312 POPE. 



the unnatural constraint of a man in full dress sitting for his 

 portrait, and endeavouring to look his best. We never catch 

 him, if he can help it, at unawares. Among all Pope s corre 

 spondents, Swift shows in the most dignified, and, one is tempted 

 to say, the most amiable light. It is creditable to the Dean that 

 the letters which Pope addressed to him are by far the most 

 simple and straightforward of any that he wrote. No sham 

 could encounter those terrible eyes in Dublin without wincing. 

 I think, on the whole, that a revision of judgment would substi 

 tute discomforting consciousness of the public for insincerity 

 in judging Pope s character by his letters. He could not shake 

 off the habits of the author, and never, or almost never, in prose, 

 acquired that knack of seeming carelessness that makes Walpole s 

 elaborate compositions such agreeable reading. Pope would 

 seem to have kept a common-place book of phrases proper to 

 this or that occasion; and he transfers a compliment, a fine 

 moral sentiment, nay, even sometimes a burst of passionate 

 ardour, from one correspondent to another, with the most cold 

 blooded impartiality. Were it not for this curious economy of 

 his, no one could read his letters to Lady Wortley Montague 

 without a conviction that they were written by a lover. Indeed, 

 I think nothing short of the sfiretce injuria formce will account 

 for (though it will not excuse) the savage vindictiveness he felt 

 and showed towards her. It may be suspected also that the 

 bitterness of caste added gall to his resentment. His enemy 

 wore that impenetrable armour of superior rank which rendered 

 her indifference to his shafts the more provoking that it was un 

 affected. Even for us his satire loses its sting when we reflect 

 that it is not in human nature for a woman to have had two such 

 utterly irreconcilable characters as those of Lady Mary before 

 and after her quarrel with the poet. In any view of Pope s 

 conduct in this affair, there is an ill savour in his attempting to 

 degrade a woman whom he had once made sacred with his love. 

 Spenser touches the right chord when he says of the Rosalind 

 who had rejected him, 



Not, then, to her, that scorn eM thing so base, 

 But to myself the blame, that lookt so high ; 

 Yet so much grace let her vouchsafe to grant 

 To simple swain, sith her I may not love, 

 Yet that I may her honor paravant 

 And praise her worth, though far my wit above ; 

 Such grace shall be some guerdon of the grief 

 And long affliction which I have endured. 



In his correspondence with Aaron Hill, Pope, pushed to the 

 wall, appears positively mean. He vainly endeavours to show 



