The scene, as he saw it, was pathetic; perhaps it is not
less pathetic to us, for whom it has another side as of grim tragic
humour.
Three weeks before his death Pope was sending off copies of the Ethic
Epistles--apparently with the Atossa lines--to his friends. "Here I am,
like Socrates," he said, "dispensing my morality amongst my friends just
as I am dying." Spence watched him as anxiously as his disciples watched
Socrates. He was still sensible to kindness. Whenever Miss Blount came
in, the failing spirits rallied for a moment. He was always saying
something kindly of his friends, "as if his humanity had outlasted his
understanding." Bolingbroke, when Spence made the remark, said that he
had never known a man with so tender a heart for his own friends or for
mankind. "I have known him," he added, "these thirty years, and value
myself more for that man's love than--" and his voice was lost in tears.
At moments Pope could still be playful. "Here I am, dying of a hundred
good symptoms," he replied to some flattering report, but his mind was
beginning to wander. He complained of seeing things as through a
curtain. "What's that?" he said, pointing to the air, and then, with a
smile of great pleasure, added softly, "'twas a vision." His religious
sentiments still edified his hearers. "I am so certain," he said, "of
the soul's being immortal, that I seem to feel it within me, as it were
by intuition;" and early one morning he rose from bed and tried to begin
an essay upon immortality, apparently in a state of semi-delirium.
Pages:
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246