We may imagine Pope, during his occasional visits to London, looking in at Lintot's to see what was coming out new, or spending a morning with Swift at his lodgings; with Bolingbroke; or with Gay, at the Duke of Queensbury's; with Lord Burlington, or Lord Halifax; and in the evening meeting in full conclave all the wits and philosophers of the time, at Will's Coffee-house, or at Button's, to which the company which used to meet at Will's had been transferred by the influence of Addison. This was also called the Hanover Club, because the members adhered to the Whig principles and the house of Hanover. But Pope was equally welcome at the Tory Club, which had been constituted by his great friends, Bolingbroke and Harley, on the downfall of the Whigs at the peace of Utrecht, in opposition to the Kit-cat Club, and where these noblemen, their great champion Swift, Sir William Wyndham, Lord Bathurst, Dr. Arbuthnot, and other men of note of that party assembled. This was called the October Club, from the month in which the great alteration in the ministry took place. Later, when the dissensions arose between Harley and Bolingbroke, a more exclusively literary club was formed, of which Swift, Gay, Parnell, and Arbuthnot were members. This was the Scriblerus Club, amid whose convivialities originated the History of Martinus Scriblerus; the Discourse on the Bathos, and Gulliver's Travels.
At all these places, Pope, who, having friends of all parties, would not commit himself to any political party, was always welcome, though the casual influence of party did not fail to take its effect, and do the work of estrangement among many of the leading spirits of the time. Pope always professed to hold Whig principles; but, in fact, there was little distinction of political principle at that period, the chief difference being that of mere party. To the nation and its interests, it was of little consequence what leader was in power.
Amid all the convivialities, the excitements of wine, wit, and conversation, which so many meetings of celebrated men opened to Pope, he began to find himself growing dissipated, and his health suffering. His wise old friend, Sir William Trumbull, warned him of his danger with an affectionate earnestness, and it is supposed with due effect. "I now come," said he, "to what is of vast moment—I mean, the preservation of your health, and beg of you earnestly to get out of all tavern company, and fly away tanquam ex incendio. What a misery it is for you to be destroyed by the foolish kindness—it is all one, real or pretended—of those who are able to bear the poison of bad wine, and to engage you in so unequal a combat. As to Homer, by all I can learn, your business is done; therefore come away, and take a little time to breathe in the country. I beg now for my own sake, and much more for yours. Methinks Mr. ——has said to you more than once,
'Heu! fuge, nati deâ, teque his, ait, eripe flammis.'"
Pope felt the justice of this call, and obeyed. It was not, however, without a lingering and reverted look, as a letter of his to Jervas testifies. "I can not express how I long to renew our old intercourse and conversation; our morning conference in bed in the same room, our evening walks in the Park, our amusing voyages on the water, our philosophical suppers, our lectures, our dissertations, our gravities, our fooleries, or what not."
It appears that not merely Jervas, Parnell, Garth, Rowe, and others of like respectable character, were his companions in the amusements referred to, but that, unfortunately for him, he had fallen into the company of the dissolute Earl of Warwick, Addison's son-in-law, and of Colley Cibber; who, availing themselves of his vivacity, laid a deliberate plan to engage him in an affair derogatory to his reputation. But he cut wisely these connections, and London, with a valediction to be found in his verses written in the character of a philosophical rake:
"Dear, damned, distracting town, farewell
Thy fools no more I'll tease," &c.
* … * … * … *
"To drink and droll be Rowe allowed
Till the third watchman toll;
Let Jervas gratis paint, and Froude
Save threepence and his soul.
"Farewell Arbuthnot's raillery
On every learned sot;
And Garth, the best good Christian he,
Although he knows it not.
"Lintot, farewell! thy bard must go:
Farewell, unhappy Tonson!
Heaven gives thee for thy loss of Rowe,
Lean Phillips and fat Johnson.
"Why should I stay? both parties rage;
My vixen mistress squalls;
The wits in envious feuds engage,
And Homer—damn him—calls."
Here, then, ends Pope's town life, or that part of his life when he gave himself most up to it. We now accompany him to his new and his last residence, his beloved Twickenham, or Twitenham, as he used to write it.
It seems that Pope did not purchase the freehold of the house and grounds at Twickenham, but only a long lease. He took his father and mother along with him. His father died there the year after, but his mother continued to live till 1733, when she died at the great age of ninety-three. For twenty years she had the singular satisfaction of seeing her son the first poet of his age; caressed by the greatest men of the time, courted by princes, and feared by all the base. No parents ever found a more tender and dutiful son. With him they shared in honor the ease and distinction he had acquired. They were the cherished objects of his home. Swift paid him no false compliment when he said, in condoling with him on his mother's death, "You are the most dutiful son I have ever known or heard of, which is a felicity not happening to one in a million."
The property at Twickenham is properly described by Roscoe as lying on both sides of the highway, rendering it necessary for him to cross the road to arrive at the higher and more ornamental part of his gardens. In order to obviate this inconvenience, he had recourse to the expedient of excavating a passage under the road from one part of his grounds to the other, a fact to which he alludes in these lines:
"Know all the toil the heavy world can heap
Rolls o'er my grotto, nor disturbs my sleep."
The lower part of these grounds, in which his house stood, constituted, in fact, only the sloping bank of the river, by much the smaller portion of his territory. The passage, therefore, was very necessary to that far greater part, which was his wilderness, shrubbery, forest, and every thing, where he chiefly planted and worked. This passage he formed into a grotto, having a front of rude stone-work opposite to the river, and decorated within with spars, ores, and shells. Of this place he has himself left this description:
"I have put the last hand to my works of this kind, in happily finishing the subterranean way and grotto. I found there a spring of the clearest water, which falls in a perpetual rill, that echoes through the cavern night and day. From the River Thames you see through my arch, up a walk of the wilderness, to a kind of open temple wholly composed of shells in the rustic manner; and from that distance under the temple, you look down through a sloping arcade of trees, and see the sails on the river passing suddenly and vanishing, as through a perspective glass. When you shut the door of this grotto, it becomes on the instant, from a luminous room, a camera obscura, on the walls of which all the objects of the river, hills, woods, and boats are forming a moving picture, in their visible radiations; and when you have a mind to light it less, it affords you a very different scene. It is finished with shells, interspersed with looking-glass in regular forms, and in the ceiling is a star of the same material, at which, when a lamp of an orbicular figure of thin alabaster is hung in the middle, a thousand pointed rays glitter, and are reflected over the place. There are connected to this grotto, by a narrow passage, two porches, one toward the river, of smooth stones, full of light and open; the other toward the garden, shadowed with trees, rough with shells, flints, and iron ore. The bottom is paved with simple pebbles, as is also the adjoining walk up the wilderness to the temple, in the natural taste, agreeing not ill with the little dripping murmur, and the aquatic idea of the whole place. It wants nothing to complete it but a good statue with an inscription, like that beautiful antique one which you know I am