account. I never saw him laugh very heartily in all my life.-Mrs. Racket, speaking of Mr. Pope. [This is odd enough! because she was with him so much in all the first part of his life, when he is said, by persons most intimate with him, to have been excessively gay and lively. It is very true, that in the latter part of his life, when he told a story, he was always the last to laugh at it: and seldom went beyond a particular easy smile, on any occasion that I remember.-Spence.] "Imperatorem decet stantem mori,” seems such odd sense to us, partly from our having shifted the sense of the word Imperator. It then signified a commander or general, not an emperor. "A general should die in action," is much the same sentiment with that of marshall Villars, when he was told of the death of the Duke of Berwick.Mr. Holdsworth. We often stare at the customs of other countries, and condemn them only from our ignorance of the original design of them. What seems more ridiculous than that the blacks should cut and slash their faces by way of ornament? and yet if we consider their perpetual wars, and that this may be designed to make them less afraid of wounds in the face, it would not be ridiculous at all.—Mr. H. Rabelais had written some sensible pieces, which the world did not regard at all." I will write something, (says he,) that they shall take notice of:" and so sat down to writing nonsense.e.-Everybody allows that there are several things without any manner of meaning in his Pantagruel. Dr. Swift likes it much, and thinks there are more good things in it than I do.-Friar John's character is maintained throughout with a great deal of spirit. His concealed characters are touched only in part, and by fits: as for example, though the King's Mis tress be meant in such a particular, related of Gargantua's mare; the very next thing that is said of the mare, will not, perhaps, at all apply to the Mistress.-P. Butler set out on too narrow a plan, and even that design is not kept up. He sinks into little true particulars about the Widow, &c.-The enthusiastic Knight, and the ignorant Squire, over-religious in two different ways, and always quarrelling together, is the chief point of view in it.-P. [Hudibras's character is that of an enthusiast for liberty, and so high and general a one, that it carries him on to attempt even the delivery of bears that are in chains. -Mr. L.] "I can't conceive how Dinocrates could ever have carried his proposal of forming Mount Athos into a statue of Alexander the Great, into execution."-For my part, I have long since had an idea how that might be done; and if anybody would make me a present of a Welch mountain, and pay the workmen, I would undertake to see it executed. I have quite formed it, sometimes, in my imagination. The figure must be in a reclining posture, because of the hollowing that would otherwise be necessary, and for the city's being in one hand. It should be a rude unequal hill, and might be helped with groves of trees for the eyebrows, and a wood for the hair. The natural green turf should be left wherever it would be necessary to represent the ground he reclines on. It should be contrived so that the true point of view should be at a considerable distance. When you were near it, it should still have the appearance of a rough mountain; but at the proper distance such a rising should be the leg, and such another an arm. It would be best if there were a river, or rather a lake, at the bottom of it, for the rivulet that came through his other hand, to tumble down the hill, and discharge itself into it.*-P. The lights and shades in gardening are managed by disposing the thick grove work, the thin, and the openings, in a proper manner: of which the eye is generally the properest judge. Those clumps of trees are like the groups in pictures, (speaking of some in his own garden.)- You may distance things by darkening them, and by narrowing the plantation more and more towards the end, in the same manner as they do in painting, and as 'tis executed in the little cypress walk to that obelisk.-P. There are several passages in Hobbes's translation of Homer, which, if they had been writ on purpose to ridicule that poet, would have done very well.-P. [He gave several instances of it, and particularly in the very first lines, the Ichor, and the two tumblers at a feast.-Spence.] In looking on the portrait of the Pope by Carlo Maratti, at Lord Burlington's, he called it" the best portrait in the world. I really do think him as good a painter as any of them," were his words.-P. When the Marquis Maffei was at Mr. Pope's at Twick * It is somewhat singular that Mr. Pope should have thought this mad project practicable, but it appears there are still persons who dream of such extravagant and fruitless undertakings. "Some modern Dinocrates had suggested to Buonaparte to have cut from the mountain of the Simplon an immense colossal figure, as a sort of Genius of the Alps. This was to have been of such enormous size, that all the passengers should have passed between its legs and arms, in a zig-zag direction.”—Mrs. Baillies's Tour on the Continent, 1819, 8vo. p. 218. enham, the latter showed him the design of an Ancient Theatre at Verona. The Marquis said the artist had done very well, but that it was all a whim, (Favola !) Mr. Pope begged his pardon, assured him that 'twas a reality; and convinced him that it was so, from an allowed old writer on the Antiquities of Verona.-P. Lord Bolingbroke is not deep either in pictures, statues, or architecture.-P. [I had been asking him what that Lord's opinion was of the Achilles' Story, among the sculpture at Cardinal Polignac's; and he said that Lord B. spoke but lowly of them.-Spence.] Speaking of Dr. A. Clarke, he said, "The man will never be contented! He has already twice as much as I; for I am told he has a good thousand pound a year, and yet he is as eager for more preferment as ever he was.— "Let Clarke make half his life the poor's support, Was a couplet in the manuscript for the fourth book of the Dunciad: but I believe I shall omit it; though, if rightly understood, it has more of commendation than satire in it. -The best time for telling a friend of any fault he has, is while you are commending him; that it may have the more influence upon him. And this I take to be the true meaning of the character which Persius gives of Horace :— "Omne vafer vitium ridenti Flaccus amico : Tangit; et admissus circum præcordia ludit.”—Pope. I had all the subscription money clear, for the Iliad, and Tonson was at all the expense of printing, paper, &c. for the copy.-An author who is at all the expenses of publishing, ought to clear two-thirds of the whole profit into his own pocket.-P. [For instance, as he explained it, in a piece of one thousand copies, at three shillings each to the common buyer; the whole sale at that rate, will bring in one hundred and fifty pounds; the expense therefore to the author, for printing, paper, publishing, selling, and advertising, should be but fifty pounds, and his clear gains should be one hundred pounds.*-Spence.] Mr. Pope's not being richer may be easily accounted for. -He never had any love for money:† and though he was not extravagant in anything, he always delighted, when he had any sum to spare, to make use of it in giving, lending, building, and gardening; for those were the ways in which he disposed of all the overplus of his income.-If he was extravagant in anything it was in his grotto, for that, from first to last, cost him above a thousand pounds.-Mrs. Blount. "What is your opinion of placing prepositions at the end of a sentence?"-It is certainly wrong: but I have * There must be some mistake in this statement of Mr. Spence's. Did not Mr. Pope mean that an author should clear two-thirds of the profits rather than of the whole proceeds of a book? Mr. Spence's after experience must surely have set him right upon this subject, although he was a successful author, having cleared one thousand five hundred pounds by his Polymetis alone! In these degenerate times, I believe, very few writers have been enabled to clear onethird of the whole proceeds of the most successful publication, except in some very few cases, where the copy-right has been sold for a very large sum.-Editor. + This does not appear to be true, Pope himself professed to be careless about wealth: but he seems ever to have been solicitous to accumulate it, and risked his money on all kinds of securities for this purpose. He was ostentatious too, yet mean; and the whole of this statement of Mrs. Blount's is a greater proof of her partiality than of her love of truth.-Editor. |