reappeared amongst the divers.

Then * * tried, but hardly snatch'd from sight
Instant buoys up and rises into light:
He bears no token of the sable streams,
And mounts far off amongst the swans of Thames.

A note applied the lines to Hill, with whom he had had a former
misunderstanding. Hill replied to these assaults by a ponderous satire
in verse upon "tuneful Alexis;" it had, however, some tolerable lines at
the opening, imitated from Pope's own verses upon Addison, and
attributing to him the same jealousy of merit in others. Hill soon
afterwards wrote a civil note to Pope, complaining of the passage in the
Dunciad. Pope might have relied upon the really satisfactory answer that
the lines were, on the whole, complimentary; indeed, more complimentary
than true. But with his natural propensity for lying, he resorted to his
old devices. In answer to this and a subsequent letter, in which Hill
retorted with unanswerable force, Pope went on to declare that he was
not the author of the notes, that the extracts had been chosen at
random, that he would "use his influence with the editors of the Dunciad
to get the note altered"; and, finally, by an ingenious evasion, pointed
out that the blank in the Dunciad required to be filled up by a
dissyllable. This, in the form of the lines as quoted above, is quite
true, but in the first edition of the Dunciad the first verse had been

H-- tried the next, but hardly snatch'd from sight.

Hill did not detect this specimen of what Pope somewhere calls "pretty
genteel equivocation." He was reconciled to Pope, and taught the poor
poet by experience that his friendship was worse than his enmity. He
wrote him letters of criticism; he forced poor Pope to negotiate for him
with managers and to bring distinguished friends to the performances of
his dreary plays; nay, to read through, or to say that he had read
through, one of them in manuscript four times, and make corrections
mixed with elaborate eulogy. No doubt Pope came to regard a letter from
Hill with terror, though Hill compared him to Horace and Juvenal, and
hoped that he would live till the virtues which his spirit would
propagate became as general as the esteem of his genius. In short, Hill,
who was a florid flatterer, is so complimentary that we are not
surprised to find him telling Richardson, after Pope's death, that the
poet's popularity was due to a certain "bladdery swell of management."
"But," he