though the Twickenham home was on a great high road from London to Teddington and Hampton Court, and the greater high road of the river, it had, like all English suburban places now, its high enclosing walls that gave privacy; and the river shores had their skirting of rhododendrons and willows and great beds of laurestina, so that the weak, misshapen poet might take his walks unobserved. He had his vanities, but he did not love to be pointed at. He carried a mind of extreme sensitiveness under that dwarfed figure; and is mad—maybe, sometimes, with destiny, that has crippled him so; and bites that thin lip of his till the blood starts. But he does not waste force or pride on repinings; he feels an altitude in that supple mind of his which lifts him above the bad lines of portraits or figures. He knows that the ready hand and brain, and the faculty of verse which comes tripping to his tongue, and the wit which flashes through and through his utterance, will make for him—has made for him—a path through whatever beleaguerments of sense, straight up and on to the gates of the Temple of Fame.
Pope's vanities.
We have had many vain men to encounter in these talks of ours—men assured of their own judgment and taste; but not one, I think, as yet, so thoroughly and highly conscious that his cleverness and scholarship and deftness and wit were as sure of their reward as the sun was sure to shine.
I can fancy him pausing after having wrought some splendid score of Homeric lines, which blaze and palpitate with new Greek fire: I can fancy him humming them over to himself—growing heated with the flames that flash and play in them—his slight, frail figure trembling with the rhythmic outburst, and he smiling serenely at a mastery which his will and wit have brought to such supreme pitch of excellence that no handling of English will go beyond it.
His Last Days.
Last days of Pope.
I have spoken of one face—I mean Lady Mary Montagu's—which used sometimes to light up the grotto of Mr. Pope, and have told you how that badly managed friendship went out in a great muddle of sootiness and rage; nor were the mud and the filth, which he used in that direction with such cruel vigor, weapons which he was unused to handling: poor John Dennis, a poet and critic of that day, had been put in a rage over and over. Lord Hervey had been scarified. Blackmore and Phillips and Bentley had caught his stiletto thrusts; even Daniel Defoe had been subject of his sneers; and so had the bland, courteous Addison. This sensitive, weak-limbed man saw offence where other men saw none; and straightway drew out that flashing sword of his and made the blood spurt. Of course there were counter-thrusts, and heavy ones, that caused that poor decrepid figure of his to writhe again—all the more because he pretended a stoicism that felt no such attack. To say that he often made his thrusts without reason, and that much of his satire was dastardly, is saying what all the world knows, and what every admirer of his fine powers must lament. But he had his steady friendships, too, and his tendernesses. Nothing could exceed the kindly consideration and affectionate watchfulness which belonged to his protection and shelter of his old mother, lingering in that poet's faery home of Twickenham till over ninety. A strange, close friendship knit him to Dean Swift, who had seemed incapable of rallying this sensitive man's—or, indeed, any man's—affections. Pope, and Bolingbroke—the brilliant and the courted—were long bound together in very close and friendly communion; the tears of this latter were among the honestest which fell when the poet died. Bishop Warburton, too, was most kindly treated by Pope in all his later years, and to this gentleman most of his books were left. There can be no doubt, also, that the poet felt the tenderest regard for that neighbor of his, Miss Patty Blount, who had grown old beside him, and who used at times to bring her quiet face into the parlors of Twickenham. Pope in his last days would, I think, have seen her oftener—did covertly wish for a sight of that kindly smile, which he had known so long and perhaps had valued more than he had dared to confess. But in those final days she had gone her ways; maybe was grown tired of waiting upon the peevish humors of the poet; certainly was not seen by him more often than a fair neighborly regard would dictate. Yet he left her all his rights there at Twickenham, and much money beside.
Death of Pope.
They say that at the last he complained of seeing things dimly—seeing things, too, which others did not see (as the bystanders told him). "Then, 'twas a vision," he said. Two days thereafter he entered very quietly upon the visions all men see after death; leaving that poor, scathed, misshapen body—I should think gladly—leaving the pleasant home shaded by the willows he had planted; and leaving a few wonderful poems which I am sure will live in literature as long as books are printed.
[1] Narcisse Luttrel: A brief historical Relation of State affairs from September, 1678, to April, 1714.
[2] George Berkeley, b. 1685; d. 1753. His works (3 vols.) and Life and Letters (1 vol.); edited by Fraser, in 1871. See also very interesting monograph on Berkeley, in Professor Tyler's Three Men of Letters, Putnam, 1895.
[3] An essay toward preventing the Ruin of Great Britain, 1721.
[4] Dr. Samuel Johnson, afterward, 1754, first President of King's (now Columbia) College, New York; he was a graduate of Yale; life by Dr. Beardsley.
[5] In 1730, he writes to Samuel Johnson, of Stratford, Ct.: "Pray let me know whether they [the college authorities] would admit the writings of Hooker and Chillingworth to the Library of the College of New Haven?"
[6] One of his last publications was, "Siris: a chain of Philosophical Reflections and inquiries concerning the Virtues of Tar-water." And it is remarkable that its arguments and teeming illustrations have not been laid hold of by our modern venders of Tar-soap.
[7] Richard Bentley, b. 1662; d. 1742. Native of Oulton, Yorkshire. Was first Boyle Lecturer, 1692; Master of Trinity, 1700; Works, edited by Dyce, London, 1836 (only 3 vols. issued of a proposed 8 vol. edition). Life, by Jacob Mähly, Leipsic, 1868.
[8] B. 1732; d. 1811. Best known by his Memoirs, 1806; among his plays is False Impressions, in which appears Scud, the forerunner of Dickens's Alfred Jingle.
[9] All along the foot-notes in a great Quarto of the Paradise Lost (London, 1732) Bentley's critical pyrotechnics flame, and flare; and he closes a bristling preface with this droll caveat;—"I made [these] notes extempore, and put them to the Press as soon as made; without any Apprehension of growing leaner by Censures, or plumper by Commendations."
[10] Isaac Watts, b. 1674; d. 1748. Horæ Lyricæ: Memoir by Southey (vol. ix., Sacred Classics: London, 1834). Lowndes (Bib. Manual) says, that up to 1864, there were sold annually 50,000 copies of Watts's Hymns.
[11] B. 1681; d. 1765. Works, with memoir, by J. Mitford. 2 vols., 12mo. London, 1834.
[12] Only staying; since the play (of The Brothers) was brought out in 1753, some twenty years after his establishment in the rectory of Welwyn.
[13] Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, b. 1690 (or 1689?); d. 1762. Works (3 vols.), edited by her great grandson, Lord Wharncliffe: Later edition (1861), with life by Moy Thomas.
[14] Wife of Lord Mar, who was exiled for his engagement in the abortive rebellion of 1715.
[15] Dilke; Papers, etc., vol. ii. pp. 354-5.
[16] Alexander Pope, b. 1688; d. 1744. Editions of his works are numerous. I name those by Bowles and Roscoe, with that of Elwin and Courthope; see also Dilke's Papers of a Critic, Leslie Stephen's Life, and notices by Lowell, Minto, and Mrs. Oliphant.
[17] Lowell, Professor Minto, De Quincey, Hazlitt, Covington, etc. De Quincey says, "It is the most exquisite monument of playful fancy that universal literature offers."
[18] The identity of the house of Pope was destroyed by a lady owner (widow of Dr. Phipps, the Court oculist) in or about 1807. Pope loved landscape gardening and was aided by Kent and Bridgeman. Warburton speaks extravagantly of the poetic graces which he lavished upon his grotto.
The name of Dean Berkeley—an acute and kindly philosopher—engaged our attention in the last chapter. So did that ripe scholar and master of Trinity, Richard Bentley;[1] then came that more saintly Doctor—Isaac Watts, whose Doxologies will long waken the echoes in country churches; we had a glimpse of the gloomy and lurid draperies, with which the muse of Dr. Edward Young sailed over earth and sky; sadly draggled, too, we sometimes found that muse with the stains of earth. We spoke of a Lady—Wortley Montagu—conspicuous for her beauty, for her acquirements, for her vivacity of mind, for her boldness, for her contempt of the convenances of society, and at last, I think, a contempt for the whole male portion of the human race.
Then came that keen, discerning, accomplished poet, Alexander Pope, with a brain as strong and elastic as his body was weak and shaky; and who, of all the poets we have encountered since Elizabeth's day, knew best how to give to words their full forces, and how to make them jingle and shine.
But the lives of these I have now named, and of those previously brought to your notice[2] overreached the reign of Queen Anne, and dropped off—some in the time of George I., some under his son George II., and others in an early part of the long reign of George III.
From Stuart to Brunswick.
But how came the Georges of Hanover and Brunswick to succeed Anne Stuart? Yes, there was a son of the deposed and exiled James II. (whose mother was an Italian princess—making him half-brother to Queen Anne) known, sometimes as James Edward, and sometimes as The Pretender. He had favorers about the Court of Anne; and if the Queen had lingered somewhat longer, or if the Jacobite or Tory political machine had been a little better oiled and in better play, this Pretender might have come to the throne instead of Hanover George. Poet and Ambassador Prior, who was suspected of favoring this, was one of those who went to the Tower, and came near losing his head in the early days of King George; and Bolingbroke, the friend of Pope, a known plotter for the Stuarts, took himself off hastily to France for safety.
James Edward, however, did not give the matter up, but made a landing in Scotland in 1715 and led that dreary rebellion, in which the poor Earl of Mar went astray, and in which Argyle figured; a rebellion which gives its small scenes of battle and its network of conspiracies to Scott's story of Rob Roy. The Pretender escaped with difficulty to France, made no succeeding attempt, lived in comparative obscurity, and died in Rome fifty years later. He was, according to best accounts, a poor, weak creature, of dissipated habits—of melancholy aspect—dubbed King of England[3] by the Pope—given a stipend by the over-gracious Holy Father—and at last a costly tomb in St. Peter's, which is dignified by some good sculptural work. Travelling sentimentalists may meditate over its grandiose inscription of James III., King of England!
James Edward had married, however, a Princess Sobieski of the Polish family, by whom he had two sons, Charles Edward and Henry. The elder, Charles Edward, an ambitious, handsome, gentlemanly, and amiable man—known as the Young Pretender—did, by favor of French aid, and stimulated by larger French promises, make a landing in Scotland in 1745, which was successful at first, but ended with that defeat on Culloden Moor, which—with pretty romantic broidery—gives a gloomy setting to Scott's first novel of Waverley.
A second plotting of some friends of the Young Pretender, somewhere about 1751-1752 (dimly foreshadowed in the story of Redgauntlet), proved abortive. Thenceforward he appears no more in English history. We know only that this bright, clever, brave Chevalier, who bewitched many a Highland maiden, lived a corrupt life, made a dreary and unfortunate marriage (1772), and, bloated with drink and blighted in hopes, died at Rome in 1788.
His brother Henry was a priest, and was made a cardinal. He spent all his money in pompous living, became miserably poor, and died in Venice early in the present century—the last of his family. There is in St. Peter's Church at Rome, in the Chapel of the Presentation, a great tomb, showy with the sculptures of Canova, which commemorates all these Stuarts, and—so far as Latin inscriptions can do it—makes kings and princes of these unfortunate representatives of the family of King James II.
Still we are without an answer to our question: How and why did the Georges of Hanover come to the British throne?
Those who recall my mention[4] of that slip-shod pedantic king, James I., who came from Scotland, and who brought the Stuart name with him, will remember an allusion to an ambitious daughter of his, Elizabeth Stuart, who married a certain Frederic of the Palatinate, and possessor of the famous chateau whose beautiful ruins are still to be seen on the hill above Heidelberg. You will remember my mention of that extravagant ambition which brought her husband to grief and to an early death. Well, she had many children; and among them one named Sophia, who married, in 1658, Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick and—afterward—Elector of Hanover. She was a good woman, a fairly pronounced Protestant—unlike some sisters she had; so that in casting about for a Protestant successor to William III. and to Anne, the orthodox wise ones of England fixed upon this Sophia, the grand-daughter of old James I. She died, however, before Anne died and in the same year; so that the succession fell to her son George Louis, who became George I. of Great Britain.
He was well toward sixty when he came to England—did not care overmuch to come; loved his ease; loved his indulgences, of which he had a good many, and a good many bad ones; was a German all over; not speaking English even, nor ever learning to speak it; had been a good soldier and fought hard in his day, but did not care for more fighting, or fatigue of any sort; had little culture, and minded the welcoming odes which English poets sang to him less than he would mind the gurgling of good "trink" from a beer-bottle. Yet withal, he was fairly well-intentioned, not a meddler, never wantonly unjust, willing to do kindnesses, if not fatiguing; a heavy, good-natured, heathenish, sottish lout of a king.
Yet, as I have said,[5] Addison could not find words noble enough to tell this man how Anne was dead and he was king; if Addison had made his letter as noble as the drama of Cato, George I. would have yawned and lighted his pipe with it.
This George I. had married in early life a beautiful cousin, and a rich one, but without much character; perhaps he treated her brutally (it was certainly a Georgian fashion); and she, who was no saint, would have run away from that Hanover home—had plotted it all, and the night came, when suddenly her lover and the would-be attendant of her flight was savagely slain; and she, separated from her two children and speaking no word more to her grim husband, was consigned a prisoner to a gloomy fortress in the Aller valley, where she dragged out an embittered and disappointed life for thirty odd years; then, Death opened the gates and set the poor soul free.
This was the wife of George I., and the mother of George II.; this latter being over thirty at the time of his father's coming to England, and not getting on over-well with the king—the son, perhaps, resenting that confinement of his mother in the Ahlden fortress.
This Prince of Wales had no more love for letters than his father George I.; would have liked a jolly German drinking song better than anything Pope could do; was short, irascible, as good a fighter as the father, swore easily and often; had a good, honest wife though, who clung to him through all his badnesses. He had a city home in Leicester Square and a lodge in Richmond Park, whence he used to ride, at a hard gait, with hunting parties (Pope speaks of meeting him with such an one) and come home to long dinners and heavy ones.
It was at this lodge in Richmond Park (which is now less changed than almost any park about London and so one of the best worth seeing) that a messenger came galloping in jack-boots one evening, thirteen years after George I. had come to the throne, to tell the Prince that old George was dead (over in Osnaburg, where he had gone on a visit) and that he, the Prince, was now King George II.[6]
"Dat is one big lie"—said the new and incredulous King with an oath. But it was not a lie; the King was wrathy at being waked too early, and wanted to swear at something or somebody. But having rubbed his eyes and considered the matter, he began then and there those thirty-three years of reign, which, without much credit to George II. personally, were, as the careful Mr. Hallam says in his history, the most prosperous years which England had ever known.
Remember please, then, that George I., who succeeded Anne, reigned some thirteen years; and after him came this short, sharp-spoken George II., who reigned thirty-three years—thus bringing us down to 1760. I have dwelt upon the personalities of these two monarchs, not because they are worthy of special regard, but rather that they may serve more effectively as finger-posts or clumsy mile-stones (with wigs upon them)—to show us just how far we are moving along upon the big high-road of English history.