Post Scriptum.—­Long as this letter has grown, I find it necessary to append a postscript; if possible, a short one.  Mr. Bowles denies that he has accused Pope of “a sordid money-getting passion;” but, he adds, “if I had ever done so, I should be glad to find any testimony that, might show he was not so.”  This testimony he may find to his heart’s content in Spence and elsewhere.  First, there is Martha Blount, who, Mr. Bowles charitably says, “probably thought he did not save enough for her, as legatee.”  Whatever she thought upon this point, her words are in Pope’s favour.  Then there is Alderman Barber; see Spence’s Anecdotes.  There is Pope’s cold answer to Halifax when he proposed a pension; his behaviour to Craggs and to Addison upon like occasions, and his own two lines—­

  “And, thanks to Homer, since I live and thrive,
  Indebted to no prince or peer alive;”

written when princes would have been proud to pension, and peers to promote him, and when the whole army of dunces were in array against him, and would have been but too happy to deprive him of this boast of independence.  But there is something a little more serious in Mr. Bowles’s declaration, that he “would have spoken” of his “noble generosity to the outcast Richard Savage,” and other instances of a compassionate and generous heart, “had they occurred to his recollection when he wrote.”  What! is it come to this?  Does Mr. Bowles sit down to write a minute and laboured life and edition of a great poet?  Does he anatomise his character, moral and poetical?  Does he present us with his faults and with his foibles?  Does he sneer at his feelings, and doubt of his sincerity?  Does he unfold his vanity and duplicity? and then omit the good qualities which might, in part, have “covered this multitude of sins?” and then plead that “they did not occur to his recollection?” Is this the frame of mind and of memory with which the illustrious dead are to be approached?  If Mr. Bowles, who must have had access to all the means of refreshing his memory, did not recollect these facts, he is unfit for his task; but if he did recollect and omit them, I know not what he is fit for, but I know what would be fit for him.  Is the plea of “not recollecting” such prominent facts to be admitted?  Mr. Bowles has been at a public school, and as I have been publicly educated also, I can sympathise with his predilection.  When we were in the third form even, had we pleaded on the Monday morning, that we had not brought up the Saturday’s exercise, because “we had forgotten it,” what would have been the reply?  And is an excuse, which would not be pardoned to a schoolboy, to pass current in a matter which so nearly concerns the fame of the first poet of his age, if not of his country?  If Mr. Bowles so readily forgets the virtues of others, why complain so grievously that others have a better memory for his own faults?  They are but the faults of an author; while the virtues he omitted from his catalogue are essential to the justice due to a man.