of Dean Swift, Alexander Pope’s is scarcely more pleasant to look back upon. He was never married, and his best associations with home were through his mother, whom he loved dearly. But his continual ill-health and misshapen body made him miserable, and he himself calls his life “one long disease.” Fame he won early, but it did not sweeten his spirit. His early life was spent near Windsor Forest, at the village of Binfield, where his father, a prosperous tradesman, retired with his fortune of £20,000 when the boy was twelve years old. Instead of putting this money in the bank, he kept it in the house in a strong chest, and drew upon the sum for all he wanted for many years, by which method it was considerably lessened before his son inherited it. Many of the despicable traits or foolish weaknesses of Pope’s character were due to his sufferings. He was deformed in person, and so feeble that he had to be dressed and tended like a child. He was laced in stays to keep him erect, and was so small that at table it was necessary to place him in a high chair. Dr. Johnson says that “his legs were so slender that he enlarged their bulk with three pair of stockings, which were drawn on and off by the maid; for he was not able to dress or undress himself, and neither went to bed nor rose without help.” He wanted help even in the night, and would often call up a servant for coffee or for pen and paper; but he was lavish of money to compensate for the trouble he gave, and a servant in Lord Oxford’s house once declared that so long as it was her business to answer the poet’s bell she would not ask for wages. In other respects, however, Pope was absurdly miserly, and one of his habits—that

of writing his verses on the backs of letters and other loose leaves and scraps—got him the nickname of “paper-sparing Pope.” It was his friend Swift who originated this saying. He was hardly thirty when his Homer had gained him an independence, and he set up his own house at Twickenham, though he still passed half his time at his parents’ home at Binfield. Twickenham had the charm of society, which to Pope was a great solace. Here he gathered a circle of admiring friends; for the place was a kind of centre of literature and fashion. Lady Mary Montagu, with whom he fell in love and then quarrelled, was his neighbor; Bolingbroke lived at Dawley, and Lord Burlington at Chiswick. Fine court people and “elegant company,” as he writes, flocked to visit him, and, though he enjoyed it, he seems to have been partly discontented with it. It was the weak protest of the higher nature, dwarfed but not crushed by the lower. His filial piety shines out as a redeeming point in his selfish, narrow, loveless life, and it never wearied of its prolonged task; for his mother died at ninety-three (in 1733), at his house, and he mourned her deeply and tenderly. Another good and innocent trait was his love of gardening, though it was but the formal, lifeless gardening of his day, when the taste prevailed for grottoes and masonry and clipped trees. He writes to Swift: “The gardens extend and flourish.… I have more fruit-trees and kitchen-garden than you have any thought of; nay, I have melons and pineapples of my own growth.” To another friend he writes: “I am now as busy planting for myself as I was lately in planting for another [his mother], and I thank God for every wet day and

for every fog that gives me the headache, but prospers my works. They will, indeed, outlive me, but I am pleased to think my trees will afford fruit and shade to others when I shall want them no more.” It is said that Pope introduced the weeping willow into England. The story runs that he discovered some twigs wrapped round an article sent from abroad, and planted one of them in his garden. A willow sprang up, from which numberless slips were taken, some to be planted in England, others to be sent abroad. The old tree died in 1801. Its life seems to have been but a short one. Pope’s grotto still remains, but the rest of the garden has been sadly changed and disfigured by partition and building. He also made a tunnel under the public road, on each side of which his property lay. This reminds us of a peculiar tunnel diving under the Parade at Ramsgate, on the Channel, and leading to a grotte, or series of catacomb-like passages in the chalk cliff overlooking the sea. This is on the Pugin property, and there are like galleries, we believe, a little further, leading from the gardens of Sir Moses Montefiore.

Richmond, adjoining Twickenham, is as classic ground in its literary associations. Here Thomson, the author of The Seasons, lived for the twelve last years of his life, at a pretty cottage called Rosedale House, now much altered and enlarged. But the summer-house in the garden remains the same as it was in the poet’s time. “It is,” says Mr. Howitt, “a simple wooden construction, with a plain back and two outward-sloping sides, a bench running round it within, a roof and boarded floor, so as to be readily removable all together. It is kept well painted of a dark green, and

in it stands an old, small walnut table, with a drawer, which belonged to Thomson.” A tablet let into the front of the alcove above bears the following inaccurate inscription:

Here
Thomson sang
“The Seasons”
and their change.

His famous poem was composed several years before, and begun when he had scarcely a roof over his head. The first part, “Winter,” was written in a lodging over a bookseller’s shop, to whose master he sold the poem for three guineas. It was neglected until a clergyman, “happening to turn his eye upon it, was so delighted that he ran from place to place celebrating its excellence.” Would such simple means be enough now to herald a new author, although literature is supposed nowadays to be so much more respected and lucrative a calling than in the last century? Before this stroke of luck Thomson had been drudging as a tutor, teaching his patron’s little boy of five years old his alphabet, and wasting his Scotch university education in such dreary pursuits. He had been brought up for the Presbyterian ministry, being himself a Scotch minister’s son; but he found himself unfit for that calling, and set out from Edinburgh for London “to seek his fortune,” with a little money and some letters of recommendation tied up in his pocket-handkerchief. He had no sooner reached London than both were stolen, and this misfortune was soon followed by a worse—the death of his widowed mother. After the happy hit of his “Winter,” however, he had no more trouble; the patrons of literature took him up, his poems sold fast, and he completed his Seasons, while also

throwing off minor works, all equally admired by his contemporaries, though not equally deserving. His writings were always moral and just; he never flatters or plays with vice, and it has been said of him with truth that he never wrote a line which, dying, he would wish to blot. We think the same could be said of Wordsworth. But if private morality did not suffer through him, public laxity in the sphere of politics did; that is, he was innocently part and parcel of a corrupt system of place-giving, irrespective of fitness for the office. It was the vice of the age, alike in church and state. He held at different times two sinecureships in the gift of government—one the Secretaryship of Briefs in the Court of Chancery, the other the general surveyorship of the Leeward Islands. In his private life he was fortunate; he travelled abroad with Sir Charles Talbot’s eldest son, he visited all the people worth knowing, and was flatteringly received by all, his means were ample, yet he was not altogether happy. He was crossed in love by a Miss Young, whom he addresses in his poems as Amanda, and who cast him off for an admiral. His love, to judge by his letters, was earnest and true; writing to her during their short engagement, he says: “If I am so happy as to have your heart, I know you have spirit to maintain your choice; and it shall be the most earnest study and pursuit of my life not only to justify but to do you credit by it.… Without you there is a blank in my happiness which nothing can fill up.” His disappointment increased his melancholy, and, indeed, made his faults come into worse relief; but he lived only five years after it. Like many whose struggles have not been very hard or lengthened, he believed

too much in luck and grew careless and indolent; his ambition was to live in peace, in luxurious dreams, in easy, social fellowship. He was kind but apathetic, and as careless of himself as of others, so that, though he had money enough to live more than comfortably, he was once arrested for a debt of seventy pounds. The actor Quin, as was often the case with friends of those detained in a “sponging-house” in those rollicking days when such confinement was not supposed to entail any disgrace, went to see him and ordered supper from a tavern close by. When they had done, Quin said seriously: “It is time now, Jemmy Thomson, we should balance our accounts.” The poet, with the instinct of a debtor, supposed that here was some further demand he had forgotten; but Quin went on to say “that he owed Thomson at least £100—the lowest estimate he could put upon the pleasure he had derived from reading his works; and that, instead of leaving it to him in his will, he insisted on taking this opportunity of discharging his debt. Then, putting the money on the table, he hastily left the room.”

A ludicrous anecdote is told of Thomson, which, if not true, is typical of his undoubted indolence—namely, that he would wander about his garden with his hands in his pockets, biting off the sunny side of the peaches that grew upon the wall. He was fond of walking, however. Laziness often brings dirt in its train, and Johnson, himself no Rhadamanthus on this score, calls Thomson slovenly in his dress, while other biographers aver that he took care only of his wig. His barber at Richmond said he was very extravagant about it, and had as many as a dozen wigs. One