“What a miracle is Genius—­Genius, the Divine and Beautiful,” said a gentleman leaning against the same fireplace with the deformed cavalier in iron-gray, and addressing that individual, who was in fact Mr. Alexander Pope.  “What a marvellous gift is this, and royal privilege of Art!  To make the Ideal more credible than the Actual:  to enchain our hearts, to command our hopes, our regrets, our tears, for a mere brain-born Emanation:  to invest with life the Incorporeal, and to glamour the cloudy into substance,—­these are the lofty privileges of the Poet, if I have read poesy aright; and I am as familiar with the sounds that rang from Homer’s lyre, as with the strains which celebrate the loss of Belinda’s lovely locks”—­(Mr. Pope blushed and bowed, highly delighted)—­“these, I say, sir, are the privileges of the Poet—­the Poietes—­the Maker—­he moves the world, and asks no lever; if he cannot charm death into life, as Orpheus feigned to do, he can create Beauty out of Nought, and defy Death by rendering Thought Eternal.  Ho!  Jemmy, another flask of Nantz.”

And the boy—­for he who addressed the most brilliant company of wits in Europe was little more—­emptied the contents of the brandy-flask into a silver flagon, and quaffed it gayly to the health of the company assembled.  ’Twas the third he had taken during the sitting.  Presently, and with a graceful salute to the Society, he quitted the coffee-house, and was seen cantering on a magnificent Arab past the National Gallery.

“Who is yon spark in blue and silver?  He beats Joe Addison himself, in drinking, and pious Joe is the greatest toper in the three kingdoms,” Dick Steele said, good-naturedly.

“His paper in the Spectator beats thy best, Dick, thou sluggard,” the Right Honorable Mr. Addison exclaimed.  “He is the author of that famous No. 996, for which you have all been giving me the credit.”

“The rascal foiled me at capping verses,” Dean Swift said, “and won a tenpenny piece of me, plague take him!”

“He has suggested an emendation in my ‘Homer,’ which proves him a delicate scholar,” Mr. Pope exclaimed.

“He knows more of the French king than any man I have met with; and we must have an eye upon him,” said Lord Bolingbroke, then Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and beckoning a suspicious-looking person who was drinking at a side-table, whispered to him something.

Meantime who was he? where was he, this youth who had struck all the wits of London with admiration?  His galloping charger had returned to the City; his splendid court-suit was doffed for the citizen’s gabardine and grocer’s humble apron.

George de Barnwell was in Chepe—­in Chepe, at the feet of Martha Millwood.

VOL III.

The condemned cell.