call a highly-bred person. His closest friends, with the exception of
Swift, were among the delights and ornaments of the polished society of
their age. Garth,(134) the accomplished and benevolent, whom Steele has
described so charmingly, of whom Codrington said that his character was
"all beauty", and whom Pope himself called the best of Christians without
knowing it; Arbuthnot,(135) one of the wisest, wittiest, most
accomplished, gentlest of mankind; Bolingbroke, the Alcibiades of his age;
the generous Oxford; the magnificent, the witty, the famous, and
chivalrous Peterborough: these were the fast and faithful friends of Pope,
the most brilliant company of friends, let us repeat, that the world has
ever seen. The favourite recreation of his leisure hours was the society
of painters, whose art he practised. In his correspondence are letters
between him and Jervas, whose pupil he loved to be--Richardson, a
celebrated artist of his time, and who painted for him a portrait of his
old mother, and for whose picture he asked and thanked Richardson in one
of the most delightful letters that ever was penned,(136)--and the
wonderful Kneller, who bragged more, spelt worse, and painted better than
any artist of his day.(137)

It is affecting to note, through Pope's correspondence, the marked way in
which his friends, the greatest, the most famous, and wittiest men of the
time--generals and statesmen, philosophers and divines--all have a kind
word, and a kind thought for the good simple old mother, whom Pope tended
so affectionately. Those men would have scarcely valued her, but that they
knew how much he loved her, and that they pleased him by thinking of her.
If his early letters to women are affected and insincere, whenever he
speaks about this one, it is with a childish tenderness and an almost
sacred simplicity. In 1713, when young Mr. Pope had, by a series of the
most astonishing victories and dazzling achievements, seized the crown of
poetry; and the town was in an uproar of admiration, or hostility, for the
young chief; when Pope was issuing his famous decrees for the translation
of the _Iliad_; when Dennis and the lower critics were hooting and
assailing him; when Addison and the gentlemen of his court were sneering
with sickening hearts at the prodigious triumphs of the young conqueror;
when Pope, in a fever of victory, and genius, and hope, and anger, was
struggling through the crowd of shouting friends and furious detr