No More Learning

In these poems Pope was abused in the most unmeasured terms. His work
was styled a mere collection of libels; he had no invention except in
defamation; he was a mere pretender to genius. His morals were not left
unimpeached; he was charged with selling other men's work printed in his
name,--a gross distortion of his employing assistants in the translation
of the 'Odyssey',--he was ungrateful, unjust, a foe to human kind, an
enemy like the devil to all that have being. The noble authors, probably
well aware how they could give the most pain, proceeded to attack his
family and his distorted person. His parents were obscure and vulgar
people; and he himself a wretched outcast:

with the emblem of [his] crooked mind
Marked on [his] back like Cain by God's own hand.

And to cap the climax, as soon as these shameful libels were in print,
Lord Hervey bustled off to show them to the Queen and to laugh with her
over the fine way in which he had put down the bitter little poet.

In order to understand and appreciate Pope's reception of these attacks,
we must recall to ourselves the position in which he lived. He was a
Catholic, and I have already (Introduction, p. x) called attention to
the precarious, tenure by which the Catholics of his time held their
goods, their persons, their very lives, in security. He was the intimate
of Bolingbroke, of all men living the most detested by the court, and
his noble friends were almost without exception the avowed enemies of
the court party. Pope had good reason to fear that the malice of his
enemies might not be content to stop with abusive doggerel. But he was
not in the least intimidated. On the contrary, he broke out in a fine
flame of wrath against Lord Hervey, whom he evidently considered the
chief offender, challenged his enemy to disavow the 'Epistle', and on
his declining to do so, proceeded to make what he called "a proper
reply" in a prose 'Letter to a Noble Lord'. This masterly piece of
satire was passed about from hand to hand, but never printed. We are
told that Sir Robert Walpole, who found Hervey a convenient tool in
court intrigues, bribed Pope not to print it by securing a good position
in France for one of the priests who had watched over the poet's youth.
If this story be true, and we have Horace Walpole's authority for it, we
may well imagine that the entry of the bribe, like that of Uncle Toby's
oath, was blotted out by a tear from the books of the Recording Angel.

But Pope was by no means disposed to let the attacks go without an
answer of some kind, and the particular form which his answer took seems
to have been suggested by a letter from Arbuthnot. "I make it my last
request," wrote his beloved physician, now sinking fast under the
diseases that brought him to the grave, "that you continue that noble
disdain and abhorrence of vice, which you seem so naturally endued with,
but still with a due regard to your own safety; and study more to reform
than to chastise, though the one often cannot be effected without the
other. " "I took very kindly your advice," Pope replied, ". . . and it has
worked so much upon me considering the time and state you gave it in,
that I determined to address to you one of my epistles written by
piecemeal many years, and which I have now made haste to put together;
wherein the question is stated, what were, and are my motives of
writing, the objections to them, and my answers. " In other words, the
'Epistle to Arbuthnot' which we see that Pope was working over at the
date of this letter, August 25, 1734, was, in the old-fashioned phrase,
his 'Apologia', his defense of his life and work.

As usual, Pope's account of his work cannot be taken literally. A
comparison of dates shows that the 'Epistle' instead of having been
"written by piecemeal many years" is essentially the work of one
impulse, the desire to vindicate his character, his parents, and his
work from the aspersions cast upon them by Lord Hervey and Lady Mary.
The exceptions to this statement are two, or possibly three, passages
which we know to have been written earlier and worked into the poem with
infinite art.

The first of these is the famous portrait of Addison as Atticus. I have
already spoken of the reasons that led to Pope's breach with Addison
(Introduction, p. xv); and there is good reason to believe that this
portrait sprang directly from Pope's bitter feeling toward the elder
writer for his preference of Tickell's translation. The lines were
certainly written in Addison's lifetime, though we may be permitted to
doubt whether Pope really did send them to him, as he once asserted.
They did not appear in print, however, till four years after Addison's
death, when they were printed apparently without Pope's consent in a
volume of miscellanies.