to
dispense with the necessity of additional praise. But call it a virtuous
or merely a useful quality, we must at least admit that it is the
necessary groundwork of a thoroughly satisfactory career. Pope, who from
his infancy had

Lisped in numbers, for the numbers came,

gained by his later numbers a secure position, and used his position to
go on rhyming to the end of his life. He never failed to do his very
best. He regarded the wealth which he had earned as a retaining fee, not
as a discharge from his duties. Comparing him with his contemporaries,
we see how vast was the advantage. Elevated above Grub Street, he had no
temptation to manufacture rubbish or descend to actual meanness like De
Foe. Independent of patronage, he was not forced to become a 'tame cat'
in the hands of a duchess, like his friend Gay. Standing apart from
politics, he was free from those disappointed pangs which contributed to
the embitterment of the later years of Swift, dying 'like a poisoned rat
in a hole;' he had not, like Bolingbroke, to affect a philosophical
contempt for the game in which he could no longer take a part; nor was
he even, like Addison and Steele, induced to 'give up to party what was
meant for mankind.' He was not a better man than some of these, and
certainly not better than Goldsmith and Johnson in the succeeding
generation. Yet, when we think of the amount of good intellect that ran
to waste in the purlieus of Grub Street, or in hunting for pensions in
ministerial ante-chambers, we feel a certain gratitude to the one
literary magnate of the century, whose devotion, it is true, had a very
tangible reward, but whose devotion was yet continuous, and free from
any distractions but those of a constitutional irritability. Nay, if we
compare Pope to some of the later writers who have wrung still
princelier rewards from fortune, the result is not unfavourable. If
Scott had been as true to his calling, his life, so far superior to
Pope's in most other respects, would not have presented the melancholy
contrast of genius running to waste in desperate attempts to win money
at the cost of worthier fame.

Pope, as a Roman Catholic, and as the adherent of a defeated party, had
put himself out of the race for pecuniary reward. His loyal adherence to
his friends, though, like all his virtues, subject to some deduction, is
really a touching feature in his character. His Catholicism was of the
most nominal kind. He adhered in nam