In the long sentence quoted from the article in “The London Magazine,” there is one coarse image, the justice of whose application I shall not pretend to determine:—­“The pruriency with which his nose is laid to the ground” is an expression which, whether founded or not, might have been omitted.  But the “anatomical minuteness” appears to me justified even by Mr. Bowles’s own subsequent quotation.  To the point:—­“Many facts tend to prove the peculiar susceptibility of his passions; nor can we implicitly believe that the connexion between him and Martha Blount was of a nature so pure and innocent as his panegyrist Ruffhead would have us believe,” &c.—­“At no time could she have regarded Pope personally with attachment,” &c.—­“But the most extraordinary circumstance in regard to his connexion with female society, was the strange mixture of indecent and even profane levity which his conduct and language often exhibited.  The cause of this particularity may be sought, perhaps, in his consciousness of physical defect, which made him affect a character uncongenial, and a language opposite to the truth.”—­If this is not “minute moral anatomy,” I should be glad to know what is!  It is dissection in all its branches.  I shall, however, hazard a remark or two upon this quotation.

To me it appears of no very great consequence whether Martha Blount was or was not Pope’s mistress, though I could have wished him a better.  She appears to have been a cold-hearted, interested, ignorant, disagreeable woman, upon whom the tenderness of Pope’s heart in the desolation of his latter days was cast away, not knowing whither to turn as he drew towards his premature old age, childless and lonely,—­like the needle which, approaching within a certain distance of the pole, becomes helpless and useless, and, ceasing to tremble, rusts.  She seems to have been so totally unworthy of tenderness, that it is an additional proof of the kindness of Pope’s heart to have been able to love such a being.  But we must love something.  I agree with Mr. B. that she “could at no time have regarded Pope personally with attachment,” because she was incapable of attachment; but I deny that Pope could not be regarded with personal attachment by a worthier woman.  It is not probable, indeed, that a woman would have fallen in love with him as he walked along the Mall, or in a box at the opera, nor from a balcony, nor in a ball-room; but in society he seems to have been as amiable as unassuming, and, with the greatest disadvantages of figure, his head and face were remarkably handsome, especially his eyes.  He was adored by his friends—­friends of the most opposite dispositions, ages, and talents—­by the old and wayward Wycherley, by the cynical Swift, the rough Atterbury, the gentle Spence, the stern attorney-bishop Warburton, the virtuous Berkeley, and the “cankered Bolingbroke.”  Bolingbroke wept over him like a child; and Spence’s description