should have been permitted to have aspersed Pope with the most degrading language. Pope is here always designated as “This Man.” Thus “This Man was no sooner dead than Lord Bolingbroke received information that an entire edition of 1500 copies of these papers had been printed; that this very Man had corrected the press, &c.” Could one imagine that this was the Tully of England, describing our Virgil? For Mallet was but the mouthpiece of Bolingbroke.
After a careful detection of many facts concerning the parties now before us, I must attribute the concealed motive 323 of this outrage on Pope to the election the dying poet made of Warburton as his editor. A mortal hatred raged between Bolingbroke and Warburton. The philosophical lord had seen the mighty theologian ravish the prey from his grasp. Although Pope held in idolatrous veneration the genius of Bolingbroke, yet had this literary superstition been gradually enlightened by the energy of Warburton. They were his good and his evil genii in a dreadful conflict, wrestling to obtain the entire possession of the soul of the mortal. Bolingbroke and Warburton one day disputed before Pope, and parted never to meet again. The will of Pope bears the trace of his divided feelings: he left his MSS. to Bolingbroke as his executor, but his works to Warburton as his editor. The secret history of Bolingbroke and Warburton with Pope is little known: the note will supply it.[238]
But how did the puny Mallet stand connected with these great men? By the pamphlets published during this literary quarrel he appears to have enjoyed a more intimate intercourse with them than is known. In one of them he is characterised “as a fellow who, while Mr. Pope lived, was as diligent in licking his feet, as he is now in licking your lordship’s; and who, for the sake of giving himself an air of importance, in being joined with you, and for the vanity of saying ‘the Author and I,’—‘the Editor and me,’—has sacrificed all his pretensions to friendship, honour, and humanity.”[239] An anecdote in this pamphlet assigns a sufficient motive to excite some wrath in a much less irritable animal than the self-important editor of Bolingbroke’s Works. The anecdote may be distinguished as
THE APOLLO VISION.
“The editor (Mallet) being in company with the person to whom Mr. Pope has consigned the care of his works (Warburton), and who, he thought, had some intention of writing Mr. Pope’s life, told him he had an anecdote, which he believed nobody knew but himself. I was sitting one day (said he) with Mr. Pope, in his last illness, who coming suddenly out of a reverie, which you know he frequently fell into at that time, and fixing his eyes steadfastly upon me; ‘Mr. M. (said he), I have had an odd kind of vision. Methought I saw my own head open, and Apollo came out of it; I then saw your head open, and Apollo went into it; after which our heads closed up again.’ The gentleman (Warburton) could not help smiling at his vanity; and with some humour replied, ‘Why, sir, if I had an intention of writing your life, this 325 might perhaps be a proper anecdote; but I don’t see, that in Mr. Pope’s it will be of any consequence at all.’” P. 14.
This exhibits a curious instance of an author’s egotism, or rather of Mallet’s conceit, contriving, by some means, to have his name slide into the projected Life of Pope by Warburton, who appears, however, always to have treated him with the contempt Pope himself evidently did.[240] What opinion could the 326 poet have entertained of the taste of that weak and vain critic, who, when Pope published anonymously “The Essay on Man,” being asked if anything new had appeared, replied that he had looked over a thing called an “Essay on Man,” but, discovering the utter want of skill and knowledge in the author, had thrown it aside. Pope mortified him by confiding to him the secret.
“The Apollo Vision” was a stinging anecdote, and it came from Warburton either directly or indirectly. This was followed 327 up by “A Letter to the Editor of the Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism, the Idea of a Patriot King,” &c., a dignified remonstrance of Warburton himself; but “The Impostor Detected and Convicted, or the Principles and Practices of the Author of the Spirit of Patriotism (Lord Bolingbroke) set forth in a clear light, in a Letter to a Member of Parliament in Town, from his Friend in the Country, 1749,” is a remarkable production. Lord Bolingbroke is the impostor and the concealed Jacobite. Time, the ablest critic on these party productions, has verified the predictions of this seer. We discover here, too, a literary fact, which is necessary to complete our present history. It seems that there were omissions and corrections in the edition Pope printed of “The Patriot King,” which his caution or his moderation prompted, and which such a political demagogue as Bolingbroke never forgave. They are thus alluded to: “Lord B. may remember” (from a conversation held, at which the writer appears to have been present), “that a difference in opinion prevailed, and a few points were urged by that gentleman (Pope) in opposition to some particular tenets which related to the limitation of the English monarchy, and to the ideal doctrine of a patriot king. These were Mr. P.’s reasons for the emendations he made; and which, together with the consideration that both their lives were at that time in a declining state, was the true cause, and no other, of his care to preserve those letters, by handing them to the press, with the precaution mentioned by the author.” Indeed the cry raised against the dead man by Bolingbroke and Mallet, was an artificial one: that it should ever have tainted the honour of the bard, or that it should ever have been excited by his “Philosopher and Friend,” are equally strange; it is possible that the malice of Mallet was more at work than that of Bolingbroke, who suffered himself to be the dupe of a man held in contempt by Pope, by Warburton, and by others. But the pamphlet I have just noticed might have enraged Bolingbroke, because his true character is ably drawn in it. The writer says that “a person in an eminent station of life abroad, when Lord B—— was at Paris to transact a certain affair, said, C’est certainement un homme d’esprit, mais un coquin sans probité.” This was a very disagreeable truth!
In one of these pamphlets, too, Bolingbroke was mortified at his dignity being lessened by the writer, in comparing his lordship with their late friend Pope.—“I venture to foretell, 328 that the name of Mr. Pope, in spite of your unmanly endeavours, shall revive and blossom in the dust, from his own merits; and presume to remind you, that yours, had it not been for his genius, his friendship, his idolatrous veneration for you, might, in a short course of years, have died and been forgotten.” Whatever the degree of genius Bolingbroke may claim, doubtless the verse of Pope has embalmed his fame. I have never been able to discover the authors of these pamphlets, who all appear of the first rank, and who seem to have written under the eye of Warburton. The awful and vindictive Bolingbroke, and the malignant and petulant Mallet, did not long brood over their anger: he or they gave it vent on the head of Warburton, in those two furious pamphlets, which I have noticed in the “Quarrels of Warburton.” All these pamphlets were published in the same year, 1749, so that it is now difficult to arrange them according to their priority. Enough has been shown to prove, that the loud outcry of Bolingbroke and Mallet, in their posthumous attack on Pope, arose from their unforgiving malice against him, for the preference by which the poet had distinguished Warburton; and that Warburton, much more than Pope, was the real object of this masked battery.