Learning is in no very thriving state here, as indeed nowhere else in Italy; however, among many pretenders, some men of taste are to be met with. A friend of mine told me not long since, that, being to visit Salvini at Florence, he found him reading your Homer: he liked the notes extremely, and could find no other fault with the version, but that he thought it approached too near a paraphrase; which shews him not to be sufficiently acquainted with our language. I wish you health to go on with that noble work; and when you have that, I need not wish you success. You will do me the justice to believe, that whatever relates to your welfare is sincerely wished by your, &c.

CXXIV.

This is doubtless one of those letters which Pope, in pretending to address to a friend, addressed in reality to posterity. It reads very like one of Addison's 'Saturday Spectators.'

A deep experience of 'that long disease, my life,' gave Pope an unusual right to moralise on the vanity of human ambition, and we have seldom an opportunity of admiring him so sincerely as when we find him indulging in this wise and wholesome strain. Yet to Steele, the most spontaneous of letterwriters, the measured cadences of Pope's epistolary style must have seemed, as they seem to us, with all their beauty, a little artificial.

Alexander Pope to Richard Steele.

July 15, 1712.

You formerly observed to me that nothing made a more ridiculous figure in a man's life than the disparity we often find in him sick and well: thus one of an unfortunate constitution is perpetually exhibiting a miserable example of the weakness of his mind and of his body in their turns. I have had frequent opportunities of late to consider myself in these different views, and I hope have received some advantage by it, if what Waller says be true, that

The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd,

Lets in new light through chinks that time has made.

Then, surely, sickness, contributing no less than old age to the shaking down this scaffolding of the body, may discover the inward structure more plainly. Sickness is a sort of early old

age; it teaches us a diffidence in our earthly state, and inspires us with the thought of a future, better than a thousand volumes of philosophers and divines. It gives so warning a concussion to those props of our vanity, our strength, and youth, that we think of fortifying ourselves within, when there is so little dependence upon our outworks. Youth, at the very best, is but a betrayer of human life in a gentler and smoother manner than age: it is like a stream that nourishes a plant upon a bank, and causes it to flourish and blossom to the sight, but at the same time is undermining it at the root in secret. My youth has dealt more fairly and openly with me: it has afforded me several prospects of my danger, and has given me an advantage not very common to young men, that the attractions of the world have not dazzled me very much; and I begin, where most people end, with a full conviction of the emptiness of all sorts of ambition, and the unsatisfactory nature of all human pleasures. When a smart fit of sickness tells me this scurvy tenement of my body will fall in a little time, I am e'en as unconscious as was that honest Hibernian, who, being in bed in the great storm some years ago, and told the house would tumble over his head, made answer, 'What care I for the house, I am only a lodger.' I fancy it is the best time to die when one is in the best humour; and so excessive weak as I now am, I may say with conscience that I am not at all uneasy at the thought that many men whom I never had any esteem for, are likely to enjoy this world after me. When I reflect what an inconsiderable little atom every single man is, with respect to the whole creation, methinks it is a shame to be concerned at the removal of such a trivial animal as I am. The morning after my exit the sun will rise as bright as ever, the flowers smell as sweet, the plants spring as green, the world will proceed in its old course, people will laugh as heartily and marry as fast as they were used to do.

The memory of man,' as it is elegantly expressed in the Book of Wisdom, 'passeth away as the remembrance of a guest that tarrieth but one day.'

There are reasons enough in the fourth chapter of the same book to make any young man contented with the prospect of death. For honourable age is not that which standeth in length of time, or is measured by number of years. But wisdom is the gray hair to men, and an unspotted life is old age. He was taken

away speedily, lest wickedness should alter his understanding, or deceit beguile his soul,' &c. I am, yours, &c.

A. POPE.

CXXV.

This letter is selected, firstly, because it is an interesting specimen of Pope's power of conveying in prose what no writer in ancient or modern literature has approached him in conveying in verse-compliment; secondly, because it contains the famous description of the lovers killed by lightning, a description which Thackeray has so justly chosen for encomium.

Alexander Pope to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

1716.

Madam,—I have been (what I never was till now) in debt to you for a letter some weeks. I was informed you were at sea, and that 'twas to no purpose to write till some news had been heard of your arriving somewhere or other. Besides, I have had a second dangerous illness, from which I was more diligent to be recovered than from the first, having now some hopes of seeing you again. If you make any tour in Italy, I shall not easily forgive you for not acquainting me soon enough to have met you there. I am very certain I can never be polite unless I travel with you and it is never to be repaired, the loss that Homer has sustained, for want of my translating him in Asia. You will come hither full of criticisms against a man who wanted nothing to be in the right but to have kept you company; you have no way of making me amends, but by continuing an Asiatic when you return to me, whatever English airs you may put on to other people. I prodigiously long for your Sonnets, your Remarks, your Oriental Learning;-but I long for nothing so much as your Oriental self. You must of necessity be advanced so far back into true uature and simplicity of manners, by these three years' residence in the East, that I shall look upon you as so many years younger than you was, so much nearer innocence, (that is, truth,) and infancy (that is, openness). I expect to see your soul so much thinner dressed as your body; and that you have left off, as unwieldy and cumbersome, a great many damned European habits. Without offence to your modesty be it spoken, I have a burning desire to see your soul stark naked, for I am confident 'tis the prettiest kind of white soul in the universe. But I forget

whom I am talking to; you may possibly by this time believe, according to the Prophet, that you have none; if so, shew me that which comes next to a soul; you may easily put it upon a poor ignorant Christian for a soul, and please him as well with it; -I mean your heart;-Mahomet, I think, allows you hearts; which (together with fine eyes and other agreeable equivalents) are worth all the souls on this side the world. But if I must be content with seeing your body only, God send it to come quickly : I honour it more than the diamond casket that held Homer's Iliads; for in the very twinkle of one eye of it there is more wit, and in the very dimple of one cheek of it there is more meaning, than all the souls that ever were casually put into women since men had the making of them.

I have a mind to fill the rest of this paper with an accident that happened just under my eyes, and has made a great impression upon me. I have just passed part of this summer at an old romantic seat of my Lord Harcourt's, which he lent me. It overlooks a common-field, where, under the shade of a haycock, sat two lovers, as constant as ever were found in Romance, beneath a spreading beech. The name of the one (let it sound as it will) was John Hewet; of the other, Sarah Drew. John was a wellset man about five and twenty, Sarah a brown woman of eighteen. John had for several months borne the labour of the day in the same field with Sarah, when she milked, it was his morning and evening charge to bring the cows to her pail. Their love was the talk, but not the scandal, of the whole neighbourhood; for all they aimed at was the blameless possession of each other in marriage. It was but this very morning that he had obtained her parents' consent, and it was but till the next week that they were to wait to be happy. Perhaps this very day, in the intervals of their work, they were talking of their wedding clothes; and John was now matching several kinds of poppies and field-flowers to her complexion, to make her a present of knots for the day. While they were thus employed, (it was on the last of July) a terrible storm of thunder and lightning arose, that drove the labourers to what shelter the trees or hedges afforded. Sarah, frighted and out of breath, sunk on a haycock, and John (who never separated from her) sate by her side, having raked two or three heaps together to secure her. Immediately there was heard so loud a crack as if

Heaven had burst asunder. The labourers, all solicitous for each other's safety, called to one another: those that were nearest our lovers, hearing no answer, stept to the place where they lay: they first saw a little smoke, and after, this faithful pair,-John, with one arm about his Sarah's neck, and the other held over her face, as if to secure her from the lightning. They were struck dead, and already grown stiff and cold in this tender posture. There was no mark or discolouring on their bodies, only that Sarah's eye-brow was a little singed, and a small spot between her breasts. They were buried the next day in one grave, in the parish of Stanton-Harcourt, in Oxfordshire! where my Lord Harcourt, at my request, has erected a monument over them. Of the following epitaphs which I made, the critics have chosen the godly one: I like neither, but wish you had been in England to have done this office better: I think 'twas what you could not have refused me on so moving an occasion.

When Eastern lovers feed the fun'ral fire,
On the same pile their faithful Fair expire;
Here pitying Heav'n that virtue mutual found,
And blasted both, that it might neither wound.
Hearts so sincere, th' Almighty saw well pleas'd,
Sent his own lightning, and the victims seized.

Think not, by rig'rous judgment seiz'd,
A pair so faithful could expire;
Victims so pure Heav'n saw well pleas'd
And snatch'd them in celestial fire.

Live well, and fear no sudden fate:

When God calls Virtue to the grave,

Alike 'tis justice, soon or late,

Mercy alike to kill or save.

Virtue unmov'd can hear the call,

And face the flash that melts the ball.

Upon the whole, I can't think these people unhappy. The greatest happiness, next to living as they would have done, was to die as they did. The greatest honour people of this low degree could have, was to be remembered on a little monument, unless you will give them another,—that of being honoured with a tear