and once more took up his residence with Pope. It was his last visit to England. Attached as he was to Pope,* Swift never seems to have felt quite at his ease at Twickenham. His host apparently paid him too much attention, and, with one exception, was over - careful to promote his comfort. The exception was a stint of wine to his guests, a meanness which Swift refers to more than once. "I tell you," he writes to Gay, " that I fear my Lord Bolingbroke and Mr. Pope-a couple of philosophers would starve me, for even of port wine I should require half a pint a day, and as much at night. . . . You have not forgot 'Gentlemen, I will leave you to your wine,' which was but the remainder of a pint when four glasses were drunk. I tell that story to everybody in commendation of Mr. Pope's abstemiousness." abstemiousness." And, alluding to Pope and Bolingbroke, in a letter to Arbuthnot he says: "They are both too temperate and too wise for me, too profound, and too poor." Pope, perhaps, like some other men of a generous nature, had occasional fits of niggardliness. He earned the epithet of "paper-sparing " Pope; but he was of a charitable disposition, and stinginess in the way of

...

On his presentation copy of the 'Dunciad,' Swift wrote Auctoris Amicissimi Donum.

hospitality was as alien to his disposition as it was to the spirit of the age. His weak health demanded the strictest temperance, but he loved good living only too well. "He certainly," says Dr. King (from whose statement, however, something must be deducted, as he was himself a total abstainer), "hastened his death by feeding much on high-seasoned dishes and drinking spirits ;" and if we may credit the disagreeable assertion of Lord Bathurst in writing to Mrs. Howard," he made himself sick every meal at your most moderate and plain table in England."

Pope's associates could not teach him the virtue of temperance. Robert, Earl of Oxford, was accused by the Queen of often coming into her presence drunk; and when his ignoble career was over, he

resigned himself to a sottishness that hastened his end." His son Edward, who succeeded to the title, and whose name is intimately associated with Pope's, having fallen into pecuniary difficulties, copied his father's example, and drank himself to death. Gay, although for some period of his life a water drinker, was, like Thomson, fat and lethargic. Swift accused him, but the accusation was made to Gay himself, of a rooted laziness, and utter impatience of fatigue; and Congreve observes that he was a great eater. Pope describes him, not

inappropriately, as sprinkled with rose-water, and living "in burrage, balm, and burnet, up to the chin with the Duchess of Queensberry" who may be said to have killed him with kindness. As he himself said, he had "no one pursuit in life"; indeed he appears to have died of ennui and of good living. Fenton, one of Pope's associates in the translation of the 'Odyssey,' "died of a great chair and two bottles of port a day." Arbuthnot, whose character in many respects was eminently noble, and of whom Swift said, "He has more wit than we all have, and more humanity than wit," was noted for his "carnivoracity," and, in the words of his admirer, Lord Chesterfield, "indulged his appetite to excess, I might have said to gluttony, which gave him a gross, plethoric habit of body, that was the cause of his death." Parnell, too, died from intemperance in his thirty-ninth year; and Swift, who considered himself a very temperate man, since he never drank more than his physician prescribed, which was no doubt sufficient, as the physician's own allowance was two bottles of claret after dinner daily-gave way once at least in his life to inordinate gluttony, from which he was destined to suffer ever afterwards. When Swift, forsaking the fallen fortunes of his Whig friends, who had treated him shabbily, promising much and doing little, was making friends

among the Tories in the three memorable years of his life 1710-12, he seems to have indulged his appetite far more than was good for him. Day after day he was asked to dine with great men, and what with Burgundy, Tokay, and bad punch, suffered in consequence. "The ugly, nasty, filthy wine," he calls it, but was ready enough to drink again when the opportunity offered.*

Pope had a not unwholesome dread of Irish hospitality, and declined a visit to Swift on the plea that if he escaped the peril of the sea he would be killed with eating and drinking.

"My ailments are such that I really believe a sea-sicknessconsidering the oppression of colical pains and the great weakness of my breast-would kill me, and if I did not die of that, I must of the excessive eating and drinking of your hospitable town."

Bolingbroke was a frequent guest at Twickenham, and Pope visited his lordship at Dawley, from whence he writes one day that they had nothing for dinner but mutton broth, beans and bacon, and a barn-door fowl. One night, we are told, and the anecdote is characteristic of the period, after the poet had been

Swift lived for the most part moderately in his deanery, and at a cost which, when contrasted with the expenses of our day, seems ridiculously and enviably small: "I can buy a chicken," he writes, "for a groat, and entertain three or four friends with as many dishes and two or three bottles of French wine for 10s. When I dine alone, my pint and chicken with the appendices, cost me about 15d."

dining at Dawley, Lord Bolingbroke sent him home in a coach and six. "A small bridge about a mile from Pope's residence was broken down, and the postilion taking the water, the coach came in contact with the trunk of a tree and was overturned. Before the coachman could get to Pope's assistance, the water had reached the knots of his periwig. The glass was broken, and he was rescued, but not until he had received a severe wound in his right hand, which for some time disqualified him for writing." Whereupon Voltaire, who was at Dawley, wrote to the poet in a strain which sounds ineffably absurd in modern ears, saying, that the water was not Hippocrene's or it would have respected him, and adding, "Is it possible that those fingers which have written the Rape of the Lock' and the 'Criticism,' which have dressed Homer so becomingly in an English coat, should have been so barbarously treated?" *

When Pope had attained the summit of his fame,

*Voltaire had been received by the poet at Twickenham, and is said to have talked so grossly as to drive Mrs. Pope from the room. The Prince of Wales, afterwards George II., must have been also an occasional guest, for Dr. Johnson records that Pope once slumbered at his own table while the Prince was talking of poetry. No doubt the talk on such a subject was stupid enough, if we may judge from the intellect of the speaker, and perhaps under the circumstances the poet's want of politeness may be forgiven. We wonder whether he ever nodded in his chair when Gay and Arbuthnot, Swift and St. John were seated at his board!