POPE’S best essays were written in verse, but the prose essays he contributed to the Guardian are by no means the worst in that collection, and they are no doubt the best specimens of Pope’s prose style. It is curious to see how much less intense he is in his prose than his verse. While his prose contains frequent quotable phrases, they do not follow each other as they do in the “Essay on Man,” the “Moral Essays,” the “Imitations of Horace,” and other verse to which some nineteenth-century critics denied the name of poetry,—seemingly on no other ground than that it had too much common sense in it to be really poetical. It may as well be admitted that though Pope’s prose is better than that of his great pupil, Byron, he never satisfies himself or his reader in it as he does when he is rhyming. In facility as a versifier he has not been surpassed by any English poet, and Byron alone has equaled him. And without attempting to enter into the dispute of what constitutes a poet, it may be safely asserted that he has said in memorable verse more things worth remembering than any other English poet except Shakespeare.

  He was born in Lombard Street, London, May 21st, 1688. His father was a linen draper, and he had little or no scholastic training. He educated himself, however, until he became fit to make what still remains the most popular, if not the only popular, English translation of Homer’s “Iliad.” He was of a very delicate physique and his work was done in spite of constant suffering, which ended only with his death May 30th, 1744. Much has been written of his moral weakness, but out of it he developed the strength of genius which could use a frail and almost worthless body to accomplish painfully the enduring purposes of an immortal spirit.