Page:The English humourists of the eighteenth century. A series of lectures, delivered in England, Scotland, and the United States of America (IA englishhumourist00thacrich).pdf/218

 and by the enthusiastic national admiration which justly rewarded his great achievement of the Iliad, purchased that famous villa of Twickenham which his song and life celebrated; duteously bringing his old parents to live and die there, entertaining his friends there, and making occasional visits to London in his little chariot, in which Atterbury compared him to "Homer in a nutshell."

"Mr. Dryden was not a genteel man," Pope quaintly said to Spence, speaking of the manners and habits of the famous old patriarch of Will's. With regard to Pope's own manners, we have the best contemporary authority that they were singularly refined and polished. With his extraordinary sensibility, with his known tastes, with his delicate frame, with his power and dread of ridicule, Pope could have been no other than what we call a highly-bred person. His closest friends, with the exception of Swift, were among the delights and ornaments of the polished society of their age. Garth, the accomplished and benevolent, whom