The poet himself was very far from being invulnerable, and he writhed at every sarcasm. There was one of his contemporaries of whom
he stood in mortal dread, but whose name he was too frightened even to mention. It is easy to guess who this was. It was Hogarth, who in one of his caricatures had depicted Pope as a hunchback, whitewashing Burlington House. Pope deemed this the most grievous insult of his life, but he said nothing about it; the spiteful pencil proving more than master of the poisoned pen.
Pope died on May 30th, 1744, bravely and cheerfully enough. His doctor was offering him one day the usual encouragements, telling him his breath was easier, and so on, when a friend entered, to whom the poet exclaimed, ‘Here I am, dying of a hundred good symptoms.’ In Spence’s Anecdotes there is another story, pitched in a higher key: ‘Shortly before his death, he said to me, “What’s that?” pointing into the air with a very steady regard, and then looked down on me and said, with a smile of great pleasure, and with the greatest softness, “’Twas a vision.”’ It may have been so. At the very last he consented to allow a priest to be sent for, who attended and administered to the dying man the last sacraments of the Church. The spirit in which he received them cannot be pronounced religious. As Cardinal Newman
has observed, Pope was an unsatisfactory Catholic.
Pope died in his enemies’ day.
Dr. Arbuthnot, who was acknowledged by all his friends to have been the best man who ever lived, be the second-best who he might, had predeceased the poet; and it should be remembered, before we take upon ourselves the task of judging a man we never saw, that Dr. Arbuthnot, who was as shrewd as he was good, had for Pope that warm personal affection we too rarely notice nowadays between men of mature years. Swift said of Arbuthnot: ‘Oh! if the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it I would burn my Travels.’ This may be doubted without damage to the friendly testimony. The terrible Dean himself, whose azure eyes saw through most pretences, loved Pope; but Swift was now worse than dead—he was mad, dying a-top, like the shivered tree he once gazed upon with horror and gloomy forebodings of impending doom.
Many men must have been glad when they read in their scanty journals that Mr. Pope lay dead at his villa in Twickenham. They breathed the easier for the news. Personal satire may be a legitimate, but it is an ugly weapon. The Muse often gives what the gods do not guide;
and though we may be willing that our faults should be scourged, we naturally like to be sure that we owe our sore backs to the blackness of our guilt, and not merely to the fact that we have the proper number of syllables to our names, or because we occasionally dine with an enemy of our scourger.
But living as we do at a convenient distance from Mr. Pope, we may safely wish his days had been prolonged, not necessarily to those of his mother, but to the Psalmist’s span, so that he might have witnessed the dawn of a brighter day. 1744 was the nadir of the eighteenth century. With Macbeth the dying Pope might have exclaimed,—
‘Renown and grace is dead;
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left in the vault to brag of.’