It did not need much imagination to see them in the serene moonshine of a summer’s night, approaching from the Upper Flask towards the elms. They walked slowly across the turf, on which the moonlight played freaks of exaggeration with the crooked figure of the poet, and caricatured the wide-skirted coat, and three-cornered hat, and the little sword he wore. But Pope is familiar with the ugly shadow, knows himself superior to it, and is indifferent about it. Moreover, at noonday, into whatever assemblage of his fellow-men he takes that defective frame of his, the people crowd around him; or else, as when Sir Joshua Reynolds saw him at a book auction, they make a lane for him to walk through, he bowing prince-like right and left as he passes. I saw the same thing happen to plain little Charlotte Brontë at the Hanover Square Rooms, a compliment at least on a par with the homage shown to the physical beauty of the two lovely Irish girls, the Miss Gunnings. But to return to the Nine Elms. Here, with the stillness and solitary beauty of Nature, the wits became philosophers, and gave their spirits air and space in higher realms, and exercised themselves in profounder thoughts than any of the salons, clubs, courts of law, or the great town itself, suggested to them. At such times the gravest and profoundest cogitations of the human soul by some celestial attraction rise to the surface, and compel us to oracular confession. At such seasons one can imagine the nature of the little satirist enlarged, and softened, the spirit of the ‘Universal Prayer’ filling his heart, and the natural influence of their surroundings imparting a gravity, mingled with poetic exaltation, to their converse, that must have made it as solemn, and yet more sweet than Johnson’s talk with Boswell in Dr. Taylor’s garden on that serene autumn night, when, emboldened by his friend’s ‘placid and benignant frame of mind,’ his hereafter biographer ‘directed the discourse to a future state.’ Seated here, how often must Pope have seen the shades of friends and kindred spirits flit across the old familiar paths, ‘Under the silent blue, With all its diamonds trembling through and through,[287] Steele, Gay, Arbuthnot, and the rest, who, as we know, had slipped out of the daylight of the sweet landscape, years and years before, but now ‘Revisiting the glimpses of the moon,’