Appleby And Honeybath by Michael Innes Page A

of an obscure bookseller, received almost everywhere with deep respect. But he handed out the same thing handsomely in return. He believed quite as wholeheartedly as James Boswell did in the grand principle of subordination.’
    ‘There had been some awkward chaps rather earlier,’ Appleby ventured. ‘Swift, for example.’
    ‘Very true. Swift had very little impulse to subordinate himself to any man. And his eventual reward was to hobnob familiarly with a number of distinctly exalted persons. His friend Alexander Pope is another special case. Pope was of course precocious, and was receiving patronage as quite a young man, being entertained in great houses and often writing about them and their owners either agreeably or disagreeably as he felt inclined. If one of his celebrated pieces could be associated with your house or estate, it was quite something.’
    ‘Somewhere or other, there’s an affair called Pope’s Tower.’
    ‘At Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire. He seems to have been entertained by the Harcourts during 1717 and 1718, when he was working on his translation of the Iliad . It was when he was finishing off the fifth volume that there was the tremendous thunderstorm that killed two rural lovers in one another’s arms in a harvest field. You will recall the incident, Sir John. The then Lord Harcourt had Pope write an epitaph for them. But that is by the way. We are considering Jonathan Grinton. It was probably some years before the Stanton Harcourt visit that he nobbled the celebrated young poet and lodged him in this house for an unknown but probably quite brief period. If Pope wrote anything about the place it has never been discovered. But it seems not unlikely that he did.’
    ‘It was his habit?’
    ‘At Timon’s Villa let us pass a day, Sir John.’ Miss Arne quoted this to an effect of mild reproach, as to a pupil inadequately prepared.
    ‘Yes, indeed. Yet hence the Poor are cloath’d, the Hungry fed.’ Appleby thus pulled up his socks with admirable speed.
    ‘And of Stanton Harcourt – where he was, I think, very well treated – he left a witty description which has of course survived. It would be pleasant to know a little more about Jonathan. He represents a tiny but not wholly unpromising plot of unexplored territory in eighteenth-century social history.’
    ‘I suppose so. But you have never profited by your acquaintance with the family to do a little exploring on your own? On this present visit, for example?’
    ‘Dear me, no!’ Miss Arne sounded surprised. ‘Mr Grinton, as you can see, would not be well-disposed to anything of the sort. And Mrs Grinton invites me here from time to time simply as judging it pleasant that her daughter should meet an old teacher. And so it is. Magda is an intelligent girl, and did very well at Somerville.’ Miss Arne lowered her voice only very slightly. ‘It is perhaps a pity that she married that intellectually undistinguished young man.’
    ‘The auctioneer?’
    ‘I believe that to be his trade, and that he knows the right price for a rare book. A drab accomplishment. He is said to have been at least promisingly freakish as a young man. But some piece of nonsense got him sent down from Oxford, and the endowment hasn’t been heard of since.’
    With this remark – which seemed a trifle freakish in itself – Miss Arne turned and talked briskly to her other neighbour.
     
    Appleby, as well as a very fair dinner, had food for thought before him. What might have appeared a merely freakish suggestion of his own to the effect that undercover literary research had been going on in the Grinton library had received sudden and unexpected reinforcement through this conversation with his learned neighbour. There must be many scholars who would be delighted to discover such a rarity as an unknown poem by Alexander Pope celebrating or perhaps mocking Grinton and the Grintons. But substantially it would be the pure dry light of scholarship that would be