Yet they did; and so this dauntless young fellow, not over-critical in his Greek knowledge, but with an abounding sense of the marvellous beauties that lay in the old Homeric hexameters, {44} sets about his task; and after five years' toil accomplishes it in such a way as makes it probable that there can never be an English Homer that will quite match it. There are juster ones; there are faithfuller ones; but not one that has been so enduringly popular. Steeping himself in the mythologies and the Trojan traditions, he has grafted thereupon his stock of British word-craft: Ajax, Achilles, and the rest range to their places in the martial clank of his couplets, with a life and charm which, if not imbued with Homeric limpidities and melodies, possess an engaging picturesqueness that belongs to few long English epics. And the poem took: that trenchant Dean Swift strode into the ante-rooms of the great men of Court, and swore that he must have a hundred or a thousand pounds subscribed for the new Homer of Mr. Pope; and he got it; Mr. Pope was the fashion. Up to that time in the whole history of English literature there had been no such payment for literary wares as accrued to the author of the new Homer--the sum reaching, for both Iliad and {45} Odyssey, some £9,000; with which the shrewd poet bought an annuity (cheaper then than now) of some £500, and a long lease of the Twickenham house and gardens; where, thereafter, amidst his willows and his grottos, he lived until his death. The house[18]--if indeed any part be now the same--has been built over and enlarged, and has a jaunty suburban villa pretension that does not look Homeric; but the grotto, or tunnel, which he cut under the high road running parallel with the Thames, and through which he might pass unobserved from garden to garden and from his house to the river, is still to be seen there; and trees of his planting still hang their limbs over the pretty greensward that goes down in gentle slope to the Thames banks. He put the same polish upon his grounds he did upon his verse: his grotto flashed with curious spars, glass jewels, and prismatic tinted shells; his walks were decorously {46} paved and rolled and his turf shorn to a nicety. He entertained there in his thrifty way, watching his butler very sharply, and by reason of his infirmities, was very measured in his wine-drinking. Swift, who used to come and pass days with him, may have made the glasses jingle: and there were other worthy friends who, when they came for a dinner, kept the poet in a tremor of unrest. The Prince of Wales, after the Georges of Hanover had come in, used sometimes to honor the poet with a visit; and the rich and powerful Bolingbroke--what time he lived at Battersea--used to come up in his barge, landing at the garden entrance--as most great visitors did--and discuss with him those faiths, dogmas, truisms, and splendid generalities which afterward took form in the famous _Essay on Man_.