From this it would seem that not only Mother Huff’s, but others of these apparently innocent places for refreshment and recreation (so-called tea and bun houses), with their fair bowling-greens, and garden bowers, for summer evenings’, and Sunday afternoons’ rest and pleasure, were included in the general blight which the drastic measures of the magistrates at Hicks’s Hall had inflicted on Well Walk and its neighbourhood. We recognise the reason for this measure when we learn that many of their proprietors had succeeded, through a direct infringement of the law, in obtaining licenses for the sale of wine and punch, and in this way tea-houses had become sources of dissipation and vice. In 1744, Pope, whose life had been one long illness, finally disappeared from the Well Walk, where with Murray and so many other wits and celebrities he had shared with the lighter crowd in the fashions and follies of the place—the last but one of that bright galaxy of literary stars in which it had been his privilege to shine and mingle. He died, to the regret of many admirers and the sincere sorrow of his friends. With all his faults—and they were flagrant—there must have been something lovable and sympathetic in his nature, to have won and kept the life-long friendship of men with minds and dispositions so differently constituted as Dr. Arbuthnot’s, Dean Swift’s, John Gay’s, and Mr. Murray’s. His love for his mother and Gay was almost feminine in its steadfastness and tenderness, and I fancy we may discover something noble in his self-restraint when tending the latter from time to time during his illness at Hampstead, for, though suffering himself from the same circumstances, he never seems to have alluded to his own share of loss in the South Sea Bubble. How affectionately each of the three ‘Yahoos’—Jonathan Swift, John Gay, and Pope—alludes to the time they spent together at Twickenham, and how much of real pathos he, the most artificial of poets, crushed, as it were, into the two last lines of his intended epitaph on Gay!— ‘For all thy blameless life the sole return, My verse, and Queensberry’s tears above thy urn.’ Everyone knew of the misunderstanding between him and Addison from the commencement of his career; yet in expressing his regret for the essayist’s death, he observed there was in Addison’s conversation ‘more charm than he had heard in any other man’s.’ High praise from a supposed adversary, but praise that was assuredly due to him.