ming.

We turn gladly from these miserable hostilities, disgraceful to all
concerned. Were any excuse available for Pope, it would be in the
brutality of taunts, coming not only from rough dwellers in Grub Street,
but from the most polished representatives of the highest classes, upon
personal defects, which the most ungenerous assailant might surely have
spared. But it must also be granted that Pope was neither the last to
give provocation, nor at all inclined to refrain from the use of
poisoned weapons.

The other connexion of which I have spoken has also its mystery,--like
everything else in Pope's career. Pope had been early acquainted with
Teresa and Martha Blount. Teresa was born in the same year as Pope, and
Martha two years later.[12] They were daughters of Lister Blount, of
Mapledurham, and after his death, in 1710, and the marriage of their
only brother, in 1711, they lived with their mother in London, and
passed much of the summer near Twickenham. They seem to have been lively
young women, who had been educated at Paris. Teresa was the most
religious, and the greatest lover of London society. I have already
quoted a passage or two from the early letters addressed to the two
sisters. It has also to be said that he was guilty of writing to them
stuff which it is inconceivable that any decent man should have
communicated to a modest woman. They do not seem to have taken offence.
He professes himself the slave of both alternately or together. "Even
from my infancy," he says (in 1714) "I have been in love with one or
other of you week by week, and my journey to Bath fell out in the 376th
week of the reign of my sovereign lady Sylvia. At the present writing
hereof, it is the 389th week of the reign of your most serene majesty,
in whose service I was listed some weeks before I beheld your sister."
He had suggested to Lady Mary that the concluding lines of Eloisa
contained a delicate compliment to her; and he characteristically made a
similar insinuation to Martha Blount about the same passage. Pope was
decidedly an economist even of his compliments. Some later letters are
in less artificial language, and there is a really touching and natural
letter to Teresa in regard to an illness of her sister's. After a time,
we find that some difficulty has arisen. He feels that his presence
gives pain; when he comes he either makes her (apparently Teresa)
uneasy, or he sees her unkind. Teresa, it would seem, is jealous and
d