'_I give and I bequeath, old Euclio said_'--and the ridiculous story
of the dying epicure insisting upon having his luxurious dish brought
back to his death-bed (for why not? since at any rate, eating or not
eating, he was doomed to die) are amongst the lowest rubbish of
jest-books--having done duty for the Christian and the Pagan worlds
through a course of eighteen centuries. Not to linger upon the nursery
silliness that could swallow the legend of epicureanism surviving up
to the very brink of the grave, and when even the hypocrisy of _medical_
hope had ceased to flatter, what a cruel memento of the infirmity
charged upon himself was Pope preparing whilst he intended nothing
worse than a falsehood! He meant only to tell a lie; naturally, perhaps,
saying to himself, What's one lie more or less? And behold, if his
friends are to be believed, he was unconsciously writing a sort of
hieroglyphic epitaph for his own tomb-stone. Dr. Johnson's taste for
petty gossip was so keen, that I distrust all his anecdotes. That Pope
killed himself by potted lampreys, which he had dressed with his own
hands, I greatly doubt; but if anything inclines me to believe it,
chiefly it is the fury of his invectives against epicures and gluttons.
What most of all he attacked as a moralist was the particular vice
which most of all besieged him.