"God never made him." The big man swayed in his seat, and added, "God had nothing to do with him—he is the child of Beelzebub."
"Think 'ee so?" asks Davy. "Why, Mephisto has some pretty good traits; but Alexander Pope is as crooked as an interrogation-point, inside and out."
"I hear he wears five pairs of stockings to fill out his shanks, and sole-leather stays to keep him from flattening out like a devilfish," said Doctor Johnson.
"But he makes a lot o' money!"
"Well, he has to, for he pays an old woman a hundred guineas a year to dress and undress him."
"I know, but she writes his heroic couplets, too!"
"Davy, I fear you are getting cynical—let's change the subject."
It surely is a case of artistic jealousy. Our friends locate the poet Gay, a fat little man, who is with his publisher, Rich.
"They say," says Samuel, again rolling in his seat as if about to have an apoplectic fit, "they say that Gay has become rich, and Rich has become gay since they got out that last book." There comes an interlude in the play, and our friends get up to stretch their legs.
"How now, Dick Savage?" calls Samuel, as he pushes three men over like ninepins, to seize a shabby fellow whose neckcloth and hair-cut betray him as being a poet. "How now, Dick, you said that Italian music was damnably bad! Why do you come to hear it?"