374 POPE. 



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.&quot; 



In his correspondence with Aaron Hill, Pope, pushed to 

 the wall, appears positively mean. He vainly endeavours to 

 show that his personalities had all been written in the 

 interests of literature and morality, and from no selfish 

 motive. But it is hard to believe that Theobald would 

 have been deemed worthy of his disgustful pre-eminence 

 but for the manifest superiority of his edition of Shake 

 speare, or that Addison would have been so adroitly 

 disfigured unless through wounded self-love. It is easy to 

 conceive the resentful shame which Pope must have felt 

 when Addison so almost contemptuously disavowed all com 

 plicity in his volunteer defence of Cato in a brutal assault 

 on Dennis. Pope had done a mean thing to propitiate 

 a man whose critical judgment he dreaded ; and the great 

 man, instead of thanking him, had resented his interference 

 as impertinent. In the whole portrait of Atticus one 

 cannot help feeling that Pope s satire is not founded on 

 knowledge, but rather on what his own sensitive suspicion 

 divined of the opinions of one whose expressed preferences 

 in poetry implied a condemnation of the very grounds 

 of the satirist s own popularity. We shall not so easily 

 give up the purest and most dignified figure of that 

 somewhat vulgar generation, who ranks with Sidney and 

 Spenser, as one of the few perfect gentlemen in our literary 

 annals. A man who could command the unswerving loyalty 

 of honest and impulsive Dick Steele could not have been a 

 coward or a backbiter. The only justification alleged by 

 Pope was of the flimsiest kind namely, that Addison 

 regretted the introduction of the sylphs in the second 

 edition of the &quot; Rape of the Lock,&quot; saying that the poem 

 was merum sal before. Let anyone ask himself how he 

 likes an author s emendations of any poem to which his ear 

 had adapted itself in its former shape, and he will hardly 

 think it needful to charge Addison with any mean motive 



