POPE'S LAST LETTER TO MARTHA BLOUNT. 385 and which he spoke to his wife about, but found he could make her not at all easy in; and that he never in his whole life was so sorry at any disappointment. I said much more, being opener than I intended at first; but finding him own nothing, but stick to this, I turned to make slighter of it, and told him he should not see my behaviour altered to Mrs. Allen so much as hers had been to me (which he declared he did not see); and that I could answer for it, Mrs. Blount was never likely to take any notice of the whole, so far from misrepresenting any particular. "There were some other particulars, which I may recollect, or tell when we meet. I thought his behaviour a little shy; but in mine, I did my very best to show I was quite unconcerned what it was. He parted, inviting himself to come again at his return in a fortnight. He has been very ill, and looks so. I don't intend to see them in town. But God knows whether I can see any body there; for Cheselden is going to Bath next Monday, with whom at Chelsea I thought to lodge, and so get to you in a morning. "My own condition is much at one; and, to save writing to you the particulars, which I know you desire to be apprised of, I enclose my letter to the Doctor. "I assure you I don't think half so much what will become of me, as of you; and when I grow worst, I find the anxiety for you doubled. Would to God you would quicken your haste to settle, by reflecting what a pleasure it would be to me just to see it, and to see you at ease; and then I could contentedly leave you to the providence of God in this life, and resign myself to it in the other. I have little to say to you when we meet, but I love you upon unalterable principles, which makes me feel my heart the same to you as if I saw you every hour. Adieu. "Easter day [March 25, 1744]. 'Pray give my services to Lady Gerard; and pray get me some 9 Pope breathes a similar wish in another letter. "I could wish you had once the constancy and resolution to act for yourself, whether before or after I leave you," &c. He had much trouble in adjusting Miss Blount's affairs, and seldom had the satisfaction to please her.-Bowles. There is in reality no trace of dissatisfaction. By settling, Pope evidently means that she should take up housekeeping and have an establishment of her own. She seems at this time to have been much with Lady Gerard, alluded to in the postscript to the above letter. This lady was, we suppose, of the Catholic family of Gerard, of New Hall, Lancashire, the widow of Sir William Gerard, the sixth baronet, who was married to Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Clifford of Lytham, Lancashire. Dr. King, mentioned in the same postscript, was Dr. William King, the Jacobite, Principal of St. Mary Hall, Oxford. In anecdotes of his contemporaries, written by Dr. King, it is said that Pope hastened his death by indulging in high-seasoned dishes and by dramdrinking. answer to Dr. King, or else it will cost me a letter of excuse to have delayed it so long. I do not understand by your note, nor by Mrs. Arbuthnot's, whether you think of coming hither to-morrow, or when. Mr. Murray's depends on his recovery, which is uncertain; and Lord Bolingbroke, the end of the week." 10 (No signature.) On the following day, Pope addressed another note to Marchmont and Bolingbroke: "Easter Monday. "MY DEAR LORDS,-When I see a finer day, or feel a livelier hour, I find my thoughts carried to you, with whom, and for whom chiefly I desire to live. I am a little revived to-day, and hope to be more so by the end of the week, since I think that was the time you gave me hopes you would pass a day or two here. Mr. Murray, by that time, or sooner, if he can, will meet you. I hope Lord Bolingbroke has settled that with him in town. Mr. Warburton is very desirous to wait on you both. If he comes to Battersea in a morning, pray furnish him with my chaise to come on hither, and let the chaise be left here, of whose earthly part I shall make use in my garden, though not of its aquatic. My faithful services wait on Lady Marchmont." " The same day, on a scrap of paper, with a pencil, he wrote to his trusted friend Richardson, "You had seen me had I been well. Ill news I did not care to tell you, and I have not been abroad this month, not out of my chamber, nor able to see any but nurses. My asthma seems immovable, but I am something easier. God preserve you!" His last letter to Warburton was written in the following month: "April, 1744. 'I am sorry to meet you with so bad an account of myself, who should otherwise with joy have flown to the interview. I am too ill to be in town; and within this week so much worse, as to make my journey thither, at present, impracticable, even if there was no Proclamation in my way. I left the town in a decent compliance to that; but this additional prohibition from the highest of all powers I must bow to without murmuring. I wish to see you here. Mr. Allen comes not till the 16th, and you will probably chuse to be in town chiefly while he is there. I received yours just now, and I writ to hinder from printing the comment on the Use of Riches too 10 Roscoe, viii. p. 504, collated with the original. 11 Marchmont Papers, ii. p. 331. ALLEGED UNKINDNESS OF MARTHA BLOUNT. 387 hastily, since what you write me, intending to have forwarded it otherwise, that you might revise it during your stay. Indeed my present weakness will make me less and less capable of any thing, I hope at least, now at first, to see you for a day or two here at Twitenham, and concert measures how to enjoy for the future what I can of your friendship. I am," &c. About three weeks before his death, Pope sent copies of his Ethic Epistles-the revised edition, probably, which was then in the course of printing-as presents to his friends. "Here I am, like Socrates," he said, "dispensing my morality among my friends just as I am dying." Spence rejoined, "I really had that thought several times when I was last at Twickenham with you, and was apt now and then to look upon myself as Phædo." "That might be," said Pope, "but you must not expect me now to say anything like Socrates." His friends were unceasing in their attentions. Marchmont and Bolingbroke evinced the most anxious solicitude, and Spence seems to have been rarely absent. Ruffhead charges Martha Blount with indifference and neglect; and Johnson relates that as the sick poet was one day sitting in the open air with his two friends, he saw his favourite Martha Blount at the bottom of the terrace, and asked Lord Bolingbroke to go and hand her up. Bolingbroke, not liking his errand, crossed his legs and sat still 1; but Lord Marchmont, who was younger and less captious, waited on the lady, who, when he came to her, asked, “What! is he not dead yet?" Much depends on the tone and manner in which words of this kind are uttered; but the anecdote, as thus related, seems incredible. Martha Blount could not be ignorant whether Pope was dead or alive; and even worldly prudence would have prevented such an unfeeling exclamation, for, if Pope was able to sit with his friends in the open air, he was fit also to alter the terms of his Will, and deprive Miss Blount of her legacy. She well knew that the poet was too sensitive to brook either neglect or affront, and too proud not to resent it. Spence says nothing of this indifference and want of feeling, but on the contrary, he quotes a remark of Warburton's, that it " was very observable during Pope's last illness, that Mrs. Blount's coming in gave a new turn of spirits or a temporary strength to him." Pope's letters to Fortescue show the interest he took up to the close of his life in all matters affecting the pecuniary affairs and comfort of his fair friend. On the whole, therefore, we may assume that a story so inconsistent with the tenderness which had so long subsisted between the parties, and so foreign to the female character at any time of suffering or distress, is destitute of foundation. Of the same nature, we suspect, is a memorandum quoted by Steevens, from Dr. Farmer's Papers, that Pope offered, in articulo mortis, to marry Miss Blount. The only allusion in the Mapledurham MSS. to the subject of marriage occurs in a letter from one of Martha's friends, Mr. L. Schrader, Hanover. In reply to a suspicion thrown out by his female correspondent, this gentleman says, "I did not hear a word of a match between you and Mr. Pope. You once told me that no such thing could ever happen." And apparently it never did. On Sunday, the 6th of May, Pope appears to have been delirious, and four days afterwards he said to Spence (in what we may call the old vein), "One of the things that I have always most wondered at 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." He afterwards complained of that odd phenomenon, as he called it, of seeing everything in the room as through a curtain, and of seeing false colours on objects. "He said to me, ," continues Spence, "What's that?' pointing into the air with a very steady regard, and then looked down on me and said with a smile of great pleasure, and with the greatest softness, 'Twas a vision."" Lyttelton visited him on the 15th, and as the doctor had previously been congratulating his patient on some improvement in his case, Pope observed to his friend, "Here am I dying of a hundred good symptoms." He suffered most, he said, from finding that he could not think. Bolingbroke wept over his dying friend, exclaiming several times, interrupted by sobs, "O great God, what is man!" Spence says that when he was telling his lordship that Pope, on every recovery of his mind, was always saying something kindly either of his present or his absent friends, as if his humanity outlasted his understanding, Bolingbroke replied, "It has so! I never in my life knew a man that had |