To rock the cradle of reposing age, With lenient arts extend a mother's breath, Make languor smile, and smooth the bed of death; Explore the thought, explain the asking eye, And keep awhile one parent from the sky. Here at least he is sincere beyond suspicion; and we know from unimpeachable testimony that the sentiment so perfectly expressed was equally exemplified in his life. It sounds easy, but unfortunately the ease is not always proved in practice, for a man of genius to be throughout their lives an unmixed comfort to his parents. It is unpleasant to remember that a man so accessible to tender emotions should jar upon us by his language about women generally. Byron countersigns the opinion of Bolingbroke that he knew the sex well; but testimony of that kind hardly prepossesses us in his favour. In fact, the school of Bolingbroke and Swift, to say nothing of Wycherley, was hardly calculated to generate a chivalrous tone of feeling. His experience of Lady Mary gave additional bitterness to his sentiments. Pope, in short, did not love good women-- Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear, And best distinguished as black, brown, or fair, as he impudently tells a lady--as a man of genius ought; and women have generally returned the dislike. Meanwhile the vein of benevolence shows itself unmistakably in Pope's language about his friends. Thackeray seizes upon this point of his character in his lectures on the English Humourists, and his powerful, if rather too favourable, description brings out forcibly the essential tenderness of the man who, during the lucid intervals of his last illness, was 'always saying something kindly of his present or absent friends.' Nobody, as has often been remarked, has paid so many exquisitely turned compliments. There is something which rises to the dog-like in his affectionate admiration for Swift and for Bolingbroke, his rather questionable 'guide, philosopher, and friend.' Whenever he speaks of a friend, he is sure to be felicitous. There is Garth, for example-- The best good Christian he, Although he knows it not. There are beautiful lines upon Arbuthnot, addressed as-- Friend to my life, which did not you prolong, The world had wanted many an idle song. Or we may quote, though one verse has been spoilt by familiarity, the lines in which Bolingbroke is coupled with Peterborough:-- There St. John mingles with my friendly bowl The feast of reason and the flow of soul; And he whose lightning pierced the Iberian lines Now farms my quincunx, and now ranks my vines, And tames the genius of the stubborn plain Almost as quickly as he conquered Spain. Or again, there are the verses in which he anticipates the dying words attributed to Pitt:--