superior charms, revived all his tenderness and admiration, and suggested this gay and pleasing effusion.

In some fair evening, on your elbow laid,
You dream of triumphs in the rural shade ;
In pensive thought recall the fancy'd scene,
See coronations rise on every green.

Before you pass th' imaginary sights

Of lords, and earls, and dukes, and garter'd knights,
While the spread fan o'ershades your closing eyes,-
Then give one flirt, and all the vision flies.

Thus vanish sceptres, coronets, and balls,

And leave you in lone woods or empty walls!

To Martha Blount is dedicated the " Epistle on the Characters of Women;" which concludes with this elegant and flattering address to her.

O! blest with temper, whose unclouded ray

Can make to-morrow cheerful as to-day;
She who can love a sister's charms, or hear
Sighs for a daughter with unwounded ear;
She who ne'er answers till a husband cools,
Or if she rules him, never shows she rules;
Charms by accepting, by submitting sways,
Yet has her humour most when she obeys;

Let fops or fortune fly which way they will,
Disdains all loss of tickets or codille;

Spleen, vapours, or small-pox, above them all,

And mistress of herself though China fall.

The allusion to her affection for her sister, is just and beautiful; but the compliment to her temper is understood not to have been quite merited-perhaps, was rather administered as a corrective; for Martha was weak and captious; and Pope, who had suffered what torments a female wit could inflict, possibly found that peevishness and folly have also their désagrémens. He complains frequently, in his letters to Martha, of the difficulty of pleasing her, or understanding her wishes. Methinks, had I been a poet, or Pope, I would rather have been led about in triumph by the spirited, accomplished Lady Mary, than "chained to the footstool of two paltry girls."

They used to employ him constantly in the most trifling and troublesome commissions, in which he had seldom even the satisfaction of contenting them. He was accustomed to send

them little presents almost daily, as concerttickets, ribbons, fruit, &c. He once sent them a basket of peaches, which, with an affectation of careless gallantry, were separately wrapped in part of the manuscript translation of the Iliad : and he humbly requests them to return the wrappers, as he had no other copy. On another occasion he sent them fans, on which were inscribed his famous lines,

“Come, gentle air,” th' Eolian shepherd said, &c.

Martha Blount was not so kind or so attentive to Pope in his last illness as she ought to have been. His love for her seemed blended with his frail existence; and when he was scarcely sensible to any thing else in the world, he was still conscious of the charm of her presence.

"When

"it was

she came into the room," says Spence, enough to give a new turn to his spirits, and a temporary strength to him."

She survived him eighteen years, and died unmarried at her house in Berkeley Square, in 1762. She is described, about that time, as a little, fair,

prim old woman, very lively, and inclined to gossip. Her undefined connexion with Pope, though it afforded matter for mirth and wonder, never affected her reputation while living; and has rendered her name as immortal as our language and our literature. One cannot help wishing that she had been more interesting, and more worthy of her fame.

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CHAPTER XVI.

POPE AND LADY M. W. MONTAGU.

IN the same year with Martha Blount, and about the same age, died Lady Mary W. Montagu. Every body knows that she was one of Pope's early loves. She had, for several years, suspended his attachment to his first favourites, the Blounts; and she really deserved the preference. But the issue of this romantic attachment was the most bitter, the most irreconcilable enmity. The cause did not proceed so much from any one particular offence on either side, but rather from a multitude of trifling causes, arising naturally out of the characters of both.