coffee-houses where authors congregated, he indulged in professional talk, and his unfavourable judgment was sure to get round to Pope. The irritation at the time must have been great, since the censure continued to rankle in the mind of the poet at the distance of five-and-twenty years. His memory was less faithful when he claimed credit for not replying. He found it convenient to forget that he had seized an early opportunity for retaliating in the Essay on Criticism.

Dennis complained that "he was attacked in a clandestine manner in his person instead of his writings." "How the attack," says Johnson, "was clandestine is not easily perceived, nor how his person is depreciated." Evidently Dennis termed the attack clandestine, because the Essay was anonymous, and his assailant concealed. Pope, however, had not been studious of secrecy among his acquaintances, and Dennis showed in his pamphlet that he knew perfectly well with whom he had to deal. His assertion, denied by Johnson, that he was attacked "in his person instead of his writings" is clearly correct, unless, contrary to usage, the word is restricted to what is indelible in a man's bodily make. To say that he reddened at every word of objection, and stared tremendous with a threatening eye, like the fierce tyrants depicted in old tapestry, was to represent his personal bearing and appearance in an offensive light. Pope himself disclaimed the personality. "I cannot conceive," he wrote to Caryll, June 25, 1711, "what ground he has for so excessive a resentment, nor imagine how those three lines can be called a reflection on his person which only describe him subject to a little colour and stare on some occasions, which are revolutions that happen sometimes in the best and most regular faces in Christendom." The description, in other words, was not a reflection upon the person of Dennis, because some persons with handsome faces were liable to the same infirmity, and no satire was personal which did not declare a man to be radically ugly. That the resentment might seem the more unreasonable, the stare tremendous and threatening eye, were softened down to a "little stare." This was characteristic of Pope. He was not afraid to strike, but when the blow was resented, he frequently made a hasty and ignominious retreat. Either he pretended that the satire was not aimed at the individuals who called him to account, or he gave a mitigated and erroneous version of his lampoons.

Pope lashed Dennis for an intemperance of manner which could be controlled at will. Dennis upbraided Pope with a deformity which he had not caused and could not cure. "If you have a mind," said the infuriated critic, "to enquire between Sunninghill and Oakingham, for a young, squab, short gentleman, an eternal writer of amorous pastoral madrigals, and the very bow of the god of Love, you will be soon directed to him. And pray, as soon as you have taken a survey of him, tell me whether he is a proper author to make personal reflections on others. This little author may extol the ancients as much, and as long as he pleases, but he has reason to thank the good gods that he was born a modern, for had he been born of Grecian parents, and his father by consequence had by law the absolute disposal of him, his life had been no longer than that of one of his poems,—the life of half a day."[11] There was a wide difference between ridiculing the distortions of countenance which grew out of irascible vanity, and mocking at defects which were a misfortune, and not a fault. But Pope's lines were insulting, and a man of the world would have foreseen that Dennis would repel insult by scurrility. The poet was as yet a novice in the coarse personalities of that abusive age, and he had not anticipated such brutal raillery. "The latter part of Mr. Dennis's book," he wrote to Caryll, "is no way to be properly answered, but by a wooden weapon, and I should perhaps have sent him a present from Windsor Forest of one of the best and toughest oaken plants between Sunninghill and Oakingham if he had not informed me in his preface that he is at this time persecuted by fortune. This, I protest, I knew not the least of before; if I had, his name had been spared in the Essay for that only reason."[12] Pope could no more compete with Dennis in personal prowess, than Dennis could compete in satire with Pope. His assigned reason for not executing his empty vaunt was equally hollow. He was not wont to spare his enemies out of consideration for their necessities, but taunted them with their forlorn condition, and, true to his custom, the persecution of fortune, which he said would have induced him to suppress his satire upon Dennis, was made the ingredient of a fresh satire at a future day:

The insinuation was unjust. Violent, and often wrong-headed, Dennis spoke his genuine sentiments, and was not more a hireling than Pope, or any other author who earns money by his pen. The poor debtor could not have bartered his honour for a sorrier bribe. The pamphlet on the Essay on Criticism consisted of thirty-two octavo pages of small print, with a preface of five pages, and he received for it 2l. 12s. 6d.

Dennis urged as an aggravation of the "falsehood and calumny" in the Essay, that they proceeded from a "little affected hypocrite, who had nothing in his mouth at the same time but truth, candour, friendship, goodnature, humanity, and magnanimity." These are the qualities enforced in the poem, and whether the description of Dennis, under the name of Appius, was a faithful likeness or a caricature, the attack was at variance with the precepts which accompanied it. Pope insisted that the specification of faults, to be useful, must be delicate and courteous. He laid down the proposition at ver. 573, that "blunt truths do more mischief than nice falsehoods," and at ver. 576, that "without good breeding truth is disapproved." At the interval of six lines he exemplified the urbanity he enjoined by a derisive sketch which could only be intended to injure and exasperate. The inconsistency did not stop here. He prefaced the obnoxious passage by the maxim, "those best can bear reproof who merit praise," and the sketch of Dennis is an illustration of the opposite character. Was Pope a man who bore reproof with the fortitude which entitled him to scoff at others for their irritability? He certainly sometimes drew a flattering picture of his own equanimity and forbearance. He assures us at ver. 741, that he was "careless of censure." He told Spence, that "he never much minded what his angry critics published against him,—only one or two things at first." "When," he added, "I heard for the first time that Dennis had written against me, it gave me some pain; but it was quite over as soon as I came to look into his book, and found he was in such a passion."[13] In the Prologue to the Satires, he represents himself to have been a perfect model of candour and amiability, and says of the objections of his correctors,