dismissed so lightly, but what can I do? From the Duchess of Marlborough Pope is said to have received a sum of money, sometimes stated at 1,000 pounds and sometimes at 3,000 pounds, for consenting to suppress his description of her as Atossa, which, none the less, he published. I do not believe the story; money passed between the parties and went to Miss Martha Blount, but it must have been for some other consideration. Sarah Jennings was no fool, and loved money far too well to give it away without security; and how possibly could she hope by a cash payment to erase from the tablets of a poet's memory lines dictated by his hate, or bind by the law of honour a man capable of extorting blackmail? Then Pope quarrelled most terribly with the elder Miss Blount, who, he said, used to beat her mother; then he quarrelled with the mother because she persisted in living with the daughter and pretending to be fond of her. As for his quarrels with the whole tribe of poor authors, are they not writ large in the four books of the _Dunciad_? Mr. Swinburne is indeed able to find in some, at all events, of these quarrels a species of holy war, waged, as he says, in language which is at all events strong, 'against all the banded bestialities of all dunces and all dastards, all blackguardly blockheads and all blockheaded blackguards.' I am sorry to be unable to allow myself to be wound up in Mr. Swinburne's bucket to the height of his argument. There are two kinds of quarrels, the noble and the ignoble. When John Milton, weary and depressed for a moment in the battle he was fighting in the cause of an enlightened liberty and an instructed freedom, exclaims, with the sad prophet Jeremy, 'Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me, a man of strife and contention,' we feel the sublimity of the quotation, which would not be quite the case were the words uttered by an Irishman returning home with a broken head from Donnybrook Fair. The _Dunciad_ was quite uncalled- for. Even supposing that we admit that Pope was not the aggressor: 'The noblest answer unto such Is kindly silence when they brawl.'