Alexander Pope the elder died in October, 1717. Not very long after, the poet moved with his mother to a little villa, or "villakin" as Swift called it, on the banks of the Thames at Twickenham, close to the grotesque Gothic jumble known as Radnor House. At Twickenham or, as he called it, "Twitnam," Pope continued to reside until his death, his permanent house-mates being his old nurse, Mary Beach, to whom there is a tablet on the outer wall of Twickenham Church, and his mother, who survived her husband until 1733, only preceding her famous son by eleven years. Pope tended her with exemplary care--a care rendered daily more imperative by her increasing infirmities. Many references to her occur in his correspondence, and the sedulous inquiries made by his friends as to her health are earnest of her son's unwearied solicitude. One or two of the old lady's simple, homely letters to him have been preserved, with their fond messages and faulty spelling. Now and then, it is recorded, he would gratify her by setting her to transcribe his "Homer," an assistance of which the advantages must have been debatable.
Many friends came and went at the pleasant little villa by the Thames, "flanked by its two Courts" of Hampton and Kew, and often, no doubt, the London stage, starting from the Chequers in Piccadilly, brought to it guests bearing names familiar in the annals of the time. There are three of his intimates who cannot be neglected in any record, however brief. When Lady Mary came back to England she took up her residence at Twickenham, and the hitherto epistolary adoration of the poet became a practical fact. According to a story popularized by the pencil of Frith, Pope at length so far forgot himself as to make a declaration in form, to which she returned no reply but that most exasperating of all replies, ungovernable laughter. Whether this tradition be true or not, it is plain that she seems always to have remembered their difference of rank, and to have been rather cold than encouraging. The issue of the acquaintance is a sorry one. Pope revenged himself for her scorn in his worst and most unmanly fashion of innuendo; she, on her side, retorted with lampoons and satire as cruel. One feels glad that she finally left England and that further bickering was impossible. The other two persons were the already mentioned Blounts, each of whom seems at first to have by turn