Thy nobles "sl-s, thy 'se--s bought with gold, Thy clergy perjured, thy whole people sold. An atheist a ""'s ad.

Alas! on one alone our all relies,

Let him be honest, and he must be wise,
Let him no trifler from his

school,

Be but a man! unminister'd, alone,

And free at once the senate and the throne;

85

90

Esteem the public love his best supply,

A 'O's true glory his integrity;

Rich with his . . . . in his . . . strong,

Affect no conquest, but endure no wrong.
Whatever his religion, or his blood,

His public virtue makes his title good.

NOTES.

95

if the nature of his distemper had permitted such an effort. He thought this country on the brink of ruin, and that monarchical but free constitution of government, wherein the glory and the happiness of our nation consisted, at the point of being dissolved, and sacrificed to the support of a weak and wicked administration; but he thought that the greater the distress was, the more incumbent and the more pressing the duty of struggling to prevent, or to alleviate it, became. One of the last things he said to me the day before he left this place was, that he did not expect to live to see Britain restored to a flourishing and secure state, but that he would die in labouring to procure that happiness to those he should leave behind him.. MS. from the Egremont Papers; com

municated by Mr. Coxe.

Ver. 95. Whatever his religion] He probably means Frederick

h Slaves.

1 Senates.

Prince

k Administration.

1 King's.

Europe's just balance and our own may stand,
And one man's honesty redeem the land.

NOTES.

Prince of Wales, who took a decided part with the malecontents against Sir R. Walpole's administration. This was written the year before the general election, which decided the fate of Walpole. It is singular that Pope, in this Satire turns his weapons against his own party, and attacks many of those whom he had lately panegyrised with the most extravagant praise, particularly Pulteney and Chesterfield, of whom he said in 1738:

"How can I, Pulteney, Chesterfield forget,

While Roman spirit charms and Attic wit."

Bowles.

The respectable authority under which the foregoing fragment has been given to the public, has induced the Editor to reprint it here; not however without feeling a strong conviction that the external evidence of its being the work of Pope is greatly overbalanced by the nature of its contents, which are entirely contrary to any idea that we could reasonably form of the sentiments of Pope at this period. That the celebrity of Pope occasioned many pieces to be unjustly attributed to him by Curll and others is certain; and it was not without reason that he complained of

"The imputed trash and dulness not his own."

That this is the piece to which Warburton alludes in his Note on the poem to Lady Frances Shirley (vide ante p. 430,) where he says that Pope began a third Dialogue more severe and sublime than the first and second, can scarcely be admitted; because this is not a dialogue, nor is there a single passage in it that can be called sublime, or even that exceeds mediocrity.

Additional Notes.

Ver. 5. C- his own proud dupe,] These lines seem to be imitated from the Dunciad, book iv. line 601.

"And nobly conscious princes are but things
Born for first ministers, as slaves for kings."

It

It is impossible that they could have any application to Lord Cobham, with whom Pope lived at this time in the most friendly intimacy.

Ver. 9. Through clouds of passion] Pulteney was not created Earl of Bath till 1742. These lines are therefore either prophetic, or were not written till after that period, when the fourth book of the Dunciad had also been published.

Ver. 16. Stern S--] It is impossible that Pope could have written these lines on Shippen, whose political sentiments nearly corresponded with his own, and whose integrity he has alluded to in the well known lines:

"I love to pour out all myself as plain,

As downright Shippen, or as old Montaigne."

Ver. 23. G-r, C-m, B-t, &c.] Can we conceive that Pope would have applied this contemptuous language to Lord Cobham and Lord Bathurst? of the former of whom he had said

"O save my country, heaven! shall be your last!"

and to the latter of whom he intended (as appears from one of his letters) to pay a visit, in the very year when this piece is said to have been written.

Ver. 25. And C--d, &c.] Was the "attic wit," of Chesterfield for which Pope had celebrated him in 1738, so degenerated in 1740? or was the decided part he took against the minister, reconcileable in common sense with the idea that his country was only "a butt to crack his joke on?"

It is remarkable that this nobleman is alluded to by Pope in the fourth book of the Dunciad, written in 1741, as lamenting the degraded state of the literature of his country:

Nor could'st thou, Chesterfield, a tear refuse,

Thou wept'st, and with thee wept each gentle muse."

No instances of such inconsistency in his treatment of his friends can be found in the works of Pope.

Ver. 43. Rise, rise, great W--,] Sir Robert Walpole, to whom Pope always considered himself as under obligations, and with whom at this period he occasionally visited. In a letter to Mr. Fortescue, he says: "You see I have made Sir Robert Walpole a second compliment in print, in my second Dialogue, and he ought to take it for no small one, since in it I couple him with Lord Bolingbroke. As he shews a right sense of this, I may make him

a third,

a third in my third Dialogue." How is this reconcileable with the gross abuse thrown out on Walpole in this piece, with the sneer upon him as a glorious minister, the insinuations (as it seems) respecting his wife, the scurrilous lines on his son Horace, and the mention of W. and Yonge as only

"Foul copies of his face and tongue?"

Is this making him another compliment in his third Dialogue? Ver. 81. Thy nobles slaves, &c.] Can it be supposed that this vulgar abuse ever escaped the pen of Pope? Or that the author of the sublime passage at the end of the first Dialogue of 1738, could have sunk into the miserable libeller who produced these lines?

Ver. 93. Whatever his religion, &c.] On this passage Mr. Bowles appears afterwards to have changed his opinion. In his Life of Pope, p. cxiv, he says, in reference to these lines: "Although they might be construed to apply to the Prince of Wales, they were more probably addressed to the Chevalier St. George, commonly called the Pretender, who came to England four years afterwards to claim the crown. He was now in his twentieth year; and the satirist seems to think there could be no hope left to the country but by again resorting to the exiled heir of the Stuarts." ." It appears therefore, that notwithstanding his joining any party against the Court, Pope continued in the same principles which he inherited from his father." Conceiving that Pope could never have degraded himself by this piece of vulgar declamation, I willingly resign it to any interpretation that Mr. Bowles, or any one else, may be pleased to put upon it.