acter, with the eagerness of a scientific student. His favourite quotation, according to Mrs. Piozzi, was Pope's saying about the 'proper study of mankind.' The phrase, however, was taking a meaning rather different from that which it had borne in the days of Pope. The typical man of Pope's circle was to be found in Courts and at Ministers' levées. He was the person to be lectured upon manners by Chesterfield and initiated into Machiavellian worldly wisdom. Johnson, as the famous letter to Chesterfield shows, expressed among other things the intrusion of a new social element; the rise of Grub Street to consideration, if not respect. He and his companions had known the world upon which Pope and his friends looked down with scorn, the world of sponging-houses and bailiffs and translators kept in Curll's garrets. The study of 'human nature,' as Johnson, and Fielding, and Hogarth, and their contemporaries understood it, had to take into account the life of London slums, and to consider a good many bald facts, coarse and repulsive enough, which their predecessors had regarded as beneath the notice of a gentleman. Dimly, too, they became aware of the passions which were leading, though they knew it not, to
