ecdotes_
there is another story, pitched in a higher key: 'Shortly before his
death, he said to me, "What's that?" pointing into the air with a very
steady regard, and then looked down on me and said, with a smile of great
pleasure, and with the greatest softness, "'Twas a vision."' It may have
been so. At the very last he consented to allow a priest to be sent for,
who attended and administered to the dying man the last sacraments of the
Church. The spirit in which he received them cannot be pronounced
religious. As Cardinal Newman has observed, Pope was an unsatisfactory
Catholic.

Pope died in his enemies' day.

Dr. Arbuthnot, who was acknowledged by all his friends to have been the
best man who ever lived, be the second-best who he might, had predeceased
the poet; and it should be remembered, before we take upon ourselves the
task of judging a man we never saw, that Dr. Arbuthnot, who was as shrewd
as he was good, had for Pope that warm personal affection we too rarely
notice nowadays between men of mature years. Swift said of Arbuthnot:
'Oh! if the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it I would burn my
_Travels_.' This may be doubted without damage to the friendly
testimony. The terrible Dean himself, whose azure eyes saw through most
pretences, loved Pope; but Swift was now worse than dead--he was mad,
dying a-top, like the shivered tree he once gazed upon with horror and
gloomy forebodings of impending doom.

Many men must have been glad when they read in their scanty journals that
Mr. Pope lay dead at his villa in Twickenham. They breathed the easier
for the news. Personal satire may be a legitimate, but it is an ugly
weapon. The Muse often gives what the gods do not guide; and though we
may be willing that our faults should be scourged, we naturally like to
be sure that we owe our sore backs to the blackness of our guilt, and not
merely to the fact that we have the proper number of syllables to our
names, or because we occasionally dine with an enemy of our scourger.

But living as we do at a convenient distance from Mr. Pope, we may safely
wish his days had been prolonged, not necessarily to those of his mother,
but to the Psalmist's span, so that he might have witnessed the dawn of a
brighter day. 1744 was the nadir of the eighteenth century. With
Macbeth the dying Pope might have exclaimed,--

'Renown and grace is dead;
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left in the