the sovereign whose family he more than any other man or set of men had seated firmly on the throne of England. His faults were many; his personal virtues perhaps but few. One great and consummate public virtue he certainly had: he was devoted to the interests of his country. In the building of Nelson's ships it was said that the oak of Houghton Woods excelled all other timber. Oak from the same woods was used to make musket-stocks for Wellington's soldiers in the long war against Napoleon. Walpole's own fibre was something like that of the oaks which grew on his domain. His policy on two of the most eventful occasions of his life has been amply justified by history. He was right in the principles of his Excise Bill; he was right in opposing the war policy of the Patriots. The very men who had leagued against him in both these instances acknowledged afterwards that he was right and that they were wrong. It was in an evil moment for himself that he yielded to the policy of the Patriots, and tried to carry on a war in which he had no sympathy, and from which he had no hope. He was a great statesman; almost, but not quite, a great man. [Sidenote: 1744--Death of Pope] Not very long before Walpole's death a star of all but {197} the first magnitude had set in the firmament of English literature. Alexander Pope died on May 30, 1744, at his house in Twickenham, where "Thames' translucent wave shines a broad mirror," to use his own famous words. He died quietly; death was indeed a relief to him from pain which he had borne with a patience hardly to be expected from one of so fitful a temper. Pope's life had been all a struggle against ill-health and premature decrepitude. He was deformed; he was dwarfish; he was miserably weak from his very boyhood; a rude breath of air made him shrink and wither; the very breezes of summer had peril in them for his singularly delicate constitution and ever-quivering nerves. He was but fifty-six years old when death set him free. Life had been for him a splendid success indeed, but the success had been qualified by much bitterness and pain. He was sensitive to the quick; he formed strong friendships, fierce and passionate enmities; and the friendships themselves turned only too often into enmities. Unsparing with the satire of his pen, he made enemies everywhere. He professed to be indifferent to the world's praise or censure, but he was nevertheless morbidly anxious to know what people said of him. He was as egotistic as Rousseau or Byron; but he had none of Byron's manly public spirit, and none of Rousseau's exalted love of humanity. Pope's place in English poetry may be taken now as settled. He stands high and stands firmly in the second class: that is, in the class just below Shakespeare and Milton and a very few others. He has been extravagantly censured and extravagantly praised. Byron at one time maintained that he was the greatest English poet, and many vehement