Rape of the Lock and Other Poems | Page 5

Pope, who had been encouraged by
Addison to begin his long task, felt at once that he had been betrayed.
His resentment was all the more bitter since he fancied that Addison,
now at the height of his power and prosperity in the world of letters and
of politics, had attempted to ruin an enterprise on which the younger
man had set all his hopes of success and independence, for no better
reason than literary jealousy and political estrangement. We know now
that Pope was mistaken, but there was beyond question some reason at
the time for his thinking as he did, and it is to the bitterness which this
incident caused in his mind that we owe the famous satiric portrait of
Addison as Atticus.

The last volume of the 'Iliad' appeared in the spring of 1720, and in it
Pope gave a renewed proof of his independence by dedicating the
whole work, not to some lord who would have rewarded him with a
handsome present, but to his old acquaintance, Congreve, the last
survivor of the brilliant comic dramatists of Dryden's day. And now
resting for a time from his long labors, Pope turned to the adornment
and cultivation of the little house and garden that he had leased at
Twickenham.
Pope's father had died in 1717, and the poet, rejecting politely but
firmly the suggestion of his friend, Atterbury, that he might now turn
Protestant, devoted himself with double tenderness to the care of his
aged and infirm mother. He brought her with him to Twickenham,
where she lived till 1733, dying in that year at the great age of
ninety-one. It may have been partly on her account that Pope pitched
upon Twickenham as his abiding place. Beautifully situated on the
banks of the Thames, it was at once a quiet country place and yet of
easy access to London, to Hampton Court, or to Kew. The five acres of
land that lay about the house furnished Pope with inexhaustible
entertainment for the rest of his life. He "twisted and twirled and
harmonized" his bit of ground "till it appeared two or three sweet little
lawns opening and opening beyond one another, the whole surrounded
by impenetrable woods." Following the taste of his times in landscape
gardening, he adorned his lawns with artificial mounds, a shell temple,
an obelisk, and a colonnade. But the crowning glory was the grotto, a
tunnel decorated fantastically with shells and bits of looking-glass,
which Pope dug under a road that ran through his grounds. Here Pope
received in state, and his house and garden was for years the center of
the most brilliant society in England. Here Swift came on his rare visits
from Ireland, and Bolingbroke on his return from exile. Arbuthnot,
Pope's beloved physician, was a frequent visitor, and Peterborough, one
of the most distinguished of English soldiers, condescended to help lay
out the garden. Congreve came too, at times, and Gay, the laziest and
most good-natured of poets. Nor was the society of women lacking at
these gatherings. Lady Mary Wortley Montague, the wittiest woman in
England, was often there, until her bitter quarrel with the poet; the grim
old Duchess of Marlborough appeared once or twice in Pope's last

years; and the Princess of Wales came with her husband to inspire the
leaders of the opposition to the hated Walpole and the miserly king.
And from first to last, the good angel of the place was the blue-eyed,
sweet-tempered Patty Blount, Pope's best and dearest friend.
Not long after the completion of the 'Iliad', Pope undertook to edit
Shakespeare, and completed the work in 1724. The edition is, of course,
quite superseded now, but it has its place in the history of
Shakespearean studies as the first that made an effort, though irregular
and incomplete, to restore the true text by collation and conjecture. It
has its place, too, in the story of Pope's life, since the bitter criticism
which it received, all the more unpleasant to the poet since it was in the
main true, was one of the principal causes of his writing the 'Dunciad'.
Between the publication of his edition of Shakespeare, however, and
the appearance of the 'Dunciad', Pope resolved to complete his
translation of Homer, and with the assistance of a pair of friends, got
out a version of the Odyssey in 1725. Like the 'Iliad', this was
published by subscription, and as in the former case the greatest men in
England were eager to show their appreciation of the poet by filling up
his lists. Sir Robert Walpole, the great Whig statesman, took ten copies,
and Harley, the fallen Tory leader, put himself, his wife, and his
daughter down for sixteen. Pope made, it is said, about £3700 by this
work.
In