to the great and powerful, and he obtained very valuable preferments
in the Church. Not long after Pope was returning home from a visit
in a friend's coach, which, in passing a bridge, was overturned into
the water; the window's were closed, and, being unable to force them
open, he was in danger of immediate death, when the postillion
snatched him out by breaking the glass, of which the fragments cut
two of his fingers in such a manner that he lost their use.

Voltaire, who was then in England, sent him a letter of consolation.
He had been entertained by Pope at his table, where he talked with
so much grossness that Mrs. Pope was driven from the room. Pope
discovered, by a trick, that he was a spy for the Court, and never
considered him as a man worthy of confidence. He soon afterwards
(1727) joined with Swift, who was then in England, to publish three
volumes of "Miscellanies," in which, amongst other things, he
inserted the "Memoirs of a Parish Clerk," in ridicule of Burnet's
importance in his own history, and a "Debate upon Black and White
Horses," written in all the formalities of a legal process by the
assistance, as is said, of Mr. Fortescue, afterwards Master of the
Rolls. Before these "Miscellanies" is a preface signed by Swift and
Pope, but apparently written by Pope, in which he makes a ridiculous
and romantic complaint of the robberies committed upon authors by
the clandestine seizure and sale of their papers. He tells in
tragic strains how "the cabinets of the sick and the closets of the
dead have been broken open and ransacked," as if those violences
were often committed for papers of uncertain and accidental value
which are rarely provoked by real treasures--as if epigrams and
essays were in danger where gold and diamonds are safe. A cat
hunted for his musk is, according to Pope's account, but the emblem
of a wit winded by booksellers. His complaint, however, received