nd went about his bed. Bolingbroke was often there
from Battersea, stirred to philosophic utterances and unphilosophic
tears, and grave Lyttleton, and kind Lord Marchmont, and faithful
Joseph Spence. Martha Blount, too, was not absent, and "it was very
observable," said the spectators, how the sick man's strength and
spirits seemed to revive at the approach of his favorite. "Here I am
dying of a hundred good symptoms," he said to one of his visitors.
What humiliated him most was his inability to think. "One of the
things that I have always most wondered at (he told Spence) is that
there should be any such thing as human vanity. If I had any, I had
enough to mortify it a few days ago, for I lost my mind for a whole
day." A little later Spence is telling Bolingbroke how, "on every
catching and recovering of his mind," Pope is "always saying something
kind either of his present or absent friends," and that it seems "as
if his humanity had outlived his understanding." But the vital spark
still continued to flicker in its socket, and only a day or two before
his death he sat for three whole hours in his sedan-chair, in the
garden he loved so well, then filled with the blossoms of May and
smelling of the summer he was not to see. On the 29th he took an
airing in Bushy Park, and a little later received the sacrament. On
the evening of the following day he passed away so softly and
painlessly that those who stood by knew not "the exact time of his
departure." He had lived fifty-six years and nine days, and he was
buried near to the monument of his father in the chancel of Twickenham
Church. Seventeen years afterward Bishop Warburton erected a tablet to
him in the same building, with an epitaph as idle as that which
disgraces the tomb of Gay in Westminster Abbey. It is possible that
Pope may at some time have written it, but the terms of his will prove
conclusively that he never intended it to be used.

What is Pope's position as a poet? Time, that great practitioner of
the exhaustive process, "sifting alway, sifting ever," even to the
point of annihilation, has already half answered the question. No one
now, except the literary historian or the student of versification, is
ever likely to consult the "Pastorals" or "Windsor Forest;" and men
will, in all probability, continue to quote "Hope springs eternal in
the human breast" and "A little learning is a dangerous thing,"
without the least suspicion that the one comes from the se