servants. A cousin, speaking of a call upon her, says:

"It is like the Tower of Babel; a Hungarian servant takes your name at the door, he gives it to an Italian, who delivers it to a Frenchman. The Frenchman to a Swiss, and the Swiss to a Polander; so that by the time you get to her ladyship's presence you have changed your name five times, without the expense of an Act of Parliament."

Horace Walpole pays her a visit, and says, "she was old, dirty, tawdry, and painted." But he did not like her: I do not think she liked him.

Could it be that this old lady-past seventy —with her fine house and her polyglot of service and her flush purse, thought to call back the old trail of flatterers? I do not know. I know very well she did not, and that within a twelvemonth she died.

There is in Lichfield Cathedral a cenotaph representing Beauty weeping the loss of her Preserver; it was placed there by some grateful person to perpetuate the memory of the Lady Mary's benevolence in introducing inoculation; and I think it is the only eulogy to be found on any memorial tablet of this strange, witty,

beautiful, indiscreet, studious, unhappy, disappointed woman.

ALEXANDER POPE

WE close our chapter with some mention of that proud, shy, infirm poet of whom we have caught shadowy glimpses in the story of Wortley Montagu. There are scores of little crackling couplets floating about on the lips of people well known as Pope's.1

"A wit's a feather and a chief 's a rod,

An honest man 's the noblest work of God."

"Know then, this truth, eno' for man to know, Virtue alone is happiness below."

"Honor and shame from no condition rise, Act well your part; there all the honor lies!"

These must be familiar; and your school must differ from most schools, if some of these or other such, from the same author, have not

1Alexander Pope, b. 1688; d. 1744. Editions of his works are numerous. I name those by Bowles and Roscoe, with that of Elwin and Courthope; see also Dilke's Papers of a Critic, Leslie Stephen's Life, and notices by Lowell, Minto, and Mrs. Oliphant.

one time done service as snappers at the end of a composition, or as a bit of decoration in the middle of it.

All know, too, in a general way, that Pope was an infirm man, without perhaps a clear idea of what his infirmity may have been; some of those fierce lampoons already alluded to, which went flying back and forth around the shades of Twickenham, speak of the poet as an ape, a hunchback, a monster. The truth is that he inherited from his father a feeble and crooked frame with some spinal weakness which did give a measure of excuse to the coarse and brutal satirists of those days. His height was much below that of ordinary men, so that cushions or a higher chair were always necessary at table to bring him to the level of his friends; his legs were thin and shrunken and he walked feebly; his countenance was drawn and pinched; yet he had good features, with the delicate complexion of a woman, and a great blue eye, full of expression. His toilette was always a serious affair for him-specially when he went abroad or would appear at his best (as he always wished to do)-involving the assistance of one or two attendants to adjust his paddings, his stays, his canvas jackets, and his twice doubled hose. I have dwelt with more particularity upon

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his personal aspect, because it serves to explain, or at least largely to qualify, a great many apparent mysteries in his social career.

He

He was a London boy, born of Romish parents; his father being a small trader in the city, but retiring, about the time of this weakly boy's birth, to a home at Binfield—a country parish lying between Windsor and Reading, where they show now a grove of beeches which was a favorite haunt of the boy poet. caught schooling in a hap-hazard way, as Romanists needed to do in those times; but had a quick, big brain, that made up for many shortcomings in teachers. Before twelve he had his Latin with some Greek, and had written verse; and after that age was his own master-sucking literary sweets where he could find them.

Before twelve, too, he had made many London visitations-partly to study French there and partly to find his way to Will's coffeehouse, and catch sight of old John Dryden, then drawing near to the end of his worldly honors. And this thin, white-faced, crippled boy looking stealthily up at the master, even then had wild ambitious dreams of the day when he too should have his dignities and lay down the law for English letters.

Out by Binfield he happened upon good friends. Among others a Blount family to

which belonged two daughters Blount-sympathetic companions to him then and long afterward; scores of letters, too, there were, to which now Teresa Blount and now Miss Patty Blount were parties: he seeming in those romantic days (upon the edge of Windsor Forest) sometimes in love with one and sometimes the other; and they, in this mixing of letters getting probably as confused as he, and a great deal more vexed; and so came coldness and short-lived quarrelling, making one thing pretty sure that when a young man or woman begins to play with the different tenses of the verb "I love," a single correspondent is much better than two. However, his friendship with Miss Patty Blount lasted his life out.

An old baronet of the neighborhood, who had been diplomat in James I.'s day, took a fancy to this keen-thoughted lad and made a companion of him. He came to know old Wycherly too, and scores of men about town; even Jacob Tonson, the famous publisher of those times, had written to Pope before he was twenty, asking the privilege of printing certain pastorals of his writing, which had been handed about in the clubs; and thought them-what they really were-astonishing for their literary finish.