sessed great influence over him, and though she treated him with great neglect for some time previous to his death, he left her the greater part of his property. With this temporary exception, those to whom Pope was attached, remained his warm friends to the last; and Bolingbroke, who wept over him in his last illness, said, 'I never knew in my life a man that had so tender a heart for his particular friends, or more general friendship for mankind.' Having discovered, however, after the death of Pope, whom he had commissioned to procure a few impressions of his Patriot King, that he had ordered one thousand five hundred copies to be privately printed, Bolingbroke was so enraged at the transaction, that he exerted his utmost efforts to blast the memory of the man over whom he had so lately shed tears of affection and regret. For this artifice, of which the motive is not apparent, Warburton attempted to apologize; but in so unsatisfactory a manner, that it produced an answer, by Mallet, in A Letter to the most Impudent Man living.
We conclude our memoir of this paradoxical character, with the following anecdotes respecting him:—Lord Halifax having expressed himself dissatisfied with several passages in Pope's translation of the Iliad, the latter observed to Garth, that, as he could not see where any alteration could be made for the better, his lordship's observation had laid him under some difficulty. 'All that you need do,' said Garth, laughing, 'is to leave them just as they are; call on Lord Halifax two or three months hence, thank him for his kind observations on those passages, and then read them to him as altered.' Pope followed his advice, waited on Lord Halifax some time after, said he hoped his lordship would find his objections to those passages removed, read them to him exactly as they were at first, and his lordship was extremely pleased with them, and cried out, 'ay, now they are perfectly right; nothing can be better.'
On Pope's receiving, at his house, the Prince of Wales, with the most dutiful expression of attachment, the former remarked, 'how shall we reconcile your love to a prince with your professed indisposition to kings, since princes will be kings in time?' 'Sir,' replied the poet, 'I consider royalty under that noble and authorized type of the lion; while he is young, and before his nails are grown, he may be approached and caressed with safety and pleasure.' During his last illness, a squabble happening between his two physicians, Dr. Burton and Dr. Thompson, who mutually charged each other with hastening the death of their patient by improper prescriptions, Pope silenced them by saying, 'gentlemen, I only learn by your discourse that I am in a dangerous way; therefore all I now ask is, that the following epigram may be added, after my death, to the next edition of The Dunciad, by way of postscript—
Dunces rejoice, forgive all censures past,
The greatest dunce has kill'd your foe at last.
Pope, though some have attributed them to Young, is also said to have composed, on being asked for an extempore couplet, by lord Chesterfield, the following lines, with the pencil of that nobleman:—
Accept a miracle, instead of wit
See two dull lines with Stanhope's pencil writ.
