ale, calm,
and beautiful; it bleeds from that black wound. He should be drawn, like
St. Sebastian, with that arrow in his side. As he sent to Gay and asked
his pardon, as he bade his stepson come and see his death, be sure he had
forgiven Pope, when he made ready to show how a Christian could die.

Pope then formed part of the Addisonian court for a short time, and
describes himself in his letters as sitting with that coterie until two
o'clock in the morning over punch and burgundy amidst the fumes of
tobacco. To use an expression of the present day, the "pace" of those
_viveurs_ of the former age was awful. Peterborough lived into the very
jaws of death; Godolphin laboured all day and gambled at night;
Bolingbroke,(131) writing to Swift, from Dawley, in his retirement, dating
his letter at six o'clock in the morning, and rising, as he says,
refreshed, serene, and calm, calls to mind the time of his London life;
when about that hour he used to be going to bed, surfeited with pleasure,
and jaded with business; his head often full of schemes, and his heart as
often full of anxiety. It was too hard, too coarse a life for the
sensitive, sickly Pope. He was the only wit of the day, a friend writes to
me, who wasn't fat.(132) Swift was fat; Addison was fat; Steele was fat;
Gay and Thomson were preposterously fat--all that fuddling and
punch-drinking, that club and coffee-house boozing, shortened the lives
and enlarged the waistcoats of the men of that age. Pope withdrew in a
great measure from this boisterous London company, and being put into an
independence by the gallant exertions of Swift(133) and his private
friends, and by the enthusiastic national admiration which justly rewarded
his great achievement of the _Iliad_, purchased that famous villa of
Twickenham which his song and life celebrated; duteously bringing his old
parents to live and die there, entertaining his friends there, and making
occasional visits to London in his little chariot, in which Atterbury
compared him to "Homer in a nutshell".

"Mr. Dryden was not a genteel man," Pope quaintly said to Spence, speaking
of the manner and habits of the famous old patriarch of Will's. With
regard to Pope's own manners, we have the best contemporary authority that
they were singularly refined and polished. With his extraordinary
sensibility, with his known tastes, with his delicate frame, with his
power and dread of ridicule, Pope could have been no other than what we