Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 7.djvu/126

86 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS and humane Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester, to Prior and Parnell, to Arbuth- not, best of men and physicians some of whom he mentions in the " Prologue to the Satires." Swift, he says : " endur'd my lays ; The courtly Talbot, Somers, Sheffield read ; Ev'n mitred Rochester would nod the head, And St. yohris self (great Dryden's friends before) With open arms receiv'd one Poet more." Closely connected with the group of Pope's connections at this time was the fa- mous literary association known as the " Scriblerus Club," the avowed object of which was to satirize the abuses of human learning. The dispersal of its mem- bers at the death of Anne interrupted this enterprise, which never extended beyond a first book a fragment which must, however, be held to have been unusually pregnant in suggestion, since it contained the germs of " Gulliver's Travels " and the " Dunciad." But Pope's life at this point grows too compli- cated to be pursued in detail, and it will be impossible henceforth to do more than note briefly its chief incidents. Trumbull's counsel to him to translate Homer, and his first essay in Tonson's " Miscellany," have already been men- tioned. In a later volume of " Miscellany " poems edited by Steele, he had printed some specimens from the " Odyssey," and in the following year he em- barked in the great work of his middle life, the translation of the " Iliad." By 1 715 the first volume, containing four books, was issued to the subscribers, whose roll, ennobled by the patronage of Oxford and Bolingbroke, and extended by the imperious advocacy of Swift, included almost everyone of importance. The only blot upon its brilliant success is the unfortunate quarrel with Addison, which led to the portrait of Atticus. Early in 1716, not long after the death of Wycherley, Pope moved from Binfield to Chiswick. His house, in what was then known as the " New Build- ings," but is now Mawson's Row, still exists down a turning off the Mall, not very far from the old Church where Hogarth lies buried, and from Chiswick House, the mansion of Lord Burlington, under whose wing Pope describes him- self as residing. Here, for a couple of years, were delivered those letters, upon whose backs or envelopes, piously preserved in the British Museum, the " paper- sparing " poet penned his daily tale of Homeric translation, completing two more volumes of the "Iliad" during his sojourn in Mawson's Row. At this time he was twenty-eight, and may therefore be assumed to be accurately repre- sented in the portrait painted by Kneller in 1716, and mezzotinted a year later by Smith. Here he appears as a slight, delicate young man, wearing a close- fitting vest or tunic, and, in lieu of a wig, the dressing or "night-cap" which took its place. His keen, shaven face is already worn by work and ill-health, and conspicuous for the large and brilliant eyes to which he refers, in his " Epistle to Arbuthnot," as one of his noticeable features. Besides the poems already mentioned, he had, in 1715, produced another