Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 7.djvu/129

 ALEXANDER POPE 89 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 favor- ite. 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 pe- riod, the younger, Martha, had proved the " real flame," to the permanent dis- placement 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 contradic- tions ; 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 long visit to Pope at Twickenham. These two in- fluences may be traced in most of Pope's remaining works. In 1 726, " Gulli- ver's Travels" saw the light, and in 1727 were issued those joint volumes of " Miscellanies " which contained the "Treatise on the Bathos," a prose satire, to be supplanted in brief space by the terrible " Dunciad." In this last, Pope en- tered upon a campaign against the smaller fry of the pen with a vigor, a deadly earnestness, and a determination to wound, unparalleled in the history of letters. One of the most gifted of his critics, the late Rector of Lincoln College, speaks of the "Dunciad" roundly as "an amalgam of dirt, ribaldry, and petty spite," and M. Taine brought against it the more fatal charge of tediousness. But even if one admits the indiscriminate nature of that onslaught which confuses Bentley with such creatures of a day as Ralph and Oldmixon, it is impossible not to ad-