SPENCE'S ANECDOTES.

SECTION IV. 1734-36.

HE famous Lord Hallifax (though so much talked of) was rather a pretender to taste, than really possessed of it.-When I had

finished the two or three first books of my translation of the Iliad, that lord "desired to have the pleasure of hearing them read at his house."-Addison, Congreve, and Garth, were there at the reading.—In four or five places, Lord Hallifax stopped me very civilly; and with a speech, each time much of the same kind: "I beg your pardon, Mr. Pope, but there is something in that passage that does not quite please me.-Be so good as to mark the place, and consider it a little more at your leisure.. -I am sure you can give it a better turn."-I returned from Lord Hallifax's with Dr. Garth,* in his chariot; and

This is lengthened from the short hints in the first memorandum paper. Such fillings up, and in this particular, should be flung into notes; for one can't answer for the particular circumstances at such a distance of time.-For instance, according to my memory, it was Garth he returned home with; but in my paper, Congreve's name has a particular mark under it; and so it might be he, and not Garth, that let Mr. Pope into this part of Lord Hallifax's character. This must be hinted at above, and enlarged upon in the notes.-Note in pencil on the margin by Spence.

as we were going along, was saying to the doctor, that my lord had laid me under a good deal of difficulty, by such loose and general observations; that I had been thinking over the passages almost ever since, and could not guess at what it was that offended his lordship in either of them.-Garth laughed heartily at my embarrassment; said, I had not been long enough acquainted with Lord Hallifax, to know his way yet: that I need not puzzle myself in looking those places over and over when I got home. "All you need do (said he) is to leave them just as they are; call on Lord Hallifax two or three months hence, thank him for his kind observations on those passages; and then read them to him as altered. I have known him much longer than you have, and will be answerable for the event."-I followed his advice; waited on Lord Hallifax some time after: said I hoped he would find his objections to those passages removed, read them to him exactly as they were at first; his lordship was extremely pleased with them, and cried out,

Ay now, Mr. Pope, they are perfectly right! nothing can be better."-P.

"Did not he write the Country Mouse with Mr. Pryor?"

Yes, just as if I was in a chaise with Mr. Cheselden here, drawn by his fine horse, and should say,-Lord, how finely we draw this chaise!"-Lord Peterborough.

Donne had no imagination, but as much wit, I think, as any writer can possibly have.*-Oldham is too rough and coarse.-Rochester is the medium between him and the Earl of Dorset.-Lord Dorset is the best of all those writers. What! better than Lord Rochester ?"-Yes, Ro

It is remarkable that Dryden also says of Donne ; " he was the greatest wit, though not the greatest poet of this nation."Jos. Warton.

chester has neither so much delicacy or exactness as Lord Dorset.*-P.

Sedley is a very insipid writer; except in some few of his little love-verses.-P.

"I have drawn in the plan for my Ethic Epistles much narrower than it was at first."-He mentioned several of the particulars, in which he had lessened it; but as this was in the year 1734, the most exact account of his plan (as it stood then) will best appear from a leaf which he annexed to about a dozen copies of the poem, printed in that year, and sent as presents to some of his most particular friends. Most of these were afterwards called in again; but that which was sent to Mr. Bethel was not.†

* He instanced from Lord Rochester's Satire on Man.-Spence. + It run as follows,

INDEX TO THE ETHIC EPISTLES.

Book I. OF THE NATURE AND STATE of Man.
Epistle 1.-With respect to the Universe.
2. As an Individual.

3. With respect to Society.

4. With respect to Happiness.

BOOK II. OF THE USE OF THINGS.

Of the Limits of Human Reason.

Of the Use of Learning.

Of the Use of Wit.

Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men.

Of the particular Characters of Women.

Of the Principles and Use of Civil and Ecclesiastical
Polity.

Of the Use of Education.

A View of the Equality of Happiness in the several Con

ditions of Men.

Of the Use of Riches.

You know there is nothing certain about him (we had been speaking of Homer's blindness); that life, attributed to Herodotus, was hardly written by that historian, and all the rest have guessed out circumstances for a life of him from his own writings. I collected everything that was worth notice, and classed it; and then Archdeacon Parnell wrote the Essay on his Life, which is prefixed to the Iliad. It is still stiff; and was written much stiffer. As it is, I think verily it cost me more pains in the correcting, than the writing of it would have done.*—P.

What Paterculus says of Homer's not being blind, might be said by him, only for the turn of it. His book is a flimsy thing; and yet nine in ten that read it will be pleased with it.-P.

Parnell's Pilgrim is very good.-The story was written

* Pope has been blamed for his inconsistency in praising Parnell in one place and censuring him in another, but it should be remembered that Pope was no party to the publication of this censure, which was spoken in the confidence of conversation with a friend. The only charges that can be made against him, are, his want of sincerity, and his propensity to feed the vanity of his correspondents by gross flattery. In a letter to Parnell, with whom he lived in habits of the strictest friendship, he says: "If I were to tell you the thing I wish above all things, it is to see you again; the next is to see your treatise of Zoilus, with the Batrachomuomachia and the Pervigilum Veneris, both which poems are master-pieces in their several kinds, and I question not the prose is as excellent in its sort as the Essay on Homer."-Dr. Anderson very justly observes, that " what he says in both places may be easily reconciled to truth; for everything of Parnell's that has appeared in prose, is written in a very awkward inelegant manner; but who can defend Pope's candour, and his sincerity ?"— Editor.

In the first MS. memoranda of this conversation, Pope is made to say, that Parnell is "a great follower of drams; and strangely open and scandalous in his debaucheries.”—As this was

originally in Spanish.-P. [Whence, probably, Howel translated it, in prose, and inserted it in one of his letters.] -Spence.

It is a great fault, in descriptive poetry, to describe everything.* The good ancients (but when I named them, I meant Virgil) have no long descriptions: commonly not above ten lines, and scarce ever thirty. One of the longest in Virgil is when Æneas is with Evander; and that is frequently broke by what Evander says.-P.

After reading the Persian Tales, (and I had been reading Dryden's Fables just before them,) I had some thought of writing a Persian fable; in which I should have given a full loose to description and imagination. It would have omitted in the transcript, Spence probably thought it not quite correct. Poor Parnell did indeed give in to excesses after the death of his wife, whom he tenderly loved, and had the misfortune to lose in 1712; this event made such an impression on his spirits, that he could hardly bear to be alone, he sought therefore to obliterate his grief by company and conviviality; "those helps that sorrow first called in for assistance, habit soon rendered necessary, and he died in his thirty-eighth year, in some measure a martyr to conjugal fidelity." Pope can hardly be suspected of having any motive to calumniate the man whom he had described in his Epistle to Lord Oxford, as

"Just beheld and lost, admir'd and mourn'd! With sweetest manners, gentlest arts adorn'd!" Whose company he seems to have been extremely fond of, and whose posthumous fame he had been particularly solicitous to increase! It is somewhat singular that this same charge of dram drinking has been brought against the poet himself by Dr. King, in the late publication of " Anecdotes of his own time, p. 12." After relating an anecdote, which seems to give some colour to the charge, he says, in direct terms, that " Pope hastened his death by feeding much on high-seasoned dishes, and drinking spirits.—Editor. * That is the fault in Thomson's Seasons.-Addition from MS.