nity, they assail them
with a pungency, a force, a wit, and a directness which, in English
verse, have no parallel. Indeed it may be doubted whether the
portraits of Bufo and Sporus, of Atossa and Atticus, have been
excelled in any language whatsoever.

The first of the Dialogues known as the "Epilogue to the Satires" was
published in 1738, on the same morning as Johnson's "London," thus (in
Boswell's view) providing England simultaneously with its Horace and
its Juvenal. The second part followed in the same year. Besides these
there is little which is material to be added to the record of Pope's
work but the revised "Dunciad," in which, to gratify an increased
antipathy, he displaced its old hero, Theobald, in favor of Colley
Cibber, who, whatever his faults, was certainly not a typical dunce.
Toward the close of his life those infirmities at which Wycherley had
hinted in his youth grew upon him, and he became almost entirely
dependent upon nurses. He had not, to use De Quincey's words, drawn
that supreme prize in life, "a fine intellect with a healthy stomach,"
and his whole story testifies to that fact. As years went on his
little figure, in its rusty black, was seen more rarely in the
Twickenham lanes, and if he took the air upon the Thames, it was in a
sedan-chair that was lifted into a boat. When he visited his friends
his sleeplessness and his multiplied needs tired out the servants;
while in the day-time he would nod in company, even though the Prince
of Wales was talking of poetry. He was a martyr to sick headaches, and
in the intervals of relief from them would be tormented by all sorts
of morbid cravings for the very dietary which must inevitably secure
their recurrence. This continued battle of the brain with the ignobler
organs goes far to explain, if it may not excuse, much of the less
admirable side of his character. His irritability, his artifice, his
meannesses even, are more intelligible in the case of a man habitually
racked with pain, and morbidly conscious of his physical shortcomings,
than they would be in the case of those "whom God has made full-limbed
and tall;" and, in the noble teaching of Arthur's court, his
infirmities should entitle him to a larger charity of judgment.

Nothing in his life is more touching than the account of his last
days, when he lay wasted with an intolerable asthma, waiting serenely
for the end, but full of kindness and tender thoughtfulness for the
friends who came a