ion. Dr. Johnson said that Pope was the first writer in whose
case the book-seller took the place of the patron. His translation of
Homer, published by subscription, brought him between eight and nine
thousand {182} pounds and made him independent. But the activity of
the press produced a swarm of poorly-paid hack-writers, penny-a-liners,
who lived from hand to mouth and did small literary jobs to order.
Many of these inhabited Grub Street, and their lampoons against Pope
and others of their more successful rivals called out Pope's _Dunciad_,
or epic of the dunces, by way of retaliation. The politics of the time
were sordid and consisted mainly of an ignoble scramble for office.
The Whigs were fighting to maintain the Act of Succession in favor of
the House of Hanover, and the Tories were secretly intriguing with the
exiled Stuarts. Many of the leaders, such as the great Whig champion,
John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, were without political principle
or even personal honesty. The Church, too, was in a condition of
spiritual deadness. Bishoprics and livings were sold and given to
political favorites. Clergymen, like Swift and Lawrence Sterne, were
worldly in their lives and immoral in their writings, and were
practically unbelievers. The growing religious skepticism appeared in
the Deist controversy. Numbers of men in high position were Deists;
the Earl of Shaftesbury, for example, and Pope's brilliant friend,
Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, the head of the Tory ministry, whose
political writings had much influence upon his young French
acquaintance, Voltaire. Pope was a Roman Catholic, though there is
little to show it in his writings, and the underlying thought of his
famous _Essay {183} on Man_ was furnished him by Bolingbroke. The
letters of the cold-hearted Chesterfield to his son were accepted as a
manual of conduct, and La Rochefoucauld's cynical maxims were quoted as
authority on life and human nature. Said Swift:

"As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew
From nature, I believe them true.
They argue no corrupted mind
In him; the fault is in mankind."

The succession which Dryden had willed to Congreve was taken up by
Alexander Pope. He was a man quite unlike Dryden, sickly, deformed,
morbidly precocious, and spiteful; nevertheless he joined on to and
continued Dryden. He was more careful in his literary workmanship than
his great forerunner, and in his _Moral Essays_ and _Satires_ he
br