ALEXANDER POPE 91 ble side of his character. His irritability, his artifice, his meannesses even, are more intelligible in the case of a man habitually racked with pain, and morbidly conscious of his physical shortcomings, than they would be in the case of those " whom God has made full-limbed and tall ; " and, in the noble teaching of Ar- thur's court, his infirmities should entitle him to a larger charity of judgment. Nothing in his life is more touching than the account of his last days, when he lay wasted with an intolerable asthma, waiting serenely for the end, but' full of kindness and tender thoughtfulness for the friends who came and went about his bed. Bolingbroke was often there from Battersea, stirred to philosophic utter- ances and unphilosophic tears, and grave Lyttleton, and kind Lord Marchmont, and faithful Joseph Spence. Martha Blount, too, was not absent, and " it was very observable," said the spectators, how the sick man's strength and spirits seemed to revive at the approach of his favorite. " Here I am dying of a hun- dred good symptoms," he said to one of his visitors. What humiliated him most was his inability to think. " One of the things that I have always most won- dered at (he told Spence) is that there should be any such thing as human vanity. If I had any, I had enough to mortify it a few days ago, for I lost my mind for a whole day." A little later Spence is telling Bolingbroke how, "on every catching and recovering of his mind," Pope is " always saying something kind either of his present or absent friends," and that it seems " as if his humanity had outlived his understanding." But the vital spark still continued to flicker in its socket, and only a day or two before his death he sat for three whole hours in his sedan-chair, in the garden he loved so well, then filled with the blossoms of May and smelling of the summer he was not to see. On the 29th he took an airing in Bushy Park, and a little later received the sacrament. On the evening of the following day he passed away so softly and painlessly that those who stood by knew not " the exact time of his departure." He had lived fifty-six years and nine days, and he was buried near to the monument of his father in the chancel of Twickenham Church. Seventeen years afterward Bishop Warburton erected a tablet to him in the same building, with an epitaph as idle as that which dis- graces the tomb of Gay in Westminster Abbey. It is possible that Pope may at some time have written it, but the terms of his will prove conclusively that he never intended it to be used. What is Pope's position as a poet ? Time, that great practitioner of the ex- haustive process, " sifting alway, sifting ever," even to the point of annihilation, has already half answered the question. No one now, except the literary his- torian or the student of versification, is ever likely to consult the " Pastorals " or " Windsor Forest ; " and men will, in all probability, continue to quote " Hope springs eternal in the human breast " and " A little learning is a dangerous thing," without the least suspicion that the one comes from the seldom-read " Es- say on Criticism " and the other from the equally seldom-read " Essay on Man." Here and there a professor like the late Professor Conington will praise the " un- hasting unresting flow " of the translations from Homer ; but the next generation will read its " Iliad " in the Greek, or in some future successor to Mr. William
