rhaps, in his consciousness of physical defect,
which made him affect a character uncongenial, and a language
opposite to the truth."--If this is not "minute moral anatomy," I
should be glad to know what is! It is dissection in all its branches.
I shall, however, hazard a remark or two upon this quotation.

To me it appears of no very great consequence whether Martha Blount
was or was not Pope's mistress, though I could have wished him a
better. She appears to have been a cold-hearted, interested,
ignorant, disagreeable woman, upon whom the tenderness of Pope's
heart in the desolation of his latter days was cast away, not knowing
whither to turn as he drew towards his premature old age, childless
and lonely,--like the needle which, approaching within a certain
distance of the pole, becomes helpless and useless, and, ceasing to
tremble, rusts. She seems to have been so totally unworthy of
tenderness, that it is an additional proof of the kindness of Pope's
heart to have been able to love such a being. But we must love
something. I agree with Mr. B. that _she_ "could at no time have
regarded _Pope personally_ with attachment," because she was
incapable of attachment; but I deny that Pope could not be regarded
with personal attachment by a worthier woman. It is not probable,
indeed, that a woman would have fallen in love with him as he walked
along the Mall, or in a box at the opera, nor from a balcony, nor in
a ball-room; but in society he seems to have been as amiable as
unassuming, and, with the greatest disadvantages of figure, his head
and face were remarkably handsome, especially his eyes. He was adored
by his friends--friends of the most opposite dispositions, ages, and
talents--by the old and wayward Wycherley, by the cynical Swift, the
rough Atterbury, the gentle Spence, the stern attorney-bishop
Warburton, the virtuous Berkeley, and the "cankered Bolingbroke."
Bolingbroke wept over him like a child; and Spence's description of
his last moments is at least as edifying as the more ostentatious
account of the deathbed of Addison. The soldier Peterborough and the
poet Gay, the witty Congreve and the laughing Rowe, the eccentric
Cromwell and the steady Bathurst, were all his intimates. The man who
could conciliate so many men of the most opposite description, not
one of whom but was a remarkable or a celebrated character, might
well have pretended to all the attachment which a reasonable man
would desire of an amiabl