"Ay, now Mr.Pope," said Halifax, "they are perfectly right; nothing can be better!" This little incident perhaps suggested to Pope that Halifax was a humbug, and there seems, as already noticed, to have been some difficulty about the desired dedication of the Iliad.

Though Halifax had been dead for twenty years when the Prologue appeared, Pope may have been in the right in satirizing the pompous would-be patron, from whom he had received nothing, and whose pretences he had seen through.

But the bitterness of the attack is disagreeable when we add that Pope paid Halifax high compliments in the preface to the Iliad, and boasted of his friendship, shortly after the satire, in the Epilogue to the Satires.

A more disagreeable affair at the moment was the description, in the Epistle on Taste, of Canons, the splendid seat of the Duke of Chandos.

Chandos, being still alive, resented the attack, and Pope had not the courage to avow his meaning, which might in that case have been justifiable.