among its species: burgeoning miraculously
at a season unknown before or since to the
naturalist, but burgeoning then—I am quite
sure of it—luxuriously! Magnificently
verdant in foliage, from the cracks in its
gnarled and burly trunk up to the minutest
skyward twig, and full of shining oak apples
as the pride of a Kent orchard is of golden
pippins in October. And so, Woodman
Niebuhr! lay your axe of incredulity to any tree
but that; administer your poisoned bolus of
Fact to any dog but Diamond. Under the
shadow of that oak I must still read Boscobel.
For the frolics of that mischievous
rascal of a spaniel I must still have an eye, as
I turn the oracular pages of the Novum
Organum!

Wherefore, that Pope did go to Will's,
when only a little boy of twelve, I am
resolutely bent upon believing, down to the very
end of the chapter. What though the
statement of the child-poet's visit to the
old coffee-house rests almost exclusively upon
the assertion of Mr. Ruffhead, his biographer?
As doubly corroborative of the probable
veracity of which assertion howbeit, hath not
Sir Charles Wogan written distinctly (in a
letter which may be found at page twenty-
one of volume eighteen of Sir Walter Scott's
edition of the works of Swift): "I had the
honour of bringing Mr. Pope from our
retreat in the forest of Windsor to dress à la
mode, and introduce at Will's Coffee-house?"
While Mr. Pope himself no less distinctly
remarks, in his earliest epistle to Mr.
Wycherley, "It was certainly a great satisfaction
to me to hear you at our first meeting doing
justice to our dead friend Mr. Dryden. I
was not so happy as to know him: Virgilium
tantum vidi." Mark the solemn Latin
asseveration or averment: "But I have seen
Virgil!" It is as explicit as possible—"I
was not so happy as to know him: but I have
seen him!" After which, I am Mr. Ruffhead's
most obedient: placing my hand in
his confidingly, even though it be with eyes
still closely blindfolded. For, observe, as
glorious John died at the ripe age of seventy
breathing his last upon Mayday, seventeen
hundred; glorious Alexander, if he saw him
at all (and he says he did, most distinctly and
deliberately), must perforce have seen him
at the early part of that year, when he
(Alexander) was still only in his tender
childhood: And further, as our English
Virgil was indisputably dying through all
the previous March and April, being
confined a close prisoner during the whole of
those two spring months within the privacy
of his house in Gerard Street, it follows
that the reputed interview at Will's
Coffee House must equally perforce have
taken place, at the very latest, during
the previous February. Scarcely a dozen
years therefore have elapsed since the child-
beau before us—fastidiously clad à la mode,
and tripping eagerly across the threshold of
the famous rendezvous—breathed his first
breath on the twenty-first of May, sixteen
hundred and eighty-eight, in that dwelling in
Lombard Street, where his father then, light
of hand and ready of whip, drove a thriving
trade as a linen merchant.

After the little red heels and the toy cane,
into the old wainscoted public room of the
great coffee-house of Covent Garden! A
cursory glance is sufficient to take in.
every detail of the peculiar scene—familiar
as his own haunt, to every reader of Captain
Steele's Spectator. Nothing, however,
remains audible in all the hubbub and gossip,
nothing visible among all the moving lights
and shadows, but what at once fixes the
attention of our boy-introducer. Mr. Dryden
yonder—scrooping his chair round upon the
bare boarding of the floor so as to have his
foot more easily upon the fender, and get
altogether at a cosier angle in the time-
honoured chimney-corner, where for so long
he has sat enthroned the master of the gay
revels of conversation. Wigged and ruffled,
brave in velvet and gold-lace as becomes
them both in their contrasting characters—I
like to think of them thus as they
momentarily confront each other, with their keen
eyes meeting casually but searchingly: the
eyes of the fragile child and of the fast-failing
septuagenarian.

STEP THE FIFTH. A.D. 1680.

PERADVENTURE another score of years may
have slipped by, and I have probably fixed
my staff, at the next stride, upon a jutting-
point in sixteen hundred and eighty, when I
find myself still standing by Mr. Dryden's
elbow—he has just completed his half-
century listening with him to "our famous
Waller"—then but some four years short of
eighty—as he chats pleasantly in a cluster
of wits, about his own varied literary
experiences. A fragment of this sparkling small-
talk Mr. Dryden subsequently preserves in
his Preface to the Fables, where he relates
having overheard Mr. Waller attribute the
smoothness of his numbers to the suave and
harmonising influence of the Tasso done into
English verse by Mr. Fairfax. While the
courtly lyrist is discoursing with a negligent
drawl in his tone, I note how vigilantly
attention is awakened in at least one listener;
I see it on that mobile brow and on those
nervous lips, so vividly and instantly
impressionable.

STEP THE SIXTH. A.D. 1621.

AN adventurous movement gives me at one
bound a new foothold sixty years further
back, namely, in sixteen hundred and twenty-
one: when I am at the elbow, no longer of
Waller's listener, but of Waller as a listener.
He himself has not lived long enough to
wither into greyness and wrinkles. He is,
on the contrary, in the fresh bloom of sixteen,
jauntily attired, as becomes a courtier