tJHISWIGK HOUSE 



generation later, Horace Walpole, writing to the Earl of Hertford, 

 could tell him of " the entertaining petition of the peri wig- makers 

 to the King, complaining that men will insist on wearing their own 

 hair," and he sagely remarks that a carpenter might just as ; 

 reasonably complain that " since the peace their trade decays 

 because there is no demand for wooden legs." 



Pope, however, appears in his portraits in a full-bottomed wig, 

 except in one in which he wears a night-cap, the alternative to it. 

 The wig must have looked ridiculous on his small person. " He 

 was the only wit of the day," writes Thackeray, " who was not 

 fat. . . . Swift was fat ; Addison was fat : Steele was fat. Gay 

 and Thomson were ^preposterously fat. All that fuddling, and 

 punch-drinking, that club and coffee-house boozing, shortened 

 the lives and enlarged the waistcoats of the men of that age." 

 To me it is very pleasant to think of these two men dropping 

 for the nonce, the manner of St. James's, and in the retirement of 

 that delightful garden, becoming entirely natural. Gay, " a little 

 round French Abbe of a man, sleek, soft-handed and soft-hearted," 

 ..." little Mr. Pope, the decrepid papist." Listen to them, 

 laugh at them, and with them, as they strip the branches, for the 

 two have become boys again. And see ! they are caught in the 

 very act ! they hear footsteps and look up who is that coming 

 quickly round the corner, arm in arm with the Dean of St. Patrick's, 

 newly come to town ? It is Dr. Arbuthnot, author of " John 

 Bull " and " Martinus Scriblerus." He was Queen Anne's physician 

 until her death hearing which a modern wit remarked " Then 

 if Queen Anne is really dead, it was Dr. Arbuthnot who killed her ! ' 

 Well, well ! They have all gone. Swift survived Pope (if his 

 mental state in his latter days can be called living) only about 

 a twelvemonth, and twelve years earlier Pope himself had written 

 Gay's epitaph for the monument in Westminster Abbey, raised 

 to his memory by his good friends the Duke and Duchess of Queens- 

 berry every word of it was inspired by genuine feeling ; and 

 it is a fine tribute. It begins : 



" Of manners gentle, of affections mild ; 

 In wit a man ; simplicity a child." 



The last three words scarcely fit the facts of the case. " Simplicity," 

 depend upon it, never raided an orchard ; he who did so was the 

 sophisticated grown-up schoolboy, whose "long experience," to 



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