" Swift's comment, on hearing the news,
gives the only consolation which Pope could have felt. "She died in
extreme old age," he writes, "without pain, under the care of the most
dutiful son I have ever known or heard of, which is a felicity not
happening to one in a million." And with her death, its most touching
and ennobling influence faded from Pope's life. There is no particular
merit in loving a mother, but few biographies give a more striking proof
that the loving discharge of a common duty may give a charm to a whole
character. It is melancholy to add that we often have to appeal to this
part of his story, to assure ourselves that Pope was really deserving of
some affection.
The part of Pope's history which naturally follows brings us again to
the region of unsolved mysteries. The one prescription which a spiritual
physician would have suggested in Pope's case would have been the love
of a good and sensible woman. A nature so capable of tender feeling and
so essentially dependent upon others, might have been at once soothed
and supported by a happy domestic life; though it must be admitted that
it would have required no common qualifications in a wife to calm so
irritable and jealous a spirit. Pope was unfortunate in his
surroundings. The bachelor society of that day, not only the society of
the Wycherleys and Cromwells, but the more virtuous society of Addison
and his friends, was certainly not remarkable for any exalted tone about
women. Bolingbroke, Peterborough, and Bathurst, Pope's most admired
friends, were all more or less flagrantly licentious; and Swift's
mysterious story shows that if he could love a woman, his love might be
as dangerous as hatred.
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