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Let the two Curlls of town and court,' abuse
His father, mother, body, soul, and muse.'
Yet why? that father held it for a rule,
It was a sin to call our neighbour fool:

1 Curll the bookseller, and Lord Hervey. He calls Lord Hervey the "Curll of Court," because, like the bookseller, he descends to such low arts as ridicule of his personal defects and his obscure birth. See on this point Letter to a Noble Lord.

2 In some of Curll's and other pamphlets, Mr. Pope's father was said to be a mechanic, a hatter (a), a farmer, nay a bankrupt (b). But, what is stranger, a nobleman (if such a reflection could be thought to come from a nobleman) had dropped an allusion to that pitiful untruth, in a paper called an Epistle to a Doctor of Divinity; and the following line :

Hard as thy heart, and as thy birth obscure,

had fallen from a like courtly pen, in

380

certain Verses to the Imitator of Horace.

Mr. Pope's father was of a gentleman's family in Oxfordshire, the head of which was the Earl of Downe, whose sole heiress married the heir of Lindsay. His mother was the daughter of William Turner, Esq., of York she had three brothers, one of whom was killed; another died in the service of King Charles; the eldest following his fortunes, and becoming a general officer in Spain, left her what estate remained after the sequestrations and forfeitures of her family. Mr. Pope died in 1717, aged 75; she in 1733, aged 93, a very few weeks after this poem was finished (c). The following inscription was placed by their son on their monument in the parish of Twickenham, in Middlesex :

D. O. M.

ALEXANDRO POPE. VIRO. INNOCUO. PROBO. PIO.
QUI. VIXIT. ANNOS. LXXV. OB. M.DCCXVII.
ET. EDITHE. CONJUGI. INCULPABILI.
PIENTISSIME. QUÆ. VIXIT. ANNOS
XCIII. OB. MDCCXXXIII.

PARENTIBUS. BENEMERENTIBUS. FILIUS. FECIT.
ET SIBI.-POPE.

(a) The allegation that Pope's father was a hatter, was made in Dean Jonathan's Parody on the 4th Chapter of Genesis. Printed for Timothy Atkins, and sold by the booksellers of London and Westminster, 1729. "And it came to pass that the nurse died, ** and then the mourning of Pope the son of the hatter was ended."-DILKE.

(b) In the "Female Dunciad. Printed for T. Read in White Fryers, and sold by the booksellers of London

and Westminster," it is said in a footnote: "Mr. Pope's Father was no stranger to a statute of Bankrupt."

(c) A notice in the Gentleman's Magazine, 2, 326, containing most of the above particulars about Mrs. Pope, says: "She lived with her son (her only child) from the time of his Birth to her Death; and was carried to the grave by 6 poor men, to whom were given suits of dark grey cloth, and followed by 6 poor women in the same sort of mourning."

That harmless mother thought no wife a whore:
Hear this, and spare his family, James Moore!'
Unspotted names, and memorable long!

If there be force in virtue, or in song."

Of gentle blood (part shed in honour's cause, While yet in Britain honour had applause)

385

Each parent sprung-A. What fortune, pray ?-P. Their

own,

And better got, than Bestia's from the throne.
Born to no pride, inheriting no strife,
Nor marrying discord in a noble wife,"
Stranger to civil and religious rage,

The good man walked innoxious through his age.

1 Wakefield says, without giving his authority, that James Moore was of illegitimate birth, and that his mother was an adulteress. Pope or his allies seem to make a similar statement in Memoirs of Grub Street, vol. 1, pp. 93, 107. An account of the loose morals of James Moore's mother is given under the title of "Maura," in a volume entitled Court Tales (1717), p. 90. There is a copy in the British Museum. After verse 385 in the Chauncy MS. followed these lines:

father was And couldst thou think my honest sire unknown

Merely because thou dost not know thine own?

Known he shall be, and loved and honoured long.

2 Imitated from Virgil, Æneid, ix. 446:

Fortunati ambo! si quid mea carmina possunt,

Nulla dies unquam memori vos eximet ævo.

3 In the early editions the name was "Clodio." Mr. Croker suspected that old Horace Walpole was intended by Bestia. He does not give his reasons, but probably his inference was drawn from the name, and from the description given of Horace

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395

Walpole's uncouth person and rustic manners in Lord Hervey's Memoirs, vol. i. p. 324. Horace Walpole the younger, also in a letter to Mann, dated 30 June, 1742, quotes an epigram of the day (A receipt to make a Lord) in which his uncle is called "in morals most wicked, most nasty in mien," and says that he was "by rapine enriched, though a beggar by birth." In the State Dunces there is a description of Horace Walpole the elder which goes far to establish the correctness of Mr. Croker's conjecture:

Full placed and pensioned see Horatio stands,

Begrimed his face, unpurified his hands, To decency he scorns all nice pretence, And reigns firm foe to cleanliness and

sense.

See also note to Imitation of Horace, Epistle i. Book 1, note to ver. 88.

4 Alluding to the unhappy marriage of Addison with the Countess of Warwick. He thus retaliates not unjustly on Lord Hervey and Lady M. W. Montagu-who had ridiculed the obscurity of his birth-by reminding them that alliances with the nobility are not always productive of family happiness:

No courts he saw, no suits would ever try,
Nor dared an oath,' nor hazarded a lie.
Unlearned, he knew no schoolman's subtle art,
No language, but the language of the heart.
By nature honest, by experience wise,
Healthy by temperance, and by exercise,

His life, though long, to sickness passed unknown,
His death was instant, and without a groan.

O grant me thus to live, and thus to die!

Who sprung from kings shall know less joy than I.'
O friend! may each domestic bliss be thine!"
Be no unpleasing melancholy mine:

Me, let the tender office long engage,

To rock the cradle of reposing age,

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405

With lenient arts extend a mother's breath,

410

Make languor smile, and smooth the bed of death.
Explore the thought, explain the asking eye,

And keep awhile one parent from the sky!^

On cares like these if length of days attend,

May Heaven, to bless those days, preserve my friend,
Preserve him social, cheerful, and serene,

And just as rich as when he served a queen.'

415

He was a non-juror, and would not take the oath of allegiance or supremacy, or the oath against the Pope.-BOWLES.

2 Imitated from Horace, Epist. i., x. 33:

Reges et regum vitâ præcurrere amicos.
3 After ver. 405 in the MS. :

And of myself too, something must I say
Take then this verse, the trifle of a day;
And if it live, it lives but to commend
The man whose heart has ne'er forgot a
friend,

Or hand, an author; critic yet polite,
And friend to learning, yet too wise to write.

4 Boileau's life affords in this re-
VOL. III.-POETRY.

spect a curious contrast to Pope's. He describes himself in his Tenth Epistle, v. 97, as :

Dès le berceau perdant une fort jeune mère,

Reduit seize ans après à pleurer mon vieux père.

5 An honest compliment to his friend's real and unaffected disinterestedness, when he was the favourite physician of Queen Anne. --WARBURTON.

Arbuthnot, after Queen Anne's death, was deprived of his appointment and his apartments at St. James's, and removed to Dover Street. He accepted the change in his cir

T

A. Whether that blessing be denied or given, Thus far was right, the rest belongs to Heaven.'

cumstances with equanimity. Writing

to Pope on the 7th of Sept., 1714, he "Martin's office is now the says: second door on the left hand in Dover Street, where he will be glad to see Mr. Parnell, Mr. Pope, and his old friends to whom he can still afford a half-pint of claret . . . I will never forgive you if you cannot use my fore-said house in Dover Street with the same freedom as you did that in St. James's; for as our friendship was not begun upon the relation of a courtier, so I hope it will not end with it."

1 He makes his friend close the dialogue with a sentiment very expressive of that religious resignation, which was the character both of his temper and piety.-WARBURTON.

But the last couplet was originally written as an expression of Pope's own sentiment. The passage containing ver. 406 to the end, with other lines, was enclosed by him in a letter to Aaron Hill, dated September, 1731. It ran as follows:

While every joy, successful youth is thine,

Be no unpleasing melancholy mine,

Me long, ah long! may these soft cares engage

To rock the cradle of reposing age,
With lenient arts prolong a parent's breath,
Make languor smile, and smooth the bed
of death.

Me, when the cares my better years have shown

Another's age, shall hasten on my own, Shall some kind hands, like B***'s or thine,

Lead gently down, and favour the decline?

In wants, in sickness shall a friend be nigh,

Explore my thought, and watch my asking eye?

Whether that blessing be denied or given, Thus far is right; the rest belongs to Heaven.

These lines are presumably those to which Johnson alludes in his Life of Thomson as having formed part of a poetical epistle sent by Pope to Thomson in Italy. The reference to Bolingbroke, however, would rather seem to indicate that the "successful youth" was a political or legal friend, such as Lyttelton or Murray.

IMITATIONS OF HORACE.

SATIRE I.

ΤΟ

MR. FORTESCUE.

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