Bowles said it was Lord Hervey, and that the adjective is due to his lordship’s well-known practice of painting himself; but Mr. Croker, who knew everything, and was in the habit of contradicting the Duke of Wellington about the battle of Waterloo, says, ‘Certainly not. The Florid Youth was young Henry Fox.’
Sometimes, indeed, in our hours of languor and dejection, when
‘The heart is sick,
And all the wheels of being slow,’
the question forces itself upon us, What can it matter who the Florid Youth was, and who cares how he offended? But this questioning
spirit must be checked. ‘The proper study of mankind is man,’ and that title cannot be denied even to a florid youth. Still, as I was saying, people did not like it at the time, and the then Duke of Argyll said, in his place in the House of Lords, that if anybody so much as named him in an invective, he would first run him through the body, and then throw himself—not out of the window, as one was charitably hoping—but on a much softer place—the consideration of their Lordship’s House. Some persons of quality, of less truculent aspect than McCallum More, thought to enlist the poet’s services, and the Duchess of Buckingham got him to write an epitaph on her deceased son—a feeble lad—to which transaction the poet is thought to allude in the pleasing lines,
‘But random praise—the task can ne’er be done,
Each mother asks it for her booby son.’
Mr. Alderman Barber asked it for himself, and was willing—so at least it was reported—to pay for it at the handsome figure of £4,000 for a single couplet. Pope, however, who was not mercenary, declined to gratify the alderman, who by his will left the poet a legacy of £100, possibly hoping by this benefaction, if he could
not be praised in his lifetime, at all events to escape posthumous abuse. If this were his wish it was gratified, and the alderman sleeps unsung.
Pope greatly enjoyed the fear he excited. With something of exultation he sings:—
‘Yes, I am proud: I must be proud to see
Men, not afraid of God, afraid of me;
Safe from the bar, the pulpit, and the throne,
Yet touched and shamed by ridicule alone.
O sacred weapon! left for Truth’s defence,
Sole dread of folly, vice, and insolence!
To all but heaven-directed hands denied,
The Muse may give thee, but the gods must guide:
Reverent I touch thee, but with honest zeal,
To rouse the watchmen of the public weal,
To Virtue’s work provoke the tardy Hall
And goad the prelate slumb’ring in his stall.
Ye tinsel insects! whom a court maintains,
That counts your beauties only by your stains,
Spin all your cobwebs o’er the eye of day,
The Muse’s wing shall brush you all away.
All his grace preaches, all his lordship sings,
All that makes saints of queens, and gods of kings,—
All, all but truth drops dead-born from the press,
Like the last gazette, or the last address.’