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“... of a woman he identified as his mother. This led Ashley Montagu to speculate that, unlike Alexander Pope, a misshapen man whose personality developed in the opposite direction, Merrick owed his surprisingly sweet disposition to a mother’s loving care in the childhood years when his awful deformity was becoming evident. Actually there is no ...”

“... of our best friends, we find something that doth not displease us.’ The poem goes on to identify Alexander Pope as his best friend. Later epigrammatists could lighten the point with self-deflating comedy: ‘Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little,’ Gore Vidal said, channelling a similar joke by Oscar Wilde. But La Rochefoucauld is in grim ...”

“... style, published The Nobleman, Gentleman and Gardener’s Recreation and when Brown was three, Alexander Pope, who believed that ‘all gardening is landscape painting,’ began work on the house and grounds at Twickenham which he continued to alter and write about for the rest of his life. Gardening of this sort was not only painting, it was also ...”

“... grotto-builders by the time of the countess. It is impossible not to associate the grotto built by Alexander Pope under his villa in Twickenham between 1720 and 1725, for instance, with the Cave of Spleen in The Rape of the Lock (1712-17), home of the goddess of bad moods and sick fancies:Here in a grotto, shelter’d close from air,And screen’d in ...”

“... he was half author of the Dunciad, had trouble with its allusions and wrote grumblingly to warn Pope that twenty miles from London ‘nobody understands hints, initial letters, or town facts and passages.’ The delighted poet seized his chance and added to his poem for its 1729 ‘Variorum’ edition those profuse helpful footnotes which make the text more ...”

“... expression appropriate to lovemaking, and that prolonged indulgence could even result in orgasm. Alexander Pope had thought it providential that humans were not so made that ‘sweet effluvia darting through the brain’ could cause them to ‘die of a rose in aromatic pain’, but the advance of civilisation was proving him naive. However, the main ...”

“... is something about the deliberate provisionality of the sonnet which makes it unimaginable that Alexander Pope should ever have written one, or that Ben Jonson (who wrote only six) would take them seriously. Milton’s abrasive political sonnets, prompting ‘the age to quit their clogs’, which used the form to make an urgent response to both ...”

“... work of man,’ observed the great 19th-century American agnostic Robert Ingersoll. Parodying Alexander Pope, Ingersoll offered his ironic support to a liberal Protestant theology that he judged less destructive than its orthodox predecessors. He understood the liberal Protestant God to sympathise with advances in science, industry, commerce and ...”

“... the period from 1660 – this is omitting foreign authors, pseudonymous characters like ‘Captain Alexander Smith’, and others whose masculinity may be nominal. It would be rash to expect all these to qualify for Spender’s epithet ‘good’. But if Ann Emelinda Skinn and M. Peddle (two of Dale’s hundred best tunes) deserve a place in the record, it is ...”

“... 1545). Second, that everybody has heard of the genius who endowed it with the anonymity of genius. Alexander Pope, say, for his ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.’ Or for ‘A little learning is a dangerous thing,’ which anybody with any learning or knowledge knows to be the right reading, with ‘little’ alliteratively locked to ...”

“... of things, for preferring a Sun-centred universe. The front matter contains a dedication to Pope Paul III and a preface ‘on the hypotheses of this work’. The dedication to the pope recalls the genesis of the work, the support it received from bishops and other prominent men, and the need for techies like ...”

“... against so many.This simile was much reviled by neoclassical critics. In his translation of 1726 Alexander Pope couldn’t bring himself to mention the sausage, and produced instead one of his prissiest euphemisms: ‘As one who long with pale-ey’d famine pin’d,/The sav’ry cates on glowing embers cast.’ Odysseus has returned to Ithaca and is ...”

“... Opposition’s leaders and pet intellectuals, Lord Bolingbroke, William Pulteney, Lord Stair and Alexander Pope. During the crisis caused by Walpole’s attempt to put an excise tax on tobacco in 1733, she distributed division lists and other political propaganda and received deputations of voters. And she used some of her wealth to further the ...”

“... see my letters are scribbled with all the carelessness & inattention imaginable,’ Alexander Pope claimed in a missive of November 1712. ‘My style, like my soul, appears in its natural undress before my friend.’ When Hester Piozzi wrote in 1788 that personal letters were ‘familiar chat spread upon paper’ she was parroting a line at ...”

“... with Swift’s A Modest Proposal.In August 1736, a couple of months after his 48th birthday, Alexander Pope wondered to Swift whether ‘increase of years’ might not make people ‘more talkative but less writative’. His own policy, he went on, was to address only ‘those few I am forced to correspond with, either out of necessity, or love: And ...”