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“————’tis thy skill
To strike the vice, and spare the person still; As he who, when he saw the serpent wreath’d About his sleeping son, and as he breathed, Drink in his soul, did so the shot contrive, To kill the beast, but keep the child alive.” |
Cooke, the translator of Hesiod, published a letter in Mist’s Journal, insisting that Pope had mistaken the whole character of Thersites, from ignorance of the language. I regret I have not drawn some notes from that essay. The subject might be made curious by a good Greek scholar, if Pope has really erred in the degree Cooke asserts. Theobald, who seems to have been a more classical scholar than has been allowed, besides some versions from the Greek tragic bards, commenced a translation of the Odyssey as soon as Pope’s Iliad appeared.
In one of these situations, Pope issued a very grave, but very ludicrous, advertisement. They had the impudence to publish an account of Pope having been flagellated by two gentlemen in Ham Walks, during his evening promenade. This was avenging Dennis for what he had undergone from the narrative of his madness. In “The Memoirs of Grub-street,” vol. i. p. 96, this tingling narrative appears to have been the ingenious forgery of Lady Mary! On this occasion, Pope thought it necessary to publish the following advertisement in the Daily Post, June 14, 1728:—
“Whereas, there has been a scandalous paper cried aloud about the streets, under the title of ‘A Pop upon Pope,’ insinuating that I was whipped in Ham Walks on Thursday last:—This is to give notice, that I did not stir out of my house at Twickenham on that day; and the same is a malicious and ill-founded report.—A. P.”
[Spence, on the authority of Pope’s half-sister, says: “When some of the people that he had put into the Dunciad were so enraged against him, and threatened him so highly, he loved to walk alone to Richmond, only he would take a large faithful dog with him, and pistols in his pocket. He used to say to us when we talked to him about it, that ‘with pistols the least man in England was above a match for the largest.’”]
It seems that Phillips hung up a birchen-rod at Button’s. Pope, in one of his letters, congratulates himself that he never attempted to use it. [His half-sister, Mrs. Rackett, testifies to Pope’s courage; she says, “My brother never knew what fear was.”]
According to the scandalous chronicle of the day, Pope, shortly after the publication of the Dunciad, had a tall Irishman to attend him. Colonel Duckett threatened to cane him, for a licentious stroke aimed at him, which Pope recanted. Thomas Bentley, nephew to the doctor, for the treatment his uncle had received, sent Pope a challenge. The modern, like the ancient Horace, was of a nature liable to panic at such critical moments. Pope consulted some military friends, who declared that his person ought to protect him from any such redundance of valour as was thus formally required; however, one of them accepted the challenge for him, and gave Bentley the option either of fighting or apologising; who, on this occasion, proved, what is usual, that the easiest of the two was the quickest done.