And you, brave Cobham, to the latest breath, Shall feel the ruling passion strong in death; Such in those moments, as in all the past, 'Oh, save my country, Heaven!' shall be your last. Cobham's name, again, suggests the spirited lines-- Spirit of Arnall! aid me while I lie, Cobham's a coward, Polwarth is a slave, And Lyttelton a dark, designing knave; St. John has ever been a wealthy fool-- But let me add Sir Robert's mighty dull, Has never made a friend in private life, And was, besides, a tyrant to his wife. Perhaps the last compliment is ambiguous, but Walpole's name again reminds us that Pope could on occasion be grateful even to an opponent. 'Go see Sir Robert,' suggests his friend in the epilogue to the Satires; and Pope replies-- Seen him I have; but in his happier hour Of social pleasure, ill exchanged for power; Seen him uncumbered with the venal tribe Smile without art, and win without a bribe; Would he oblige me? Let me only find He does not think me what he thinks mankind; Come, come; at all I laugh, he laughs no doubt; The only difference is, I dare laugh out. But there is no end to the delicate flattery which may be set off against Pope's ferocious onslaughts upon his enemies. If one could have a wish for the asking, one could scarcely ask for a more agreeable sensation than that of being titillated by a man of equal ingenuity in caressing one's pet vanities. The art of administering such consolation is possessed only by men who unite such tenderness to an exquisitely delicate intellect. This vein of genuine feeling sufficiently redeems Pope's writings from the charge of a commonplace worldliness. Certainly he is not one of the 'genial' school, whose indiscriminate benevolence exudes over all that they touch. There is nothing mawkish in his philanthropy. Pope was, if anything, too good a hater; 'the portentous cub never forgives,' said Bentley; but kindliness is all the more impressive when not too widely diffused. Add to this his hearty contempt for pomposities, humbugs, and stupidities of all kinds, and above all the fine spirit of independence, in which we have again the real man, and which expresses itself in such lines as these: Oh, let me live my own, and die so too! (To live and die is all I have to do); Maintain a poet's dignity and ease, And see what friends and read what books I please. And we may admit that Pope, in spite of his wig and his stays, his vanities and his affectations, was in his way as fair an embodiment as we would expect of that 'plain living and high thinking' of which Wordsworth regretted the disappearance. The little cripple, diseased in mind and body, spiteful and occasionally brutal, had in him the spirit of a man. The monarch of the literary world was far from immaculate; but he was not without a dignity of his own.