POPE. 373 



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 

 substitute &quot;discomforting consciousness of the public&quot; for 

 &quot;insincerity&quot; 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 

 commonplace book of phrases proper to this or that occa 

 sion ; 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 im 

 partiality. 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 spretce injuria formce 

 will account for (though it will not excuse) the savage vin- 

 dictiveness 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 unaffected. 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 attempt 

 ing 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 



&quot; Not, then, to her, that scorned 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 1 may not love, 



