buildings, had been an indifferent action in another man, but that
in Pope, after the reciprocal kindness that had been exchanged
between them, it had been less easily excused.

Pope, in one of his letters, complaining of the treatment which his
poem had found, "owns that such critics can intimidate him, nay
almost persuade him, to write no more, which is a compliment this
age deserves." The man who threatens the world is always
ridiculous, for the world can easily go on without him, and in a
short time will cease to miss him. I have heard of an idiot, who
used to revenge his vexatious by lying all night upon the bridge.
"There is nothing," says Juvenal, "that a man will not believe in
his own favour." Pope had been flattered till he thought himself
one of the moving powers in the system of life. When he talked of
laying down his pen, those who sat round him entreated and implored;
and self-love did not suffer him to suspect that they went away and
laughed.

The following year deprived him of Gay, a man whom he had known
early, and whom he seemed to love with more tenderness than any
other of his literary friends. Pope was now forty-four years old,
an age at which the mind begins less easily to admit new confidence,
and the will to grow less flexible, and when, therefore, the
departure of an old friend is very acutely felt. In the next year
(1733) he lost his mother, not by an unexpected death, for she had
lasted to the age of ninety-three. But she did not die unlamented.
The filial piety of Pope was in the highest degree amiable and
exemplary. His parents had the happiness of living till he was at
the summit of poetical reputation, till he was at ease in his
fortune, and without a rival in his fame, and found no diminution of