allowing him
to do so in the English, and he also lent sums on bond to
fellow-Catholics, one of whom used to remit him his half-year's interest
calculated at the rate of 4 pounds per cent. per annum, whereas by the
terms of the bond he was to pay 4.25 pounds per cent. per annum. On
another occasion the same borrower deducted from the interest accrued due
a pound he said he had lent the youthful poet. These things annoyed the
old gentleman, as they would most old gentlemen of my acquaintance. The
poet was the only child of his mother, and a queerly constituted mortal
he was. Dr. Johnson has recorded the long list of his infirmities with
an almost chilling bluntness; but, alas! so malformed was Pope's
character, so tortuous and twisted were his ways, so elaborately
artificial and detestably petty many of his devices, that it is not
malice, but charity, that bids us remember that, during his whole
maturity, he could neither dress nor undress himself, go to bed or get up
without help, and that on rising he had to be invested with a stiff
canvas bodice and tightly laced, and have put on him a fur doublet and
numerous stockings to keep off the cold and fill out his shrunken form.
If ever there was a man whose life was one long provocation, that man was
the author of the _Dunciad_. Pope had no means of self-defence save his
wit. Dr. Johnson was a queer fellow enough, having inherited, as he
tells us, a vile melancholy from his father, and he certainly was no
Adonis to look at, but those who laughed at him were careful to do so
behind his gigantic back. When a rapacious bookseller insulted him he
knocked him down. When the caricaturist Foote threatened to take him off
upon the stage, the most Christian of lexicographers caused it to be
intimated to him that if he did the author of _Rasselas_ would thrash him
in the public street, and the buffoon desisted. 'Did not Foote,' asked
Boswell, 'think of exhibiting you, sir?' and our great moralist replied,
'Sir, fear restrained him; he knew I would have broken his bones.' When
he denounced Macpherson for his _Ossian_ frauds, and the irate Celt said
something about personal chastisement, Johnson told him, in writing, that
he was not to be deterred from detecting a cheat by the menaces of a
ruffian, and by way of a temporary provision for his self-defence
selected a most grievous cudgel, six feet in height, and terminating in a
head (once the root) of the size of a large orange.