persuade his friends and himself that cares and passions could be
excluded.

A grotto is not often the wish or pleasure of all Englishmen, who
has more frequent need to solicit than exclude the sun; but Pope's
excavation was requisite as an entrance to his garden; and, as some
men try to be proud of their defects, he extracted an ornament from
an inconvenience, and vanity produced a grotto where necessity
enforced a passage. It may be frequently remarked of the studious
and speculative, that they are proud of trifles, and that their
amusements seem frivolous and childish. Whether it be that men,
conscious of great reputation, think themselves above the reach of
censure, and safe in the admission of negligent indulgences, or that
mankind expect from elevated genius a uniformity of greatness, and
watch its degradation with malicious wonder, like him who, having
followed with his eye an eagle into the clouds, should lament that
she ever descended to a perch.

While the volumes of his "Homer" were annually published, he
collected his former works (1717) into one quarto volume, to which
he prefixed a preface, written with great sprightliness and
elegance, which was afterwards reprinted, with some passages
subjoined that he at first omitted. Other marginal additions of the
same kind he made in the later editions of his poems. Waller
remarks, that poets lose half their praise, because the reader knows
not what they have blotted. Pope's voracity of fame taught him the
art of obtaining the accumulated honour both of what he had
published, and of what he had suppressed. In this year his father
died suddenly, in his seventy-fifth year, having passed twenty-nine
years in privacy. He is not known but by the character which his