'_The most interesting person of the Alcibiades class._' But it is
thoroughly characteristic of Pope, that the one solitary trait in the
Duke's career which interested _him_, was the fact that a man so
familiar with voluptuous splendor should have died on a flock-bed
patched with straw. How advantageously does Dryden come forward on
this occasion! _He_, as Mr. Bayes, had some bitter wrongs to avenge;
and he was left at liberty to execute this revenge after his own heart,
for he survived the Duke by a dozen years. Yet he took no revenge at
all. _He_, with natural goodness and magnanimity, declined to kick the
dead lion. And in the memorable lines, all alive and trembling with
impassioned insight into the demoniac versatility of the Duke's
character, how generously does he forbear every expression of scorn,
and cover the man's frailties with a mantle of comprehensive apology,
and, in fact, the true apology, by gathering them together, one and
all, as the united results of some secret nympholepsy, or some sacred
Pythian inspiration:--
'Blest madman! that could every hour employ
In something new to wish or to enjoy;
Now all for rhyming, wenching, fiddling, drinking;
Beside ten thousand freaks that died in thinking'
Strangely enough, the only Duke of Buckingham that interested Pope was
not the Villiers that so profoundly interested Dryden and his own
generation, but in every sense a mock Duke of Buckingham, a pantomimic
duke, that is known only for having built a palace as fine as gilt
gingerbread, and for having built a pauper poem. Some time after the
death of the Villiers duke, and the consequent extinction of the title,
Sheffield, Lord Mulgrave, obtained a patent creating him, not Duke of
Buckingham, but by a pawnbroker's dodge, devised between himself and
his attorney, Duke of Buckingham_shire_; the ostensible reason for
which, as alleged by himself, was, that he apprehended some lurking
claim to the old title that might come forward to his own confusion
at a future time, and in that case he was ready with this demur: 'You
mistake, I am not _ham_, but ham_shire_.' Such was _his_ account of
the matter. Mine is different: I tell the reason thus. He had known
the Villiers of old, he knew well how that lubricated gladiator had
defied all the powers of Chancery and the Privy Council, for months
after months, once to get a 'grip' of him, or a hawk over him. It was
the old familiar case of trying to catch a pig (but in this instance
a wild boar of the forest) whose tail has been soaped. (See _Lord
Clarendon_, not his History but his Life.) What the Birmingham duke
therefore really feared was, that the worst room, the tawdry curtains,
the flock-bed, &c., were all a pyramid of lies; that the Villiers had
_not_ been thrown; had probably _not_ died at all; but was only 'trying
it on,' in readiness for a great demonstration against himself; and
that, in case the title of Buckingham were ever finally given away,
the Villiers would be heard clattering on horseback up the grand
staircase of the new-built Buckingham House, like the marble statue
in 'Don Juan,' with a double commission against the false duke and the
Government as joint-traders in stolen goods. But if Pope were callous
to the splendor of the true Buckingham, what was it that drew him to
the false one? Pope must have been well aware that, amongst all the
poetic triflers of the day, there was not one more ripe for the
'Dunciad.' Like the jaws of the hungry grave (_Acherontis avari_), the
'Dunciad' yawned for him, whilst yet only in dim conception as a remote
possibility. He was, besides, the most vain-glorious of men; and, being
anxious above all things to connect himself with the blood royal, he
had conceived the presumptuous thought of wooing Queen Anne (then the
unmarried Princess Anne). Being rejected, of course, rather than have
no connection at all with royalty, he transferred his courtship to a
young lady born on the wrong side of the blanket, namely, the daughter
of James II. by Miss Sedley. Her he married, and they reigned together
in great pomp over Buckingham House. But how should this have attracted
Pope? The fact, I fear is, that Pope admired him, in spite of his
verses, as a man rich and prosperous. One morning, in some of his own
verses, he lodged a compliment to the Duke as a poet and a critic:
immediately the Duke was down upon him with an answering salute of
twenty-one guns, and ever afterwards they were friends. But I repeat
that, in Pope's own judgment, nine out of ten who found their way into
that great _menagerie_ of the 'Dunciad,' had not by half so well
established their right of entrance as the Duke.