passages, of a general nature, too curious to be lost, which I shall accordingly proceed to extract for the reader. « Pope himself sleeps well-nothing can touch him further;' but those who love the honour of their country, the perfection of her literature, the glory of her language, are not to be expected to permit an atom of his dust to be stirred in his tomb, or a leaf to be stripped from the laurel which grows over it. << To me it appears of no very great consequence whether Martha Blount was or was not Pope's mistress, though I could have wished him a better. She appears to have been a cold-hearted, interested, ignorant, disagreeable woman, upon whom the tenderness of Pope's heart in the desolation of his latter days was cast away, not knowing whither to turn, as he drew towards his premature old age, childless and lonely,-like the needle which, approaching within a certain distance of the pole, becomes helpless and useless, and, ceasing to tremble, rusts. She seems to have been so totally unworthy of tenderness, that it is an additional proof of the kindness of Pope's heart to have been able to love such a being. But we must love something. I agree with Mr B. that she 'could at no time have regarded Pope personally with attachment,' because she was incapable of attachment; but I deny that Pope could not be regarded with personal attachment by a worthier woman. It is not probable, indeed, that a woman would have fallen in love with him as he walked along the Mall, or in a box at the opera, nor from a balcony, nor in a ball-room; but in society he seems to have been as amiable as unassuming, and, with the greatest disadvantages of figure, his head and face were remarkably handsome, especially his eyes. He was adored by his friends-friends of the most opposite dispositions, ages, and talents-by the old and wayward Wycherley, by the cynical Swift, the rough Atterbury, the gentle Spence, the stern attorney-bishop Warburton, the virtuous Berkeley, and the 'cankered Bolingbroke.' Bolingbroke wept over him, like a child; and Spence's description of his last moments is at least as edifying as the more ostentatious account of the deathbed of Addison. The soldier Peterborough and the poet Gay, the witty Congreve and the laughing Rowe, the eccentric Cromwell and the steady Bathurst, were all his intimates. The man who could conciliate so many men of the most opposite description, not one of whom but was a remarkable or a celebrated character, might well have pretended to all the attachment which a reasonable man would desire of an amiable woman. « Pope, in fact, wherever he got it, appears to have understood the sex well. Bolingbroke, 'a judge of the subject,' says Warton, thought his 'Epistle on the Characters of Women' his 'masterpiece.' And even with respect to the grosser passion, which takes occasionally the name of 'romantic,' accordingly as the degree of sentiment elevates it above the definition of love by Buffon, it may be remarked, that it does not always depend upon personal appearance, even in a woman. Madame Cottin was a plain woman, and might have been virtuous, it may be presumed, without much interruption. Virtuous she was, and the consequences of this inveterate virtue were that two different admirers (one an elderly gentleman) killed themselves in despair (see Lady Morgan's 'France). I would not, however, recommend this rigour to plain women in general, in the hope of securing the glory of two suicides a-piece. I believe that there are few men who, in the course of their observations on life, may not have perceived that it is not the greatest female beauty who forms the longest and the strongest passions. « But, apropos of Pope.-Voltaire tells us that the Marechal Luxembourg (who had precisely Pope's figure) was not only somewhat too amatory for a great man, but fortunate in his attachments. La Valière, the passion of Louis XIV, had an unsightly defect. The Princess of Eboli, the mistress of Philip the Second of Spain, and Maugiron, the minion of Henry the Third of France, had each of them lost an eye; and the famous Latin epigram was written upon them, which has, I believe, been either translated or imitated by Goldsmith: Lumine Acon dextro, capta est Leonilla sinistro, <«< Wilkes, with his ugliness, used to say that 'he was but a quarter of an hour behind the handsomest man in England;' and this vaunt of his is said not to have been disproved by circumstances. Swift, when neither young, nor handsome, nor rich, nor even amiable, inspired the two most extraordinary passions upon record, Vanessa's and Stella's. Vanessa, aged scarce a score, Sighs for a gown of forty-four. «He requited them bitterly; for he seems to have broken the heart of the one, and worn out that of the other; and he had his reward, for he died a solitary idiot in the hands of servants. << For my own part, I am of the opinion of Pausanias, that success in love depends upon Fortune. They particularly renounce Celestial Venus, into whose temple,' etc. etc. etc. I remember, too, to have seen a building in Ægina in which there is a statue of Fortune, holding a horn of Amalthea; and near her there is a winged Love. The meaning of this is, that the success of men in love-affairs depends more on the assistance of Fortune than the charms of beauty. I am persuaded, too, with Pindar (to whose opinion I submit in other particulars), that Fortune is one of the Fates, and that in a certain respect she is more powerful than her sisters.'-See Pausanias, Achaics, book vii, chap 26, page 246, Taylor's Translation.' « Grimm has a remark of the same kind on the different destinies of the younger Crebillon and Rousseau. The former writes a licentious novel, and a young English girl of some fortune and family (a Miss Strafford) runs away, and crosses the sea to marry him; while Rousseau, the most tender and passionate of lovers, is obliged to espouse his chambermaid. If I recollect rightly, this remark was also repeated in the Edinburgh Review of Grimm's Correspondence, seven or eight years ago. << In regard to the strange mixture of indecent, and sometimes profane levity, which his conduct and language often exhibited,' and which so much shocks Mr Bowles, I object to the indefinite word often ;' and in extenuation of the occasional occurrence of such language it is to be recollected, that it was less the tone of Pope, than the tone of the time. With the exception of the correspondence of Pope and his friends, not many private letters of the period have come down to us; but those, such as they are-a few scattered scraps from Farquhar and others—are more indecent and coarse than any thing in Pope's letters. The comedies of Congreve, Vanbrugh, Farquhar, Cibber, etc., which naturally attempted to represent the manners and conversation of private life, are decisive upon this point; as are also some of Steele's papers, and even Addison's. We all know what the conversation of Sir R. Walpole, for seventeen years the prime-minister of the country, was at his own table, and his excuse for his licentious language, viz., 'that every body understood that, but few could talk rationally upon less common topics.' The refinement of latter days,-which is perhaps the consequence of vice, which wishes to mask and soften itself, as much as of virtuous civilisation,-had not yet made sufficient progress. Even Johnson, in his 'London,' has two or three passages which cannot be read aloud, and Addison's 'Drummer' some indelicate allusions." To the extract that follows I beg to call the particular attention of the reader. Those who at all remember the peculiar bitterness and violence with which the gentleman here commemorated assailed Lord Byron, at a crisis when both his heart and fame were most vulnerable, will, if am not mistaken, feel a thrill of pleasurable admiration in reading these sentences, such as alone can convey any adequate notion of the proud, generous pleasure that must have been felt in writing them. « Poor Scott is now no more. In the exercise of his vocation, he contrived at last to make himself the subject of a coroner's inquest. But he died like a brave man, and he lived an able one. I knew him personally, though slightly. Although several years my senior, we |