HIS DESCENT AND FAMILY CONNECTIONS.
FACTS AND CONJECTURES.
BY JOSEPH HUNTER.
| Ancestry, whose grace Chalks successors their way, Shakespeare. |
LONDON:
JOHN RUSSELL SMITH,
36, SOHO SQUARE.
M.DCCC.LVII.
London:
F. Pickton, Printer,
Perry’s Place, 29, Oxford Street.
The following Tract is an enlargement of the principal portion of anaccount which I propose to give of Pope, in Poets and Verse Writers, fromChaucer to Pope: new Facts in their History—should the public curiosityrespecting them call for the publication of what I have collected andwritten.
October 26, 1857.
POPE:
HIS DESCENT AND FAMILY CONNECTIONS.
Two persons of noble birth, who thought themselves insulted in the“Imitation of the First of the Second Book of the Satires of Horace,”retorted upon the Poet with a severity not wholly undeserved. Unlike Pope,who had dismissed them both in a line or two, they composed their attacksvery elaborately, seeking out everything that could offend him,—defectsfor which he must be held responsible, and those for which no man canjustly be so held.
One of these latter points was, want of birth. The lines,
Whilst none thy crabbed numbers can endure,
Hard as thy heart, and as thy birth obscure,
are attributed to the Lady Mary Wortley Montague; but Johnson assigns themto Lord Hervey,[1] who attacked Pope in another poem, in which he makes ita charge that he was[Pg 6] a hatter’s son, and insults him on the score of themeanness of his family.
These allusions to his origin seem to have galled the Poet more thananything else that was said of him. He was then living in what is calledhigh society, and it was of some importance to him not to be thoughtmeanly bred. Three courses were open to him. He might have assumed to passover the charge as unworthy his notice: he might have claimed it as amerit to have surpassed his ancestors, and risen to distinction by his owngenius, “out of himself drawing his web;” or he might deny the chargealtogether. He adopted the last of these courses, and in this he actedwisely and honestly.
[Pg 7]When a defence against such a charge is undertaken, there is an advantagein the difficulty of defining that really undefinable quality calledbirth. There is an absolute, and a relative, want of it. A richmercantile family may be a good family when compared with persons of thesame class who have been less successful than they; a family owning a goodestate in the country is a good family amongst the neighbours; a race ofpersons eminent in any of the professions may be called a good family.