Of all thy blameless life the sole return

My Verse, and QUEENSB'RY weeping o'er thy urn!

Oh let me live my own, and die so too!

(To live and die is all I have to do :) Maintain a Poet's dignity and ease,

261

And see what friends, and read what books, I please: Above a Patron, tho' I condescend

Sometimes to call a Minister my friend.

I was not born for Courts or great affairs;

I pay my debts, believe, and say my pray'rs ;
Can sleep without a Poem in my head,

Nor know, if Dennis be alive or dead.

265

270

VARIATIONS.

After Ver. 270 in the MS.

*

Friendships from youth I sought, and seek them still :
Fame, like the wind, may breathe where'er it will.
The World I knew, but made it not my School*,
And in a course of flatt'ry liv'd no fool.

By not making the World his School, he means, he did not form his system of morality on the principles or practice of men in business.

NOTES.

dison, in his last illness, sent to speak with Mr. Gay, and told him he had injured him; probably with respect to his gaining some employment at court; but," said he, "if I recover I will endeavour to recompense you."

Ver. 261. Oh let me live] In the first edition;

Give me on Thames's banks, in honest ease,

To see what friends, or read what books I please.

Ver. 265. tho' I condescend, &c.] He thought it, and he justly thought it, a condescension in an honest man to accept the friendship of any one, how high soever, whose conduct in life was governed only on principles of policy: for of what Ministers he speaks, may be seen by the character he gives, in the next line, of the Courts they belong to. W.

Why am I ask'd what next shall see the light? Heav'ns! was I born for nothing but to write? Has Life no joys for me? or (to be grave)

274

Have I no friend to serve, no soul to save?
"I found him close with Swift-Indeed? no doubt
(Cries prating Balbus) something will come out."
'Tis all in vain, deny it as I will;

"No, such a Genius never can lie still;"
And then for mine obligingly mistakes
The first Lampoon Sir Will. or Bubo makes.
Poor guiltless I! and can I choose but smile
When ev'ry Coxcomb knows me by my Style?

280

VARIATIONS.

After Ver. 282 in the MS.

P. What if I sing Augustus, great and good?
A. You did so lately, was it understood?

P. Be nice no more, but, with a mouth profound,
As rumbling D- -s or a Norfolk hound;
With GEORGE and FRED'RIC roughen every verse,
Then smooth up all, and CAROLINE rehearse.
A. No-the high task to lift up Kings to Gods,
Leave to Court-sermons, and to Birth-day Odes.
On themes like these, superior far to thine,
Let laurell❜d Cibber, and great Arnal shine.

P. Why write at all?- -A. Yes, silence if
you keep,
The Town, the Court, the Wits, the Dunces, weep.

NOTES.

Ver. 271. Why am I ask'd, &c.] This is intended as a reproof of those impertinent complaints, which were continually made to him by those who called themselves his friends, for not entertaining the Town as often as it wanted amusement.—A French Writer says well on this occasion-Dès qu'on est auteur, il semble qu'on soit aux gages d'un tas de fainéans, pour leur fournir de quoi amuser leur oisiveté. W.

Ver. 282. When ev'ry Coxcomb knows me by my Style?] The discovery of a concealed author by his Style, not only requires

Curst be the verse, how well soe'er it flow, That tends to make one worthy man my

foe,

Give Virtue scandal, Innocence a fear,
Or from the soft-ey'd Virgin steal a tear!
But he who hurts a harmless neighbour's peace,
Insults fall'n worth, or Beauty in distress,
Who loves a Lie, lame slander helps about,
Who writes a Libel, or who copies out:
That Fop, whose pride affects a patron's name,
Yet absent, wounds an author's honest fame :

285

290

NOTES.

a perfect intimacy with his writings, but great skill in the nature of composition. But, in the practice of these Critics, knowing an Author by style, is like judging of a man's whole person from the view of one of his moles,

When Mr. Pope wrote the Advertisement to the first edition of the new Dunciad, intimating, that, "it was by a different hand from the other, and found in detached pieces, incorrect and unfinished," I objected to him the affectation of using so unpromising an attempt to mislead his Reader. He replied, that I thought too highly of the public taste; that, most commonly, it was formed on that of half a dozen people in fashion; who took the lead, and who sometimes have intruded on Town the dullest performances for works of wit: while, at the same time, some true effort of genius, without name or recommendation, hath passed by the public eye unobserved or neglected: that he once before made the trial I now objected to with success in the Essay on Man: which was at first given (as he told me) to Dr. Young, to Dr. Desaguliers, to Lord Bolingbroke, to Lord Paget, and, in short, to every body but to him who was capable of writing it. However, to make him amends, this same Public, when let into the secret, would, for some time after, suffer no poem with a moral title, to pass for any man's but his. So the Essay on Human Life, the Essay on Reason, and many others of a worse tendency, were very liberally bestowed upon him. W. -There are many admirable passages in Harte's Essay on Human Reason, which was much praised on its first publication and is said to have been corrected by Pope.

Who can your merit selfishly approve,

And shew the sense of it without the love;
Who has the vanity to call you friend,

295

300

Yet wants the honour, injur'd to defend ;
Who tells whate'er you think, whate'er you say,
And, if he lie not, must at least betray:
Who to the Dean, and silver bell can swear,
And sees at Cannons what was never there;
Who reads, but with a lust to misapply,
Make Satire a Lampoon, and Fiction Lie.
A lash like mine no honest man shall dread,
But all such babbling blockheads in his stead.
Let Sporus tremble-A. What? that thing of silk,
Sporus, that mere white curd of Ass's milk?

NOTES.

306

Ver. 299. Who to the Dean, and silver bell, &c.] Meaning the man who would have persuaded the Duke of Chandos that Mr. P. meant him in those circumstances ridiculed in the Epistle on Taste. See Mr. Pope's letter to the Earl of Burlington concerning this matter. P.

Ver. 305. Let Sporus tremble] Language cannot afford more glowing or more forcible terms to express the utmost bitterness of contempt. We think we are here reading Milton against Salmasius. The raillery is carried to the very verge of railing, some will say ribaldry. He has armed his muse with a scalping knife. The portrait is certainly overcharged: for Lord H. for whom it was designed, whatever his morals might be, had yet considerable abilities, though marred by affectation. Some of his speeches in parliament were much beyond florid impotence. They were, it is true, in favour of Sir R. Walpole; and this was sufficiently offensive to Pope. The fact that particularly excited his indignation, was Lord H.'s Epistle to a Doctor of Divinty (Dr. Sherwin) from a Nobleman at Hampton Court, 1733; as well as his having been concerned with Lady M. W. M. in Verses to the Imitator of Horace, 1732. This Lady's beauty, wit, genius, and travels, of which she gave an account in a series of elegant and entertaining letters, very characteristical of

Satire or Sense, alas! can Sporus feel?
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

NOTES.

the manners of the Turks, and of which many are addressed to Pope; are well known, and justly celebrated. With both noble personages had Pope lived in a state of intimacy. And justice obligeth us to confess that he was the aggressor in the quarrel with them: as he first assaulted and affronted Lord H. by these two lines in his Imitation of the first Satire of Horace's second Book:

The lines are weak, another's pleas'd to say,

Lord Fanny spins a thousand such a day.

And Lady M. W. M. by the eighty-third line of the same piece, too gross to be here repeated.

It is a singular circumstance, that our Author's indignation was so vehement and inexhaustible, that it furnished him with another invective, of equal power, in prose, which is to be found at the end of the third volume, containing his Letters. The reader that turns to it, page 328 (for it is too long to be here inserted, and too full of matter to be abridged), will find, that it abounds in so many new strokes of sarcasm, in so many sudden and repeated blows, that he does not allow the poor devoted peer a moment's breathing-time:

Nunc dextra ingeminans ictus, nunc ille sinistra ;
Nec mora, nec requies; quam multa grandine nimbi
Culminibus crepitant; sic densis ictibus heros

Creber utraque manu pulsat, versatque.

It is indeed a master-piece of invective, and perhaps excels the character of Sporus itself, capital as that is, above-quoted: who, however, would wish to be the author of such a cutting invective? But can this be the nobleman (we are apt to ask) whom Middleton, in his Dedication to the History of the Life of Tully, has so seriously and so earnestly praised, for his strong good sense, his consummate politeness, his real patriotism, his rigid temperance, his thorough knowledge and defence of the laws of his country, his accurate skill in history, his unexampled and unremitted diligence in literary pursuits, who added credit to this very history, as Scipio and Lælius did to that of Polybius, by revising and correcting it; and brightening it, as he expresses it, by the strokes of his pencil? The man that had