enumerating generous wines as among the latter influences, and
spirituous liquors among the former! His last words were, "There is
nothing that is meritorious but virtue and friendship; and, indeed,
friendship itself is only a part of virtue." Thus, "motionless and
moanless," without a word about Christ--the slightest syllable of
repentance--and with a scrap of heathen morality in his mouth, died the
brilliant Alexander Pope. Who is ready to say, "May my last end be like
his"? His favourite Martha Blount behaved, according to some accounts,
with disgusting unconcern on the occasion. So true it is, "there is no
friendship among the wicked," even although the heartless Bolingbroke,
too, was by, and seems to have succeeded in squeezing out some crocodile
tears, as he bent over the dying poet, and said, "O God! what is man?"
His remains were, according to his wish, deposited in Twickenham church,
near his parents, where the single letter P on the stone alone
distinguishes the spot.

Pope's character, apart from his poetry, which we intend criticising in
our next volume, was not specially interesting or elevated. He was a
spoiled child, a small self-tormentor,--full to bursting with petty
spites, mean animosities, and unfounded jealousies. While he sought,
with the fury of a pampered slave, to trample on those authors that were
beneath him in rank or in popularity, he could on all occasions fawn
with the sycophancy of a eunuch upon the noble, the rich, and the
powerful. Hazlitt speaks of Moore as a "pug-dog barking from the lap of
a lady of quality at inferior passengers." The description is far more
applicable to Pope. We have much allowance to make for the influence
exerted on his mind by his singularly crooked frame and sickly habit of
body, by his position as belonging to a proscribed faith, and by his
want of training in a public school; but after all these deductions, we
cannot but deplore the spectacle of one of the finest, clearest, and