Lives of the English Poets : Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope

This work in its full extent—being now afflicted with an asthma, and finding the powers of life gradually declining—he had no longer courage to undertake; but, from the materials which he had provided, he added, at Warburton’s request, another book to the “Dunciad,” of which the design is to ridicule such studies as are either hopeless or useless, as either pursue what is unattainable, or what, if it be attained, is of no use.  When this book was printed (1742) the laurel had been for some time upon the head of Cibber, a man whom it cannot be supposed that Pope could regard with much kindness or esteem, though in one of the imitations of Horace he has liberally enough praised the “Careless Husband.”  In the “Dunciad,” among other worthless scribblers, he had mentioned Cibber, who, in his “Apology,” complains of the great Poet’s unkindness as more injurious, “because,” says he, “I never have offended him.”

It might have been expected that Pope should have been in some degree mollified by this submissive gentleness, but no such consequence appeared.  Though he condescended to commend Cibber once, he mentioned him afterwards contemptuously in one of his satires, and again in his “Epistle to Arbuthnot,” and in the fourth book of the “Dunciad” attacked him with acrimony, to which the provocation is not easily discoverable.  Perhaps he imagined that, in ridiculing the Laureate, he satirised those by whom the laurel had been given, and gratified that ambitious petulance with which he affected to insult the great.  The severity of this satire left Cibber no longer any patience.  He had confidence enough in his own powers to believe that he could disturb the quiet of his adversary, and doubtless did not want instigators, who, without any care about the victory, desired to amuse themselves by looking on the contest.  He therefore gave the town a pamphlet, in which he declares his resolution from that time never to bear another blow without returning it, and to tire out his adversary by perseverance if he cannot conquer him by strength.

The incessant and unappeasable malignity of Pope he imputes to a very distant cause.  After the Three Hours After Marriage had been driven off the stage, by the offence which the mummy and crocodile gave the audience, while the exploded scene was yet fresh in memory, it happened that Cibber played Bayes in the Rehearsal; and, as it had been usual to enliven the part by the mention of any recent theatrical transactions, he said, that he once thought to have introduced his lovers disguised in a mummy and a crocodile.  “This,” says he, “was received with loud claps, which indicated contempt for the play.”  Pope, who was behind the scenes, meeting him as he left the stage, attacked him, as he says, with all the virulence of a “wit out of his senses;” to which he replied, “that he would take no other notice of what was said by so particular a man, than to declare, that as often as he played that part he would repeat the same provocation.”  He shows his opinion to be that Pope was one of the authors of the play which he so zealously defended, and adds an idle story of Pope’s behaviour at a tavern.

The pamphlet was written with little power of thought or language, and, if suffered to remain without notice, would have been very soon forgotten.  Pope had now been enough acquainted with human life to know, if his passion had not been too powerful for his understanding, that, from a contention like his with Cibber, the world seeks nothing but diversion, which is given at the expense of the higher character.  When Cibber lampooned Pope, curiosity was excited.  What Pope would say of Cibber nobody inquired, but in hope that Pope’s asperity might betray his pain and lessen his dignity.  He should therefore have suffered the pamphlet to flutter and die, without confessing that it stung him.  The dishonour of being shown as Cibber’s antagonist could never be compensated by the victory.  Cibber had nothing to lose.  When Pope had exhausted all his malignity upon him, he would rise in the esteem both of his friends and his enemies.  Silence only could have made him despicable; the blow which did not appear to be felt would have been struck in vain.  But Pope’s irascibility prevailed, and he resolved to tell the whole English world that he was at war with Cibber; and, to show that he thought him to common adversary, he prepared no common vengeance.  He published a new edition of the “Dunciad,” in which he degraded Theobald from his painful pre-eminence, and enthroned Cibber in his stead.  Unhappily the two heroes were of opposite characters, and Pope was unwilling to lose what he had already written.  He has therefore depraved his poem by giving to Cibber the old books, the old pedantry, and the sluggish pertinacity of Theobald.

Pope was ignorant enough of his own interest to make another change, and introduced Osborne contending for a prize among the booksellers.  Osborne was a man entirely destitute of shame, without sense of any disgrace but that of poverty.  He told me, when he was doing that which raised Pope’s resentment, that he should be put into the “Dunciad;” but he had the fate of Cassandra.  I gave no credit to his prediction, till in time I saw it accomplished.  The shafts of satire were directed equally in vain against Cibber and Osborne; being repelled by the impenetrable impudence of one, and deadened by the impassive dulness of the other.  Pope confessed his own pain by his anger; but he gave no pain to those who had provoked him.  He was able to hurt none but himself; by transferring the same ridicule from one to another, he reduced himself to the insignificance of his own magpie, who from his cage calls cuckold at a venture.

Cibber, according to his engagement, repaid the “Dunciad” with another pamphlet, which, Pope said, “would be as good as a dose of hartshorn to him;” but his tongue and his heart were at variance.  I have heard Mr. Richardson relate that he attended his father the painter on a visit, when one of Cibber’s pamphlets came into the hands of Pope, who said, “These things are my diversion.”  They sat by him while he perused it, and saw his features writhing with anguish: and young Richardson said to his father, when they returned, that he hoped to be preserved from such diversion as had been that day the lot of Pope.  From this time, finding his diseases more oppressive, and his vital powers gradually declining, he no longer strained his faculties with any original composition, nor proposed any other employment for his remaining life than the revisal and correction of his former works, in which he received advice and assistance from Warburton, whom he appears to have trusted and honoured in the highest degree.  He laid aside his Epic Poem, perhaps without much loss to mankind; for his hero was Brutus the Trojan, who, according to a ridiculous fiction, established a colony in Britain.  The subject, therefore, was of the fabulous age; the actors were a race upon whom imagination has been exhausted, and attention wearied, and to whom the mind will not easily be recalled, when it is invited in blank verse, which Pope had adopted with great imprudence, and, I think, without due consideration of the nature of our language.  The sketch is, at least in part, preserved by Ruffhead, by which it appears that Pope was thoughtless enough to model the names of his heroes with terminations not consistent with the time or country in which he places them.  He lingered through the next year, but perceived himself, as he expresses it, “going down the hill.”  He had for at least five years been afflicted with an asthma, and other disorders, which his physicians were unable to relieve.  Towards the end of his life he consulted Dr. Thomson, a man who had, by large promises, and free censures of the common practice of physic, forced himself up into sudden reputation.  Thomson declared his distemper to be a dropsy, and evacuated part of the water by tincture of jalap, but confessed that his belly did not subside.  Thomson had many enemies, and Pope was persuaded to dismiss him.

While he was yet capable of amusement and conversation, as he was one day sitting in the air with Lord Bolingbroke and Lord Marchmont, he saw his favourite Martha Blount at the bottom of the terrace, and asked Lord Bolingbroke to go and hand her up.  Bolingbroke, not liking his errand, crossed his legs and sat still; but Lord Marchmont, who was younger and less captious, waited on the lady, who, when he came to her, asked, “What, is he not dead yet?”  She is said to have neglected him with shameful unkindness, in the latter time of his decay; yet, of the little which he had to leave she had a very great part.  Their acquaintance began early; the life of each was pictured on the other’s mind; their conversation therefore was endearing, for when they met, there was an immediate coalition of congenial notions.  Perhaps he considered her unwillingness to approach the chamber of sickness as female weakness, or human frailty; perhaps he was conscious to himself of peevishness and impatience, or, though he was offended by her inattention, might yet consider her merit as overbalancing her fault; and if he had suffered his heart to be alienated from her, he could have found nothing that might fill her place; he could have only shrunk within himself.  It was too late to transfer his confidence or fondness.

In May, 1744, his death was approaching.  On the 6th he was all day delirious, which he mentioned for days afterwards as a sufficient humiliation of the vanity of man; he afterwards complained of seeing things as through a curtain, and in false colours, and one day, its the presence of Dodsley, asked what arm it was that came from the wall.  He said that his greatest inconvenience was inability to think.  Bolingbroke sometimes wept over him in this state of helpless decay; and being told by Spence, that Pope, at the intermission of his deliriousness, was always saying something kind either of his present or absent friends, and that his humanity seemed to have survived his understanding, answered, “It has so.”  And added, “I never in my life knew a man that had so tender a heart for his particular friends, or more general friendship for mankind.”  At another time he said, “I have known Pope these thirty years, and value myself more in his friendship than—”  His grief then suppressed his voice.

Pope expressed undoubting confidence of a future state.  Being asked by his friend Mr. Hooke, a papist, whether he would not die like his father and mother, and whether a priest should not be called, he answered, “I do not think it essential, but it will be very right; and I thank you for putting me in mind of it.”  In the morning, after the priest had given him the last sacraments, he said “There is nothing that is meritorious but virtue and friendship; and indeed friendship itself is only a part of virtue.”  He died in the evening of the 30th day of May 1744, so placidly, that the attendants did not discern the exact time of his expiration.  He was buried at Twickenham, near his father and mother, where a monument has been erected to him by his commentator, the Bishop of Gloucester.

He left the care of his papers to his executors; first to Lord Bolingbroke, and, if he should not be living, to the Earl of Marchmont, undoubtedly expecting them to be proud of the trust, and eager to extend his fame.  But let no man dream of influence beyond his life.  After a decent time Dodsley, the bookseller, went to solicit preference as the publisher, and was told that the parcel had not been yet inspected; and, whatever was the reason, the world has been disappointed of what was “reserved for the next age.”  He lost, indeed, the favour of Bolingbroke by a kind of posthumous offence.  The political pamphlet called “The Patriot King” had been put into his hands that he might procure the impression of a very few copies, to be distributed, according to the author’s direction, among his friends, and Pope assured him that no more had been printed than were allowed; but, soon after his death, the printer brought and resigned a complete edition of fifteen hundred copies, which Pope had ordered him to print and retain in secret.  He kept, as was observed, his engagement to Pope better than Pope had kept it to his friend; and nothing was known of the transaction till, upon the death of his employer, he thought himself obliged to deliver the books to the right owner, who, with great indignation, made a fire in his yard, and delivered the whole impression to the flames.

Hitherto nothing had been done which was not naturally dictated by resentment of violated faith; resentment more acrimonious, as the violator had been more loved or more trusted.  But here the anger might have stopped; the injury was private, and there was little danger from the example.  Bolingbroke, however, was not yet satisfied.  His thirst of vengeance excited him to blast the memory of the man over whom he had wept in his last struggles; and he employed Mallet, another friend of Pope, to tell the tale to the public, with all its aggravations.  Warburton, whose heart was warm with his legacy and tender by the recent separation, thought it proper for him to interpose, and undertook, not indeed to vindicate the action, for breach of trust has always something criminal, but to extenuate it by an apology.  Having advanced what cannot be denied, that moral obliquity is made more or less excusable by the motives that produce it, he inquires what evil purpose could have induced Pope to break his promise.  He could not delight his vanity by usurping the work, which, though not sold in shops, had been shown to a number more than sufficient to preserve the author’s claim; he could not gratify his avarice, for he could not sell his plunder till Bolingbroke was dead; and even then, if the copy was left to another, his fraud would be defeated, and if left to himself would be useless.

Warburton therefore supposes, with great appearance of reason, that the irregularity of his conduct proceeded wholly from his zeal for Bolingbroke, who might perhaps have destroyed the pamphlet, which Pope thought it his duty to preserve, even without its author’s approbation.  To this apology an answer was written in “A letter to the most impudent man living.”  He brought some reproach upon his own memory by the petulant and contemptuous mention made in his will of Mr. Allen and an affected repayment of his benefactions.  Mrs. Blount, as the known friend and favourite of Pope, had been invited to the house of Allen, where she comported herself with such indecent arrogance that she parted from Mrs. Allen in a state of irreconcilable dislike, and the door was for ever barred against her.  This exclusion she resented with so much bitterness as to refuse any legacy from Pope unless he left the world with a disavowal of obligation to Allen.  Having been long under her dominion, now tottering in the decline of life, and unable to resist the violence of her temper, or perhaps, with the prejudice of a lover, persuaded that she had suffered improper treatment, he complied with her demand, and polluted his will with female resentment.  Allen accepted the legacy, which he gave to the hospital at Bath, observing that Pope was always a bad accountant, and that if to £150 he had put a cipher more he had come nearer to the truth.

The person of Pope is well known not to have been formed by the nicest model.  He has, in his account of the “Little Club,” compared himself to a spider, and by another is described as protuberant behind and before.  He is said to have been beautiful in his infancy, but he was of a constitution originally feeble and weak; and, as bodies of a tender frame are easily distorted, his deformity was probably in part the effect of his application.  His stature was so low, that to bring him to a level with common tables, it was necessary to raise his seat.  But his face was not displeasing, and his eyes were animated and vivid.  By natural deformity, or accidental distortion, his vital functions were so much disordered, that his life was “a long disease.”  His most frequent assailant was the headache, which he used to relieve by inhaling the steam of coffee, which he very frequently required.

Most of what can be told concerning his petty peculiarities was communicated by a female domestic of the Earl of Oxford, who knew him perhaps after the middle of life.  He was then so weak as to stand in perpetual need of female attendance; extremely sensible of cold, so that he wore a kind of fur doublet, under a shirt of a very coarse warm linen with fine sleeves.  When he rose, he was invested in bodice made of stiff canvas, being scarcely able to hold himself erect till they were laced, and he then put on a flannel waistcoat.  One side was contracted.  His legs were so slender, that he enlarged their bulk with three pairs of stockings, which were drawn on and off by the maid, for he was not able to dress or undress himself, and neither went to bed nor rose without help.  His weakness made it very difficult for him to be clean.  His hair had fallen almost all away, and he used to dine sometimes with Lord Oxford, privately, in a velvet cap.  His dress of ceremony was black, with a tie-wig, and a little sword.  The indulgence and accommodation which his sickness required, had taught him all the unpleasing and unsocial qualities of a valetudinary man.  He expected that everything should give way to his ease or humour, as a child, whose parents will not hear her cry, has an unresisted dominion in the nursery.

“C’est que l’enfant toujours est homme,C’est que l’homme est toujours enfant.”

When he wanted to sleep he “nodded in company,” and once slumbered at his own table while the Prince of Wales was talking of poetry.

The reputation which his friendship gave procured him many invitations, but he was a very troublesome inmate.  He brought no servant, and had so many wants, that a numerous attendance was scarcely able to supply them.  Wherever he was, he left no room for another, because he exacted the attention, and employed the activity of the whole family.  His errands were so frequent and frivolous, that the footmen in time avoided and neglected him, and the Earl of Oxford discharged some of his servants for their resolute refusal of his messages.  The maids, when they had neglected their business, alleged that they had been employed by Mr. Pope.  One of his constant demands was of coffee in the night, and to the woman that waited on him in his chamber he was very burthensome.  But he was careful to recompense her want of sleep, and Lord Oxford’s servant declared, that in the house where her business was to answer his call, she would not ask for wages.  He had another fault, easily incident to those who, suffering much pain, think themselves entitled to what pleasures they can snatch.  He was too indulgent to his appetite: he loved meat highly seasoned and of strong taste; and, at the intervals of the table, amused himself with biscuits and dry conserves.  If he sat down to a variety of dishes, he would oppress his stomach with repletion; and though he seemed angry when a dram was offered him, did not forbear to drink it.  His friends, who knew the avenues to his heart, pampered him with presents of luxury, which he did not suffer to stand neglected.  The death of great men is not always proportioned to the lustre of their lives.  Hannibal, says Juvenal, did not perish by the javelin or the sword, the slaughters of Cannæ were revenged by a ring.  The death of Pope was imputed by some of his friends to a silver saucepan, in which it was his delight to eat potted lampreys.  That he loved too well to eat is certain; but that his sensuality shortened his life will not be hastily concluded, when it is remembered that a conformation so irregular lasted six-and-fifty years, notwithstanding such pertinacious diligence of study and meditation.  In all his intercourse with mankind he had great delight in artifice, and endeavoured to attain all his purposes by indirect and unsuspected methods.  “He hardly drank tea without a stratagem.”  If at the house of friends he wanted any accommodation, he was not willing to ask for it in plain terms, but would mention it remotely as something convenient; though when it was procured, he soon made it appear for whose sake it had been recommended.  Thus he teased Lord Orrery till he obtained a screen.  He practised his arts on such small occasions, that Lady Bolingbroke used to say, in a French phrase, that “he played the politician about cabbages and turnips.”  His unjustifiable impression of the “Patriot King,” as it can be attributed to no particular motive, must have proceeded from his general habit of secrecy and cunning; he caught an opportunity of a sly trick, and pleased himself with the thought of outwitting Bolingbroke.  In familiar or convivial conversation, it does not appear that he excelled.  He may be said to have resembled Dryden, as being not one that was distinguished by vivacity in company.  It is remarkable that, so near his time, so much should be known of what he has written, and so little of what he has said: traditional memory retains no sallies of raillery, nor sentences of observation: nothing either pointed or solid, either wise or merry.  One apophthegm only stands upon record.  When an objection, raised against his inscription for Shakespeare, was defended by the authority of Patrick, he replied, horresco referens, that he “would allow the publisher of a dictionary to know the meaning of a single word, but not of two words put together.”

He was fretful and easily displeased, and allowed himself to be capriciously resentful.  He would sometimes leave Lord Oxford silently, no one could tell why, and was to be courted back by more letters and messages than the footmen were willing to carry.  The table was indeed infested by Lady Mary Wortley, who was the friend of Lady Oxford, and who, knowing his peevishness, could by no entreaties be restrained from contradicting him, till their disputes were sharpened to such asperity, that one or the other quitted the house.  He sometimes condescended to be jocular with servants or inferiors; but by no merriment, either of others or his own, was he ever seen excited to laughter.

Of his domestic character, frugality was a part eminently remarkable.  Having determined not to be dependent, he determined not to be in want, and therefore wisely and magnanimously rejected all temptations to expense unsuitable to his fortune.  This general care must be universally approved; but it sometimes appeared in petty artifices of parsimony, such as the practice of writing his compositions on the back of letters, as may be seen in the remaining copy of the “Iliad,” by which perhaps in five years five shillings were saved; or in a niggardly reception of his friends, and scantiness of entertainment, as, when he had two guests in his house, he would set at supper a single pint upon the table; and having himself taken two small glasses, would retire, and say, “Gentlemen.  I leave you to your wine.”  Yet he tells his friends that “he has a heart for all, a house for all, and whatever they may think, a fortune for all.”  He sometimes, however, made a splendid dinner, and is said to have wanted no part of the skill or elegance which such performances require.  That this magnificence should be often displayed, that obstinate prudence with which he conducted his affairs would not permit; for his revenue, certain and casual, amounted only to about eight hundred pounds a year, of which, however, he declares himself able to assign one hundred to charity.  Of this fortune, which, as it arose from public approbation, was very honourably obtained, his imagination seems to have been too full: it would be hard to find a man so well entitled to notice by his wit, that ever delighted so much in talking of his money.  In his Letters and in his poems, his garden and his grotto, his quincunx and his vines, or some hints of his opulence, are always to be found.  The great topic of his ridicule is poverty; the crimes with which he reproaches his antagonists are their debts, their habitation in the Mint, and their want of a dinner.  He seems to be of an opinion not very uncommon in the world, that to want money is to want everything.  Next to the pleasure of contemplating his possessions, seems to be that of enumerating the men of high rank with whom he was acquainted, and whose notice he loudly proclaims not to have been obtained by any practices of meanness or servility; a boast which was never denied to be true, and to which very few poets have ever aspired.  Pope never set genius to sale; he never flattered those whom he did not love, nor praised those whom he did not esteem.  Savage, however, remarked that he began a little to relax his dignity when he wrote a distich for “his Highness’s dog.”