ght to allude in the pleasing lines,

'But random praise--the task can ne'er be done,
Each mother asks it for her booby son.'

Mr. Alderman Barber asked it for himself, and was willing--so at least it
was reported--to pay for it at the handsome figure of 4,000 pounds for a
single couplet. Pope, however, who was not mercenary, declined to
gratify the alderman, who by his will left the poet a legacy of 100
pounds, possibly hoping by this benefaction, if he could not be praised
in his lifetime, at all events to escape posthumous abuse. If this were
his wish it was gratified, and the alderman sleeps unsung.

Pope greatly enjoyed the fear he excited. With something of exultation
he sings:--

'Yes, I am proud: I must be proud to see
Men, not afraid of God, afraid of me;
Safe from the bar, the pulpit, and the throne,
Yet touched and shamed by ridicule alone.
O sacred weapon! left for Truth's defence,
Sole dread of folly, vice, and insolence!
To all but heaven-directed hands denied,
The Muse may give thee, but the gods must guide:
Reverent I touch thee, but with honest zeal,
To rouse the watchmen of the public weal,
To Virtue's work provoke the tardy Hall
And goad the prelate slumb'ring in his stall.
Ye tinsel insects! whom a court maintains,
That counts your beauties only by your stains,
Spin all your cobwebs o'er the eye of day,
The Muse's wing shall brush you all away.
All his grace preaches, all his lordship sings,
All that makes saints of queens, and gods of kings,--
All, all but truth drops dead-born from the press,
Like the last gazette, or the last address.'

The poet himself was very far from being invulnerable, and he writhed at
every sarcasm. There was one of his contemporaries of whom he stood in
mortal dread, but whose name he was too frightened even to mention. It
is easy to guess who this was. It was Hogarth, who in one of his
caricatures had depicted Pope as a hunchback, whitewashing Burlington
House. Pope deemed this the most grievous insult of his life, but he
said nothing about it; the spiteful pencil proving more than master of
the poisoned pen.

Pope died on May 30th, 1744, bravely and cheerfully enough. His doctor
was offering him one day the usual encouragements, telling him his breath
was easier, and so on, when a friend entered, to whom the poet exclaimed,
'Here I am, dying of a hundred good symptoms.' In Spence's _An