I have not heard who set up this bust with its impudent inscription.  I hope it was not Stanhope himself.  I cannot help thinking that it would have been a truer compliment to the memory of Pope if the house and grounds had been kept up exactly as he had left them.  Most people, I suspect, would greatly have preferred the poet’s own “unfolding of his soul” to that “unfolding” attempted for him by a Stanhope and commemorated by a Nugent.  Pope exhibited as much taste in laying out his grounds as in constructing his poems.  Sir William, after his attempt to make the garden more worthy of the original designer, might just as modestly have undertaken to enlarge and improve the poetry of Pope on the plea that it did not sufficiently unfold his soul.  A line of Lord Nugent’s might in that case have been transferred from the marble bust to the printed volume: 

    His fancy now displays a fairer scope.

Or the enlarger and improver might have taken his motto from Shakespeare: 

    To my unfolding lend a gracious ear.

This would have been an appropriate motto for the title-page of “The Poems of Pope:  enlarged and improved:  or The Soul of the Poet Unfolded.”

But in sober truth, Pope, whether as a gardener or as a poet, required no enlarger or improver of his works.  After Sir William Stanhope had left Pope’s villa it came into the possession of Lord Mendip, who exhibited a proper respect for the poet’s memory; but when in 1807 it was sold to the Baroness Howe, that lady pulled down the house and built another.  The place subsequently came into the possession of a Mr. Young.  The grounds have now no resemblance to what the taste of Pope had once made them.  Even his mother’s monument has been removed!  Few things would have more deeply touched the heart of the poet than the anticipation of this insult to the memory of so revered a parent.  His filial piety was as remarkable as his poetical genius.  No passages in his works do him more honor both as a man and as a poet than those which are mellowed into a deeper tenderness of sentiment and a softer and sweeter music by his domestic affections.  There are probably few readers of English poetry who have not the following lines by heart,

    Me, let the tender office long engage
    To rock the cradle of reposing age;
    With lenient arts extend a mother’s breath;
    Make langour smile, and smooth the bed of death;
    Explore the thought, explain the asking eye,
    And keep at least one parent from the sky.

In a letter to Swift (dated March 29, 1731) begun by Lord Bolingbroke and concluded by Pope, the latter speaks thus touchingly of his dear old parent: 

“My Lord has spoken justly of his lady; why not I of my mother?  Yesterday was her birth-day, now entering on the ninety-first year of her age; her memory much diminished, but her senses very little hurt, her sight and hearing good; she sleeps not ill, eats moderately, drinks water, says her prayers; this is all she does.  I have reason to thank God for continuing so long to me a very good and tender parent, and for allowing me to exercise for some years those cares which are now as necessary to her, as hers have been to me.”