. But
the pamphlet I have just noticed might have enraged Bolingbroke,
because his true character is ably drawn in it. The writer says that
"a person in an eminent station of life abroad, when Lord B----
was at Paris to transact a certain affair, said, _C'est certainement
un homme d'esprit, mais un coquin sans probite_." This was a very
disagreeable truth!

In one of these pamphlets, too, Bolingbroke was mortified at his
dignity being lessened by the writer, in comparing his lordship with
their late friend Pope.--"I venture to foretell, that the name of Mr.
Pope, in spite of your unmanly endeavours, shall revive and blossom in
the dust, from his own merits; and presume to remind you, that
_yours_, had it not been for _his_ genius, _his_ friendship, _his_
idolatrous veneration for _you_, might, in a short course of years,
have died and been forgotten." Whatever the degree of genius
Bolingbroke may claim, doubtless the verse of Pope has embalmed his
fame. I have never been able to discover the authors of these
pamphlets, who all appear of the first rank, and who seem to have
written under the eye of Warburton. The awful and vindictive
Bolingbroke, and the malignant and petulant Mallet, did not long brood
over their anger: he or they gave it vent on the head of Warburton, in
those two furious pamphlets, which I have noticed in the "Quarrels of
Warburton." All these pamphlets were published in the same year, 1749,
so that it is now difficult to arrange them according to their
priority. Enough has been shown to prove, that the loud outcry of
Bolingbroke and Mallet, in their posthumous attack on Pope, arose from
their unforgiving malice against him, for the preference by which the
poet had distinguished Warburton; and that Warburton, much more than
Pope, was the real object of this masked battery.

FOOTNOTES:

[237] At the time, to season the tale for the babble of Literary
Tattlers, it was propagated that POPE intended, on the death
of BOLINGBROKE, to sell this eighteenpenny pamphlet at a
guinea a copy; which would have produced an addition of as
many hundreds to the thousands which the poet had honourably
reaped from his Homer. This was the ridiculous lie of the day,
which lasted long enough to obtain its purpose, and to cast an
odium on the shade of Pope. Pope must have been a miserable
calculator of _survivorships_, if ever he had reckoned on