Marlborough was an unmatched fighter; Bolingbroke was an imaginative and masterful statesman; there were thousands of able and strong warriors; but the one who was the most respected and feared was that tiny cripple whose life was a long disease. Alexander Pope was as frail a creature as ever managed to support existence; he rarely had a moment free from pain; he was so crooked and aborted that a good-hearted woman like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was surprised into a sudden fit of laughter when he proposed marriage to her. Yet how he was feared! The only one who could match him was that raging giant who wrote "Gulliver," and the two men wielded an essential power greater than that of the First Minister. The terrible Atossa, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, shrank from contact with Pope, while for a long time the ablest men of the political sets approached Swift like lackeys. One power was made manifest by the waspish verse-maker and the powerful satirist, and each was acknowledged as a sort of monarch. It would be like playing at paradoxes if I went on to adduce many mysteries and contradictions that strike us when we consider man's dominion over man. We can only come to the same conclusion if we bring forward a million of instances; we can only see that the whole human race, individual by individual, are separated one from the other by differences more or less minute, and wherever two human beings are placed together one must inevitably begin to assert mastery over the other. The method of self-assertion may be that of the athlete, or that of the intriguer, or that of the clear-sighted over the purblind, or that of the subtle over the simple; it matters not, the effort for mastery may be made either roughly or gently, or subtly, or even clownishly, but made it will be.