trouble which he was preparing for his future biographers. The letters,
he thought, were good reading but not so good as he could make them, and
he set to work to improve them with all an artist's zeal, and without a
trace of a historian's care for facts. It was this which led him to
embody in his description of a rich fool's splendid house and park
certain unmistakable traces of a living nobleman's estate and to start
in genuine amazement and regret when the world insisted on identifying
the nobleman and the fool. And when Pope had once done a good piece of
work, he had all an artist's reluctance to destroy it. He kept bits of
verse by him for years and inserted them into appropriate places in his
poems. This habit it was that brought about perhaps the gravest charge
that has ever been made against Pope, that of accepting L1000 to
suppress a satiric portrait of the old Duchess of Marlborough, and yet
of publishing it in a revision of a poem that he was engaged on just
before his death. The truth seems to be that Pope had drawn this
portrait in days when he was at bitter enmity with the Duchess, and
after the reconcilement that took place, unwilling to suppress it
entirely, had worked it over, and added passages out of keeping with the
first design, but pointing to another lady with whom he was now at odds.
Pope's behavior, we must admit, was not altogether creditable, but it
was that of an artist reluctant to throw away good work, not that of a
ruffian who stabs a woman he has taken money to spare.

Finally Pope was throughout his life, and notably in his later years,
the victim of an irritable temper and a quick, abusive tongue. His
irritability sprang in part, we may believe, from his physical
sufferings, even more, however, from the exquisitely sensitive heart
which made him feel a coarse insult as others would a blow. And of the
coarseness of the insults that were heaped upon Pope no one except the
careful student of his life can have any conception. His genius, his