ely associated. Before
reaching the age of thirty Pope was regarded as the first of living
poets. His income more than sufficed for all his wants. At Twickenham
the great in intellect, and the great by birth, met around his table; he
was welcomed by the highest society in the land, and although proud of
his intimacy with the nobility, 'unplaced, unpensioned,' he was 'no
man's heir or slave,' and jealously preserved his independence. 'Pope,'
says Johnson, 'never set genius to sale, he never flattered those whom
he did not love, or praised those whom he did not esteem,' and he was,
we may add, in this respect a striking contrast to Dryden, who lavished
his flatteries wholesale.

With a mother to whom he was tenderly attached, with troops of friends,
with an undisputed supremacy in the world of letters, and with a
vocation that was the joy of his heart,--if possessions like these can
confer happiness, Pope should have been a happy man.

But his 'crazy carcass,' as the painter Jervas called it, was united to
the most suspicious and irritable of temperaments, and the fine wine of
his poetry was rarely free from bitterness in the cup. Pope could be a
warm friend, but was not always a faithful one, and even women whose
friendship he had enjoyed suffered from the venom of his satire. He was
not a man to rise above his age, and it would be charitable to ascribe a
portion of his grossness to it. Voltaire is said by his loose talk to
have driven Pope's good old mother from the table at Twickenham;
Walpole's language not only in his home at Houghton, but at Court, was
insufferably coarse; and Pope wrote to ladies in language that must
have disgusted modest women even in his free-speaking day. His foul
lines on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, to whom he had formerly written in a
most ridiculous strain of gallantry, and to whom he is said to have made
love,[15] cannot easily be characterized in moderate language. Lady Mary
had little delicacy herself, but the poet, who thought himself a
gentleman, had no excuse for abusing her. Excuses indeed are not easily
to be offered for Pope's moral defalcations. His life was a series of
petty intrigues, trickeries, and deceptions. He could not, it has been
said,--the conceit is borrowed from Young's _Satires_--'take his tea
without a stratagem,' and knew how to utter the loftiest sentiments
while acting the most contemptible of parts.

The long and intricate deceptions which he practised to secure