Though the Twickenham home was on a great high road from London to Teddington and Hampton Court, and the greater high road of the river, it had, like all English suburban places now, its high enclosing walls that gave privacy; and the river shores had their skirting of rhododendrons and willows and great beds of laurestina, so that {47} the weak, misshapen poet might take his walks unobserved. He had his vanities, but he did not love to be pointed at. He carried a mind of extreme sensitiveness under that dwarfed figure; and is mad--maybe, sometimes, with destiny, that has crippled him so; and bites that thin lip of his till the blood starts. But he does not waste force or pride on repinings; he feels an altitude in that supple mind of his which lifts him above the bad lines of portraits or figures. He knows that the ready hand and brain, and the faculty of verse which comes tripping to his tongue, and the wit which flashes through and through his utterance, will make for him--has made for him--a path through whatever beleaguerments of sense, straight up and on to the gates of the Temple of Fame. [Sidenote: Pope's vanities.] We have had many vain men to encounter in these talks of ours--men assured of their own judgment and taste; but not one, I think, as yet, so thoroughly and highly conscious that his cleverness and scholarship and deftness and wit were as sure of their reward as the sun was sure to shine. I can fancy him pausing after having wrought {48} some splendid score of Homeric lines, which blaze and palpitate with new Greek fire: I can fancy him humming them over to himself--growing heated with the flames that flash and play in them--his slight, frail figure trembling with the rhythmic outburst, and he smiling serenely at a mastery which his will and wit have brought to such supreme pitch of excellence that no handling of English will go beyond it. _His Last Days._ [Sidenote: Last days of Pope.]