th such excess of sorrow as only the keenest
sensibility could feel, and the most excellent character excite. After
the death of Stella his life became very retired, and the austerity of
his temper increased; his public days for receiving company were
discontinued, and he even shunned the society of his most intimate
friends.

We have now conducted the dean through the most interesting
circumstances of his life, to the fatal period wherein he was utterly
deprived of his reason, a loss which he often seemed to foresee, and
prophetically lamented to his friends. The total deprivation of his
senses came upon him by degrees. In the year 1736 he was seized with a
violent fit of giddiness: he was at that time writing a satirical
poem, called the "Legion Club;" but he found the effects of his
giddiness so dreadful that he left the poem unfinished, and never
afterward attempted a composition of any length, either in verse or
prose. However, his conversation still remained the same, lively and
severe; but his memory gradually grew worse and worse, and as that
decreased he grew every day more fretful and impatient. From the year
1739 to the year 1744 his passions grew so violent and ungovernable,
his memory so decayed, and his reason so depraved, that the utmost
precautions were taken to prevent all strangers from approaching him,
for till then he had not appeared totally incapable of conversation.
He now, however, grew rapidly worse, and died in 1745. He had willed
all his fortune to be used in founding a home for incurable madmen.

ALEXANDER POPE[3]

[Footnote 3: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]

By AUSTIN DORSON

(1688-1744)

[Illustration: Alexander Pope.]

More than two hundred years ago, on May 21, 1688, was born in Lombard
Street, London, a poet whose influence, for nearly a century, reigned
paramount in English verse. He had not been long dead, it is true,
when his supremacy was contested, but to so little purpose that two
decades passed away before his overbold assailant mustered courage to
follow up his first attack. Then, after an interval, the challenge was
renewed, and for a long period the literary world rang with the blows
of the opposing champions. Was Alexander Pope a great poet or was he
not? It was Thomas Warton who first put that question, and it was
William Bowles who repeated it. Against Warton was Warburton; against
Bowles were Byron and Campbell and Roscoe, with a host of minor