Whether Pope's malignity at length provoked Addison to retaliate for the
first and last time cannot now be known with certainty. We have only
Pope's story, which runs thus. A pamphlet appeared containing some
reflections which stung Pope to the quick. What those reflections were,
and whether they were reflections of which he had a right to complain,
we have now no means of deciding. The Earl of Warwick, a foolish and
vicious lad, who regarded Addison with the feelings with which such lads
generally regard their best friends, told Pope, truly or falsely, that
this pamphlet had been written by Addison's direction. When we consider
what a tendency stories have to grow, in passing even from one honest
man to another honest man, and when we consider that to the name of
honest man neither Pope nor the Earl of Warwick had a claim, we are not
disposed to attach much importance to this anecdote.

It is certain, however, that Pope was furious. He had already sketched
the character of Atticus in prose. In his anger he turned this prose
into the brilliant and energetic lines which everybody knows by heart,
or ought to know by heart, and sent them to Addison. One charge which
Pope has enforced with great skill is probably not without foundation.
Addison was, we are inclined to believe, too fond of presiding over a
circle of humble friends. Of the other imputations which these famous
lines are intended to convey, scarcely one has ever been proved to be
just, and some are certainly false. That Addison was not in the habit of
"damning with faint praise" appears from innumerable passages in his
writings, and from none more than from those in which he mentions Pope.
And it is not merely unjust, but ridiculous, to describe a man who made
the fortune of almost every one of his intimate friends as "so obliging
that he ne'er obliged."

That Addison felt the sting of Pope's satire keenly, we cannot doubt.
That he was conscious of one of the weaknesses with which he was
reproached is highly probable. But his heart, we firmly believe,
acquitted him of the gravest part of the accusation. He acted like
himself. As a satirist he was, at his own weapons, more than Pope's
match; and he would have been at no loss for topics. A distorted and
diseased body, tenanted by a yet more distorted and diseased mind; spite
and envy thinly disguised by sentiments as benevolent and noble as those
which Sir Peter Teazle admired in Mr. Joseph Surface; a feeble sic