Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 7.djvu/128

 88 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS Lepel, meeting never a creature of quality but his Majesty King George I., giving audience to his Vice Chamberlain "all alone under the garden wall." Another epistolary idyl to Martha Blount, of which there are at least four rep- licas, relates the sentimental death by lightning of the two haymakers at Stan- ton Harcourt. Did Pope write this letter? or did Gay? Or did they write it both together? This is a question which Pope's editors have failed to settle. At all events, a similar composition went to another of Pope's flames, the brill- iant Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, now absent from England with her husband, who was ambassador at Constantinople. Clever Lady Mary, however, entirely declined to be subjugated by the pathetic fallacy, and sent back a matter-of-fact epitaph for John Hewet and Sarah Drew, which, though it wound up with a compliment to her correspondent, can hardly have gratified him. But there is one letter of this time the sincerity of which is undoubted. It is Pope's an- nouncement to Martha Blount of his father's death. " My poor Father dyed last night," it says. " Believe, since I don't forget you this moment, I never shall. A. Pope." The antithetical touch shows how art had become a second nature with the writer ; but his attachment and devotion to his parents is not one of the disputed points in his story. Alexander Pope the elder died in October, 171 7. Not very long after, the poet moved with his mother to a little villa, or " villakin " as Swift called it, on the banks of the Thames at Twickenham, close to the grotesque Gothic jumble known as Radnor House. At Twickenham or, as he called it, "Twitnam," Pope continued to reside until his death, his permanent house-mates being his old nurse, Mary Beach, to whom there is a tablet on the outer wall of Twicken- ham Church, and his mother, who survived her husband until 1 733, only preced- ing her famous son by eleven years. Pope tended her with exemplary care a care rendered daily more imperative by her increasing infirmities. Many refer- ences to her occur in his correspondence, and the sedulous inquiries made by his friends as to her health are earnest of her son's unwearied solicitude. One or two of the old lady's simple, homely letters to him have been preserved, with their fond messages and faulty spelling. Now and then, it is recorded, he would gratify her by setting her to transcribe his " Homer," an assistance of which the advantages must have been debatable. Many friends came and went at the pleasant little villa by the Thames, " flanked by its two Courts " of Hampton and Kew, and often, no doubt, the London stage, starting from the Chequers in Piccadilly, brought to it guests bearing names familiar in the annals of the time. There are three of his inti- mates who cannot be neglected in any record, however brief. When Lady Mary came back to England she took up her residence at Twickenham, and the hith- erto epistolary adoration of the poet became a practical fact. According to a story popularized by the pencil of Frith, Pope at length so far forgot himself as to make a declaration 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