rence, for he found Mr. Pope a steady and
unalienable friend almost to the end of his life.

About this time, notwithstanding his avowed neutrality with regard to
party, he published a panegyrick on sir Robert Walpole, for which he was
rewarded by him with twenty guineas, a sum not very large, if either
the excellence of the performance, or the affluence of the patron, be
considered; but greater than he afterwards obtained from a person of yet
higher rank, and more desirous in appearance of being distinguished as a
patron of literature.

As he was very far from approving the conduct of sir Robert Walpole, and
in conversation mentioned him sometimes with acrimony, and generally
with contempt; as he was one of those who were always zealous in their
assertions of the justice of the late opposition, jealous of the rights
of the people, and alarmed by the long-continued triumph of the court;
it was natural to ask him what could induce him to employ his poetry in
praise of that man, who was, in his opinion, an enemy to liberty, and an
oppressor of his country? He alleged, that he was then dependent upon
the lord Tyrconnel, who was an implicit follower of the ministry, and
that, being enjoined by him, not without menaces, to write in praise of
his leader, he had not resolution sufficient to sacrifice the pleasure
of affluence to that of integrity.

On this, and on many other occasions, he was ready to lament the misery
of living at the tables of other men, which was his fate from the
beginning to the end of his life; for I know not whether he ever had,
for three months together, a settled habitation, in which he could claim
a right of residence.

To this unhappy state it is just to impute much of the inconstancy of
his conduct; for though a readiness to comply with the inclination of
others was no part of his natural character, yet he was sometimes
obliged to relax his obstinacy, and submit his own judgment, and even
his virtue, to the government of those by whom he was supported: so
that, if his miseries were sometimes the consequences of his faults, he
ought not yet to be wholly excluded from compassion, because his faults
were very often the effects of his misfortunes.

In this gay period[78] of his life, while he was surrounded by
affluence and pleasure, he published the Wanderer, a moral poem, of
which the design is comprised in these lines:

I fly all publick care, all venal strife,
To try the still, compa