My female friends, whose tender hearts
Have better learned to play their parts,
Receive the news in doleful dumps,
‘The Dean is dead (and what is trumps?) Dean Swift
The Lord have mercy on his soul.
(Ladies, I’ll venture for the vole.) in cards, a strong bid
Six deans, they say must bear the pall.
(I wish I knew what king to call.) (in cards)
“Madam, your husband will attend
The funeral of so good a friend?” ...
He loved the Dean. (I lead a heart.)
But dearest Friends, they say, must part.
His time was come, he ran his race;
We hope he’s in a better place.’
Why do we grieve that friends should die?
No loss more easy to supply.
One year is past; a different scene;
No further mention of the Dean;
Who now, alas, no more is missed
Than ifhe never did exist.Swift ends the poem with a defence of his record.
Alexander Pope
Self-defence also concludes the retrospective Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot ofAlexander
Pope (1688–1744). Pope had found that ‘the life of a wit is a warfare on earth’. He
had achieved fame at a precocious age, and envious enemies attacked him on
personal grounds. Pope is the first professional non-dramatic poet in English,
dedicating his life to the art of poetry, and winning an unprecedented position for
it. He lived by, as well as for, his art – a tribute both to its new status and to his
determination.
Pope was the son of a cloth merchant in the City. When a law was passed forbid-
ding Catholics to own a house within ten miles of London, the Popes moved,
settling in Windsor Forest, west of London. The boy attended schools, but tubercu-
losis of the bone at the age of 12 kept him at home, reading, writing and drawing;
and kept him small. The portrait painter Joshua Reynolds described Pope late in life
as ‘about four feet six high; very humpbacked and deformed’. Catholics (unlike
Dissenters) could not go to university, vote or have a public position, and were
taxed and penalized in other ways – they were not, for example, allowed to keep a
horse worth £10. Pope had to vacate his rented house whenever the court moved
upstream.
By cultivating his talent, Pope achieved a moral triumph over these formidable
disadvantages. At 12 he wrote a version of a poem by the Roman poet Horace. It
begins:
Happy the man whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.And ends:
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 189