The ricketty framework was giving way, and failing to answer the demands of the fretful and excitable brain.

In the spring of 1744 the poet was visibly breaking up; he suffered from dropsical asthma, and seems to have made matters worse by putting himself in the hands of a notorious quack--a Dr.Thomson.The end was evidently near as he completed his fifty-sixth year.

Friends, old and new, were often in attendance.

Above all, Bolingbroke, the venerated friend of thirty years' standing; Patty Blount, the woman whom he loved best; and the excellent Spence, who preserved some of the last words of the dying man.

The scene, as he saw it, was pathetic; perhaps it is not less pathetic to us, for whom it has another side as of grim tragic humour.
Three weeks before his death Pope was sending off copies of the Ethic Epistles--apparently with the Atossa lines--to his friends.