full: it would be hard to find a man so well entitled to notice by
his wit, that ever delighted so much in talking of his money. In
his Letters and in his poems, his garden and his grotto, his
quincunx and his vines, or some hints of his opulence, are always to
be found. The great topic of his ridicule is poverty; the crimes
with which he reproaches his antagonists are their debts, their
habitation in the Mint, and their want of a dinner. He seems to be
of an opinion not very uncommon in the world, that to want money is
to want everything. Next to the pleasure of contemplating his
possessions, seems to be that of enumerating the men of high rank
with whom he was acquainted, and whose notice he loudly proclaims
not to have been obtained by any practices of meanness or servility;
a boast which was never denied to be true, and to which very few
poets have ever aspired. Pope never set genius to sale; he never
flattered those whom he did not love, nor praised those whom he did
not esteem. Savage, however, remarked that he began a little to
relax his dignity when he wrote a distich for "his Highness's dog."

His admiration of the great seems to have increased in the advance
of life. He passed over peers and statesmen to inscribe his "Iliad"
to Congreve, with a magnanimity of which the praise had been
complete, had his friend's virtue been equal to his wit. Why he was
chosen for so great an honour, it is not now possible to know; there
is no trace in literary history of any particular intimacy between
them. The name of Congreve appears in the Letters among those of
his other friends, but without any observable distinction or
consequence. To his latter works, however, he took care to annex
names dignified with titles, but was not very happy in his choice;
for, except Lord Bathurst, none of his noble friends were such as
that a good man would wish to have his intimacy with them known to