into the air with a very steady
regard, and then looked down and said, with a smile of the greatest
softness, "'twas a vision!" He laughed scarcely ever, but his companions
describe his countenance as often illuminated by a peculiar sweet smile.

"When," said Spence,(139) the kind anecdotist whom Johnson despised, "when
I was telling Lord Bolingbroke that Mr. Pope, on every catching and
recovery of his mind, was always saying something kindly of his present or
absent friends; and that this was so surprising, as it seemed to me as if
humanity had outlasted understanding, Lord Bolingbroke said, 'It has so,'
and then added, 'I never in my life knew a man who had so tender a heart
for his particular friends, or a more general friendship for mankind. I
have known him these thirty years, and value myself more for that man's
love than----' Here," Spence says, "St. John sunk his head, and lost his
voice in tears." The sob which finishes the epitaph is finer than words.
It is the cloak thrown over the father's face in the famous Greek picture
which hides the grief and heightens it.

In Johnson's _Life of Pope_, you will find described with rather a
malicious minuteness some of the personal habits and infirmities of the
great little Pope. His body was crooked, he was so short that it was
necessary to raise his chair in order to place him on a level with other
people at table.(140) He was sewed up in a buckram suit every morning and
required a nurse like a child. His contemporaries reviled these
misfortunes with a strange acrimony, and made his poor deformed person the
butt for many a bolt of heavy wit. The facetious Mr. Dennis, in speaking
of him, says, "If you take the first letter of Mr. Alexander Pope's
Christian name, and the first and last letters of his surname, you have A.
P. E." Pope catalogues, at the end of the _Dunciad_, with a rueful
precision, other pretty names, besides Ape, which Dennis called him. That
great critic pronounced Mr. Pope was a little ass, a fool, a coward, a
Papist, and therefore a hater of Scripture, and so forth. It must be
remembered that the pillory was a flourishing and popular institution in
those days. Authors stood in it in the body sometimes: and dragged their
enemies thither morally, hooted them with foul abuse, and assailed them
with garbage of the gutter. Poor Pope's figure was an easy one for those
clumsy caricaturists to draw. Any stupid hand could draw a hunchback, and
write Pope unde