428 POPE. 



that impenetrable armor of superior rank which ren- 

 dered 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 charac- 

 ters 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 savor 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 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 I may not love, 

 Yet that I may her honor paravant 

 And praise her wortli, though far my wit above; 

 Such grace shall be some guerdon of the grief 

 And long affliction which I have endui'ed.'' 



In his coiTespondence with Aaron Hill, Pope, pushed 

 to the wall, apjDcars positively mean. He vainly en- 

 deavors to show that his personalities had all been writ- 

 ten in the interests of literature and morality, and from 

 no selfish motive. But it is hard to believe that Theo- 

 bald would have been deemed worthy of his disgustful 

 pre-eminence but for the manifest superiority of his 

 edition of Shakespeare, 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 contempt- 

 uously disavowed all complicity in his volunteer defence 

 of Cato in a brutal assault on Dennis. Pope had done 

 a mean thing to propitiate a man whose critical judg- 

 ment he dreaded ; and the great man, instead of thank- 

 ing him, had resented his interference as impertinent. 

 In the whole portrait of Atticus one cannot help feeling 



