1744.

THE DEATH OF POPE.

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the Patriots and tried to carry on a war in which he had no sympathy, and from which he had no hope. He was a great statesman; almost, but not quite, great man.

Not very long before Walpole's death a star of all but the first magnitude had set in the firmament of English literature. Alexander Pope died on May 30, 1744, at his house in Twickenham, where 'Thames' translucent wave shines a broad mirror,' to use his own famous words. He died quietly; death was indeed a relief to him from pain which he had borne with a patience hardly to be expected from one of so fitful a temper. Pope's life had been all a struggle against ill-health and premature decrepitude. He was deformed; he was dwarfish; he was miserably weak from his very boyhood; a rude breath of air made him shrink and wither; the very breezes of summer had peril in them for his singularly delicate constitution and ever-quivering nerves. He was but fifty-six years old when death set him free. Life had been for him a splendid success indeed, but the success had been qualified by much bitterness and pain. He was sensitive to the quick; he formed strong friendships, fierce and passionate enmities ; and the friendships themselves turned only too often into enmities. Unsparing with the satire of his pen, he made enemies everywhere. He professed to be indifferent to the world's praise or censure, but he was nevertheless morbidly anxious to know what people said of him. He was as egotistic as Rousseau or Byron : but he had none of Byron's manly

public spirit and none of Rousseau's exalted love of humanity. Pope's place in English poetry may be taken now as settled. He stands high and stands firmly in the second class: that is, in the class just below Shakespeare and Milton and a very few others. He has been extravagantly censured and extravagantly praised. Byron at one time maintained that he was the greatest English poet, and many vehement arguments have been used to prove that he was not a poet at all. One English critic believed he had settled the question for ever when he described Pope as a musical rocking-horse.' Again and again the world has been told that Pope has disappeared from the sky of literature, but the world looks up, and behold, there is the star shining just as before. Many scholars and many poets have scoffed at his translations of Homer, but generations of English schoolboys have learned to love the 'Iliad' because of the way in which Pope has told them the story, and as to the telling of a story the judgment of a schoolboy sometimes counts for more than the judgment of a sage. Pope's 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' are certainly not for those who can read the great originals in their own tongue, or even for those who have a taste strong and refined enough to enjoy the severe fidelity of a prose translation. But Pope has brought the story of Achilles' wrath, and Helen's pathetic beauty, and Hector's fall, and Priam's agony home to the hearts of millions for whom they would otherwise have no life. We have no intention of writing a critical dissertation on the poetry of Pope. One fact may, however, be

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.

6 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.'

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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