In the _Penny London Advertiser_, under the date of June 13-15, 1744, and the heading ‘Home News,’ it is stated that ‘Last week the body of Mr. Pope was privately interred at Twickenham, when twelve men and twelve women were entirely new cloathed, and attended his corpse to the grave, pursuant to his will.’[265] No reference is made to his genius, no word is said of his works; nor does it appear that any personal friends attended his funeral. I have said that, owing to his deformity and other causes, his life had been pronounced one long disease. I wonder if his more robustly-constituted critics took this fact into consideration when sitting in judgment on the bitterness, irritability, and other sins of omission and commission of the man of whom the friends around his death-bed observed ‘that his humanity survived his understanding,’ and whom Gay had said ‘he loved as his own soul.’ Think of fifty-six years’ habitation of a misshapen, dwarfed, feeble body, in which he could never have known freedom from physical depression, and say how many of us under the same conditions might not have dentated sharpest incisors rather than wisdom-teeth. In 1748 Richardson, after eight years’ abstinence from novel-writing, produced his crowning work, ‘Clarissa Harlowe,’ a book that occasioned intenser excitement and more eager expectation than any work of fiction that had preceded it. To understand this, one has only to take a course of eighteenth-century belles-lettres, as exhibited in the romances of the magazines, and so-called memoirs, and narratives of the day.