ikely
went to sleep, that Swift was deaf and overbearing, that Congreve and
Bolingbroke were painfully witty, and Gay frightened into silence. When
in 1727 Swift again visited England, and stayed at Twickenham, the
clouds were gathering. The scene is set before us in some of Swift's
verses:--

Pope has the talent well to speak,
But not to reach the ear;
His loudest voice is low and weak,
The deaf too deaf to hear.

Awhile they on each other look,
Then different studies choose;
The dean sits plodding o'er a book,
Pope walks and courts the muse.

"Two sick friends," says Swift in a letter written after his return to
Ireland, "never did well together." It is plain that their infirmities
had been mutually trying, and on the last day of August Swift suddenly
withdrew from Twickenham, in spite of Pope's entreaties. He had heard of
the last illness of Stella, which was finally to crush his happiness.
Unable to endure the company of friends, he went to London in very bad
health, and thence, after a short stay, to Ireland, leaving behind him
a letter which, says Pope, "affected me so much that it made me like a
girl." It was a gloomy parting, and the last. The stern Dean retired to
die "like a poisoned rat in a hole," after long years of bitterness, and
finally of slow intellectual decay. He always retained perfect
confidence in his friend's affection. Poor Pope, as he says in the
verses on his own death,--

will grieve a month, and Gay
A week, and Arbuthnot a day;

and they were the only friends to whom he attributes sincere sorrow.

Meanwhile two volumes of Miscellanies, the joint work of the four wits,
appeared in June, 1727, and a third in March, 1728. A fourth, hastily
got up, was published in 1732. They do not appear to have been
successful. The copyright of the three volumes was sold for 225_l._, of
which Arbuthnot and Gay received each 50_l._, whilst the remainder was
shared between Pope and Swift; and Swift seems to have given his part,
according to his custom, to the widow of a respectable Dublin
bookseller. Pope's correspondence with the publisher shows that he was
entrusted with the financial details, and arranged them with the
sharpness of a practised man of business. The whole collection was made
up in great part of old scraps, and savoured of bookmaking, though Pope
speaks complacently of the joint volumes, in which he says to Swift, "We
look