on in form, to which she returned no reply but that most
exasperating of all replies, ungovernable laughter. Whether this
tradition be true or not, it is plain that she seems always to have
remembered their difference of rank, and to have been rather cold
than encouraging. The issue of the acquaintance is a sorry one. Pope
revenged himself for her scorn in his worst and most unmanly fashion
of innuendo; she, on her side, retorted with lampoons and satire as
cruel. One feels glad that she finally left England and that further
bickering was impossible. The other two persons were the already
mentioned Blounts, each of whom seems at first to have by turn

"--blossomed in the light
Of tender personal regards;"

Teresa, the elder and handsomer, becoming by degrees the acknowledged
favorite. But whether, like the lover in Prior's song, Pope "convey'd
his treasure in a borrowed name," or merely changed his mind, it is
certain that, at a later period, the younger, Martha, had proved the
"real flame," to the permanent displacement of her sister. As time
went on, Pope's attachment for Martha Blount continued to increase
until she became almost an inmate of his house. For more than fifteen
years, he told Gay in 1730, he had spent three or four hours a day in
her company; and he seems to have loved her with an affection as
genuine and as watchful as that which he showed to his parents. Like
all his connections, this, too, was marred by strange pettinesses and
curious contradictions; but one can scarcely grudge to his sickly
sensitive nature the anodyne of feminine sympathy. Why so close and
tender a friendship never ripened into marriage is an inquiry that may
be consigned to the limbo of questions insoluble. It is enough that in
the checkered chronicle of the loves of the poets, "blue-eyed Patty
Blount" has an immortality almost as secure as that of Esther Johnson.

To return to Pope's works. In the first years of his Twickenham
residence the "Iliad" was finished triumphantly, and Pope was invited
by the booksellers to edit Shakespeare. The task was one for which he
had few qualifications, and his execution of it at once laid him open
to a new attack from a fresh opponent, Lewis Theobald, afterward the
Tibbald of the "Dunciad" and the "Satires." Then he followed up the
"Iliad" by the "Odyssey," in which he was assisted by Fenton and
Broome. Toward 1725 Bolingbroke settled at Dawley, and in the
succeeding year Swift paid a l