kly
licentiousness; an odious love of filthy and noisome images--these were
things which a genius less powerful than that to which we owe the
Spectator could easily have held up to the mirth and hatred of mankind.
Addison had, moreover, at his command other means of vengeance which a
bad man would not have scrupled to use. He was powerful in the state.
Pope was a Catholic; and in those times a minister would have found it
easy to harass the most innocent Catholic by innumerable petty
vexations. Pope, near twenty years later, said that "through the lenity
of the government alone he could live with comfort." "Consider," he
exclaimed, "the injury that a man of high rank and credit may do to a
private person, under penal laws and many other disadvantages!" It is
pleasing to reflect that the only revenge which Addison took was to
insert in the Freeholder a warm encomium on the translation of the
Iliad, and to exhort all lovers of learning to put down their names as
subscribers. There could be no doubt, he said, from the specimens
already published, that the masterly hand of Pope would do as much for
Homer as Dryden had done for Virgil. From that time to the end of his
life, he always treated Pope, by Pope's own acknowledgment, with
justice. Friendship was, of course, at an end.

One reason which induced the Earl of Warwick to play the ignominious
part of talebearer on this occasion may have been his dislike of the
marriage which was about to take place between his mother and Addison.
The Countess Dowager, a daughter of the old and honorable family of the
Myddletons of Chirk, a family which, in any country but ours, would be
called noble, resided at Holland House. Addison had, during some years,
occupied at Chelsea a small dwelling, once the abode of Nell Gwynn.
Chelsea is now a district of London, and Holland House may be called a
town residence. But, in the days of Anne and George the First, milkmaids
and sportsmen wandered between green hedges and over fields bright with
daisies, from Kensington almost to the shore of the Thames. Addison and
Lady Warwick were country neighbors, and became intimate friends. The
great wit and scholar tried to allure the young Lord from the
fashionable amusements of beating watchmen, breaking windows, and
rolling women in hogsheads down Holborn Hill, to the study of letters
and the practice of virtue. These well-meant exertions did little good,
however, either to the disciple or to the master