and by the enthusiastic national admiration which justly rewarded his great achievement of the Iliad, purchased that famous villa of Twickenham which his song and life celebrated; duteously bringing his old parents to live and die there, entertaining his friends there, and making occasional visits to London in his little chariot, in which Atterbury compared him to "Homer in a nutshell."
"Mr. Dryden was not a genteel man," Pope quaintly said to Spence, speaking of the manners and habits of the famous old patriarch of Will's. With regard to Pope's own manners, we have the best contemporary authority that they were singularly refined and polished. With his extraordinary sensibility, with his known tastes, with his delicate frame, with his power and dread of ridicule, Pope could have been no other than what we call a highly-bred person.[1] His closest friends, with the exception of Swift, were among the delights and ornaments of the polished society of their age. Garth,[2] the accomplished and benevolent, whom
- ↑ "His (Pope's) voice in common conversation was so naturally musical, that I remember honest Tom Southerne used always to call him 'the little nightingale'"—Orrery.
- ↑ Garth, whom Dryden calls "generous as his Muse," was a Yorkshireman. He graduated at Cambridge, and was made M.D. in 1691. He soon distinguished himself in his profession, by his poem of the "Dispensary," and in society, and pronounced Dryden's funeral oration. He was a strict Whig, a notable member of the Kit-Kat, and a
annuities, and partly in the purchase of his famous villa. Johnson remarks that "it would be hard to find a man so well entitled to notice by his wit, that ever delighted so much in talking of his money."
