Walpole still kept a good deal in touch with the King. George consulted him privately, and indeed with much mystery about the consultations. The King sometimes sent a trusty messenger, who met Walpole at midnight at the house of a friend. It was indeed a summons from George which hastened the great statesman's death. The King wished to consult Walpole, and Walpole hurried up from Houghton for the purpose. The journey greatly increased a malady from which he suffered, and he was compelled by pain to have recourse to heavy doses of opium, which kept him insensible for the greater part of every day during more than six weeks. When the stupefying effect of the opium was not on him—that is, for {196} some two or three hours each day—he talked with all that former vivacity which of late years seemed to have deserted him. He knew that the end was coming, and he bore the knowledge with characteristic courage. On March 18, 1745, he died at his London house in Arlington Street. Life could have had of late but little charm for him. He had always lived for public affairs and for power. He had none of the gifts of seclusion. Except for his love of pictures, he had no in-door intellectual resources. He could not bury himself in literature as Carteret could do; or, at a later day, Charles James Fox; or, at a later day still, Mr. Gladstone. Walpole's life really came to an end the day he left the House of Commons; the rest was silence. He was only in his sixty-ninth year when he died. It was fitting that he should lose his life in striving to assist and counsel the sovereign whose family he more than any other man or set of men had seated firmly on the throne of England. His faults were many; his personal virtues perhaps but few. One great and consummate public virtue he certainly had: he was devoted to the interests of his country. In the building of Nelson's ships it was said that the oak of Houghton Woods excelled all other timber. Oak from the same woods was used to make musket-stocks for Wellington's soldiers in the long war against Napoleon. Walpole's own fibre was something like that of the oaks which grew on his domain. His policy on two of the most eventful occasions of his life has been amply justified by history. He was right in the principles of his Excise Bill; he was right in opposing the war policy of the Patriots. The very men who had leagued against him in both these instances acknowledged afterwards that he was right and that they were wrong. It was in an evil moment for himself that he yielded to the policy of the Patriots, and tried to carry on a war in which he had no sympathy, and from which he had no hope. He was a great statesman; almost, but not quite, a great man.
[Sidenote: 1744—Death of Pope]
Not very long before Walpole's death a star of all but {197} the first magnitude had set in the firmament of English literature. Alexander Pope died on May 30, 1744, at his house in Twickenham, where "Thames' translucent wave shines a broad mirror," to use his own famous words. He died quietly; death was indeed a relief to him from pain which he had borne with a patience hardly to be expected from one of so fitful a temper. Pope's life had been all a struggle against ill-health and premature decrepitude. He was deformed; he was dwarfish; he was miserably weak from his very boyhood; a rude breath of air made him shrink and wither; the very breezes of summer had peril in them for his singularly delicate constitution and ever-quivering nerves. He was but fifty-six years old when death set him free. Life had been for him a splendid success indeed, but the success had been qualified by much bitterness and pain. He was sensitive to the quick; he formed strong friendships, fierce and passionate enmities; and the friendships themselves turned only too often into enmities. Unsparing with the satire of his pen, he made enemies everywhere. He professed to be indifferent to the world's praise or censure, but he was nevertheless morbidly anxious to know what people said of him. He was as egotistic as Rousseau or Byron; but he had none of Byron's manly public spirit, and none of Rousseau's exalted love of humanity. Pope's place in English poetry may be taken now as settled. He stands high and stands firmly in the second class: that is, in the class just below Shakespeare and Milton and a very few others. He has been extravagantly censured and extravagantly praised. Byron at one time maintained that he was the greatest English poet, and many vehement arguments have been used to prove that he was not a poet at all. One English critic believed he had settled the question forever when he described Pope as "a musical rocking-horse." Again and again the world has been told that Pope has disappeared from the sky of literature, but the world looks up, and behold, there is the star shining just as before. Many scholars and many poets have scoffed at his translations of {198} Homer, but generations of English school-boys have learned to love the "Iliad" because of the way in which Pope has told them the story; and as to the telling of a story, the judgment of a school-boy sometimes counts for more than the judgment of a sage. Pope's "Iliad" and "Odyssey" are certainly not for those who can read the great originals in their own tongue, or even for those who have a taste strong and refined enough to enjoy the severe fidelity of a prose translation. But Pope has brought the story of Achilles' wrath, and Helen's pathetic beauty, and Hector's fall, and Priam's agony home to the hearts of millions for whom they would otherwise have no life. We have no intention of writing a critical dissertation on the poetry of Pope. One fact may, however, be remarked and recorded concerning it. After Shakespeare, and possibly Milton, no English poet is so much quoted from as Pope. Lines and phrases of his have passed into the common vernacular of our daily life. We talk Pope, many of us, as the too-often cited bourgeois gentilhomme of Molière talked prose, without knowing it. There is hardly a line of "The Rape of the Lock" or "The Dunciad" that has not thus passed into the habitual conversation of our lives. This of itself would not prove that Pope was a great poet, but it is a striking testimony to his extraordinary popularity, and his style is not that which of itself would seem calculated to insure popularity. The very smoothness and perfection of his verse make it seem to many ears nothing better than a melodious monotony. Pope had not imagination enough to be a great poet of the highest order—the order of creative power. He had marvellous fancy, which sometimes, as in "The Rape of the Lock" and in passages of the fierce "Dunciad," rose to something like imagination. Every good Christian ought no doubt to lament that a man of such noble gifts should have had also such a terrible gift of hate. But even a very good Christian could hardly help admitting that it must have been all for the best, seeing that only for that passion of hatred we should never have had "The Dunciad."
{199}
CHAPTER XXXIV.
"THE FORTY-FIVE."
[Sidenote: 1720—Birth of "Prince Charlie">[
Thirty years had come and gone since England had been alarmed, irritated, or encouraged, according to the temper of its political inhabitants, by a Jacobite rising. The personality of James Stuart, the Old Pretender, was little more than a memory among those clansmen who had rallied round the royal standard at Braemar. In those thirty years James Stuart had lived his melancholy, lonely, evil life of exile, the hanger-on of foreign courts, the half grotesque, half pitiable, sham monarch of a sham court, that was always ready to be moved from place to place, with all its cheaply regal accessaries, like the company and the properties of some band of strolling players. Now there was a new Stuart in the field, a new sham prince, a "Young Pretender." After the disasters of the Fifteen, James Stuart had become the hero of as romantic a love-story as ever wandering prince experienced. He had fallen in love, in the hot, unreasoning Stuart way, with the beautiful Clementine Sobieski, and the beautiful Clementine had returned the passion of the picturesquely unfortunate prince, and they had carried on their love affairs under conditions of greater difficulty than Romeo and Juliet, and had overcome the difficulties and got married, and in 1720 Clementine had borne to the House of Stuart a son and heir. Every precaution was taken to insure the most public recognition of the existence of the newly born prince. It was determined that none of the perplexity, the uncertainty, the suspicion, which attended upon the birth of James, should be permitted to arise now. There must be no haro about warming-pans, no accusations of {200} juggling, no possible doubts as to the right of the new-born babe to be regarded as the son of James Stuart and of Clementine Sobieski. The birth took place in Rome, and cardinals accredited from all the great Powers of Europe were present on the occasion to bear witness to it. The city was alive with such excitement as it had seldom witnessed since the days when pagan Rome became papal Rome. The streets in the vicinity of the house where Clementine Sobieski lay in her pain were choked with the gilt carriages of the proudest Italian nobility; princes of the Church and princes of royal blood thronged the antechambers. Gallant gentlemen who bore some of the stateliest names of England and of Scotland waited on the stair-ways for the tidings that a new prince was given unto their loyalty. Adventurous soldiers of fortune kicked their heels in the court-yard, and thought with moistened eyes of the toasts they would drink to their future king. From the Castle of St. Angelo, where long ago the besieged had hurled upon the besiegers the statues that had proved the taste of a Roman emperor, where Rienzi lay yesterday, and where Cagliostro shall lie to-morrow, thunders of artillery saluted the advent of the new rose of the House of Stuart.
In the years that followed, while the young Prince Charles was growing up to his tragic inheritance, it can hardly be maintained, even by the most devoted adherent of the Stuart line, that James showed himself in the slightest degree worthy of the crown towards which he reached. Indeed, his conduct showed a reckless indifference to the means most likely to attain that crown which it is difficult to account for. When everything depended for the success of his schemes upon the friends he made abroad and the favor he retained at home, he wantonly acted as if his dearest purpose was to alienate the one and to wholly lose the other. His conduct towards his wife, and his persistent and stupid favoritism of the Mar man and woman—especially the woman—drove the injured and indignant Clementine into a convent, and made the great European {201} princes of Spain, Germany, and Rome his adversaries. Spain refused him entrance to the kingdom unaccompanied by his wife; the Pope struck him a heavier blow in diminishing by one-half the income that had hitherto been allowed him from the Papal treasury. But worse than the loss of foreign friends, worse even than the loss of the Sistine subsidy, was the effect which his treatment of his wife produced in the countries which he aspired to rule. His wisest followers wrote to him that he had done more to injure his cause by his conduct to Clementine than by anything else in his ill-advised career. At last even James took alarm; his stubborn nature was forced to yield; the obnoxious favorites were dismissed, and a reconciliation of a kind was effected between the Stuart king and queen. But fidelity was a quality difficult enough for James to practise, and when the Queen died in 1735 it is said that she found death not unwelcome.
[Sidenote: 1734-1735—Charles in his first campaign]