compositions, our author, with that just self-confidence that ought to actuate every man of real genius and ability, meditated a higher effort-something that might improve and advance his fortune as well as his fame-a translation of Homer, which Milton once thought of executing. This translation he proposed to print by subscription, in six volumes quarto, for the sum of six guineas; and, to the eternal honour of our country in encouraging a work of such superlative and uncommon merit, the subscription was larger than any before known. Every man, of every party, that had any, or pretended to have any, taste or love of literature, sent his name. The number of subscribers was five hundred and seventy-five; but, as some subscribed for more than one copy, the copies delivered to subscribers were six hundred and fifty-four. These copies Lintot, who became proprietor of the work, engaged to supply at his own expense, and also to give the author two hundred pounds for each volume: so that Pope obtained, on the whole, the sum of five thousand three hundred and twenty pounds, four shillings. With this money, so very honourably obtained, he immediately and prudently purchased several annuities, and particularly one of five hundred pounds a-year from the Duke of Buckingham.

The most important advantage to the poet of the subscriptions to his Homer was enabling him to purchase the estate at Twickenham, whither he removed in 1715, with his father and mother, having persuaded the former to sell his little property in Windsor Forest.

The instances of estates purchased with the sweat of the brain are so very few, and far between, that an additional interest attaches to them. Ideas of dependence, poverty, and want of the comforts of life attach so naturally to the poet, and a garret would so much appear to belong to him by prescriptive usage, that a poet with a house or garden of his own seems like a dream or unreal phantasy. That ordinary parts and vulgar industry should purchase estates is a matter of course, a thing of every-day occurrence; but that genius should not always starve, has something in it that makes us stare-the rarity of the spectacle is so great.

We therefore think that, all things considered, we may be excused if we devote some of our leisure to this pre-eminently classic spot; more especially, as no pains seem to be taken by those who hitherto have had any local interest in the place, of preserving in its integrity, or in the style and manner of its adornment, the spot formerly the estate of the poet, so rich in poctic and

classic associations, and which, in any other country save this, would have been thought worthy the tutelary guardianship of the nation at large.

When we visited the spot that had once been the delight of the poet, the favourite retreat of his friends, and the scene of his labours, we anticipated the grateful care with which everything, no matter how trivial, that related to him, or connected his memory with things still existing, would have been preserved and cherished: we hoped to have found preserved the room in which he lived and in which he died; we anticipated the pleasures of being seated in his favourite chair, and of finding his garden, obelisks, temples, grotto, exactly as he left them.

Imagine our astonishment-we might almost say disgust-on finding, in answer to our anxious inquiries of the whereabouts of the villa of Pope, that it had long since been levelled with the ground! It was not without many contradictory directions that we were at length enabled to ascertain where it once had stood.

Not far from the original site was erected by Lady Howe, a plain, uninteresting, unpoetic edifice, now being pulled down, usually, but improperly, called Pope's villa; the poet's house, as has been satisfactorily demonstrated to us by the inspection of old maps and plans, having stood exactly over the grotto, which formed as it were a part of the basement.

How much did we miss-how much was lost to us for ever!

The house of the poet was gone-ruthlessly pulled down by a lady-queen of the Goths and Vandals might she well be called; a lady of rank was she, and title; and her only object in this wanton piece of barbarism would seem to have been to demonstrate, by an overt act, how little of communion, sympathy, or feeling may subsist in the breast of some of the aristocracy of rank for the abiding-place of the aristocracy of genius. The house-that house which Lord Spencer thought it the highest honour to preserve and adorn, from respect to its great inhabitant, was levelled with the ground; the willow tree, also, springing from the hand of the poet, as much one of his works as the Messiah, or the Windsor Forest-whose pendent boughs overshadowed the silvery Thames, was pulled up by the roots. Of all that the poet loved or delighted to cherish, the grotto alone remains; not, however, as he left it; but still there is enough to enable us to recall the rest.

We turned with melancholy satisfaction to the poet's letter to his friend Edward Blount, in which he gives so delightful a picture of his grotto, and of the pleasure he took in its formation: no better account of it than the author's can be given, and if such were possible to give, while Pope's remains, it would be impertinent.

"DEAR SIR,

"You show yourself a just man and a friend in those guesses and suppositions you make at the possible reasons of my silence; every one of which is a true one. As to forgetfulness of you or yours, I assure you the promiscuous conversations of the town serve only to put me in mind of better and more quiet to be had in a corner of the world (undisturbed, innocent, serene, and sensible) with such as you. Let no access of any distrust make you think of me differently in a cloudy day, from what you do in the most sunshiny weather.

"Let the young ladies be assured I make nothing new in my gardens, without wishing to see the print of their fairy steps in every part of them.

"I have put the last hand to works of this kind in happily finishing the subterraneous way and grotto: I there found a spring of the clearest water, which falls in a perpetual rill that echoes through the cavern day and night. From the river Thames you see through my arch up a walk of the wilderness, to a kind of open temple, wholly composed of shells in the rustic manner; and from that distance under the temple, passing suddenly and vanishing, as through a perspective glass. When you shut the door of this grotto, it becomes in the instant, from a luminous room, a camera obscura, on the walls of which all the objects of the river, hills, woods and boats, are forming a moving picture in their visible radiations and when you have a mind to light it up, it affords you a very different scene; it is finished with shells interspersed with pieces of looking-glass in angular forms, and in the ceiling is a star of the same material, at which when a lamp (of an orbicular figure of thin alabaster) is hung in the middle, a thousand pointed rays glitter, and are reflected over the place. There are connected to this grotto by a narrower passage two porches, one towards the river, of smooth stones, full of light, and open; the other towards the garden, shadowed with trees, rough with shells, flints, and iron ores. The bottom is paved with simple pebble, as is also the adjoining walk up the wilderness to the temple, in the natural taste, agreeing not ill with the little dripping murmur and the aquatic idea of the whole place.

"It wants nothing to complete it but a good statue with an inscription, like that beautiful antique one which you know I am so fond of :

Hujus nympha loci, sacri custodia fontis

Dormio, dum blanda sentio murmur aquæ.
Parce meum, quisquis tangis cava marmora, somnum
Rumpere si bibas, sive lavas, tace.

Nymph of the grot, these sacred springs I keep,

And to the murmur of these waters sleep.

Ah, spare my slumbers, gently tread the cave,

And drink in silence, or in silence lave.

"You'll think I have been very poetical in this description, but it is pretty near

the truth. I wish you were here to bear testimony how little it owes to art, either the place itself, or the image I give of it."

To another dear friend he writes in the following terms :

"The history of my transplantation and settlement which you desire would require a volume, were I to enumerate the many projects, difficulties, vicissitudes, and various fates attending that important part of my life; much more, should I describe the many draughts, elevations, profiles, perspectives, &c., of every palace and garden proposed, intended, and happily raised, by the strength of that faculty wherein all great geniuses excel, imagination.

"At last, the gods and fate have fixed me on the borders of the Thames, in the districts of Richmond and Twickenham; it is here I have passed an entire year of my life, without any fixed abode in London, or more than casting a transitory glance (for a day or two at most) on the pomps of the town.

"It is here I hope to receive you, sir, returned from eternising the Ireland of the age. For you my structures rise; for you my colonnades extend their wings; for you my groves aspire, and roses bloom. And to say truth, I hope posterity (which no doubt will be made acquainted with all these things) will look upon it as one of the principal motives of my architecture, that it was a mansion prepared to receive you, against you ever shall fall to dust.

"At present I consider you bounded by the Irish sea, like the ghosts in Virgil: and I can't express how I long to renew our old intercourse and conversation, our morning conferences in bed in the same room, our evening walks in the park (Twickenham or Bushy ?), our amusing voyages on the water, our philosophical suppers, our lectures, our dissertations, our gravities, our reveries, our fooleries, or what not."

Mr. Digby, writing to Pope, says :

"I have some faint notion of the beauties of Twickenham from what I see around me. The verdure of showers is poured upon every tree and field about us ; the gardens unfold a variety of colours to the eye every morning; the hedges' breath is beyond all perfume, and the song of the birds we hear as well as you. But though I hear and see all this, yet I think they would delight me more if you were here. I found the want of these at Twickenham whilst I was there with you, by which I guess what an increase of charms it must now have. How kind it is in

you to wish me there, and how unfortunate my circumstances that allow me not to visit you!"

In another place the same friend inquires,

"How thrive your garden plants? How look the trees? How spring the brocoli and the fenochio? Hard names to spell! How did the poppies bloom? and how is