ato very speedily. In the meantime they are getting ready as good a
sentence as the former on their side. So, betwixt them, it is
probable that Cato, as Dr. Garth expressed it, may have something to
live upon after he dies.'

Later on music was dragged into the fray. The Court was all for Handel
and the Germans; the Prince of Wales and the Tory nobility affected the
Italian opera. The Whigs went to the Haymarket; the Tories to the Opera
House in Lincoln's Inn Field. In this latter strife Pope took small
part; for, notwithstanding his _Ode on St. Cecilia's Day_, he hated music
with an entire sincerity. He also affected to hate the drama; but some
have thought this accounted for by the fact that, early in his career, he
was damned for the farce of _Three Hours after Marriage_, which, after
the fashion of our own days, he concocted with another, the co-author in
this case being a wit of no less calibre than Gay, the author of _The
Beggars' Opera_. The astonished audience bore it as best they might till
the last act, when the two lovers, having first inserted themselves
respectively into the skins of a mummy and a crocodile, talk at one
another across the boards; then they rose in their rage, and made an end
of that farce. Their yells were doubtless still in Pope's ears when,
years afterwards, he wrote the fine lines--

'While all its throats the gallery extends
And all the thunder of the pit ascends,
Loud as the wolves on Orca's stormy steep
Howl to the roarings of the northern deep.'

Pope, as we have said, became a partisan, and so had his hands full of
ready-made quarrels; but his period was certainly one that demanded a
satirist. Perhaps most periods do; but I am content to repeat, his did.
Satire like Pope's is essentially modish, and requires a restricted
range. Were anyone desirous of satirizing humanity at large I should
advise him to check his noble rage, and, at all events, to begin with his
next-door neighbour, who is almost certain to resent it, which humanity
will not do. This was Pope's method. It was a corrupt set amongst whom
he moved. The gambling in the South Sea stock had been prodigious, and
high and low, married and single, town and country, Protestant and
Catholic, Whig and Tory, took part in it. One _could_ gamble in that
stock. The mania began in February 1720, and by the end of May the price
of 100 pounds stock was up to 340 pounds. In July and August it was 9