We do not accuse Pope of bringing an accusation which he knew to be false.We have not the smallest doubt that he believed it to be true; and the evidence on which he believed it he found in his own bad heart.His own life was one long series of tricks, as mean and as malicious as that of which he suspected Addison and Tickell.He was all stiletto and mask.To injure, to insult, and to save himself from the consequences of injury and insult by lying and equivocating, was the habit of his life.He published a lampoon on the Duke of Chandos; he was taxed with it; and he lied and equivocated.He published a lampoon on Aaron Hill; he was taxed with it; and he lied and equivocated.He published a still fouler lampoon on Lady Mary Wortley Montague; he was taxed with it; and he lied with more than usual effrontery and vehemence.He puffed himself and abused his enemies under feigned names.He robbed himself of his own letters, and then raised the hue and cry after them.Besides his frauds of malignity, of fear, of interest, and of vanity, there were frauds which he seems to have committed from love of fraud alone.He had a habit of stratagem, a pleasure in outwitting all who came near him.Whatever his object might be, the indirect road to it was that which he preferred.For Bolingbroke, Pope undoubtedly felt as much love and veneration as it was in his nature to feel for any human being.Yet Pope was scarcely dead when it was discovered that, from no motive except the mere love of artifice, he had been guilty of an act of gross perfidy to Bolingbroke.
Nothing was more natural than that such a man as this should attribute to others that which he felt within himself.A plain, probable, coherent explanation is frankly given to him.He is certain that it is all a romance.A line of conduct scrupulously fair, and even friendly, is pursued towards him.He is convinced that it is merely a cover for a vile intrigue by which he is to be disgraced and ruined.It is vain to ask him for proofs.He has none, and wants none, except those which he carries in his own bosom.
Whether Pope's malignity at length provoked Addison to retaliate for the first and last time, cannot now be known with certainty.
We have only Pope's story, which runs thus.A pamphlet appeared containing some reflections which stung Pope to the quick.What those reflections were, and whether they were reflections of which he had a right to complain, we have now no means of deciding.The Earl of Warwick, a foolish and vicious lad, who regarded Addison with the feelings with which such lads generally regard their best friends, told Pope, truly or falsely, that this pamphlet had been written by Addison's direction.When we consider what a tendency stories have to grow, in passing even from one honest man to another honest man, and when we consider that to the name of honest man neither Pope nor the Earl of Warwick had a claim, we are not disposed to attach much importance to this anecdote.
It is certain, however, that Pope was furious.He had already sketched the character of Atticus in prose.In his anger he turned this prose into the brilliant and energetic lines which everybody knows by heart, or ought to know by heart, and sent them to Addison.One charge which Pope has enforced with great skill is probably not without foundation.Addison was, we are inclined to believe, too fond of presiding over a circle of humble friends.Of the other imputations which these famous lines are intended to convey, scarcely one has ever been proved to be just, and some are certainly false.That Addison was not in the habit of "damning with faint praise" appears from innumerable passages in his writings, and from none more than from those in which he mentions Pope, And it is not merely unjust, but ridiculous, to describe a man who made the fortune of almost every one of his intimate friends, as "so obliging that he ne'er obliged."That Addison felt the sting of Pope's satire keenly, we cannot doubt.That he was conscious of one of the weaknesses with which he was reproached, is highly probable.But his heart, we firmly believe, acquitted him of the gravest part of the accusation.He acted like himself.As a satirist he was, at his own weapons, more than Pope's match; and he would have been at no loss for topics.A distorted and diseased body, tenanted by a yet more distorted and diseased mind; spite and envy thinly disguised by sentiments as benevolent and noble as those which Sir Peter Teazle admired in Mr.Joseph Surface; a feeble sickly licentiousness; an odious love of filthy and noisome images;these were things which a genius less powerful than that to which we owe the Spectator could easily have held up to the mirth and hatred of mankind.Addison, had, moreover, at his command, other means of vengeance which a bad man would not have scrupled to use.He was powerful in the State.Pope was a Catholic; and, in those times, a Minister would have found it easy to harass the most innocent Catholic by innumerable petty vexations.Pope, near twenty years later, said that "through the lenity of the Government alone he could live with comfort." "Consider," he exclaimed, " the injury that a man of high rank and credit may do to a private person, under penal laws and many other disadvantages." It is pleasing to reflect that the only revenge which Addison took was to insert in the Freeholder a warm encomium on the translation of the Iliad, and to exhort all lovers of learning to put down their names as subscribers.There could be no doubt, he said, from the specimens already published, that the masterly hand of Pope would do as much for Homer as Dryden had done for Virgil.From that time to the end of his life, he always treated Pope, by Pope's own acknowledgment, with justice.Friendship was, of course, at an end.