1744.

POPE'S PLACE IN LITERATURE.

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remarked and recorded concerning it. After Shakespeare, and possibly Milton, no English poet is so much quoted from as Pope. Lines and phrases of his have passed into the common vernacular of our daily life. We talk Pope, many of us, as the toooften cited bourgeois gentilhomme of Molière talked prose, without knowing it. There is hardly a line of 'The Rape of the Lock' or 'The Dunciad' that has not thus passed into the habitual conversation of our lives. This of itself would not prove that Pope was a great poet; but it is a striking testimony to his extraordinary popularity, and his style is not that which of itself would seem calculated to ensure popularity. The very smoothness and perfection of his verse make it seem to many ears nothing better than a melodious monotony. Pope had not imagination enough to be a great poet of the highest order the order of creative power. He had marvellous fancy, which sometimes, as in 'The Rape of the Lock' and in passages of the fierce 'Dunciad,' rose to something like imagination. Every good Christian ought no doubt to lament that a man of such noble gifts should have had also such a terrible gift of hate. But even a very good Christian

could hardly help admitting that it must have been all for the best, seeing that only for that passion of hatred we should never have had The Dunciad.'

CHAPTER XXXIV.

'THE FORTY-FIVE.'

THIRTY years had come and gone since England had been alarmed, irritated, or encouraged, according to the temper of its political inhabitants, by a Jacobite rising. The personality of James Stuart, the Old Pretender, was little more than a memory among those clansmen who had rallied round the royal standard at Braemar. In those thirty years James Stuart had lived his melancholy, lonely, evil life of exile, the hanger-on of foreign Courts, the half grotesque, half pitiable, sham monarch of a sham Court, that was always ready to be moved from place to place with all its cheaply regal accessories, like the company and the properties of some band of strolling players. Now there was a new Stuart in the field, a new sham prince, a Young Pretender.' After the disasters of the Fifteen, James Stuart had become the hero of as romantic a love story as ever wandering prince experienced. He had fallen in love, in the hot, unreasoning Stuart way, with the beautiful Clementine Sobieski, and the beautiful Clementine had returned the passion of the picturesquely unfortunate prince, and they had carried on their love affairs under

1720.

BIRTH OF 'PRINCE CHARLIE.'

265

conditions of greater difficulty than Romeo and Juliet, and had overcome the difficulties and got married, and in 1720 Clementine had borne to the House of Stuart a son and heir. Every precaution was taken to ensure the most public recognition of the existence of the newly born prince. It was determined that none of the perplexity, the uncertainty, the suspicion, which attended upon the birth of James, should be permitted to arise now. There must be no haro about warming-pans, no accusations of juggling, no possible doubts as to the right of the new-born babe to be regarded as the son of James Stuart and of Clementine Sobieski. The birth took place in Rome, and cardinals accredited from all the great Powers of Europe were present on the occasion to bear witness to it. The city was alive with such excitement as it had seldom witnessed since the days when pagan Rome became papal Rome. The streets in the vicinity of the house where Clementine Sobieski lay in her pain were choked with the gilt carriages of the proudest Italian nobility; princes of the Church and princes of royal blood thronged the ante-chambers. Gallant gentlemen who bore some of the stateliest names of England and of Scotland waited on the stairways for the tidings that a new prince was given unto their loyalty. Adventurous soldiers of fortune kicked their heels in the courtyard and thought with moistened eyes of the toasts they would drink to their future king. From the Castle of St. Angelo, where long ago the besieged had hurled upon the

besiegers the statues that had proved the taste of a Roman emperor, where Rienzi lay yesterday, and where Cagliostro shall lie to-morrow, thunders of artillery saluted the advent of the new rose of the House of Stuart.

In the years that followed, while the young Prince Charles was growing up to his tragic inheritance, it can hardly be maintained, even by the most devoted adherent of the Stuart line, that James showed himself in the slightest degree worthy of the crown towards which he reached. Indeed, his conduct showed a reckless indifference to the means most likely to attain that crown, which it is difficult to account for. When everything depended for the success of his schemes upon the friends he made abroad and the favour he retained at home, he wantonly acted as if his dearest purpose was to alienate the one and to wholly lose the other. His conduct towards his wife, and his persistent and stupid favouritism of the Mar man and woman-especially the woman-drove the injured and indignant Clementine into a convent, and made the great European princes of Spain, Germany, and Rome his adversaries. Spain refused him entrance to the kingdom unaccompanied by his wife; the Pope struck him a heavier blow in diminishing by one-half the income that had hitherto been allowed him from the Papal treasury. But worse than the loss of foreign friends, worse even than the loss of the Sistine subsidy, was the effect which his treatment of his wife produced in the countries which he aspired to rule. His wisest

1734-5. CHARLES IN HIS FIRST CAMPAIGN.

267

followers wrote to him that he had done more to injure his cause by his conduct to Clementine than by anything else in his ill-advised career. At last even James took alarm; his stubborn nature was forced to yield; the obnoxious favourites were dismissed, and a reconciliation of a kind was effected between the Stuart King and Queen. But fidelity was a quality difficult enough for James to practise, and when the Queen died in 1735 it is said that she found death not unwelcome.

In the meantime the young Prince Charles grew up to early manhood. Princes naturally begin the world at an earlier age than most men, and Charles may be said to have begun the world in 1734, when, as we have seen, at the age of fourteen, he took part in the siege of Gaeta as a general of artillery, and bore himself, according to overwhelming testimony, as became a soldier. Up to this time his education had been pursued with something like regularity; and if at all times he preferred rowing, riding, hunting, and shooting to graver and more secluded pleasures, he was not in this respect peculiar among young men, princes or otherwise. If, too, he never succeeded in overcoming the difficulties which the spelling of the English language presented, and if his handwriting always remained slovenly and illegible, it must be remembered that in that age spelling was not prized as a pre-eminent accomplishment by exalted persons, and that Charles Stuart could spell quite as well as Marlborough. He knew how to sign his name, and it may be remarked that, though he has passed into