CHISWICK HOUSE 
generation later, Horace Walpole, writing to the Earl of Hertford, 
could tell him of “‘ the entertaining petition of the periwig-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 Abbé 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 
177 12 
