o think "as becomes a
reasonable creature."

James Craggs, who had been formerly Secretary of State, and was on the
warmest terms of intimacy with the poet, resided for some time near his
friend in order to enjoy the pleasure of his society. When in office he
proposed to pay him a pension of L300 a year out of the secret service
money, but Pope declined the offer. Statesmen and men of active pursuits
cultivated the society of the poetical recluse, and Pope, whose
compliments are monuments more enduring than marble, has recorded their
visits to Twickenham:

'There, my retreat the best companions grace,
Chiefs out of war, and statesmen out of place,
There St. John mingles with my friendly bowl,
The feast of reason and the flow of soul,
And he whose lightning pierced the Iberian lines[18]
Now forms my quincunx and now ranks my vines.'

Among Pope's associates was the 'blameless Bethel,'

'---- who always speaks his thought,
And always thinks the very thing he ought,'

and Berkeley who had 'every virtue under heaven,' and Lord Bathurst who
was unspoiled by wealth and joined

'With splendour, charity; with plenty, health;'

and 'humble Allen' who

'Did good by stealth and blushed to find it fame;'

and many another friend who lives in his verse and is secure of the
immortality a poet can confer.

The five volumes which contain the letters between Pope and his friends
exhibit an interesting picture of the times and of the writers. The
poet's own letters, as may be supposed from the thought he bestowed on
them, are full of artifice, and composed with the most elaborate care.
Every sentence is elaborately turned, and the ease and naturalness which
give a charm to the letters of Cowper and of Southey are not to be found
in Pope. His epistles are weighted with compliments and with professions
of the most exalted morality. 'He laboured them,' says Horace Walpole,
'as much as the _Essay on Man_, and as they were written to everybody
they do not look as if they had been written to anybody.' Pope said
once, what he did not mean, that he could not write agreeable letters.
This was true; his letters are, as Charles Fox said, 'very bad,' but
some of Pope's friends write admirably, and if there is much that can be
skipped without loss in the correspondence, there is much which no
student of the period can afford to neglect. 'There has accumulated,'
says Mark Pattison, 'round Po