[Illustration]
Pope, who was born in London, spent nearly the whole of his life between
Binfield, in Windsor Forest, and Twickenham. They were his only two
constant residences; the time which he passed in London, he passed but
as a visitor, or lodger. Town poet, or poet of society, as he seems, he
was inseparably attached to the country, though it was the country of an
easily accessible vicinity to town, and itself pretty thickly inhabited
by people of rank and intelligence. From the time that his father
purchased the property at Binfield, with the exception of a short time
at school at Twyford, near Winchester, and at another school in
Mary-le-bone, which was removed while he was there to near Hyde Park
Corner, Pope never quitted Binfield as a residence till he bought
Twickenham. He went soon after his twelfth year from school, and he
continued to reside at Binfield till 1716, when he was twenty-eight
years of age; and singularly enough, he lived at Twickenham
twenty-eight years more, dying in May 1744, at the age of fifty-six.
As is the case of many other people, who, with all their philosophy, are
not content to rest their claims to distinction on their own virtues and
achievements, there was an attempt on the part of Pope to hang his
family on an aristocratic peg; and, as was to be expected in the case of
a man who did not spare his enemies and who wrote Dunciads, there was as
stout an attempt to pull this peg out. In his epistle to Dr. Arburthnot,
he makes this claim for his parentage:
"Of gentle blood, part shed in honor's cause,
While yet in Britain honor had applause,
Each parent sprang,"
And in a note to that epistle we are further informed, "that Mr. Pope's
father was a gentleman of family in Oxfordshire, the head of which was
the Earl of Downe, whose sole heiress married the Earl of Lindsay. His
mother was the daughter of William Turner, of York," &c. In reply to
this, Warton tells us, that when Pope published this note, a relation of
his own, a Mr. Pottinger, observed that his cousin, Pope, had made
himself out a fine pedigree, but he wondered where he got it; that he
had never heard any thing himself of their being related to the Earls of
Downe; and, what was more, he had an old maiden aunt, equally related, a
great genealogist, who was always talking of her family, but never
mentioned this circumstance, on which she certainly would not have been
silent had she known any thing of it. That the Earl of Guildford had
examined the pedigree and descents of the Downe family for any such
relationship; and that at the Heralds' Office, this pedigree, which Pope
had made out for himself, was considered to be as much fabricated as Mr.
Ireland's descent from Shakspeare.
This was one of Pope's weaknesses. No man did more than he did in his
day to free literature from the long degradation of servile, fulsome
dependence on patrons. He created a property for himself by his own
literary exertions, and set a splendid example to literary men of
independence. He showed them that they might be free, honorable, and
even wealthy, by their own means. He had the pride to place himself on
equal terms with lords when they were intellectual, but he scorned to
flatter them. It was a pride worthy of a literary man, and it was well
that when he departed from this just feeling, and would fain set up a
claim to rank with them on their own terms of family and descent--a
proceeding which undermined his true and unassailable principle of the
dignity of genius--that he should receive a due reprimand from the hands
of his enemies. The moment that he abandoned in any degree the patent of
God, the long and luminous descent of genius from heaven--a patent far
above all other patents, a descent far higher than all other
descents--it was a fitting retribution that the pigmies of the Dunciad
should fling it in his face that his father was a mechanic, a hatter, or
a cobbler, as it appears, from his reply to Lord Hervey and Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu, that they did; who themselves had thus addressed him in
print:
"None thy crabbed numbers can endure,
Hard as thy heart, and as thy birth obscure."
The simple fact was, that Pope's grandfather, the highest they could
trace the family, was a clergyman in Hampshire. The second son was
Alexander, the father of the poet. This Alexander was intended for
mercantile offices, and was sent out to reside in a family in Lisbon,
where he embraced Catholicism, and transmitted that faith to his son. He
afterward settled in Lombard-street, in London, as a linen-merchant,
where Pope was born; and, acquiring an independence, retired first to
Kensington, and afterward to Binfield, where he purchased a house and
about twenty acres of land. This was pedigree enough for a poet, who
needs none. In a truer tone, he pronounces the genuine honors of both
his parents and himself in these words: "A mother, on whom I never was
obliged so far to reflect as to say _she spoiled me_; and a father, who
never found himself obliged to say that _he disapproved my conduct_. In
a word, I think it enough that my parents, such as they were, never cost
me a blush; and that their son, such as he is, never cost them a tear."
Improving on this in his prologue to his Satires, he disclaims any
adventitious distinctions for his parents whatever, and draws a
beautiful character of his father:
"Born to no pride, inheriting no strife,
Nor marrying discord in a noble wife;
Stranger to civil and religious rage,
The good man walked innoxious through his age;
No courts he saw, no suits would ever try,
Nor dared an oath, or hazarded a lie.
Unlearned, he knew no schoolman's subtle art,
No language but the language of the heart;
By nature honest, by experience wise,
Healthy by temperance and by exercise;
His life, though long, to sickness passed unknown,
His death was instant, and without a groan."
From these parents, however, Pope inherited a feeble and crooked frame.
This circumstance, added to his being the only child of his father, led
to his domestic education and habits. When eight years old he was placed
under the tuition of the family priest. From him he passed to the
schools mentioned, and at the early age of twelve returned home. This,
he says, was all the instruction he received. He continued, however, to
educate himself; and as Milton had done in Buckinghamshire, so he at
Binfield in the shades of Windsor Forest, pursued steadily his studies,
both of books and nature. One of his earliest favorite books was Homer;
and at Twyford school he wrote a satire on the master, for which he was
severely castigated. Both these facts indicated his future character and
pursuits. At Binfield he not only went on strenuously with the study of
Latin, Greek, and French, but he commenced author. At twelve he wrote
his Ode to Solitude; a subject with which his situation made him well
acquainted. Pope was one of the very rare instances of a genius which
was at once prococious and enduring. But the secret of this was, that he
did not exhaust his young powers out of mere puerile vanity, but went on
reading all the best authors, English, French, Italian, Greek, and
Latin, and wrote rather to imitate and practice different styles. To his
sedulous practice of all kinds of styles, as those of Spenser, Waller,
Cowley, Rochester, Dorset, but especially Chaucer and Dryden, may be
attributed that great mastery of language, and that exquisite harmony of
versification, in which he has never yet been excelled.
A great advantage to him in these pursuits was the friendship of Sir
William Trumbull, who was not only an excellent scholar, but a man of
great taste, and had seen the world. Sir William had been embassador to
the Ottoman Porte, and afterward one of the secretaries of William III.;
he had now retired to East Hamstead, his native place, near Binfield,
where he soon found out the promise of Pope, and became his guide and
friend so long as he lived. Sir William introduced him to Wycherley,
then an old man; Wycherley introduced him to Walsh; and the literary
connections of the young poet spread so rapidly, that at seventeen he
was an avowed poet, and frequented Will's Coffee-house, which was on the
north side of Russell-street, in Covent Garden, where the wits of the
time used to assemble; and where Dryden had, when he lived, been
accustomed to preside. But even while giving his evenings to society of
the highest kind here, he was, during the day, pursuing his studies in
town, and particularly prosecuting, under good masters, his knowledge of
French and Italian. Neither, freely as he had written, had he rushed so
very prematurely into print; it was not till 1709, when he was
twenty-one, that he published his Pastorals, including some verses of
Homer and Chaucer, in Jacob Tonson's Miscellany. This miscellany seemed
to be the great periodical of the time; but the same year in which
Pope's contributions appeared in it, brought forth the Tatler, which was
succeeded by the Guardian and Spectator.
In 1711 Pope published his Essay on Criticism: this was soon followed by
the Rape of the Lock; and Pope, still only twenty-three, was at once on
the pinnacle of popularity. In 1715, or at the age of twenty-seven, he
had already proceeded boldly with his grand enterprise, the translation
of the Iliad of Homer, and had issued the first volume of it. This great
work, however, had been preceded by the Windsor Forest, in 1712, and
other detached poems, as his Ode on St. Cecilia's Day, in 1713; his
Temple of Fame, in 1714; and his Key to the Lock, in 1715. Long before
his Homer was out he numbered among his acquaintance and friends every
great and distinguished name of the time--Swift, Bolingbroke, Gay,
Addison, Steele, Congreve, Mr. Secretary Craggs, Lord Halifax, Prior,
Mallet, Arbuthnot, Parnell, Lord Oxford, Garth, Rowe, Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu, &c. All this Pope had accomplished by the age of twenty-seven,
and while at Binfield. Binfield will, therefore, always remain a place
of lively interest to the lovers of our national literature, and
especially to the admirers of the polished, acute, logical, and moral
intellect of Pope.
Binfield lies near Wokingham, and about two miles north of Cæsar's camp,
a pleasant village, surrounded with handsome houses, and in the midst of
the tract called the Royal Hunt. The house in which Pope's father, and
Pope too, resided, till he went to Twickenham, is a small, neat brick
house, on the side of the London road. Within about half a mile of this
house, and within a retired part of the forest, on the edge of a common,
is the spot where, it is said, Pope used to compose many of his verses;
on a large tree are inscribed, in capital letters, the words, _Here
Pope sung_: this sentence used to be annually refreshed at the expense
of a lady of Wokingham. There used also to be a seat under this tree,
but that has long disappeared; the fact is, however, that tradition
likes to fix on some particular spot, and especially some tree, as a
particular object of a poet's attachment; it is a palpable affair, and
satisfies the ordinary mind; but Pope, no doubt, especially when
planning and working out his poem of Windsor Forest, used to ramble all
through these scenes, and they may all be considered as associated with
his memory and genius.
Of the town life of Pope we find but few traces, considering the
well-known times, and the personages among whom he moved. Where his
settled lodgings were I find no exact mention; he was sometimes at
friends' houses, or at that of Jervas, the painter, which was probably
near St. James's Park; as when Mr. Blount writes to Pope, in 1716,
endeavoring to persuade him to make a journey to the Continent with him,
he exhorts him to leave "laziness and the elms of St. James's Park." Now
this summer Jervas was on a visit to Swift in Ireland, and during his
absence Pope made use of his house as his town sojourn; it was exactly
at the crisis of Pope's removal from Binfield to Twickenham, and no
doubt was a great convenience to him till his own house was fully ready
for him. His description of this house, in a letter to Jervas, will be
well remembered by the readers of his letters: "As to your inquiry about
your house, when I came within the walls, they put me in mind of those
of Carthage, where you find, like the wandering Trojan,
'Animum picturâ pascit inani;'
for the spacious mansion, like a Turkish caravansera, entertains the
vagabonds with bare lodgings. I rule the family very ill, keep bad
hours, and lend out your pictures about the town. See what it is to have
a poet in your house. Frank, indeed, does all he can in such
circumstances; for, considering he has a wild beast in it, he
constantly keeps the door chained: every time it is opened the links
rattle, the rusty hinges roar. The house seems so sensible that you are
all its support, that it is ready to drop in your absence; but I still
trust myself under its roof, as depending that Providence will preserve
so many Raphaels, Titians, and Guidos as are lodged in your cabinet.
Surely the sins of one poet can hardly be so heavy as to bring an old
house over the heads of so many painters. In a word, your house is
falling; but what of that? I am only a lodger!"
This was mere pleasant badinage. During Jervas's absence, Pope made a
journey on horseback to Oxford, a place he was fond of visiting; and his
account of his journey, and mode of passing his time there, given in a
letter to Martha Blount, is a pleasant near peep into his life. "Nothing
could have more of that melancholy which once used to please me than my
last day's journey; for, after having passed through my favorite woods
in the forest, with a thousand reveries of past pleasures, I rode over
hanging hills, whose tops were edged with groves, and whose feet watered
with winding rivers, listening to the falls of cataracts below, and the
murmuring of the winds above. The gloomy verdure of Stonor succeeded to
these, and then the shades of the evening overtook me: the moon rose in
the clearest sky I ever saw, by whose solemn light I passed on slowly
without company, or any interruption to the range of my thoughts. About
a mile before I reached Oxford, all the bells rang out in different
notes; the clocks of every college answered one another, and sounded
forth, some in deeper, some in softer tones, that it was eleven at
night. All this was no ill preparation to the life I have since led
among these old walls, memorable galleries, stone porticoes, students'
walks, and solitary scenes of the University. I wanted nothing but a
black gown and a salary to be as mere a book-worm as any there. I
conformed myself to college hours, was rolled up in books, lay in the
most dusky parts of the University, and was as dead to the world as any
hermit of the desert. If any thing was alive or awake in me, it was a
little vanity, such as even those good men used to entertain when the
monks of their own order extolled their piety and abstraction; for I
found myself received with a sort of respect which the idle part of
mankind, the learned, pay to their own species; who are as considerable
here as the busy, the gay, and the ambitious are in your world. Indeed,
I was treated in such a manner, that I could not but sometimes ask
myself, in my mind, what college I was founder of, or what library I had
built. Methinks I do very ill to return to the world again--to leave the
only place where I make a figure; and from seeing myself seated with
dignity in the most conspicuous shelves of a library, put myself into
the abject posture of lying at a lady's feet in St. James's Square."
There is a good deal of the poetical and picturesque in this account, as
in another, of a ride to Oxford about two years before, there is of the
picturesque and ludicrous. Pope and his cotemporaries, Swift, Addison,
and Steele, have made immortal the triad of great publishers of their
day--Tonson, Lintot, and Curll. Curll issued to the light a stolen
volume of Pope's letters, to the poet's astonishment; and, on Pope's
very natural anger, with very bibliopolical coolness, replied, that Mr.
Pope ought to be very much obliged to him for making them known, for
they did him so much credit. Jacob Tonson was the John Murray of his
day; he turned out the most splendid editions of standard works, and
was, moreover, the secretary of the great political Whig, or Kit-cat
Club, of which the dukes of Somerset, Richmond, Grafton, Devonshire, and
Marlborough; the Earls of Dorset, Sunderland, Manchester, Wharton, and
Kingston; Lords Halifax and Somers; Sir Richard Steele, Addison,
Congreve, Garth, Mainwaring, Pulteney, and many other distinguished men,
were members. These, such was the munificence of the great bibliopole,
he employed Sir Godfrey Kneller to paint for him, of a size to admit of
representing the heads, and which has since been called the kit-cat
size. Munificent, however, as he was, Lintot soon out-bid him for Pope's
Homer, and made his fortune by it.
Of Lintot's active schemes to turn a penny, the ride just mentioned to
Oxford affords a curious example. Pope had borrowed a horse of Lord
Burlington, and set out alone. He had most likely mentioned his going in
Lintot's shop, for he had but just entered Windsor Forest, when who
should come trotting up behind at a smart rate but Bernard Lintot. Pope
had an instant feeling of Lintot's design, and in a letter to Lord
Burlington gave a humorous and characteristic account of the singular
conversation which took place between them. Pope had observed that
Lintot, who was more accustomed to get astride of authors than of
horses, sat uneasily in his saddle, for which he expressed some
solicitude, when Lintot proposed that, as they had the day before them,
it would be pleasant to sit a while under the woods. When they had
alighted, "See here," said Lintot, "what a mighty pretty Horace I have
in my pocket! What if you amused yourself in turning an ode till we
mount again? Lord! if you pleased, what a clever miscellany you might
make at leisure hours." "Perhaps I may," said Pope, "if we ride on; the
motion is an aid to my fancy; a round trot very much awakens my spirits;
then jog on apace, and I'll think as hard as I can." Silence ensued for
a full hour, after which Lintot stopped short, and broke out, "Well,
sir, how far have you gone?" "Seven miles," answered Pope. "Zounds!
sir," exclaimed Lintot, "I thought you had done seven stanzas. Oldsworth
in a ramble round Wimbledon Hill would translate a whole ode in this
time. I'll say that for Oldsworth, though I lost by his Timothys, he
translates an ode of Horace the quickest of any man in England. I
remember Dr. King would write verses in a tavern three hours after he
could not speak; and there is Sir Richard, in that rumbling old chariot
of his, between Fleet-street and St. Giles's Pound, shall make you half
a Job." Pope jogged on to Oxford, and dropped Lintot as soon as he
could.
We may imagine Pope, during his occasional visits to London, looking in
at Lintot's to see what was coming out new, or spending a morning with
Swift at his lodgings; with Bolingbroke; or with Gay, at the Duke of
Queensbury's; with Lord Burlington, or Lord Halifax; and in the evening
meeting in full conclave all the wits and philosophers of the time, at
Will's Coffee-house, or at Button's, to which the company which used to
meet at Will's had been transferred by the influence of Addison. This
was also called the Hanover Club, because the members adhered to the
Whig principles and the house of Hanover. But Pope was equally welcome
at the Tory Club, which had been constituted by his great friends,
Bolingbroke and Harley, on the downfall of the Whigs at the peace of
Utrecht, in opposition to the Kit-cat Club, and where these noblemen,
their great champion Swift, Sir William Wyndham, Lord Bathurst, Dr.
Arbuthnot, and other men of note of that party assembled. This was
called the October Club, from the month in which the great alteration in
the ministry took place. Later, when the dissensions arose between
Harley and Bolingbroke, a more exclusively literary club was formed, of
which Swift, Gay, Parnell, and Arbuthnot were members. This was the
Scriblerus Club, amid whose convivialities originated the History of
Martinus Scriblerus; the Discourse on the Bathos, and Gulliver's
Travels.
At all these places, Pope, who, having friends of all parties, would not
commit himself to any political party, was always welcome, though the
casual influence of party did not fail to take its effect, and do the
work of estrangement among many of the leading spirits of the time. Pope
always professed to hold Whig principles; but, in fact, there was
little distinction of political principle at that period, the chief
difference being that of mere party. To the nation and its interests, it
was of little consequence what leader was in power.
Amid all the convivialities, the excitements of wine, wit, and
conversation, which so many meetings of celebrated men opened to Pope,
he began to find himself growing dissipated, and his health suffering.
His wise old friend, Sir William Trumbull, warned him of his danger with
an affectionate earnestness, and it is supposed with due effect. "I now
come," said he, "to what is of vast moment--I mean, the preservation of
your health, and beg of you earnestly to get out of all tavern company,
and fly away _tanquam ex incendio_. What a misery it is for you to be
destroyed by the foolish kindness--it is all one, real or pretended--of
those who are able to bear the poison of bad wine, and to engage you in
so unequal a combat. As to Homer, by all I can learn, your business is
done; therefore come away, and take a little time to breathe in the
country. I beg now for my own sake, and much more for yours. Methinks
Mr. ---- has said to you more than once,
'Heu! fuge, nati deâ, teque his, ait, eripe flammis.'"
Pope felt the justice of this call, and obeyed. It was not, however,
without a lingering and reverted look, as a letter of his to Jervas
testifies. "I can not express how I long to renew our old intercourse
and conversation; our morning conference in bed in the same room, our
evening walks in the Park, our amusing voyages on the water, our
philosophical suppers, our lectures, our dissertations, our gravities,
our fooleries, or what not."
It appears that not merely Jervas, Parnell, Garth, Rowe, and others of
like respectable character, were his companions in the amusements
referred to, but that, unfortunately for him, he had fallen into the
company of the dissolute Earl of Warwick, Addison's son-in-law, and of
Colley Cibber; who, availing themselves of his vivacity, laid a
deliberate plan to engage him in an affair derogatory to his reputation.
But he cut wisely these connections, and London, with a valediction to
be found in his verses written in the character of a philosophical rake:
"Dear, damned, distracting town, farewell
Thy fools no more I'll tease," &c.
*...*...*...*
"To drink and droll be Rowe allowed
Till the third watchman toll;
Let Jervas gratis paint, and Froude
Save threepence and his soul.
"Farewell Arbuthnot's raillery
On every learned sot;
And Garth, the best good Christian he,
Although he knows it not.
"Lintot, farewell! thy bard must go:
Farewell, unhappy Tonson!
Heaven gives thee for thy loss of Rowe,
Lean Phillips and fat Johnson.
"Why should I stay? both parties rage;
My vixen mistress squalls;
The wits in envious feuds engage,
And Homer--damn him--calls."
Here, then, ends Pope's town life, or that part of his life when he gave
himself most up to it. We now accompany him to his new and his last
residence, his beloved Twickenham, or Twitenham, as he used to write it.
It seems that Pope did not purchase the freehold of the house and
grounds at Twickenham, but only a long lease. He took his father and
mother along with him. His father died there the year after, but his
mother continued to live till 1733, when she died at the great age of
ninety-three. For twenty years she had the singular satisfaction of
seeing her son the first poet of his age; caressed by the greatest men
of the time, courted by princes, and feared by all the base. No parents
ever found a more tender and dutiful son. With him they shared in honor
the ease and distinction he had acquired. They were the cherished
objects of his home. Swift paid him no false compliment when he said, in
condoling with him on his mother's death, "You are the most dutiful son
I have ever known or heard of, which is a felicity not happening to one
in a million."
The property at Twickenham is properly described by Roscoe as lying on
both sides of the highway, rendering it necessary for him to cross the
road to arrive at the higher and more ornamental part of his gardens. In
order to obviate this inconvenience, he had recourse to the expedient of
excavating a passage under the road from one part of his grounds to the
other, a fact to which he alludes in these lines:
"Know all the toil the heavy world can heap
Rolls o'er my grotto, nor disturbs my sleep."
The lower part of these grounds, in which his house stood, constituted,
in fact, only the sloping bank of the river, by much the smaller portion
of his territory. The passage, therefore, was very necessary to that far
greater part, which was his wilderness, shrubbery, forest, and every
thing, where he chiefly planted and worked. This passage he formed into
a grotto, having a front of rude stone-work opposite to the river, and
decorated within with spars, ores, and shells. Of this place he has
himself left this description:
"I have put the last hand to my works of this kind, in happily finishing
the subterranean way and grotto. I found there a spring of the clearest
water, which falls in a perpetual rill, that echoes through the cavern
night and day. From the River Thames you see through my arch, up a walk
of the wilderness, to a kind of open temple wholly composed of shells in
the rustic manner; and from that distance under the temple, you look
down through a sloping arcade of trees, and see the sails on the river
passing suddenly and vanishing, as through a perspective glass. When you
shut the door of this grotto, it becomes on the instant, from a
luminous room, a _camera obscura_, on the walls of which all the
objects of the river, hills, woods, and boats are forming a moving
picture, in their visible radiations; and when you have a mind to light
it less, it affords you a very different scene. It is finished with
shells, interspersed with looking-glass in regular forms, and in the
ceiling is a star of the same material, at which, when a lamp of an
orbicular figure of thin alabaster is hung in the middle, a thousand
pointed rays glitter, and are reflected over the place. There are
connected to this grotto, by a narrow passage, two porches, one toward
the river, of smooth stones, full of light and open; the other toward
the garden, shadowed with trees, rough with shells, flints, and iron
ore. The bottom is paved with simple pebbles, as is also the adjoining
walk up the wilderness to the temple, in the natural taste, agreeing not
ill with the little dripping murmur, and the aquatic idea of the whole
place. It wants nothing to complete it but a good statue with an
inscription, like that beautiful antique one which you know I am so fond
of. You will think I have been very poetical in this description; but it
is pretty near the truth."
To this prose description Pope added this one in verse:
"Thou who shalt stop, where Thames' translucent wave
Shines a broad mirror through the shadowy cave;
Where lingering drops from mineral roofs distill,
And pointed crystals break the sparkling rill;
Unpolished gems no ray on pride bestow,
And latent metals innocently glow;
Approach! great Nature studiously behold,
And eye the mine without a wish for gold.
Approach; but awful! Lo! the Egerian grot,
Where, nobly pensive, St. John sat and thought;
Where British sighs from dying Wyndham stole,
And the bright flame was shot through Marchmont's soul.
Let such, such only, tread this sacred floor,
Who dare to love their country, and be poor."
But it was not merely in forming this grotto that Pope employed himself;
it was in building and extending his house, which was in a Roman style,
with columns, arcades, and porticoes. The designs and elevations of
these buildings may be seen by his own hand in the British Museum, drawn
in his usual way on backs of letters. The following passage, in a letter
to Mr. Digby, will be sufficient to give us his idea of both his
Thamesward garden and his house in a summer view: "No ideas you could
form in the winter could make you imagine what Twickenham is in this
warm summer. Our river glitters beneath the unclouded sun, at the same
time that its banks retain the verdure of showers; our gardens are
offering their first nosegays; our trees, like new acquaintance brought
happily together, are stretching their arms to meet each other, and
growing nearer and nearer every hour. The birds are paying their
thanksgiving songs for the new habitations I have made them. My building
rises high enough to attract the eye and curiosity of the passenger from
the river, where, upon beholding a mixture of beauty and ruin, he
inquires, What house is falling, or what church is rising? So little
taste have our common Tritons for Vitruvius; whatever delight the
poetical gods of the river may take in reflecting on their streams, my
Tuscan porticoes, or Ionic pilasters."
Pope's architecture, like his poetry, has been the subject of much and
vehement dispute. On the one hand, his grottoes and his buildings have
been vituperated as most tasteless and childish; on the other, applauded
as beautiful and romantic. Into neither of these disputes need we enter.
In both poetry and architecture a bolder spirit and a better taste have
prevailed since Pope's time. With all his foibles and defects, Pope was
a great poet of the critical and didactic kind, and his house and place
had their peculiar beauties. He was himself half inclined to suspect the
correctness of his fancy in such matters, and often rallies himself on
his gimcracks and crotchets in both verse and prose. Thus, in his first
epistle of his first book of Horace, addressed to Bolingbroke:
"But when no prelate's lawn with haircloth lined
Is half so incoherent as my mind;
When--each opinion with the next at strife,
An ebb and flow of follies all my life--
I plant, root up; I build, and then confound;
Turn round to square, and square again to round;
You never change one muscle of your face;
You think this madness but a common case."
Pope's building madness, however, had method in it. Unlike the great
romancer and builder of our time, he never allowed such things to bring
him into debt. He kept his mind at ease by such prudence, and soothed
and animated it under circumstances of continued evil by working among
his trees, and grottoes, and vines, and at his labors of poetry and
translation. At the period succeeding the rebellion of 1715, when that
event had implicated and scattered so many of his highest and most
powerful friends, here he was laboring away at his Homer with a progress
which astonished every one. Removed at once from the dissipations and
distractions of London, and from the agreeable interruptions of such
society, he found leisure and health enough here to give him vigor for
exertions astonishing for so weak a frame. The tastes he indulged here,
if they were not faultless according to our notions, were healthy, and
they endured. To the end of his life he preserved his strong attachment
to his house and grounds. In 1736, writing to Swift, he says: "I wish
you had any motive to see this kingdom. I could keep you, for I am rich;
that is, I have more room than I want. I can afford room for myself and
two servants. I have, indeed, room enough; nothing but myself at home.
The kind and hearty housewife is dead! The agreeable and instructive
neighbor is gone! Yet my house is enlarged, and the gardens extend and
flourish, as knowing nothing of the guests they have lost. I have more
fruit-trees and kitchen garden than you have any thought of; nay, I have
melons and pine-apples of my own growth. I am as much a better gardener
as I am a worse poet than when you saw me; but gardening is more akin
to philosophy, for Tully says, '_Agricultura proxima sapientiæ_.'" And
toward the end of the same year he says, in a letter to Ralph Allen, "I
am now as busy planting for myself as I was lately in planting for
another; and I thank God for every wet day and for every fog that gives
me the headache, but prospers my works. They will indeed outlive me, but
I am pleased to think my trees will afford fruit and shade to others
when I shall want them no more. And it is no sort of grief to me that
those others will not be things of my own poor body; but it is enough
that they are creatures of the same species, and made by the same hand
that made me."
In 1743, the last year of his life, he was still inspired by the same
tastes, and occupied in the same pursuits. "I have lived," says he,
March 24th, 1743, "much by myself of late, partly through ill health,
and partly to amuse myself with little improvements in my gardens and
house, to which, possibly, I shall, if I live, be much more confined."
Of the mode of Pope's life here we have, from the letters of himself and
his friends, a pretty tolerable notion. He was near enough town to make
occasional visits to it, and his friends there near enough to visit him.
His friends and acquaintances were every distinguished man and woman of
the time, whether literary characters or statesmen. The greater part of
them may be set down as his guests here, at one period or another. He
delighted to have his most intimate friends near him, and some one or
more of them with him. Bishops Atterbury and Warburton, the Duke and
Duchess of Queensbury, Gay's great patrons; Sheffield, duke of
Buckingham, Lady Suffolk, Lord and Lady Hervey, Lords Bathurst, Halifax,
Oxford, Bolingbroke, Burlington, Lady Scudamore, the Countess of
Winchilsea, Lord-chancellor Harcourt, and his son Sir Simon Harcourt,
the Duke of Chandos, Lords Carlton, Peterborough, and Lansdowne, Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu, Addison, Steele, Swift, Parnell, Gay, Rowe, and
all the literary men of the age. What an array of those who wrote, and
of those who admired letters, were the frequenters of Twickenham. In
fact, in a letter to Swift in 1736, Pope says, "I was the other day
recollecting twenty-seven great ministers, or men of wit and learning,
who are all dead, and all of my acquaintance within twenty years past."
But Pope loved to get those he most delighted to converse with to reside
near him. Bolingbroke settled at Dawley, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
at Twickenham itself. The latter remarkable woman was a little too near.
All the world is familiar with Pope's intense admiration of her, his
having her picture drawn by Sir Godfrey Kneller to gaze on every day,
his worship of her, and their quarrel, which knew no reconciliation.
But Pope's attachments were, for the most part, strong and enduring.
Except in the case of the flattered, spoiled, and satirical Lady Mary,
there is scarcely a friend of Pope's who was not a friend for life. With
the Blounts, the Allens,
"And honest, hatless Cromwell, with red breeches,"
people who could confer no distinction, but had qualities worth loving,
he maintained the most steady friendship to the last. On Martha Blount,
the woman who above all others he most loved, he has conferred an
immortality as enduring as his own.
But his three most intimate friends, after all, were Swift, Bolingbroke,
and Gay. These congenial souls were here much, often, and for long times
together. With Pope they not only entered into literary plans, read
together, wrote together, and joked and feasted together, but with him
they worked at his grotto and in his garden. They helped him to
construct his quincunx; to plant, to sort spars and stones, and to fix
them in the wall. Lord Peterborough, who had run so victorious a career
in Spain, did not disdain to lay on a helping hand.
"He whose lightnings pierced the Iberian lines,
Now forms my quincunx and now ranks my vines."
Even the querulous dean, even the proud Bolingbroke, as well as the easy
and good-humored Gay, zealously partook of the rural as well as the
philosophical labors of Pope at Twickenham. Swift made two
extraordinarily long sojourns here, one of five months; and though he
took an abrupt leave at length, it was not, as Johnson would biliously
represent it, because they could not live together, or had abated their
mutual regard, but because they were both completely out of health, and
the dean especially, afflicted with the nervous irritability which
proved the forerunner of insanity. It was necessary for him to get home,
where he could as little bear any society, in that morbid condition. Gay
dead, Bolingbroke obliged to live abroad, Swift sunk into a
hypochondriac, the latter end of Pope's life was melancholy, and
Twickenham a comparative solitude. He had, however, the cordially
cheering attentions of Martha Blount; and Warburton, whose advancement
in the church was the work of his friendship, came in to supply the
places of the old companions gone.
Such was the home of Pope: there is still another portion of his life of
which we get most picturesque glimpses, I mean into his haunts.
Occasionally we find him at Bath for his health, but more frequently
making a summer sojourn of a few weeks or months at the houses of some
of his friends in the country. At one time he is at Dawley, with
Bolingbroke, where they are lying and reading between two haycocks; at
another at Prior Park, near Bath, at the Allens', where an odd kind of
stiffness grew up between the Allens and Miss Blount and himself, that
was never cleared up, but blew away, and left them as good friends as
before. Then he is at Oakley Bower, Lord Bathurst's seat at Cirencester.
In 1716, he writes to Martha and Teresa Blount--that was in his young
and Homeric days--"I am with Lord Bathurst at my bower in whose groves
we had yesterday a dry walk of three hours. It is the place that of all
others I fancy, and I am not yet out of humor with it, though I have had
it some months; it does not cease to be agreeable to me so late in the
season (October); the very dying of the leaves adds a variety of colors
that is not unpleasant. I look upon it as upon a beauty I once loved,
whom I should preserve a respect for in her decay; and as we should look
upon a friend, with remembrance how he pleased us once, though now
declined from his gay and flourishing condition.
"I write an hour or two every morning, then ride out a hunting upon the
downs, eat heartily, talk tender sentiments with Lord B., or draw plans
for houses and gardens, open avenues, cut glades, plant firs, contrive
water-works, all very fine and beautiful in our own imagination. At
night we play at commerce, and play pretty high. I do more. I bet too;
for I am really rich, and must throw away my money, if no deserving
friend will use it. I like this course of life so well, that I am
resolved to stay here till I hear of somebody's being in town that is
worth coming after."
In another letter to these sisters, he gives us a curious peep at court
life. "First, then, I went by water to Hampton Court, unattended by all
but by my own virtues, which were not of so modest a nature as to keep
themselves or me concealed; for I met the prince, with all his ladies,
on horseback, coming from hunting. Mrs. B---- and Mrs. L----" (Mary
Bellenden and Mary Lepell, maids of honor to the queen) "took me into
protection, contrary to the laws against harboring papists, and gave me
a dinner, with something I liked better, an opportunity of conversing
with Mrs. H----" (Mrs. Howard, afterward Countess of Suffolk). "We all
agreed that the life of a maid of honor was of all things the most
miserable; and wished that every woman that envied it had a specimen of
it. To eat Westphalia ham in a morning, ride over hedges and ditches on
borrowed hacks, come home in the heat of the day with a fever, and--what
is worse a hundred times--with a red mark in the forehead from an uneasy
hat; all this may qualify them to make excellent wives for fox-hunters,
and bear abundance of ruddy-complexioned children. As soon as they can
wipe off the sweat of the day, they must simper an hour, and catch cold
in the princess's apartment; from thence, as Shakspeare has it, 'to
dinner with what appetite they may;' and after that, till midnight,
walk, work, or think, which they please. I can easily believe no lone
house in Wales, with a mountain and a rookery, is more contemplative
than this court; and, as a proof of it, I need only tell you, Mrs. L----
(Mary Lepell) walked with me three or four hours by moonlight, and we
met no creature of any quality but the king, who gave audience to the
vice-chamberlain, all alone, under the garden wall.
"In short, I heard of no ball, assembly, basset-table, or any place
where two or three were gathered together, except Madam Kilmansegg's, to
which I had the honor to be invited, and the grace to stay away.
"I was heartily tired, and posted to ---- Park (_q._ Bushy?); there we
had an excellent discourse of quackery; Dr. S---- was mentioned with
honor. Lady ---- walked a whole hour abroad without dying after it, at
least in the time I stayed, though she seemed to be fainting, and had
convulsive motions several times in her head. I arrived in the forest by
Tuesday at noon."
At another time we find him at Orchard Wyndham, the seat of Sir William
Wyndham, in Somersetshire. "The reception we met with," says he, "and
the little excursions we made, were every way agreeable. I think the
country abounds with beautiful prospects. Sir William Wyndham is at
present amusing himself with some real improvements, and a great many
visionary castles. We are often entertained with sea views and sea-fish;
and were at some places in the neighborhood, among which I was mightily
pleased with Dunster Castle, near Minehead. It stands upon a great
eminence, and hath a prospect of that town, with an extensive view of
the Bristol Channel, in which are seen two small islands called the
Steep Holms and Flat Holms, and on the other side we could plainly
distinguish the divisions of the fields on the Welsh coast. All this
journey I performed on horseback." To how many readers will this fine
scene here mentioned be familiar!
But another visit of Pope's to Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire, an old
mansion of Lord Harcourt's, who lent it to him for the summer, has
furnished us with a description which, though somewhat long, we must
take in full. So much delighted was Pope with it, that he has described
it twice; once to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and once to the Duke of
Buckingham. The following account is made complete by a careful
comparison of both these letters; but may be supposed to be addressed to
Lady Mary.
"I am fourscore miles from London; and the place is such as I would not
quit for the town, if I did not value you more than, nay, every body
else there; and you will be convinced how little the town has engaged my
affections in your absence from it, when you know what a place this is
which I prefer to it. I shall therefore describe it to you at large, as
a true picture of a genuine ancient country seat.
"You must expect nothing regular in my description of a house which
seems to be built before rules were in fashion. The whole is so
disjointed, and the parts are so detached from each other, and yet so
joining again, one can not tell how, that in a poetical fit you could
imagine it had been a village in Amphion's time, when twenty cottages
had taken a dance together, were all out, and stood still in amazement
ever since.
"You must excuse me if I say nothing of the front; indeed, I do not know
which it is. A stranger would be grievously disappointed who should
think to get into this house the right way. One would reasonably expect,
after the entry through the porch, to be let into the hall; but alas!
nothing less! you find yourself in a brew-house. From the parlor you
think to step into the drawing-room, but, upon opening the iron-nailed
door, you are convinced, by a flight of birds about your ears, and a
cloud of dust in your eyes, that it is the pigeon-house. On each side of
our porch are two chimneys, that wear their greens on the outside, which
would do as well within; for whenever we make a fire, we let the smoke
out of the windows. Over the parlor window hangs a sloping balcony,
which time has turned to a very convenient pent-house. The top is
crowned with a very venerable tower, so like that of the church just by,
that the jackdaws build in it as if it were the true steeple.
"The great hall is high and spacious, flanked on one side with a very
long table, a true image of ancient hospitality. The walls are all over
ornamented with monstrous horns of animals, about twenty broken pikes,
ten or a dozen blunderbusses, and a rusty matchlock musket or two, which
we were informed had served in the civil wars. There is one vast arched
window, beautifully darkened with divers scutcheons of painted glass.
There seems to be a great propriety in this old manner of blazoning upon
glass, ancient families, like ancient windows, in the course of
generations being seldom free from cracks. One shining pane, in
particular, bears date 1286, which alone preserves the memory of a
knight whose iron armor has long since perished with rust, and whose
alabaster nose has moldered from his monument. The youthful face of Dame
Elinor, in another piece, owes more to that single pane than to all the
glasses she ever consulted in her life. Who can say, after this, that
glass is frail, when it is not half so perishable as human beauty or
glory? And yet I can not but sigh to think that the most authentic
record of so ancient a family should be at the mercy of every boy who
flings a stone! In this hall, in former days, have dined gartered
knights and courtly dames, with ushers, sewers, and seneschals, and yet
it was but the other night that an owl flew in hither, and mistook it
for a barn.
"This hall lets you, up and down over a very high threshold, into the
great parlor. It is furnished with historical tapestry, whose marginal
fringes do confess the moisture of the air. The other contents of this
room are a broken-bellied virginal, a couple of crippled velvet chairs,
with two or three moldered pictures of moldy ancestors, who look as
dismally as if they came fresh from hell with all their brimstone about
them. These are carefully set at the further corner, for the windows
being every where broken, make it so convenient a place to dry poppies
and mustard-seed in, that the room is appropriated to that purpose.
"Next to this parlor lies, as I said before, the pigeon-house, by the
side of which runs an entry that leads, on one hand and on the other,
into a bed-chamber, a buttery, and a small hole called the chaplain's
study. Then follow the brew-house, a little green and gilt parlor, and
the great stairs, under which is the dairy. A little further on the
right, the servants' hall; and, by the side of it, up six steps, the old
lady's closet for her private devotions, which has a lattice into the
said hall, that, while she said her prayers, she might cast an eye on
the men and maids. There are, upon the ground floor, in all, twenty-six
apartments, hard to be distinguished by particular names, among which I
must not forget a chamber that has in it a huge antiquity of timber,
which seems to have been either a bedstead or a cider-press.
"The kitchen is built in form of the Rotunda, being one vast vault to
the top of the house, where one aperture serves to let out the smoke and
let in light. By the blackness of the walls, the circular fires, vast
caldrons, yawning mouths of ovens and furnaces, you would think it
either the forge of Vulcan, the cave of Polyphemus, or the temple of
Moloch. The horror of this place has made such an impression on the
country people, that they believe the witches keep their Sabbath here,
and that once a year the devil treats them with infernal venison, a
roasted tiger stuffed with tenpenny nails.
"Above stairs we have a number of rooms: you never pass out of one into
another but by the ascent and descent of two or three stairs. Our best
room is very long and low, of the exact proportions of a bandbox. In
most of these rooms there are hangings of the finest work in the world;
that is to say, those which Arachne spins from her own bowels. Were it
not for this only furniture, the whole would be a miserable scene of
naked walls, flawed ceilings, broken windows, and rusty locks. Its roof
is so decayed, that after a favorable shower we may, with God's
blessing, expect a crop of mushrooms between the chinks of the floors.
"All the doors are as little and low as those to the cabins of
packet-boats; and the rooms have, for many years, had no other
inhabitants than certain rats, whose very age renders them worthy of
this venerable mansion, for the very rats of this ancient seat are gray.
Since these have not yet quitted it, we hope, at least, that this house
may stand during the small remnant of days these poor animals have to
live, who are too infirm to remove to another. They have still a small
subsistence left them in the few remaining books of the library.
"We had never seen half what I have described but for an old, starched,
gray-headed steward, who is as much an antiquity as any in the place,
and looks like an old family picture walked out of its frame. He failed
not, as we passed from room to room, to entertain us with several
relations of the family; but his observations were particularly curious
when he came to the cellar. He showed where stood the triple rows of
butts of sack, and where now ranged the bottles of tent for toasts in a
morning. He pointed to the stands that supported the iron-hooped
hogsheads of strong beer; then, stepping to a corner, he lugged out the
tattered fragments of an unframed picture. 'This,' says he, with tears
in his eyes, 'was poor Sir Thomas, once master of all this drink! He had
two sons, poor young masters! who never arrived to the age of this beer;
they both fell ill in this very cellar, and never went out upon their
own legs.' He could not pass by a heap of broken bottles without taking
up a piece, to show us the arms of the family upon it. He then led us up
the tower by dark, winding stone steps, which landed us into several
little rooms, one above another. One of these was nailed up; and our
guide whispered to us a secret occasion of it. It seems the course of
this noble blood was a little interrupted, about two centuries ago, by a
freak of the Lady Frances with a neighboring priest, since which the
room has been nailed up, and branded as the Adultery Chamber. The ghost
of Lady Frances is supposed to walk there, and some prying maids of the
family report that they have seen a lady in a farthingale through the
keyhole; but this matter is hushed up, and the servants are forbid to
talk of it.
"I must needs have tired you by this long description; but what engaged
me in it was a generous principle to preserve the memory of that which
must itself soon fall into dust; nay, perhaps, part of it, before this
letter reaches your hands. Indeed, I owe this old house the same
gratitude that we do to an old friend, who harbors us in his declining
condition, nay, even in his last extremities. I have found this an
excellent place for retirement and study, where no one who passes by can
dream there is one inhabitant; and even any body that could visit me
does not venture under my roof. You will not wonder that I have
translated a great deal of Homer in this retreat; any one that sees it
will own that I could not have chosen a fitter or more likely place to
converse with the dead."
No one, after reading this, can doubt that Pope possessed that rare
talent of painting in words which Thomson called so truly "the portrait
painting of Nature," and which, in a letter to Doddington from Italy, he
justly laments as so rare a faculty. "There are scarcely any to be met
with who have given a landscape of the country through which they
traveled, seen thus with the mind's eye, though that is the first thing
which strikes, and what all readers of travels demand." "We must
lament," says Warton, "that we have no more letters of Bishop Berkeley,
who, we see by this before us (from Naples), possessed the uncommon
talent of describing _places_ in the most _lively_ and _graphical_
manner, a talent in which he has only been equaled or excelled by
_Gray_, in many of those lively and interesting letters published by
Mason; those especially written during his travels." The want continues
to the present hour; the want of the art of bringing the things you
speak of livingly before the reader. It is this want, which can only be
supplied by the same principles of study in the writer as in the
painter, which first suggested to me the necessity of "Visits to
Remarkable Places." No one could have made such visits more effectual
than Pope. This is a merit for which he yet has received little or no
praise; and yet no talent is rarer, and few more delightful. In his
letters, especially those addressed to his two lovely, charming, and
life-long friends, Martha and Teresa Blount, such living portraitures of
places abound. His description of Sir Walter Raleigh's old mansion and
gardens at Sherbourne is a master-piece of the kind. You are now at
Letcombe, in Berkshire, with Swift, where the author of Gulliver used to
run up a hill every morning before breakfast; now at Bevis Mount, near
Southampton, with his friend Lord Peterborough, the conqueror of Spain;
and in his journeys to Bath, or to Lord Cobham's at Stowe, you peep in
at a number of country houses, and rich peeps they are. Bath and London
society is sketched with great vivacity and gusto; but such sketches
are more common than these peeps into aristocratic country life. Thus
you have him rolling along slowly from Cobham toward Bath, drawn by the
very horse on which Lord Derwentwater rode in the Rebellion, but then
employed by Lord Cobham in rolling the garden. He looks in at Lord
Deloraine's on the Downs. He lies one night at Rowsham, the seat of
Colonel Cotterell, near Oxford; "the prettiest place for water-falls,
jets, ponds inclosed with beautiful scenes of green and hanging wood,
ever seen." Then at Mr. Howe's in Gloucestershire, "as fine a thing of
another kind, where Nature has done every thing, and luckily, for the
master has ten children." Then he calls at Sir William Codrington's, at
Durhams, eight miles from Bath, where he thus describes his
entertainment: "My reception there will be matter for a letter to Mr.
Bethel. It was perfectly in his spirit. All his sisters, in the first
place, insisted that I should take physic preparatory to the waters, and
truly I made use of the time, place, and persons to that end. My Lady
Cox, the first night I lay there, mixed my electuary; Lady Codrington
pounded sulphur; Mrs. Bridget Bethel ordered broth; Lady Cox mounted
first up stairs with the physic in a gallipot; Lady Codrington next,
with the vial of oil; Mrs. Bridget third, with pills; the fourth sister
with spoons and tea-cups. It would have rejoiced the ghost of Dr.
Woodward to have beheld this procession." But two years before his death
he was again at Stowe, when he says, "All the mornings we breakfast and
dispute; after dinner and at night, music and harmony; in the garden
fishing; no politics, and no cards nor novel reading. This agrees
exactly with me, for the want of cards sends us early to bed."
This was the way he describes spending the latter part of his life:
"Lord Bathurst is still my constant friend, but his country seat is now
always in Gloucestershire, not in this neighborhood. Mr. Pulteney has no
country seat; and in town I see him seldom. In the summer I generally
ramble for a month to Lord Cobham's, or to Bath, or elsewhere."
Such were the homes and haunts of Pope. In his life, one thing is very
striking. How much the literary men of the time and the nobility
associated; how little do they now. Are our nobility grown less
literary, or our authors less aristocratic? It may be said that authors
now are more independent, and can not flatter aristocracy. But no man
was more independent, and proud of his independence, than Pope. But I
leave this question to wind up this article with a glance at Twickenham
as it is.
Pope was anxious that some of his friends should have the lease of his
house and grounds, and prevent their being pulled to pieces; but it was
never done. Since his day they have gone through various hands. His
house has long been pulled down; his willow has fallen down in utter
decay; his quincunx has been destroyed. Two new tenements, having the
appearance of one house, with a portico opening into the highway, have
for some years been built at the further extremity of Pope's grounds
next to the Thames. The house itself was stripped, immediately after his
death, of all mementoes of him, by the operation of his own will. To
Lord Bolingbroke he left his own copy of his Translation of Homer, and
his other works. To Lord Marchmont, other books, with the portrait of
Bolingbroke by Richardson. To Lord Bathurst, the three statues of the
Hercules of Farnese, the Venus de Medici, and the Apollo in chiaro
oscuro, by Kneller. To Mr. Murray, the marble head of Homer, by Bernini,
and Sir Isaac Newton, by Guelfi. To Dr. Arbuthnot, another picture of
Bolingbroke. He left to Lord Littleton the busts in marble of
Shakspeare, Spenser, and Milton, presented to him by the Prince of
Wales. His library went among his friends; the pictures of his mother,
father, and aunts, to his sister-in-law, Mrs. Rackett. Of that of Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu, by Kneller, there is no mention; but all the
furniture of his grotto, with the urns for his garden, given by the
Prince of Wales, he left to Martha Blount. Thus flew abroad those
precious relics, then; and what changes in the place itself! A new house
is at this moment rising on a part of the Thames bank, so that there are
actually three tenements on the spot, and it is cut up and divided
accordingly. With all this havoc, there are still, however, more traces
of Pope left than might have been expected. The Thames is there; nothing
can remove or cut up that. The scene across the river is woody, rich,
and agreeable as ever. The sloping bank from the road to the river, once
Pope's garden, is a pretty garden still. There is even at the end
nearest to London a conservatory still standing, which has all the
characteristics of another age, and probably was Pope's. It has Tuscan
columns, and large panes of glass fit for sash windows. But a fine,
fantastic sort of Swiss villa is rapidly rising, called by the people
about Elizabethan. It has deep, depending eaves, full of wooden
ornament, and a lofty tower. It is the property of a Mr. Young, a
wholesale tea-dealer. Around were lying heaps of lime and other building
materials, when I visited it a few weeks ago, and troops of work-people
were busily employed where the lords, ladies, and literati of George
II.'s reign resorted.
The subterranean passage, or grotto, still runs under the road, spite of
Bowles telling us that all these things were pulled down and done away
with. It is secured by iron gates at each end, and far more of the
original spar and shell-work remains than you could have believed. Near
the opening facing the Thames, under some ivied rockwork, stands the
figure of a nun in stone, which, no doubt, has been placed there by some
occupant subsequent to Pope.
On the opposite side of the road there is a field of some half dozen
acres, still bearing traces of its former character. This was Pope's
larger garden and wilderness, where he used to plant and replant,
contrive and recontrive, pull down and build up, to his heart's content.
Around it still are traces of shrubberies, and over all are scattered
many of those trees which, upward of a hundred years ago, Pope said he
was busy planting for posterity. They are now stupendous in
size--Spanish chestnuts, elms, and cedars. No doubt many of them have
been felled, but what remain are lofty and magnificent trees. The walks
and shrubberies are to a great extent annihilated; the center of the
field was planted with potatoes. In the midst of a clump of old laurels,
near the road, there is a remains of a large tree, hewn out into the
shape of a seat, not unlike a watchman's box, which is said to have been
Pope's, but is doubtful. At the top of the grounds is another grotto,
that which was erected by Sir William Stanhope, who purchased the
estate, or the lease of it, at Pope's death. This grotto seems to have
formed the passage to still further grounds; for we are informed that
Sir William Stanhope not only built two wings to Pope's house, but
extended his grounds. There was placed over the entrance of this grotto
a bust of Pope in white marble, and on a white marble slab the following
inscription:
"The humble roof, the garden's scanty line,
Ill spoke the genius of a bard divine:
But fancy now displays a fairer scope,
And Stanhope's plans unfold the soul of Pope."--_Clare._
These vaunting lines, which represent the addition of another grotto and
another field as unfolding the soul of Pope, and Sir William Stanhope as
somebody capable of far greater things than the poet himself, still
remain, the monument of the writer's and the erector's folly. The bust,
of course, is gone. The grotto is lined with spars; pieces of basalt,
perhaps the very joints of the Giant's Causeway sent to Pope by Sir Hans
Sloane in 1742, but two years before Pope's death; some huge pieces of
glazed and striped jars of pottery; and masses of stalactites and of
stone worn by the action of the waters, evidently brought from some
cavernous shore or bed of a torrent, perhaps from a great distance, and
no doubt at a great expense. As this, however, was the work of Sir
William Stanhope, and not of Pope, the whole possesses little interest.
Every trace of the temple of which Pope speaks, as being in full view
from his grotto, is annihilated; and if the small obelisk, having a
funeral urn on each side, said to have been placed in a retired part of
the grounds, remain, it escaped my observation. It had this inscription
in memory of his mother:
Ah! Editha,
Matrum Optima,
Mulierum Amantissima,
Vale!
Lord Mendip, who married Sir William Stanhope's daughter, is said to
have been particularly anxious to retain every trace of Pope. Yet in his
care to maintain, he must have very much altered. He stuccoed the house,
and adorned it, says a writer in the Gentleman's Magazine, in an elegant
style. He inclosed the lawn, and propped with uncommon care the
far-famed weeping willow, supposed to be the parent stock of the willows
in Twickenham Park. Yes, Pope is said to have been the introducer of the
weeping willow into England; that, seeing some twigs around the wrapping
of an article of _vertu_ sent to Lady Sylvius from abroad, he planted
these, saying they might belong to some kind of tree yet unknown in
England. From one of these sprung Pope's willow, and from Pope's willow
thousands. Slips of his tree were anxiously sought after; they were even
transmitted to distant climes; and in 1789, the Empress of Russia had
some planted in her garden at Petersburgh. Notwithstanding every care,
old age overcame this willow, and in spite of all props, it perished,
and fell to the ground in 1801.
On the decease of Lord Mendip in 1802, the property was sold to Sir
John Briscoe, Bart.; after whose death it was again sold to the Baroness
Howe. This lady and her husband, Sir J. Waller Wathen, with a tasteless
Vandalism, leveled the house of Pope to the ground; extirpated
ruthlessly almost every trace of him in the gardens, and erected that
house already mentioned at the extremity of Pope's property, now
occupied as two tenements. This house of the unpoetical Lady Howe was
also erected on the site of an elegant little villa, belonging to
Hudson, the painter, the master of Sir Joshua Reynolds.
Such are the revolutions which have passed over Pope's villa and its
grounds. Where he, and such celebrated gardeners as Swift, Bolingbroke,
and Gay labored, I found potatoes, black with the disease of 1846,
growing. The giant trees planted by his hands, which still lift aloft
their noble heads, we know not how long may escape some fresh change.
The whole of the larger garden of Pope in which they grow, bears the
evidences of neglect on its face. Laurels grow wild under the lofty
hedges. The stones of Stanhope's grotto lie scattered about; and vast
quantities of the deadly nightshade, as if undisturbed for years,
displayed to my notice its dark purple and burnished berries of death.
The remains of Pope rest, with those of his parents, in Twickenham
church. In the middle aisle, the sexton shows you a P in one of the
stones, which marks the place of their interment. To see the monuments
to their memory, you must ascend into the north gallery, where at the
east end, on the wall, you see a tablet, with a Latin inscription, which
was placed there by Pope in honor of his parents; and on the side wall
of the gallery nearest the west is a tablet of gray marble, in a
pyramidal form, with a medallion profile of the poet. This was placed
here by Bishop Warburton, and bears the following inscription:
ALEXANDRO POPE, M. H. Gulielmus Episcopus, Glocestriensis,
Amicitiæ causâ fac: cur: 1761.
_Poeta loquitur._