severity, rather than by keeping up any forms of complaisance to correct any of his faults. This Mr. Pope spoke in such a manner as plainly showed he thought Mr. Addison the aggressor, and expected him to condescend and own himself the cause of the breach between them. But he was deceived; for Mr. Addison, without appearing to be in anger, though quite overcome with it, began a formal speech, said that he had always wished him well, and often had endeavoured to be his friend, and as such advised him, if his nature was capable of it, to divest himself of part of his vanity, which was too great for his merit; said that he had not arrived yet to that pitch of excellence he might imagine, or think his most partial readers imagined; said when he and Sir Richard Steele corrected his verses they had a different air; he reminded Mr. Pope of the amendments of a line in the poem called Messiah, by Sir Richard Steele. [See note to the Messiah.] He proceeded to lay before him all the mistakes and inaccuracies hinted at by the crowd of scribblers and writers, some good, some bad, who had attacked Mr. Pope, and added many things which he himself objected to; speaking of Mr. Pope's Homer, he said to be sure he was not to blame to get so large a sum of money, but it was an ill-executed thing, and not equal to Tickell's, who had all the spirit of Homer. This afterwards appeared to be wrote by Mr. Addison, though Tickell's name was made use of. Mr. Addison concluded, still in a low hollow voice of feigned temper, that he was not solicitous about his own fame as a poet, but of truth; that he had quitted the Muses to enter into the business of the public; and all that he spoke was through friendship and a desire that Mr. Pope, as he would do if he was much humbler, might look better to the world. Mr. Gay spoke a few words in answer before Mr. Pope, but his expectations from the Court made him very cautious. It was not so with our poet he told Mr. Addison he appealed from his judgment, did not esteem him able to correct him, and that he had long known him too well to expect any friendship; upbraided him with being a pensioner from his youth, sacrificing the very learning that was purchased with the public money to a mean thirst of power; that he was sent abroad to encourage literature, and had always endeavoured to cuff down new-fledged merit. At last the contest grew so warm, that they parted without any ceremony, and Mr. Pope immediately wrote those verses which are not thought by all to be a very false character of Mr. Addison." We have no hesitation in setting this down as an "Imaginary Dialogue," though one not quite in the style of Mr. Walter Savage Landor. Ayre's work contains several of a kindred description, in which the biographer compounds scenes and characters out of fragments of Pope's poetry and MISREPRESENTATIONS IN AYRE'S MEMOIR. 129 correspondence,17 sometimes hitting upon a sort of blundering likeness, but generally running into the most puerile extravagance and absurdity. Every circumstance in the narrative we have quoted is at variance either with fact or with probability. The whole is, in the first place, contrary to Pope's own statement of the circumstances; secondly, it is untrue that Pope undertook his translation at the request or command of Sir Richard Steele, and he never could have made such a declaration; thirdly, the style and language of Addison's "formal speech" is ridiculously opposed to his wellknown character and habits; and lastly, at the time of the 17 Some of these are very ludicrous and absurd. In one letter, for example, Pope rallies his fair correspondent, Teresa Blount, on her delight in war, the insurrection of 1715 having then excited all classes. He tells her, in raillery, that she may soon see gallant armies, encampments, standards waving over her brother's corn-fields, and the windings of the Thames about Mapledurham stained with the blood of men. Ayre takes this literally, and believing it to be addressed to Martha, not Teresa Blount (of whose existence he was apparently not aware), he says, "Mrs. Blount had always a very gallant spirit; she would often wish to see such sights as armies, encampments, and standards waving over her brother's grounds and fields, and would talk of battles and bloodshed as familiar as if she was noways afraid of them, which some other ladies used to call barbarity, and wonder how she could talk or even think of such cruel things without tears and aching heart. 'Oh,' she would make answer, 'it would be a glorious sight; so many fine officers, fine gentlemen, fine soldiers, fine colours, fine horses, 'twould be a prodigious pleasure to see!'" Pope also eulogises the conduct of the Earl of Oxford, saying he might seem above man, if he had not just now voided a stone to prove him subject to human infirmities. "The utmost weight of affliction from ministerial power and popular hatred were almost worth bearing for the glory of such a dauntless conduct as he has shown under it." Ayre again transfers this from the poet to Martha Blount. "She was particularly concerned at the fall of the late Earl of Oxford, for whom she had the greatest respect and veneration imaginable, and suffered very much with him, when he had the great weight of affliction to bear, both from princely power and popular hatred; nothing comforted her but the dauntless conduct he showed under it, though he then laboured with the racking pains of the stone, one of which, a very considerable one, he at that time voided." In the same manner Ayre prattles about Pope's "Unfortunate Lady," as if he knew the whole of the mysterious story, and adds to it his usual garnishing of small facts invented for the occasion. Several other cases might be cited, in which Pope's letters and notes to his poems have undergone the same curious transformation. The fable of Addison's conference with Pope chiefly manufactured out of the letters of Pope and Jervas, August, 1714. K supposed interview, Steele and Addison were estranged from each other, and had ceased to meet as friends. "I ask no favours of Mr. Secretary Addison," writes Steele proudly to his wife in 1717; and certainly he would not officiously have intruded on him to request him to meet Pope, in order that he might be "cuffed down" in the mock-heroic manner described by Ayre. Dismissing the biographical figment (which is only worthy of notice because Johnson has grafted it into his masterly memoir of the poet, and Mr. Roscoe has attached importance to it), there still remains the statement of Spence. Philips seems to have been encouraged to abuse me in coffee-houses and conversation," says Pope. By whom was he encouraged? Not by Addison, for Pope had previously said that Philips set Addison against him, and it was not likely that the patron and the protégé had changed places in the conspiracy. In truth, Philips had a very good case of his own. Pope had heaped the most provoking ridicule on his Pastorals, and had incited Gay to do the same, besides evincing towards him the most marked contempt. But it is added: "Gildon wrote a thing about Wycherley [in the notes to the Dunciad termed a Life of Wycherley] in which he abused both me and my relations very grossly," and Lord Warwick "assured me that Addison encouraged Gildon to publish those scandals, and had given him ten guineas after they were published." No copy of this pamphlet, nor any reference to it in any of the publications of the day, can be found.18 It is highly improbable that Addison knew Gildon, who was a wretched hack-scribbler; but that he should not only know him, but should bribe him to publish scandals against Pope and his relations, and, after having perpetrated this crime, should entrust the secret to a dissolute, unprin 18 It is certain, however, that Gildon published some work or observations on Wycherley before August 11, 1721. In a letter of that date to Dennis he says, "I am sorry I have not pleased you in what I have said of Mr. Wycherley, because I am sensible that by not pleasing you, I am so far in the wrong."-Dennis's Remarks on the Dunciad, 1729. In 1718 Curll published a short memoir of Wycherley, by Major Pack, to which Dennis made an interesting supplement in a letter to Pack, dated Whitehall, September 1, 1720; but in neither of these is there any allusion to Pope. ADDISON PRAISES POPE'S HOMER. 131 cipled youth of eighteen-all this is so foreign to Addison's character, and evinces such extreme malice and folly, that the tale is utterly incredible. The resentment of Pope, brooded over for years, had conjured up phantoms as visionary as those in his own Cave of Spleen; or, what is as probable, the young Earl of Warwick, hating Addison for his approaching marriage with his mother, the Countess, and eager, in his senseless rage, to blacken the character of one who threw a lustre on his family, had condescended to the office of a spy, and become the retailer of false and malignant fables. In all our literature, as Pope himself afterwards wrote, "no whiter page than Addison remains ;" and the object of his writings was to "set the passions on the side of truth." We must not, therefore, suffer his moral purity to be stained by an imputation so foul and improbable. If in the course of his criticism, while intent on serving his friends, Philips and Tickell, he evinced coldness and neglect with regard to the superior claims of Pope, he took an early opportunity of making reparation. Pope's satire on Addison must, according to the statement in Spence, have been written and sent to him early in 1716, and Addison's only reply was contained in a paper in the Freeholder of May 7, praising the translation of Homer: "When I consider myself as a British freeholder," he said, "I am in a particular manner pleased with the labours of those who have improved our language with the translation of old Latin and Greek authors, and by that means let us into the knowledge of what passed in the famous Governments of Greece and Rome. We have already most of their historians in our own tongue, and what is still more for the honour of our language, it has been taught to express with elegance the greatest of their poets in each nation. The illiterate among our countrymen may learn to judge from Dryden's Virgil of the most perfect epic performance; and those parts of Homer which have already been published by Mr. Pope, give us reason to think that the Iliad will appear in English with as little disadvantage to that immortal poem." Addison had thus the last word in the contest, and it must be admitted that his last word was characteristic of the man. The unintentional injury was atoned |