Eve’s tempter thus the Rabbins have expressed,
A cherub’s face and reptile all the rest;
Beauty that shocks you, parts that none will trust,
Wit that can creep, and pride that licks the dust.
Coxe, alluding to the portrait of Sporus, writes: “I never could read this passage without disgust and horror, disgust at the indelicacy of the allusions, horror at the malignity of the poet in laying the foundation of his abuse on the lowest species of satire, personal invective, and what is still worse, sickness and debility”. This condemnation is true of Pope’s verses on Hervey, but it is equally true of Hervey’s verses on Pope—and it was Hervey who began the personal abuse.
Lady Mary did not escape either. Pope depicted her as a wanton, scoffed at her eccentricities, and hinted that she conferred her favours on “a black man,” the Sultan Ahmed of Turkey.
JOHN, LORD HERVEY.
Pope also addressed a prose letter to Lord Hervey, which was, if possible, more bitter and vindictive than his character of “Sporus”. He thought very highly of his letter, which Wharton styles “a masterpiece of invective”. To one of his friends Pope wrote: “There is woman’s war declared against me by a certain lord; his weapons are the same which women and children use—a pin to scratch, and a squirt to bespatter. I writ a sort of answer, but was ashamed to enter the lists with him, and after showing it some people, suppressed it; otherwise it was such as was worthy of him and worthy of me.” The reason Pope gives for suppressing this letter, which was not published until after his death, though privately shown to many, was not the true one. Queen Caroline got hold of a copy of the epistle, and it was at her express desire that Pope withheld it. She feared lest it should render her favourite contemptible in the eyes of the world, and though she was greatly incensed against Pope, she dissembled her anger, and used her influence to end this wordy war, in which there could be no doubt that Pope was the victor.[81]
But though Caroline was unfortunate in her relations with Swift, Gay and Pope, men whose writings shed a lustre on her era, she was the means of helping other writers who were eminent in a different way. Butler, the author of the Analogy, and Berkeley, who wrote The Minute Philosopher, she preferred to high office in the Church. For other writers who were not in holy orders she did what she could. She befriended Steele at a time when, to use his own words, he was “bereft both of limbs and speech”.[82] She had often befriended him before in the course of his chequered career. She reprieved Savage, the natural son of that unnatural mother the Countess of Macclesfield, when he lay under sentence of death. And after his wonderful poem, The Bastard, was written, she helped him again with a pension of £50 from her privy purse. She patronised Somerville, author of The Chase, no mean poet in the opinion of Dr. Johnson; and she sought to support that luckless playwright William Duncombe. It was one of her sayings that “genius was superior to the patronage of princes,” but she had a great sympathy for literary endeavour, however humble. But her patronage of minor writers was more often dictated by the kindness of her heart than by the soundness of her judgment. An instance of this was afforded by her patronage of Stephen Duck, whose fate has been not inaptly compared to that of Burns—without the genius.