How much more comfortable we feel under such a lesser luminary as James Montgomery! His sun is not so bright, does not glare with so fierce a ray, does not so light up every felon like a detective's lantern. But there is heat in it. We live and grow under it. Our hearts bless it; and we feel that it is indeed a pleasant thing to behold the light of the sun. We glow with gratitude to the Great Father, with love to the Great Family, and we find rest and peace ourselves. Pope resembled the great heathen moralists in nothing more than in the high-in fact, prime-place which he assigns to friendship in his category of virtues. A favourite argument in the early ages, and one which has been repeated frequently since, against the divine origin of Christianity, was that it did not expressly inculcate the duty and obligation of friendship. With regard to this virtue, the cultivated heathen intellect was possessed by a morbid sentimentalism, affected or really participated in by Pope and others in recent times, whose culture, like his, was essentially pagan. Piety also, as indicating affection for one's kindred, and, of course, closely allied to friendship, ranked very high among heathen virtues, especially as we see in their delineations of the heroic age; and piety in this sense was another strong feature of Pope's moral nature. The affection he bestowed was warmly reciprocated. His half-sister, Mrs Racket, evidently thought there never was such another wonderful man as her brother. And his love for his mother -who can forget that touching story? He had at one time an intense desire to travel, but he would not leave the poor old woman who lived only in his love. On no consideration would he remove himself for any length of time out of immediate reach of her. He might have gone with Berkeley to Italy, he might have visited Bolingbroke in France, he might have accepted Swift's frequent and urgent invitation to visit Ireland. But, though not unwilling to go, he framed excuses-chiefly the dread of sea-sickness. This may ulti mately have assumed even to himself, with his miserably weak and buckram-cased body, the form and consistence of a solid reason; but it was really his mother, coming well on to a hundred years of age, whose dull ears and lustreless eyes recognised her son long after they had ceased to recognise every other, that kept him at home. And as his piety or affection for his kindred was sincere, so was his affection for his friends. The querulous, peevish Pope never abandoned a friend. He stuck to them till they withdrew themselves. He says he abandoned Lady Mary Montagu, but this, perhaps, was a brag to hide an unpleasant blunder. He was in some respects a narrow man; his moral nature, as well as his body, had a twist in it. But his virtues were sincere, and had their roots firmly fixed in his very nature. His friendships were even generous. Wycherly ran off from him in a huff, and pooh-poohed him in society; but Pope, with his matchless satiric powers, and the fair scope for them in poor Wycherly's utterly undone character and bemuddled Muse, forgave the old scamp, spoke kindly of him, and visited him before he died. Gay, and Garth, and Arbuthnot, and Swift, and Peterborough, and Oxford, and Bolingbroke -with all these his friendship was romantically close and strong; of all worthy to be his friends he lost none but Addison, and of this the disgrace does not, as is now well known, rest with Pope. |