Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets Part 10

At all these places, Pope, who, having friends of all parties, would not commit himself to any political party, was always welcome, though the casual influence of party did not fail to take its effect, and do the work of estrangement among many of the leading spirits of the time. Pope always professed to hold Whig principles; but, in fact, there was little distinction of political principle at that period, the chief difference being that of mere party. To the nation and its interests, it was of little consequence what leader was in power.

Amid all the convivialities, the excitements of wine, wit, and conversation, which so many meetings of celebrated men opened to Pope, he began to find himself growing dissipated, and his health suffering.

His wise old friend, Sir William Trumbull, warned him of his danger with an affectionate earnestness, and it is supposed with due effect. "I now come," said he, "to what is of vast moment--I mean, the preservation of your health, and beg of you earnestly to get out of all tavern company, and fly away _tanquam ex incendio_. What a misery it is for you to be destroyed by the foolish kindness--it is all one, real or pretended--of those who are able to bear the poison of bad wine, and to engage you in so unequal a combat. As to Homer, by all I can learn, your business is done; therefore come away, and take a little time to breathe in the country. I beg now for my own sake, and much more for yours. Methinks Mr. ---- has said to you more than once,

'Heu! fuge, nati dea, teque his, ait, eripe flammis.'"

Pope felt the justice of this call, and obeyed. It was not, however, without a lingering and reverted look, as a letter of his to Jervas testifies. "I can not express how I long to renew our old intercourse and conversation; our morning conference in bed in the same room, our evening walks in the Park, our amusing voyages on the water, our philosophical suppers, our lectures, our dissertations, our gravities, our fooleries, or what not."

It appears that not merely Jervas, Parnell, Garth, Rowe, and others of like respectable character, were his companions in the amus.e.m.e.nts referred to, but that, unfortunately for him, he had fallen into the company of the dissolute Earl of Warwick, Addison's son-in-law, and of Colley Cibber; who, availing themselves of his vivacity, laid a deliberate plan to engage him in an affair derogatory to his reputation.

But he cut wisely these connections, and London, with a valediction to be found in his verses written in the character of a philosophical rake:

"Dear, d.a.m.ned, distracting town, farewell Thy fools no more I'll tease," &c.

"To drink and droll be Rowe allowed Till the third watchman toll; Let Jervas gratis paint, and Froude Save threepence and his soul.

"Farewell Arbuthnot's raillery On every learned sot; And Garth, the best good Christian he, Although he knows it not.

"Lintot, farewell! thy bard must go: Farewell, unhappy Tonson!

Heaven gives thee for thy loss of Rowe, Lean Phillips and fat Johnson.

"Why should I stay? both parties rage; My vixen mistress squalls; The wits in envious feuds engage, And Homer--d.a.m.n him--calls."

Here, then, ends Pope's town life, or that part of his life when he gave himself most up to it. We now accompany him to his new and his last residence, his beloved Twickenham, or Twitenham, as he used to write it.

It seems that Pope did not purchase the freehold of the house and grounds at Twickenham, but only a long lease. He took his father and mother along with him. His father died there the year after, but his mother continued to live till 1733, when she died at the great age of ninety-three. For twenty years she had the singular satisfaction of seeing her son the first poet of his age; caressed by the greatest men of the time, courted by princes, and feared by all the base. No parents ever found a more tender and dutiful son. With him they shared in honor the ease and distinction he had acquired. They were the cherished objects of his home. Swift paid him no false compliment when he said, in condoling with him on his mother's death, "You are the most dutiful son I have ever known or heard of, which is a felicity not happening to one in a million."

The property at Twickenham is properly described by Roscoe as lying on both sides of the highway, rendering it necessary for him to cross the road to arrive at the higher and more ornamental part of his gardens. In order to obviate this inconvenience, he had recourse to the expedient of excavating a pa.s.sage under the road from one part of his grounds to the other, a fact to which he alludes in these lines:

"Know all the toil the heavy world can heap Rolls o'er my grotto, nor disturbs my sleep."

The lower part of these grounds, in which his house stood, const.i.tuted, in fact, only the sloping bank of the river, by much the smaller portion of his territory. The pa.s.sage, therefore, was very necessary to that far greater part, which was his wilderness, shrubbery, forest, and every thing, where he chiefly planted and worked. This pa.s.sage he formed into a grotto, having a front of rude stone-work opposite to the river, and decorated within with spars, ores, and sh.e.l.ls. Of this place he has himself left this description:

"I have put the last hand to my works of this kind, in happily finis.h.i.+ng the subterranean way and grotto. I found there a spring of the clearest water, which falls in a perpetual rill, that echoes through the cavern night and day. From the River Thames you see through my arch, up a walk of the wilderness, to a kind of open temple wholly composed of sh.e.l.ls in the rustic manner; and from that distance under the temple, you look down through a sloping arcade of trees, and see the sails on the river pa.s.sing suddenly and vanis.h.i.+ng, as through a perspective gla.s.s. When you shut the door of this grotto, it becomes on the instant, from a luminous room, a _camera obscura_, on the walls of which all the objects of the river, hills, woods, and boats are forming a moving picture, in their visible radiations; and when you have a mind to light it less, it affords you a very different scene. It is finished with sh.e.l.ls, interspersed with looking-gla.s.s in regular forms, and in the ceiling is a star of the same material, at which, when a lamp of an orbicular figure of thin alabaster is hung in the middle, a thousand pointed rays glitter, and are reflected over the place. There are connected to this grotto, by a narrow pa.s.sage, two porches, one toward the river, of smooth stones, full of light and open; the other toward the garden, shadowed with trees, rough with sh.e.l.ls, flints, and iron ore. The bottom is paved with simple pebbles, as is also the adjoining walk up the wilderness to the temple, in the natural taste, agreeing not ill with the little dripping murmur, and the aquatic idea of the whole place. It wants nothing to complete it but a good statue with an inscription, like that beautiful antique one which you know I am so fond of. You will think I have been very poetical in this description; but it is pretty near the truth."

To this prose description Pope added this one in verse:

"Thou who shalt stop, where Thames' translucent wave s.h.i.+nes a broad mirror through the shadowy cave; Where lingering drops from mineral roofs distill, And pointed crystals break the sparkling rill; Unpolished gems no ray on pride bestow, And latent metals innocently glow; Approach! great Nature studiously behold, And eye the mine without a wish for gold.

Approach; but awful! Lo! the Egerian grot, Where, n.o.bly pensive, St. John sat and thought; Where British sighs from dying Wyndham stole, And the bright flame was shot through Marchmont's soul.

Let such, such only, tread this sacred floor, Who dare to love their country, and be poor."

But it was not merely in forming this grotto that Pope employed himself; it was in building and extending his house, which was in a Roman style, with columns, arcades, and porticoes. The designs and elevations of these buildings may be seen by his own hand in the British Museum, drawn in his usual way on backs of letters. The following pa.s.sage, in a letter to Mr. Digby, will be sufficient to give us his idea of both his Thamesward garden and his house in a summer view: "No ideas you could form in the winter could make you imagine what Twickenham is in this warm summer. Our river glitters beneath the unclouded sun, at the same time that its banks retain the verdure of showers; our gardens are offering their first nosegays; our trees, like new acquaintance brought happily together, are stretching their arms to meet each other, and growing nearer and nearer every hour. The birds are paying their thanksgiving songs for the new habitations I have made them. My building rises high enough to attract the eye and curiosity of the pa.s.senger from the river, where, upon beholding a mixture of beauty and ruin, he inquires, What house is falling, or what church is rising? So little taste have our common Tritons for Vitruvius; whatever delight the poetical G.o.ds of the river may take in reflecting on their streams, my Tuscan porticoes, or Ionic pilasters."

Pope's architecture, like his poetry, has been the subject of much and vehement dispute. On the one hand, his grottoes and his buildings have been vituperated as most tasteless and childish; on the other, applauded as beautiful and romantic. Into neither of these disputes need we enter.

In both poetry and architecture a bolder spirit and a better taste have prevailed since Pope's time. With all his foibles and defects, Pope was a great poet of the critical and didactic kind, and his house and place had their peculiar beauties. He was himself half inclined to suspect the correctness of his fancy in such matters, and often rallies himself on his gimcracks and crotchets in both verse and prose. Thus, in his first epistle of his first book of Horace, addressed to Bolingbroke:

"But when no prelate's lawn with haircloth lined Is half so incoherent as my mind; When--each opinion with the next at strife, An ebb and flow of follies all my life-- I plant, root up; I build, and then confound; Turn round to square, and square again to round; You never change one muscle of your face; You think this madness but a common case."

Pope's building madness, however, had method in it. Unlike the great romancer and builder of our time, he never allowed such things to bring him into debt. He kept his mind at ease by such prudence, and soothed and animated it under circ.u.mstances of continued evil by working among his trees, and grottoes, and vines, and at his labors of poetry and translation. At the period succeeding the rebellion of 1715, when that event had implicated and scattered so many of his highest and most powerful friends, here he was laboring away at his Homer with a progress which astonished every one. Removed at once from the dissipations and distractions of London, and from the agreeable interruptions of such society, he found leisure and health enough here to give him vigor for exertions astonis.h.i.+ng for so weak a frame. The tastes he indulged here, if they were not faultless according to our notions, were healthy, and they endured. To the end of his life he preserved his strong attachment to his house and grounds. In 1736, writing to Swift, he says: "I wish you had any motive to see this kingdom. I could keep you, for I am rich; that is, I have more room than I want. I can afford room for myself and two servants. I have, indeed, room enough; nothing but myself at home.

The kind and hearty housewife is dead! The agreeable and instructive neighbor is gone! Yet my house is enlarged, and the gardens extend and flourish, as knowing nothing of the guests they have lost. I have more fruit-trees and kitchen garden than you have any thought of; nay, I have melons and pine-apples of my own growth. I am as much a better gardener as I am a worse poet than when you saw me; but gardening is more akin to philosophy, for Tully says, '_Agricultura proxima sapientiae_.'" And toward the end of the same year he says, in a letter to Ralph Allen, "I am now as busy planting for myself as I was lately in planting for another; and I thank G.o.d for every wet day and for every fog that gives me the headache, but prospers my works. They will indeed outlive me, but I am pleased to think my trees will afford fruit and shade to others when I shall want them no more. And it is no sort of grief to me that those others will not be things of my own poor body; but it is enough that they are creatures of the same species, and made by the same hand that made me."

In 1743, the last year of his life, he was still inspired by the same tastes, and occupied in the same pursuits. "I have lived," says he, March 24th, 1743, "much by myself of late, partly through ill health, and partly to amuse myself with little improvements in my gardens and house, to which, possibly, I shall, if I live, be much more confined."

Of the mode of Pope's life here we have, from the letters of himself and his friends, a pretty tolerable notion. He was near enough town to make occasional visits to it, and his friends there near enough to visit him.

His friends and acquaintances were every distinguished man and woman of the time, whether literary characters or statesmen. The greater part of them may be set down as his guests here, at one period or another. He delighted to have his most intimate friends near him, and some one or more of them with him. Bishops Atterbury and Warburton, the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess of Queensbury, Gay's great patrons; Sheffield, duke of Buckingham, Lady Suffolk, Lord and Lady Hervey, Lords Bathurst, Halifax, Oxford, Bolingbroke, Burlington, Lady Scudamore, the Countess of Winchilsea, Lord-chancellor Harcourt, and his son Sir Simon Harcourt, the Duke of Chandos, Lords Carlton, Peterborough, and Lansdowne, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Addison, Steele, Swift, Parnell, Gay, Rowe, and all the literary men of the age. What an array of those who wrote, and of those who admired letters, were the frequenters of Twickenham. In fact, in a letter to Swift in 1736, Pope says, "I was the other day recollecting twenty-seven great ministers, or men of wit and learning, who are all dead, and all of my acquaintance within twenty years past."

But Pope loved to get those he most delighted to converse with to reside near him. Bolingbroke settled at Dawley, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu at Twickenham itself. The latter remarkable woman was a little too near.

All the world is familiar with Pope's intense admiration of her, his having her picture drawn by Sir G.o.dfrey Kneller to gaze on every day, his wors.h.i.+p of her, and their quarrel, which knew no reconciliation.

But Pope's attachments were, for the most part, strong and enduring.

Except in the case of the flattered, spoiled, and satirical Lady Mary, there is scarcely a friend of Pope's who was not a friend for life. With the Blounts, the Allens,

"And honest, hatless Cromwell, with red breeches,"

people who could confer no distinction, but had qualities worth loving, he maintained the most steady friends.h.i.+p to the last. On Martha Blount, the woman who above all others he most loved, he has conferred an immortality as enduring as his own.

But his three most intimate friends, after all, were Swift, Bolingbroke, and Gay. These congenial souls were here much, often, and for long times together. With Pope they not only entered into literary plans, read together, wrote together, and joked and feasted together, but with him they worked at his grotto and in his garden. They helped him to construct his quincunx; to plant, to sort spars and stones, and to fix them in the wall. Lord Peterborough, who had run so victorious a career in Spain, did not disdain to lay on a helping hand.

"He whose lightnings pierced the Iberian lines, Now forms my quincunx and now ranks my vines."

Even the querulous dean, even the proud Bolingbroke, as well as the easy and good-humored Gay, zealously partook of the rural as well as the philosophical labors of Pope at Twickenham. Swift made two extraordinarily long sojourns here, one of five months; and though he took an abrupt leave at length, it was not, as Johnson would biliously represent it, because they could not live together, or had abated their mutual regard, but because they were both completely out of health, and the dean especially, afflicted with the nervous irritability which proved the forerunner of insanity. It was necessary for him to get home, where he could as little bear any society, in that morbid condition. Gay dead, Bolingbroke obliged to live abroad, Swift sunk into a hypochondriac, the latter end of Pope's life was melancholy, and Twickenham a comparative solitude. He had, however, the cordially cheering attentions of Martha Blount; and Warburton, whose advancement in the church was the work of his friends.h.i.+p, came in to supply the places of the old companions gone.

Such was the home of Pope: there is still another portion of his life of which we get most picturesque glimpses, I mean into his haunts.

Occasionally we find him at Bath for his health, but more frequently making a summer sojourn of a few weeks or months at the houses of some of his friends in the country. At one time he is at Dawley, with Bolingbroke, where they are lying and reading between two hayc.o.c.ks; at another at Prior Park, near Bath, at the Allens', where an odd kind of stiffness grew up between the Allens and Miss Blount and himself, that was never cleared up, but blew away, and left them as good friends as before. Then he is at Oakley Bower, Lord Bathurst's seat at Cirencester.

In 1716, he writes to Martha and Teresa Blount--that was in his young and Homeric days--"I am with Lord Bathurst at my bower in whose groves we had yesterday a dry walk of three hours. It is the place that of all others I fancy, and I am not yet out of humor with it, though I have had it some months; it does not cease to be agreeable to me so late in the season (October); the very dying of the leaves adds a variety of colors that is not unpleasant. I look upon it as upon a beauty I once loved, whom I should preserve a respect for in her decay; and as we should look upon a friend, with remembrance how he pleased us once, though now declined from his gay and flouris.h.i.+ng condition.

"I write an hour or two every morning, then ride out a hunting upon the downs, eat heartily, talk tender sentiments with Lord B., or draw plans for houses and gardens, open avenues, cut glades, plant firs, contrive water-works, all very fine and beautiful in our own imagination. At night we play at commerce, and play pretty high. I do more. I bet too; for I am really rich, and must throw away my money, if no deserving friend will use it. I like this course of life so well, that I am resolved to stay here till I hear of somebody's being in town that is worth coming after."

In another letter to these sisters, he gives us a curious peep at court life. "First, then, I went by water to Hampton Court, unattended by all but by my own virtues, which were not of so modest a nature as to keep themselves or me concealed; for I met the prince, with all his ladies, on horseback, coming from hunting. Mrs. B---- and Mrs. L----" (Mary b.e.l.l.e.n.den and Mary Lepell, maids of honor to the queen) "took me into protection, contrary to the laws against harboring papists, and gave me a dinner, with something I liked better, an opportunity of conversing with Mrs. H----" (Mrs. Howard, afterward Countess of Suffolk). "We all agreed that the life of a maid of honor was of all things the most miserable; and wished that every woman that envied it had a specimen of it. To eat Westphalia ham in a morning, ride over hedges and ditches on borrowed hacks, come home in the heat of the day with a fever, and--what is worse a hundred times--with a red mark in the forehead from an uneasy hat; all this may qualify them to make excellent wives for fox-hunters, and bear abundance of ruddy-complexioned children. As soon as they can wipe off the sweat of the day, they must simper an hour, and catch cold in the princess's apartment; from thence, as Shakspeare has it, 'to dinner with what appet.i.te they may;' and after that, till midnight, walk, work, or think, which they please. I can easily believe no lone house in Wales, with a mountain and a rookery, is more contemplative than this court; and, as a proof of it, I need only tell you, Mrs. L---- (Mary Lepell) walked with me three or four hours by moonlight, and we met no creature of any quality but the king, who gave audience to the vice-chamberlain, all alone, under the garden wall.

"In short, I heard of no ball, a.s.sembly, ba.s.set-table, or any place where two or three were gathered together, except Madam Kilmansegg's, to which I had the honor to be invited, and the grace to stay away.

"I was heartily tired, and posted to ---- Park (_q._ Bushy?); there we had an excellent discourse of quackery; Dr. S---- was mentioned with honor. Lady ---- walked a whole hour abroad without dying after it, at least in the time I stayed, though she seemed to be fainting, and had convulsive motions several times in her head. I arrived in the forest by Tuesday at noon."

At another time we find him at Orchard Wyndham, the seat of Sir William Wyndham, in Somersets.h.i.+re. "The reception we met with," says he, "and the little excursions we made, were every way agreeable. I think the country abounds with beautiful prospects. Sir William Wyndham is at present amusing himself with some real improvements, and a great many visionary castles. We are often entertained with sea views and sea-fish; and were at some places in the neighborhood, among which I was mightily pleased with Dunster Castle, near Minehead. It stands upon a great eminence, and hath a prospect of that town, with an extensive view of the Bristol Channel, in which are seen two small islands called the Steep Holms and Flat Holms, and on the other side we could plainly distinguish the divisions of the fields on the Welsh coast. All this journey I performed on horseback." To how many readers will this fine scene here mentioned be familiar!

But another visit of Pope's to Stanton Harcourt, Oxfords.h.i.+re, an old mansion of Lord Harcourt's, who lent it to him for the summer, has furnished us with a description which, though somewhat long, we must take in full. So much delighted was Pope with it, that he has described it twice; once to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and once to the Duke of Buckingham. The following account is made complete by a careful comparison of both these letters; but may be supposed to be addressed to Lady Mary.

"I am fourscore miles from London; and the place is such as I would not quit for the town, if I did not value you more than, nay, every body else there; and you will be convinced how little the town has engaged my affections in your absence from it, when you know what a place this is which I prefer to it. I shall therefore describe it to you at large, as a true picture of a genuine ancient country seat.

"You must expect nothing regular in my description of a house which seems to be built before rules were in fas.h.i.+on. The whole is so disjointed, and the parts are so detached from each other, and yet so joining again, one can not tell how, that in a poetical fit you could imagine it had been a village in Amphion's time, when twenty cottages had taken a dance together, were all out, and stood still in amazement ever since.

"You must excuse me if I say nothing of the front; indeed, I do not know which it is. A stranger would be grievously disappointed who should think to get into this house the right way. One would reasonably expect, after the entry through the porch, to be let into the hall; but alas!

nothing less! you find yourself in a brew-house. From the parlor you think to step into the drawing-room, but, upon opening the iron-nailed door, you are convinced, by a flight of birds about your ears, and a cloud of dust in your eyes, that it is the pigeon-house. On each side of our porch are two chimneys, that wear their greens on the outside, which would do as well within; for whenever we make a fire, we let the smoke out of the windows. Over the parlor window hangs a sloping balcony, which time has turned to a very convenient pent-house. The top is crowned with a very venerable tower, so like that of the church just by, that the jackdaws build in it as if it were the true steeple.

"The great hall is high and s.p.a.cious, flanked on one side with a very long table, a true image of ancient hospitality. The walls are all over ornamented with monstrous horns of animals, about twenty broken pikes, ten or a dozen blunderbusses, and a rusty matchlock musket or two, which we were informed had served in the civil wars. There is one vast arched window, beautifully darkened with divers scutcheons of painted gla.s.s.

There seems to be a great propriety in this old manner of blazoning upon gla.s.s, ancient families, like ancient windows, in the course of generations being seldom free from cracks. One s.h.i.+ning pane, in particular, bears date 1286, which alone preserves the memory of a knight whose iron armor has long since perished with rust, and whose alabaster nose has moldered from his monument. The youthful face of Dame Elinor, in another piece, owes more to that single pane than to all the gla.s.ses she ever consulted in her life. Who can say, after this, that gla.s.s is frail, when it is not half so perishable as human beauty or glory? And yet I can not but sigh to think that the most authentic record of so ancient a family should be at the mercy of every boy who flings a stone! In this hall, in former days, have dined gartered knights and courtly dames, with ushers, sewers, and seneschals, and yet it was but the other night that an owl flew in hither, and mistook it for a barn.