1688, (May 21), Birth of Pope. 1700, (Circ.), Pope takes up his residence with his father at Binfield. 1704, Commencement of intimacy with Sir Wm. Trumbull, 1705, and Walsh. 1707, First acquaintance with the Blount family. 1709, “Pastorals” published. 1711, “Essay on Criticism,” Pope introduced to Gay, 1712, and Addison. “Rape of the Lock” (original edition), “The Messiah.” 1713, (April), Addison’s “Cato” first acted, “Prologue to Cato.” Pope’s attack on Dennis reproved by Addison, “Windsor Forest,” Pope introduced to Swift, “Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day,” Pope studies painting under Jervas. (November), Subscription for “Translation of Iliad” opened. 1713–4, Meetings of the Scriblerus Club. 1714, Death of Queen Anne, “Rape of the Lock” (enlarged), “Temple of Fame.” 1715, “Iliad” (vol. i.). 1715–6, Quarrel with Addison. 1716, (April), Pope settles with his parents at Chiswick, Departure for the East of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. 1717, “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady,” “Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard,” “Three Hours after Marriage” produced, First quarrel with Cibber. (October), Death of Pope’s father. 1718, Pope settles with his mother at Twickenham, Return from the East of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. 1720, South-Sea Year, “Iliad” (last volume). 1722, Correspondence with Judith Cowper. 1723, First return of Bolingbroke, Banishment of Atterbury. 1725, Edition of “Shakspere,” Pope attacked by Theobald, “Odyssey” (vols. i.–iii.), Second return of Bolingbroke, who settles at Dawley. 1726, “Letters to Cromwell” (Curll), Swift pays a long visit to Twickenham. 1727, (June), Death of George I., “Miscellanies” (vols. i. and ii.); containing, among other pieces by Pope, the “Treatise on the Bathos.” 1728, “The Dunciad” (Books i.–iii.). 1730, “Grub Street Journal” (continued by Pope and others till 1737). Quarrels with Aaron Hill and others. 1731, “Epistle on Taste,” The remaining “Moral Essay” up to 1735. 1732, “Essay on Man” (Ep. I.), The remaining Epistles up to 1734. (December), Death of Gay. 1733, Quarrel with Lord Hervey. (June), Death of Pope’s mother. 1735, “Epistle to Arbuthnot,” Death of Arbuthnot, Pope’s “Correspondence.” (Curll). 1736, Pope’s “Correspondence” (Authorised edition). 1737, “Imitations of Horace.” 1738, “Epilogue to Satires.” 1740. (March), Close of Correspondence with Swift, First meeting with Warburton. 1742. “The New Dunciad” (in four books). 1743, “The Dunciad” (with Cibber as hero). 1744, (May 30), Death of Pope.

Personal

  If you have a mind to enquire between Sunninghill and Oakingham, for a young, squab, short gentleman, an eternal writer of amorous pastoral madrigals, and the very bow of the god of Love, you will be soon directed to him. And pray, as soon as you have taken a survey of him, tell me whether he is a proper author to make personal reflections on others. This little author may extol the ancients as much, and as long as he pleases, but he has reason to thank the good gods that he was born a modern, for had he been born of Grecian parents, and his father by consequence had by law the absolute disposal of him, his life had been no longer than that of one of his poems,—the life of half a day.

  Dick Distick we have elected president, not only as he is the shortest of us all, but because he has entertained so just a sense of his stature as to go generally in black, that he may appear yet less; nay, to that perfection is he arrived that he stoops as he walks. The figure of the man is odd enough: He is a lively little creature, with long arms and legs—a spider is no ill emblem of him; he has been taken at a distance for a small windmill.

	And yet so wonderful, sublime a thing
	As the great Iliad, scarce could make me sing,
	Except I justly could at once commend
	A good companion, and as firm a friend.

  Mr. Pope, the poet, who is now publishing Homer, in English verse, (three volumes of the Iliads in 4to. being already come out,) was born in the parish of Binfield, near Ockingham, in Berks. He is a papist, as is also his father, who is a sort of a broken merchant. The said Mr. Pope was patronized and encouraged by the late sir William Trumbull. He lived in Binfield parish till of late, when he removed to Chiswick, in Surrey. He is most certainly a very ingenious man. He is deformed.

	Tuneful Alexis on the Thames’ fair side,
	The Ladies’ play-thing, and the Muses’ pride;
	With merit popular, with wit polite,
	Easy, tho’ vain, and elegant tho’ light:
	Desiring, and deserving others’ praise,
	Poorly accepts a fame he ne’er repays;
	Unborn to cherish, sneakingly approves,
	And wants the soul to spread the worth he loves.

	… Pope, the monarch of the tuneful train!
	To whom be Nature’s, and Britannia’s praise!
	All their bright honours rush into his lays!
	And all that glorious warmth his lays reveal,
	Which only poets, kings, and patriots feel!
	Tho’ gay as mirth, as curious though sedate,
	As elegance polite, as pow’r elate;
	Profound as reason, and as justice clear;
	Soft as compassion, yet as truth severe;
	As bounty copious, as persuasion sweet,
	Like Nature various, and like Art complete;
	So fine her morals, so sublime her views,
	His life is almost equall’d by his Muse.

  Mr. Alexander Pope, the poet’s father, was a poor ignorant man, a tanner at Binfield in Berks. This Mr. Alex. Pope had a little house there, that he had from his father, but hath now sold it to one Mr. Tanner, an honest man. This Alexander Pope, though he be an English poët, yet he is but an indifferent scholar, mean at Latin, and can hardly read Greek. He is a very ill-natured man and covetous, and excessively proud.

	Hail, happy Pope! whose generous mind
	Detesting all the statesman kind,
	Contemning courts, at courts unseen,
	Refused the visits of a queen.
	A soul with every virtue fraught,
	By sages, priests, or poets taught;
	Whose filial piety excels
	Whatever Grecian story tells;
	A genius for all stations fit,
	Whose meanest talent is his wit:
	His heart too great, though fortune little,
	To lick a rascal statesman’s spittle:
	Appealing to the nation’s taste,
	Above the reach of want is placed:
	By Homer dead was taught to thrive,
	Which Homer never could alive;
	And sits aloft on Pindus’ head,
	Despising slaves that cringe for bread.

	Nor thou the justice of the world disown,
	That leaves thee thus an outcast and alone:
	For though in law the murder be to kill,
	In equity the murder is the will.
	Then while with coward hand you stab a name,
	And try at least to assassinate our Fame,
	Like the first bold assassin be thy lot,
	Ne’er be thy guilt forgiven or forgot;
	But as thou hat’st be hated by mankind,
	And with the emblem of thy crooked mind
	Marked on thy back, like Cain, by God’s own hand,
	Wander like him accursed through the land.

	Whose life, severely scann’d, transcends his lays;
	For wit supreme is but his second praise.

  To believe nothing is yours but what you own, would be merely ridiculous. Did you not deny the Dunciad for seven years? Did you not offer a reward of three guineas, by an advertisement in the Post-man, to know the publisher of your version of the First Psalm? and when you were informed, did you ever pay the premium? Did you not publish the Worms yourself? And do you own any of these in the preface of the second volume of your works? In short, sir, your conduct as to your poetical productions is exactly of a piece with what I once met with at the Old Bailey. A most flagrant offender was put upon his trial for a notorious theft, and by his egregious shuffling he put Mr. Recorder Lovel into a violent passion. Sirrah, says he, you have got a trick of denying what you ought to own, and by owning what you might as well deny. “An’ please your honour,” quoth culprit, “that’s the way not to be hanged.”

  Mr. Pope’s not being richer may be easily accounted for.—He never had any love for money: and though he was not extravagant in anything, he always delighted, when he had any sum to spare, to make use of it in giving, lending, building, and gardening; for those were the ways in which he disposed of all the overplus of his income.—If he was extravagant in anything it was in his grotto, for that, from first to last, cost him above a thousand pounds.

	To cast a shadow o’er the spotless fame,
	Or dye the cheek of innocence with shame;
	To swell the breast of modesty with care,
	Or force from beauty’s eye a secret tear;
	And, not by decency or honour sway’d,
	Libel the living and asperse the dead.
	Prone, where he ne’er received, to give offence,
	But most averse to merit and to sense;
	Base to his foe, but baser to his friend;
	Lying to blame, and sneering to commend:
	Then let him boast that honourable crime
	Of making those who fear not God, fear HIM—
	When the great honour of that boast is such,
	That hornets and mad dogs may boast as much.
	Such is th’ injustice of his daily theme,
	And such the lust that breaks his nightly dream,
	That vestal fire of undecaying hate,
	Which time’s cold tide itself can ne’er abate.

  One of his worst mistakes was that unnecessary noise he used to make in boast of his morality. It seemed to me almost a call upon suspicion that a man should rate the duties of plain honesty, as if they had been qualities extraordinary. And, in fact, I saw in some occasions, that he found these duties too severe for practice, and but prized himself upon the character in proportion to the pains it cost him to support it.

  I can say no more for Mr. Pope (for what you keep in reserve may be worse than all the rest). It is natural to wish the finest writer, one of them, we ever had, should be an honest man. It is for the interest even of that virtue, whose friend he professed himself, and whose beauties he sung, that he should not be found a dirty animal. But, however, this is Mr. Warburton’s business, not mine, who may scribble his pen to the stumps and all in vain, if these facts are so. It is not from what he told me about himself that I thought well of him, but from a humanity and goodness of heart, ay, and greatness of mind, that runs through his private correspondence, not less apparent than are a thousand little vanities and weaknesses mixed with those good qualities, for nobody ever took him for a philosopher.

  His voice in common conversation was so naturally musical, that I remember honest Tom Southerne used always to call him “the little nightingale.”

  “But I have been told of one Pope, is he there?” “It is time enough,” replied my guide, “these hundred years; he is not long dead; people have not done hating him yet.” “Strange,” cried I, “can any be found to hate a man, whose life was wholly spent in entertaining and instructing his fellow-creatures?” “Yes,” said my guide, “they hate him for that very reason.”

  Pope’s frame of body did not promise long life; but he certainly hastened his death by feeding much on high-seasoned dishes, and drinking spirits.

  Pope had but one great end in view to render this world supportable to him. That was Friendship, the peculiar gift of heaven. This did he nobly deserve and obtain; but for how short a time! Jealousy deprived him of the affection he assiduously sought from Mr. Wycherly, and many others; but Death cruel Death was far more cruel. The dearest ties of his heart all yielded to his stroke. The modest Digby, the gentle virtuous Gay, the worthy Arbuthnot, the exiled Atterbury—but why should I enumerate these excellent men, when their very names dejected me? But in nothing does Pope equally charm me as in his conduct to his mother: it is truly noble.

  Pope, who was all malice, hatred, and uncharitableness; false as a Jesuit; fickle as a fool; mercenary as a waiting woman; and with a prurient fancy, which, had his body permitted it, would have led him into excesses as gross as any that Chartres was accused of.

  Pope was, through his whole life, ambitious of splendid acquaintance; and he seems to have wanted neither diligence nor success in attracting the notice of the great; for from his first entrance into the world (and his entrance was very early) he was admitted to familiarity with those whose rank or station made them most conspicuous…. He is said to have been beautiful in his infancy; but he was of a constitution originally feeble and weak; and as bodies of a tender frame are easily distorted, his deformity was probably in part the effect of his application. His stature was so low, that, to bring him to the level with common tables, it was necessary to raise his seat. But his face was not displeasing, and his eyes were animated and vivid…. When he rose, he was invested in a bodice made of stiff canvas, being scarcely able to hold himself erect till they were laced, and he then put on a flannel waistcoat. One side was contracted. His legs were so slender that he enlarged their bulk with three pair of stockings, which were drawn on and off by the maid; for he was not able to dress or undress himself, and neither went to bed nor rose without help. His weakness made it very difficult for him to be clean…. He sometimes condescended to be jocular with servants or inferiors; but by no merriment, either of others or his own, was he ever seen excited to laughter…. In the duties of friendship he was zealous and constant; his early maturity of mind commonly united him with men older than himself, and therefore, without attaining any considerable length of life, he saw many companions of his youth sink into the grave; but it does not appear that he lost a single friend by coldness or by injury; those who loved him once, continued their kindness.

  Sir Joshua Reynolds once saw Pope. It was about the year 1740, at an auction of books or pictures. He remembers that there was a lane formed to let him pass freely through the assemblage, and he proceeded along bowing to those who were on each side. He was, according to Sir Joshua’s account, about four feet six high; very humpbacked and deformed; he wore a black coat; and according to the fashion of that time, had on a little sword. Sir Joshua adds that he had a large and very fine eye, and a long handsome nose; his mouth had those peculiar marks which always are found in the mouths of crooked persons; and the muscles which run across the cheek were so strongly marked as to appear like small cords. Roubilliac, the statuary, who made a bust of him from life, observed that his countenance was that of a person who had been much afflicted with headache, and he should have known the fact from the contracted appearance of the skin between his eyebrows, though he had not been otherwise apprised of it.

  Pope’s character and habits were exclusively literary, with all the hopes, fears, and failings, which are attached to that feverish occupation,—a restless pursuit of poetical fame. Without domestic society, or near relations; separated by weak health and personal disadvantages from the gay; by fineness of mind and lettered indolence, from the busy part of mankind, surrounded only by a few friends, who valued these gifts in which he excelled, Pope’s whole hopes, wishes, and fears, were centred in his literary reputation. To extend his fame, he laboured indirectly, as well as directly; and to defend it from the slightest attack, was his daily and nightly anxiety. Hence the restless impatience which that distinguished author displayed under the libels of dunces, whom he ought to have despised, and hence too the venomed severity with which he retorted their puny attacks.

  No politician studied to obtain his purposes by more oblique directions, or with more intricate stratagems; and Pope was at once the lion and the fox of Machiavel. A book might be written on the Stratagems of Literature, as Frontinus has composed one on War, and among its subtilest heroes we might place this great poet.

  I have hung up Pope, and a gem it is, in my town room; I hope for your approval. Though it accompanies the “Essay on Man,” I think that was not the poem he is here meditating. He would have looked up, somehow affectedly, if he were just conceiving “Awake, my St. John.” Neither is he in the “Rape of the Lock” mood exactly. I think he has just made out the last lines of the “Epistle to Jervis,” between gay and tender,

“And other beauties envy Worsley’s eyes.”

I’ll be d….’d if that isn’t the line. He is brooding over it, with a dreamy phantom of Lady Mary floating before him. He is thinking which is the earliest possible day and hour that she will first see it. What a miniature piece of gentility it is! Why did you give it me? I do not like you well enough to give you anything so good.

  As he advanced in life the original complaint ceased to make any further progress, and its effects on his constitution might have been removed by due attention to regimen and exercise; but instead of these active medicines and stimulating diet were the means he constantly employed of temporarily palliating the exhaustion, and obviating the excitement consequent on excessive mental application. None of his biographers, indeed, allude to his having suffered from indigestion; and it is even possible that he might not have been himself aware of the nature of those anomalous symptoms of dyspepsia, which mimic the form of every other malady; those symptoms of giddiness, languor, dejection, palpitation of the heart, constant headache, dimness of sight, occasional failure of the mental powers, exhaustion of nervous energy, depriving the body of vital heat, and the diminution of muscular strength, without a corresponding loss of flesh, he frequently complains of; and every medical man is aware, that they are the characteristic symptoms of dyspepsia.

  The peculiar fondness of Pope for petty stratagem is well known. He was like one of those gallants whom Swift ridicules as preferring midnight and a window, to prosecute an amour, which could be carried on with equal safety by daylight and the door. Lady Bolingbroke used to tell him that he played the politician about cabbages and turnips; and another of his lady friends accused him of not being able to drink tea without a stratagem.

  As a Christian, Pope appears in a truly estimable light. He found himself a Roman Catholic by accident of birth; so was his mother; but his father was so upon personal conviction and conversion.—yet not without extensive study of the questions at issue. It would have laid open the road to preferment, and preferment was otherwise abundantly before him, if Pope would have gone over to the Protestant faith. And in his conscience he found no obstacle to that change; he was a philosophical Christian, intolerant of nothing but intolerance, a bigot only against bigots. But he remained true to his baptismal profession, partly on a general principle of honour in adhering to a distressed and dishonoured party, but chiefly out of reverence and affection to his mother. In his relation to women Pope was amiable and gentlemanly, and accordingly was the object of affectionate regard and admiration to many of the most accomplished in that sex. This we mention especially, because we would wish to express our full assent to the manly scorn with which Mr. Roscoe repels the libellous insinuations against Pope and Miss Martha Blount. A more innocent connexion we do not believe ever existed.

  His own life was one long series of tricks, as mean and as malicious as that of which he suspected Addison and Tickell. He was all stiletto and mask. To injure, to insult, to save himself from the consequence of injury and insult by lying and equivocating, was the habit of his life. He published a lampoon on the Duke of Chandos; he was taxed with it; and he lied and equivocated. He published a lampoon on Aaron Hill; he was taxed with it; and he lied and equivocated. He published a still fouler lampoon on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; he was taxed with it; and he lied with more than usual effrontery and vehemence. He puffed himself and abused his enemies under feigned names. He robbed himself of his own letters, and then raised the hue and cry after them. Besides his frauds of malignity, of fear, of interest, and of vanity, there were frauds which he seems to have committed from love of fraud alone. He had a habit of stratagem—a pleasure in outwitting all who came near him. Whatever his object might be, the indirect road to it was that which he preferred.

  By one of those acts which neither science nor curiosity can excuse, the skull of Pope is now in the private collection of a phrenologist. The manner in which it was obtained is said to have been this. On some occasion of alteration in the church, or burial of someone in the same spot, the coffin of Pope was disinterred, and opened to see the state of the remains; that by a bribe to the sexton of the time, possession of the skull was obtained for a night, and another skull returned instead of it. I have heard that fifty pounds were paid to manage and carry through this transaction. Be that as it may, the skull of Pope figures in a private museum.

  Alexander Pope went through doubt, contradiction, confusion, to which yours are simple and light; and conquered. He was a man of light passions with yourselves; infected with the peculiar vices of his day. Narrow, for his age was narrow; shallow, for his age was shallow; a bon-vivant, for his age was a gluttonous and drunken one; bitter, furious, and personal, for men around him were such; foul-mouthed often, and indecent, as the rest were. Nay, his very power, when he abuses it for his own ends of selfish spite and injured vanity, makes him, as all great men can be (in words at least, for in life he was far better than the men around him), worse than his age. He can outrival Dennis in ferocity, and Congreve in filth. So much the worse for him in that account which he has long ago rendered up. But in all times and places, as far as we can judge, the man was heart-whole, more and not less righteous than his fellows. With his whole soul he hates what is evil, as far as he can recognise it. With his whole soul he loves what is good, as far as he can recognise that. With his whole soul he believes that there is a righteous and a good God, whose order no human folly or crime can destroy; and he will say so; and does say it, clearly, simply, valiantly, reverently in that “Essay on Man.”

  The Pope mansion was described by the poet as

	“A little house, with trees a row,
	And like its master very low.”

It has since been raised and transformed into a handsome villa residence. Two of the trees—noble elms—still remain at the gate of the house, and the poet’s study has been preserved. On the lawn is a cypress-tree which Pope is said to have planted—a tradition common to all poetical residences. Milton has still an apple-tree at Horton and a mulberry-tree at Cambridge; and Shakspeare’s mulberry-tree, with the story of its ruthless and Gothic destruction, has a fame almost as universal as his dramas…. Part of the forest of Windsor now bears the name of Pope’s Wood, and among those tall, spreading beeches with smooth, grey, fluted trunks he first met the Muse and “lisped in numbers.” His country retirement and sylvan walks were highly important at this susceptible period of life in the formation of Pope’s poetical character. He soon ceased to be a descriptive poet, and, with a weakness observable on other subjects, he depreciated what he did not adopt or prefer…. Pope’s physical constitution no doubt helped to shape his mental habits, but it was fortunate that he had this early taste of the country. His recollections of Windsor Forest, and of the mornings and sunsets he had enjoyed within its broad circumference of shade, or from the “stately brow” of its historic heights, may be tracked, like the fresh green of spring, along the fiery course of his satire, and through the mazes of his metaphysics. Milton, let us remember, was familiar with the same scenery. Horton is within sight of Windsor, and the great poet must often have listened to the echoes of the royal chase in the forest.

  He had giant energies, and a wretched field for them; a soul for worship, in an age of unbelief; a heart for love, yet under the ban of a mysterious destiny; and he had to fight his fight under the closest of all restrictions,—the restriction on the very energies of life within him, by disease;—he moved from youth in a cloud of hypochondria. Hercules had the poisoned shirt on him all his life.

  Thanks to his father, Pope’s fortune was enough to place him above dependence. No matter what was the amount of his patrimony, his spirit was independent, and he resolved, from the first, to limit his desires to his means…. Pope greedy of money! Why Johnson admits that he gave away an eighth part of his income; and where is the man, making no ostentatious profession of benevolence—subscribing to no charities, as they are called, or few—standing in no responsible position before the world, which indeed he rather scorned than courted, of whom the same can be said? Pope, we suspect, with all his magnificent subscriptions, did not leave behind him so much as he had received from his father. His pleasure was in scattering, not in hoarding, and that on others rather than on himself. He was generous to the Blounts and because one proof has accidentally become known, it has been winged with scandal;—he was generous to his half-sister,—generous to her sons,—generous to Dodsley, then struggling into business,—nobly generous to Savage; for though the weakness and the vice of Savage compelled Pope to break off personal intercourse, he never deserted him. These facts were known to his biographers; and we could add a bead-roll of like noble actions, but that it would be beside our purpose and our limits. Pope, indeed, was generous to all who approached; and though his bodily weakness and sufferings made him a troublesome visitor, especially to servants,—though one of Lord Oxford’s said that, “in the dreadful winter of forty, she was called from her bed by him four times in one night,” yet this same servant declared, “that in a house where her business was to answer his call, she would not ask for wages.” What more could be told of the habitual liberality of a man who never possessed more than a few hundred a year? It startled persons accustomed to the munificence of the noble and the wealthy.

  There is probably no English author whose life can be compared with Pope as a succession of petty secrets and third-rate problems…. A man whose actions were generally blameless would not have left so many things for his apologists to explain; a man whose character was truthful and simple would not have been the hero of so many enigmatical narratives.

  Bolingbroke had given to Pope the manuscript of “The Patriot King,” and the letter on Patriotism, in order to get five or six copies printed for private circulation. Pope, however, had given orders for fifteen hundred additional copies to be worked off, under the strictest injunctions of secrecy. The secret was kept until Pope’s death. Soon afterwards Bolingbroke received a letter from the printer, asking him what was to be done with these fifteen hundred copies? Bolingbroke was astonished to find so much artifice and meanness in his former friend. He requested Lord Marchmont to get all the edition into his hands…. The edition was, however, not burnt at the house Lord Marchmont was furnishing in London. He thought it more satisfactory to have the sheets, destroyed under Bolingbroke’s own eyes. They were all taken down to Battersea, and burned on the terrace. Bolingbroke himself set fire to the pile. It is impossible to defend Pope. That he greatly admired “The Patriot King,” and was afraid so valuable a work would be lost to posterity, unless he took this method of preserving it, as Warburton afterwards alleged, is at best scarcely an excuse. No adequate motive for Pope’s conduct has ever been discovered nor imagined. The simplest explanation is the most satisfactory. Stratagem and double-dealing were habitual to him: he could not act straightforwardly, nor understand a straightforward course in others; he frequently lied when lying was quite useless to him, and answered no purpose of deception; and when he could not deceive his enemies, he with a weak kind of cunning appears to have taken a pleasure in outwitting his best friends.

  It was not, however, the hate of his contemporaries that kept his bust out of the Abbey, but his own deliberate wish to be interred, by the side of his beloved mother, in the central aisle of the parish church of Twickenham: and his epitaph, composed by himself, is inscribed on a white marble tablet above the gallery.—

	FOR ONE THAT WOULD NOT BE BURIED IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY
	Heroes and kings! your distance keep,
	In peace let one poor poet sleep,
	Who never flatter’d folks like you:
	Let Horace blush, and Virgil too.

The “Little Nightingale,” who withdrew from the boisterous company of London to those quiet shades, only to revisit them in his little chariot like “Homer in a nutshell,” naturally rests there at last.

  No author has been more elaborately slandered on principle, or more studiously abused through envy. Smarting dullards went about for years, with an ever-ready microscope, hunting for flaws in his character that might be injuriously exposed; but to-day his defamers are in bad repute. Excellence in a fellow-mortal is to many men worse than death; and great suffering fell upon a host of mediocre writers when Pope uplifted his sceptre and sat supreme above them all.

  Personally we know more about Pope than about any of our poets. He kept no secrets about himself. If he did not let the cat out of the bag, he always contrived to give her tail a wrench so that we might know she was there. In spite of the savageness of his satires, his natural disposition seems to have been an amiable one, and his character as an author was as purely factitious as his style.

  It is not a pleasant picture one of Pope’s biographers has painted of the sickly stunted young poet shut up in his room at Binfield, building himself up with books, reading till the stars twinkle in upon him unheeded, reading while the wonders of the sun-setting and sun-rising pass by unknown. “He is ignorant how the little birds answer each other among the trees, and how the wood-pigeons coo. The mavis and the merle are never singing among the branches, nor is it a ‘good greenwood’ to the boy-poet.” He has nothing to do with the beauty outside; the dews fall not, the balm breathes not, for him. Windsor Forest was the scene, its glades and recesses the surrounding; but in a “curious mental work-shop,” as one critic expresses it, the lad lived and laboured, “with his windows shut, we may be sure,” and the fever of toil on his worn face: it was a juvenile manufactory, where verse was already turned and returned, and where a correct couplet was reckoned the highest product of earth and heaven. Thus at least modern criticism rates him, and rates his work.

  In Pope, then, we have to do with a remarkably complex character. It will not do simply to brand him as a hypocrite, for the essence of hypocrisy consists in unreality; but behind the falsities of Pope there is an eagerness and intensity which gives them a human interest, and makes us feel, that, in his poetry, we are in contact with the nature of the man himself. To separate that moral nature into various elements, so as to decide how much is deliberately false, how much may be accepted as true, and how much is self-deception, we ought, following his own rule, to examine his

	Proper character,
	His fable, subject, scope in every page,
	Religion, country, genius of his age.

On this principle much of the inconsistency in his conduct will be found to correspond with the union of opposite conditions in his nature: the piercing intelligence and artistic power, lodged in the sickly and deformed frame; the vivid perception of the ridiculous in others, joined to the most sensitive consciousness of his own defects; the passionate desire for fame, aggravated by a fear of being suspected by his countrymen on account of his religion; the conflicting qualities of benevolence and self-love; the predominance of intellectual instinct; the deficiency of moral principle. It might be predicted of a character so highly strung, so variously endowed, so “tremblingly alive” to opinion, and so capable of transformation, that it would exhibit itself in the most diverse aspects, according to the circumstances by which it was tested. And this is just what we find. Perhaps no man of genius was ever more largely influenced by his companions and his surroundings than Pope.

  The deformed and decrepit poet had a grudge against the world. The feelings of this “Homer in a nutshell” were easily hurt, and easily fired. He was keenly alive to his own infirmities. He resented his malformation. He once or twice tries to allude lightly, and by and by, to “the libelled person and the pictured shape;” but the hand winces and the flesh quivers as he writes. “There is a smile on the shrunken face, but the pain is intense. There is mockery in the voice, but the excessive bitterness is fitter for tears than for laughter…. In the heart of such a man many jealous and angry passions must have lodged. Sometimes he was bowed down by anguish; sometimes he was fiercely excited. And, undoubtedly, there was a twist in his mind as in his body. Pope’s was, in many aspects, a lofty and generous nature. He was of an intrepid disposition. He could brave power. Let the cowards bully him if they dared! He loved his friends. Yet he was sometimes base. He was familiar with the stealthy and secret arts with which nature arms the weaker animals. Sometimes he practised these arts without excuse, necessity, or provocation.

  With the exception of some details recently brought to light with an industry worthy of a better subject, his contemporaries were as well aware of these delinquencies as we are now, only none but his bitter enemies were so earnest in denouncing them.

  Nor can I think that “’twere to consider too curiously, to consider” that the temperament of his ill-conditioned body rather than the temper of his imprisoned mind must be held responsible for the childish trickery and apish furtiveness of such intrigues as have been so sharply cast in his teeth by the successive severity of the three Anglican clergymen who have edited and defamed him as a poet or as man. After the Reverend Mr. Warton came the Reverend Mr. Bowles, and after the Reverend Mr. Bowles comes the Reverend Mr. Elwin. “Hear them! All these against one foreigner!” cries Mr. Browning’s Luria; and “See them! All these against one Liberal Catholic!” a lay student may be tempted and permitted to exclaim at sight of so many cassocked commentators opening in full cry upon the trail of this poet. And such a feeling may be indulged without any very sympathetic admiration for the balanced attitude of Pope between a modified sort of conformity and a moderate kind of philosophy.

  “An Ape,”—“An Apothecary,”—“The Bard of Twickenham,”—“The Best Poet of England,”—“The Empty Flask,”—“Gunpowder Percy,”—“A Little Druid-wight,”—“A Little Liar,”—“The Little Man of Twickenham,”—“The Little Nightingale,”—“A Lurking, Way-Laying Coward,”—“The Most Faultless of Poets,”—“The Nightingale of Twickenham,”—“Paper-Sparing Pope,”—“Poet Pug,”—“The Portentous Cub,”—“Sawney,”—“The Sweet Swan of Thames,”—“The True Deacon of the Craft,”—“The Wasp of Twickenham.”

  Pope’s disease was that of Malvolio and one or two others—he was sick of self-love. He knew himself to be warm-hearted and generous, he forgot he was also vain and disingenuous, and so remembering and thus forgetting, he loved himself unsparingly. A cripple and a Catholic, he was prevented by nature and by law from either active pursuits or the public service. Crazy for praise and fame, and conscious of enormous ability, he determined to make himself felt, as an independent force in verse. Resentful to the last degree, writhing under a dunce’s sneer, maddened by a woman’s laugh, he grasped his only weapon with a fierce hand and made his hatreds “live along the line.” I do not believe any just man can read Dr. Johnson’s and Mr. Courthope’s Lives of Pope without liking him. Some of the bad poets (e.g. Kirke White) have been better men, but very few of the good ones.

  The poor man’s life was as weak and crooked as his frail, tormented body, but he had a dauntless spirit, and he fought his way against odds that might well have appalled a stronger nature. I suppose I must own that he was from time to time a snob, and from time to time a liar, but I believe that he loved the truth, and would have liked always to respect himself if he could. He violently revolted, now and again, from abasement to which he forced himself, and he always bit the heel, that trod on him, especially if it was a very high, narrow heel, with a clocked stocking and a hooped skirt above it. I loved him fondly at one time, and afterwards despised him, but now I am not sorry for the love, and I am very sorry for the despite.

Lady Mary

  To say that he had any right to make love to her is one thing; yet to believe that her manners, and cast of character, as well as the nature of the times, and of the circles in which she moved, had given no license, no encouragement, no pardoning hope to the presumption, is impossible; and to trample in this way upon the whole miserable body of his vanity and humility, upon all which the consciousness of acceptability and glory among his fellow-creatures, had given to sustain himself, and all which in so poor, and fragile, and dwarfed, and degrading a shape, required so much to be so sustained;—assuredly it was inexcusable,—it was inhuman…. She had every advantage on her side:—could not even this induce her to put a little more heart and consideration into her repulse? Oh, Lady Mary! A duke’s daughter wert thou, and a beauty, and a wit, and a very triumphant and flattered personage, and covered with glory as with lute-string and diamonds; and yet false measure didst thou take of thy superiority, and didst not see how small thou becamest in the comparison when thou didst thus, with laughing cheeks, trample under foot the poor little immortal!

  The friendship with Pope, conspicuous in the letters written during the embassy, is an unfortunate episode in the life of Lady Mary. All the stories which have gained credence, to the injury of her reputation, are probably due to his subsequent quarrel with her, the hatred and unscrupulousness with which he pursued her, and his fatal power of circulating scandalous insinuations. It is certain that the tenor of her life up to the period of her quarrel with Pope, was wholly unlike that career of profligacy which has been popularly attributed to her since the publication of Pope’s Satires and the Letters of Horace Walpole—who, it must be remembered, wrote after Pope’s celebrated attacks; and it is no less certain that, on a careful investigation, not one of the charges brought against her will be found to rest on any evidence.

  Why Pope and Lady Mary quarreled is a question on which much discussion has been expended, and on which a judicious German professor might even now compose an interesting and exhaustive monograph. A curt English critic will be more apt to ask why they should not have quarreled. We know that Pope quarreled with almost every one: we know that Lady Mary quarreled or half quarreled with most of her acquaintances: why then should they not have quarreled with one another? It is certain that they were very intimate at one time; for Pope wrote to her some of the most pompous letters of compliment in the language. And the more intimate they were to begin with, the more sure they were to be enemies in the end…. We only know that there was a sudden coolness or quarrel between them, and that it was the beginning of a long and bitter hatred. In their own times Pope’s sensitive disposition probably gave Lady Mary a great advantage,—her tongue perhaps gave him more pain than his pen gave her; but in later times she has fared the worse.

  The stroke, when it came, was delivered on the most sensitive part of the poet’s nature. It is quite unnecessary to suppose that he was passionately in love with Lady Mary. The “declarations” which he is constantly making to her in his letters, he made, with as much sincerity, and almost in identical words, to Judith Cowper and Martha Blount; and, in using language of this kind, he was only conforming with the gallantry fashionable in his age. He calls himself in one of his poems the “most thinking rake alive.” His love-making was like his description of Stanton-Harcourt, purely ideal, but his vanity and his artistic sensibility were so strong that he was vexed when he was not believed to be in earnest. To have the declaration of his elaborate passion received with laughter, must have been a rude shock to his vanity, and his acute self-consciousness would have no doubt associated Lady Mary’s behaviour with his own physical defects. After all his well-considered expressions of devotion, after the exquisite lines in which he had connected her name with his grotto, ridicule was the refinement of torture. It humiliated him in his own esteem, and the recollection of the light mockery, with which she had always met his heroics, added to his sense of insult and injury. These considerations, though they help us to understand the condition of Pope’s feelings, afford no excuse whatever for the character of his satire on Lady Mary.

  An incident occurred in connection with this picture that is worth recording, as showing the way artists are sometimes treated by their—so-called—patrons. A collector, of a somewhat vulgar type, had long desired me to paint a picture for him. I showed him the sketch, and, to prove the culture of the gentleman, I may mention the following fact: “What’s the subject?” said he. “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Pope,” said I; “the point taken is when Pope makes love to the lady, who was married at the time, and she laughed at him.” “The pope make love to a married woman—horrible!” “No, no, not the pope—Pope the poet!” “Well, it don’t matter who it was; he shouldn’t make love to a married woman, and she done quite right in laughing at him; and if I had been her husband I should —” etc. “Very well,” said I, “as you don’t like the subject, we will say no more about it. I will paint you something else.” “Oh, no,” was the reply; “I like to see a woman laugh at a man who makes an ass of himself. I’ll take it. What’s the figure?”

Martha Blount

  Patty Blount was red-faced, fat, and by no means pretty. Mr. Walpole remembered her walking to Mr. Bethell’s, in Arlington Street, after Pope’s death, with her petticoats tucked up like a sempstress. She was the decided mistress of Pope, yet visited by respectable people.

  He was never indifferent to female society; and though his good sense prevented him, conscious of so many personal infirmities, from marrying, yet he felt the want of that sort of reciprocal tenderness and confidence in a female, to whom he might freely communicate his thoughts, and on whom, in sickness and infirmity, he could rely. All this Martha Blount became to him; by degrees, she became identified with his existence. She partook of his disappointments, his vexations, and his comforts. Wherever he went, his correspondence with her was never remitted; and when the warmth of gallantry was over, the cherished idea of kindness and regard remained.

  Martha Blount was not so kind or so attentive to Pope in his last illness as she ought to have been. His love for her seemed blended with his frail existence; and when he was scarcely sensible to any thing else in the world, he was still conscious of the charm of her presence. “When she came into the room,” says Spence, “it was enough to give a new turn to his spirits, and a temporary strength to him.” She survived him eighteen years, and died unmarried at her house in Berkeley Square, in 1762. She is described, about that time, as a little, fair, prim old woman, very lively, and inclined to gossip. Her undefined connexion with Pope, though it afforded matter for mirth and wonder, never affected her reputation while living; and has rendered her name as immortal as our language and our literature. One cannot help wishing that she had been more interesting, and more worthy of her fame.

  Johnson repeats a story that Martha neglected Pope “with shameful unkindness,” in his later years. It is clearly exaggerated or quite unfounded. At any rate, the poor sickly man, in his premature and childless old age, looked up to her with fond affection, and left to her nearly the whole of his fortune. His biographers have indulged in discussions—surely superfluous—as to the morality of the connexion. There is no question of seduction, or of tampering with the affections of an innocent woman. Pope was but too clearly disqualified from acting the part of Lothario. There was not in his case any Vanessa to give a tragic turn to the connexion, which otherwise resembled Swift’s connexion with Stella. Miss Blount, from all that appears was quite capable of taking care of herself, and, had she wished for marriage, need only have intimated her commands to her lover. It is probable enough that the relations between them led to very unpleasant scenes in her family; but she did not suffer otherwise in accepting Pope’s attentions. The probability seems to be that the friendship had become imperceptibly closer, and that what begun as an idle affectation of gallantry was slowly changed into a devoted attachment, but not until Pope’s health was so broken that marriage would then, if not always, have appeared to be a mockery.

  Miss Blount retained her place in the fashionable world after Pope’s death. She lived at last in Berkeley Row, by Hanover Square, and there Swinburne the traveller, her relative, visited her (Roscoe, i, 581 note). He found her a little, neat, fair, prim old woman, easy and gay in her manners. By her will she left the residue of her property to her “dear nephew,” Michael Blount, of Mapledurham. She died in 1762, aged 72.

Ode to Solitude

  The first of our author’s compositions now extant in print, is an “Ode on Solitude,” written before he was twelve years old: Which, consider’d as the production of so early an age, is a perfect masterpiece; nor need he have been ashamed of it, had it been written in the meridian of his genius. While it breathes the most delicate spirit of poetry, it at the same time demonstrates his love of solitude, and the rational pleasures which attend the retreats of a contented country life.

  The close of the seventeenth century forever shut the eyes of John Dryden upon the clouded and fluctuating daylight of our sublunary world. It may have been in the same year, that a solitary boy, then twelve years old, wrote five stanzas which any man might have been glad to have written—and which you have by heart—an “Ode to Solitude,”—conspicuous in the annals of English poetry as the dawn-gleam of a new sun that was presently to arise, and to fill the region that Dryden had left.

  Pope never wrote more agreeable or well-tuned verses than this interesting effusion of his boyhood. Indeed there is an intimation of sweetness and variety in the versification, which was not borne out afterwards by his boasted smoothness: nor can we help thinking, that had the author of the “Ode on Solitude” arisen in less artificial times, he would have turned out to be a still finer poet than he was. But the reputation which he easily acquired for wit and criticism, the recent fame of Dryden, and perhaps even his little warped and fragile person, tempted him to accept such power over his contemporaries as he could soonest realize. It is observable that Pope never repeated the form of verse in which this poem is written. It might have reminded him of a musical feeling he had lost.

  The Odes written by Pope are decidedly of an inferior caste. I need not say how inferior to the immortal “Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day,” by Dryden, who preceded—or how inferior to Gray or Campbell, who have followed him. The Ode, perhaps, of every species of poetical composition, was the most alien to the genius of Pope.

Pastorals, 1709

  The author seems to have a particular genius for this kind of poetry, and a judgment that much exceeds his years. He has taken very freely from the ancients. But what he has mixed of his own with theirs is no way inferior to what he has taken from them. It is not flattery at all to say that Virgil had written nothing so good at his age. His preface is very judicious and learned.

  He shall bring with him, if you will, a young poet, newly inspired in the neighbourhood of Cooper’s Hill, whom he and Walsh have taken under their wing. His name is Pope. He is not above seventeen or eighteen years of age, and promises miracles. If he goes on as he has begun in the Pastoral way, as Virgil first tried his strength, we may hope to see English poetry vie with the Roman, and this swan of Windsor sing as sweetly as the Mantuan.

  I have lately seen a pastoral of yours in Mr. Walsh’s and Congreve’s hands, which is extremely fine, and is generally approved of by the best judges in poetry. I remember I have formerly seen you at my shop, and am sorry I did not improve my acquaintance with you. If you design your poem for the press, no person shall be more careful in printing it, nor no one can give a greater encouragement to it.

	Young, yet judicious; in your verse are found
	Art strength’ning nature, sense improved by sound.

  Neither Mr. Pope’s nor Mr. Philips’s pastorals, do any great honour to the English poetry. Mr. Pope’s were composed in his youth; which may be an apology for other faults, but cannot well excuse the barrenness that appears in them. They are written in remarkably smooth and flowing numbers, and this is their chief merit; for there is scarcely any thought in them which can be called his own; scarcely any description, or any image of nature, which has the marks of being original, or copied from nature herself; but a repetition of the common images that are to be found in Virgil, and in all poets who write of rural themes.

  It is somewhat strange that in the pastorals of a young poet there should not be found a single rural image that is new; but this, I am afraid, is the case in the Pastorals before us. The ideas of Theocritus, Virgil, and Spenser are, indeed, here exhibited in language equally mellifluous and pure; but the descriptions and sentiments are trite and common. To this assertion, formerly made, Dr. Johnson answered, “that no invention was intended.” He, therefore, allows the fact and the charge. It is a confession of the very fault imputed to them. There ought to have been invention. It has been my fortune from my way of life, to have seen many compositions of youths of sixteen years old, far beyond these Pastorals in point of genius and imagination, though not perhaps of correctness. Their excellence, indeed, might be owing to having had such a predecessor as Pope.

  Warton’s observations are very just, but he does not seem sufficiently to discriminate between the softness of individual lines, which is the chief merit of these Pastorals, and the general harmony of poetic numbers. Let it, however, be always remembered, that Pope gave the first idea of mellifluence, and produced a softer and sweeter cadence than before belonged to the English couplet. Dr. Johnson thinks it will be in vain, after Pope, to endeavour to improve the English versification, and that it is now carried to the ne plus ultra of excellence. This is an opinion the validity of which I must be permitted to doubt. Pope certainly gave a more correct and finished tone to the English versification, but he sometimes wanted a variety of pause, and his nice precision of every line prevented, in a few instances, a more musical flow of modulated passages. But we are to consider what he did, not what might be done, and surely there cannot be two opinions respecting his improvement of the couplet though it does not follow that his general rhythm has no imperfection. Johnson seems to have depreciated, or to have been ignorant of, the metrical powers of some writers prior to Pope. His ear seems to have been caught chiefly by Dryden, and as Pope’s versification was more equably (couplet with couplet being considered, not passage with passage) connected than Dryden’s, he thought therefore that nothing could be added to Pope’s versification. I should think it the extreme of arrogance and folly to make my own ear the criterion of music; but I cannot help thinking that Dryden, and of later days, Cowper, are much more harmonious in their general versification than Pope. I ought also to mention a neglected poem, not neglected on account of its versification, but on account of its title and subject—Prior’s “Solomon.” Whoever candidly compares these writers together, unless his ear be habituated to a certain recurrence of pauses precisely at the end of a line, will not (though he will give the highest praise for compactness, skill, precision, and force, to the undivided couplets of Pope, separately considered)—will not, I think, assent to the position, that in versification “what he found brickwork he left marble.” I am not afraid to own, that with the exception of the “Epistle to Abelard,” as musical as it is pathetic, the verses of Pope want variety, and on this account in some instances they want both force and harmony. In variety, and variety only, let it be remembered, I think Pope deficient.

  There is no evidence, except the poet’s own assertion, to prove that the Pastorals were composed at the age of sixteen. They had been seen by Walsh before April 20, 1705, if any dependence could be placed upon the letter of that date which he wrote to Wycherley, when returning the manuscript, but the letter rests on the authority of Pope alone, and there is reason to question the correctness of the date…. Whatever may be the true date of the Pastorals, a portion of them certainly existed before April 20, 1706.

  The Pastorals have been seriously criticised; but they are, in truth, mere school-boy exercises; they represent nothing more than so many experiments in versification. The pastoral form has doubtless been used in earlier hands to embody true poetic feeling; but in Pope’s time it had become hopelessly threadbare. The fine gentlemen in wigs and laced coats amused themselves by writing about nymphs and “conscious swains,” by way of asserting their claims to elegance of taste. Pope, as a boy, took the matter seriously, and always retained a natural fondness for a juvenile performance upon which he had expended great labour, and which was the chief proof of his extreme precocity. He invites attention to his own merits, and claims especially the virtue of propriety. He does not, he tells us, like some other people, make his roses and daffodils bloom in the same season, and cause his nightingales to sing in November; and he takes particular credit for having remembered that there were no wolves in England, and having accordingly excised a passage in which Alexis prophesied that those animals would grow milder as they listened to the strains of his favourite nymph. When a man has got so far as to bring to England all the pagan deities, and rival shepherds contending for bowls and lambs in alternate strophes, these niceties seem a little out of place…. We may agree with Johnson that Pope performing upon a pastoral pipe is rather a ludicrous person, but for mere practice even nonsense verses have been found useful.

  I fell in love with Pope, whose life I read with an ardor of sympathy which I am afraid he hardly merited. I was of his side in all his quarrels, as far as I understood them, and if I did not understand them I was of his side anyway. When I found he was a Catholic I was almost ready to abjure the Protestant religion for his sake; but I perceived that this was not necessary when I came to know that most of his friends were Protestants. If the truth must be told, I did not like his best things at first, but long remained chiefly attached to his rubbishing pastorals, which I was perpetually imitating, with whole apparatus of swains and shepherdesses, purling brooks, enameled meads, rolling years, and the like…. I could not imitate Pope without imitating his methods, and his method was to the last degree intelligent. He certainly knew what he was doing, and although I did not always know what I was doing, he made me wish to know, and ashamed of not knowing. There are several truer poets who might not have done this; and after all the modern contempt of Pope, he seems to me to have been at least one of the great masters, if not one of the great poets.

  Certainly, the controversy as to the respective merits of Pope and Philips has lost its freshness. From the point of view taken in this essay, each had failed alike to appreciate the true conditions and to catch the proper spirit of pastoral. Yet within their own limits, one can hardly deny that the superiority rests with Pope. The contrary judgment were to confuse a rhymester with a man of genius. Pope’s manner is intolerably artificial; he bears the graceless yoke of the Miltonic epithet; his matter is a mere pastiche from Virgil and Theocritus, Dryden and Spenser; but for melodious rhythm and dignity of phrase his pastorals reach a point which he never afterwards surpassed. The musical possibilities of the heroic couplet are exhausted in the eclogue entitled “Autumn,” and though we may perhaps think the meter inappropriate to the subject, we cannot fail to be sensible of the ease and dignity of the verse.

Essay on Criticism, 1711–12

  “The Art of Criticism,” which was published some months since, and is a masterpiece in its kind. The observations follow one another like those in Horace’s “Art of Poetry,” without that methodical regularity which would have been requisite in a prose author. They are some of them uncommon, but such as the reader must assent to, when he sees them explained with that elegance and perspicuity in which they are delivered. As for those which are the most known, and the most received, they are placed in so beautiful a light, and illustrated with such apt allusions, that they have in them all the graces of novelty, and make the reader, who was before acquainted with them, still more convinced of their truth and solidity.

  His precepts are false, or trivial, or both; his thoughts are crude and abortive, his expressions absurd, his numbers harsh and unmusical, his rhymes trivial and common; instead of majesty, we have something that is very mean; instead of gravity, something that is very boyish; and instead of perspicuity and lucid order, we have but too often obscurity and confusion.

  I dare not say anything of the “Essay on Criticism” in verse; but if any more curious reader has discovered in it something new which is not in Dryden’s prefaces, dedications, and his “Essay on Dramatic Poetry,” not to mention the French critics, I should be very glad to have the benefit of the discovery.

  Was the work of his childhood almost; but is such a monument of good sense and poetry as no other, that I know, has raised in his riper years.

  I admired Mr. Pope’s “Essay on Criticism” at first, very much, because I had not then read any of the ancient critics, and did not know that it was all stolen.

  A work which displays such extent of comprehension, such nicety of distinction, such acquaintance with mankind, and such knowledge both of ancient and modern learning, as are not often attained by the maturest age and longest experience…. One of his greatest, though of his earliest, works is the “Essay on Criticism,” which, if he had written nothing else, would have placed him among the first critics and the first poets, as it exhibits every mode of excellence that can embellish or dignify didactic composition,—selection of matter, novelty of arrangement, justness of precept, splendour of illustration, and propriety of digression. I know not whether it be pleasing to consider that he has produced this piece at twenty, and never afterwards excelled it: he that delights himself with observing that such powers may be soon attained, cannot but grieve to think that life was ever after at a stand. To mention the particular beauties of the Essay would be unprofitably tedious; but I cannot forbear to observe, that the comparison of a student’s progress in the sciences with the journey of a traveller in the Alps, is perhaps the best that English poetry can shew.

  Most of the observations in this Essay are just, and certainly evince good sense, an extent of reading, and powers of comparison, considering the age of the author, extraordinary. Johnson’s praise however is exaggerated.

  The quantity of thought and observation in this work, for so young a man as Pope was when he wrote it, is wonderful: unless we adopt the supposition that most men of genius spend the rest of their lives in teaching others what they themselves have learned under twenty. The conciseness and felicity of the expression are equally remarkable…. Nothing can be more original and happy than the general remarks and illustrations in the Essay: the critical rules laid down are too much those of a school, and of a confined one.

  Which some people have very unreasonably fancied his best performance.

  The praise that is uppermost in one’s mind of the “Essay on Criticism” is its rectitude of legislation. Pope is an orthodox doctor—a champion of the good old cause…. It is of the right good English temper—thoughtful and ardent—discreet and generous—firm with sensibility—bold and sedate—manly and polished. He establishes himself in well-chosen positions of natural strength, commanding the field; and he occupies them in the style of an experienced leader, with forces judiciously disposed, and showing a resolute front every way of defence and offence.

  Considered solely as a phenomenon in literary history, the “Essay on Criticism” is doubtless one of the most remarkable instances of precocious genius which the annals of English or of any other literature afford.

  English literature must become far richer than it is in witty mots or rememberable lines before we can afford to throw away the “Essay on Criticism.”

  The “Essay” has many incorrect observations, and, in spite of its own axioms, many bad rhymes, many faulty grammatical constructions. But these cannot weigh against the substantial merit of the performance. They cannot obscure the truth that the poem is, what its title pretends, an “Essay on Criticism,” an attempt made, for the first time in English literature, and in the midst of doubts, perplexities, and distractions, of which we, in our position of the idle heirs of that age, can only have a shadowy conception, to erect a standard of judgment founded in justice of thought and accuracy of expression. Nor will it be denied that, as a poem, the critical and philosophical nature of the subject is enlivened by bold, brilliant, and beautiful imagery.

  Pope impaired the vitality of English poetry for fifty years by his futile “to advantage dressed,” and succeeded in teaching “a school of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit,” as the excited Keats has it. Horace is very modern, we say; we can read him nowadays with great comfort, with greater comfort than we can get from Pope. Not only is Horace nearer to us in his ideas on language and on style; he understood criticism better than did Pope.

The Messiah, 1712

  This is certainly the most animated and sublime of all authors’ compositions, and it is manifestly owing to the great original which he copied. Perhaps the dignity, the energy, and the simplicity of the original, are in a few passages weakened and diminished by florid epithets, and useless circumlocutions.

  All things considered, the “Messiah” is as fine and masterly a piece of composition as the English language, in the same style of verse, can boast. I have ventured to point out a passage or two, for they are rare, where the sublimity has been awakened by epithets; and I have done this, because it is a fault, particularly with young writers, so common. In the most truly sublime images of Scripture, the addition of a single word would often destroy their effect. It is therefore right to keep as nearly as possible to the very words. No one understood better than Milton where to be general, and where particular; where to adopt the very expression of Scripture, and where it was allowed to paraphrase.

  The flamboyant style of his “Messiah” is to me detestable: nothing can be more unlike the simplicity of Christianity. All such, equally with those by whatever hand that would be religious by being miserable, I reject at once, along with all that are merely commonplace religious exercises.

  Pope says he was induced to subjoin in his notes the passages he had versified by “the fear that he had prejudiced Isaiah and Virgil by his management.” The reputation of Isaiah and Virgil was safe, and no one can doubt that his real reason for inviting the comparison was the belief that he had improved upon them. He imagined that he had enriched the text of the prophet, and did not suspect that the majesty and truth of the original were vitiated by his embroidery.

  Pope’s “Messiah” reads to us like a sickly paraphrase, in which all the majesty of the original is dissipated.

  His “Messiah” would sound grand to us, if we could for a moment feel that he felt it himself, or forget that it was copied from Virgil’s Pollio.

  It is an admirable tour de force, and should be regarded like his “Pastorals” as an exercise in diction and versification. Though, by the conditions under which he has bound himself, he was forced to lower the grandeur of the Scripture language, the artfulness with which he adapts his imagery to the Virgilian manner, and combines scattered passages of prophecy in a volume of stately and sonorous verse, is deserving of high admiration; and the concluding lines ascend to a height not unworthy of the original they paraphrase.

Rape of the Lock, 1712–14

	THE RAPE OF THE LOCK.
	An heroi-comical poem.
	Nolueram, Belinda, tuos violare capillos,
	Sed jurat, hoc precibus me tribuisse tuis.
	MART. Epigr. XII. 84.
	Printed for Bernard Lintott, 1712. 8vo.

	How flames the glories of Belinda’s hair,
	Made by the Muse the envy of the fair!
	Less shone the tresses Egypt’s princess wore,
	Which sweet Callimachus so sung before.
	Here courtly trifles set the world at odds,
	Belles war with beaux, and whims descend for gods.
	The new machines, in names of ridicule,
	Mock the grave phrenzy of the chemic fool:
	But know, ye fair, a point concealed with art,
	The Sylphs and Gnomes are but a woman’s heart.
	The Graces stand in sight; a Satyr train
	Peeps o’er their heads, and laughs behind the scene.

  The stealing of Miss Belle Fermor’s hair, was taken too seriously, and caused an estrangement between the two families, though they had lived so long in great friendship before. A common acquaintance and well-wisher to both, desired me to write a poem to make a jest of it, and laugh them together again. It was with this view that I wrote the “Rape of the Lock;” which was well received, and had its effect in the two families.—Nobody but Sir George Brown was angry, and he was a good deal so, and for a long time. He could not bear, that Sir Plume should talk nothing but nonsense.—Copies of the poem got about, and it was like to be printed; on which I published the first draught of it (without the machinery), in a Miscellany of Tonson’s. The machinery was added afterwards, to make it look a little more considerable, and the scheme of adding it was much liked and approved of by several of my friends, and particularly by Dr. Garth: who, as he was one of the best natured men in the world, was very fond of it.

  I have been assured by a most intimate friend of Mr. Pope’s, that the Peer in the “Rape of the Lock” was Lord Petre; the person who desired Mr. Pope to write it, old Mr. Cafyl, of Sussex; and that what was said of Sir George Brown in it, was the very picture of the man.

  The grand characteristic of a poet is his invention, the surest distinction of a great genius. In Mr. Pope, nothing is so truly original as his “Rape of the Lock,” nor discovers so much invention. In this kind of mock-heroic, he is without a rival in our language, for Dryden has written nothing of the kind.

  This seems to be Mr. Pope’s most finished production, and is, perhaps, the most perfect in our language. It exhibits stronger powers of imagination, more harmony of numbers, and a greater knowledge of the world, than any other of this poet’s works: and it is probable, if our country were called upon to shew a specimen of their genius to foreigners, this would be the work here fixed upon.

  The most airy, the most ingenious, and the most delightful of all his compositions…. To the praises which have been accumulated on “The Rape of the Lock” by readers of every class, from the critic to the waiting-maid, it is difficult to make any addition. Of that which is universally allowed to use the most attractive of all ludicrous compositions, let it rather be now inquired from what sources the power of pleasing is derived.

	’Tis Pope who sweetly wakes the silver lyre
	To melting notes, more musically clear
	Than Ariel whisper’d in Belinda’s ear.

  In my eyes, the “Lutrin,” the “Dispensary,” and the “Rape of the Lock” are standards of grace and elegance, not to be paralleled by antiquity…. The “Rape of the Lock,” besides the originality of great part of the invention, is a standard of graceful writing.

  That exquisite little toilet-bottle of essence, the “Rape of the Lock.”

  It is the most exquisite specimen of filigree work ever invented. It is admirable in proportion as it is made of nothing…. It is made of gauze and silver spangles. The most glittering appearance is given to every thing, to paste, pomatum, billets-doux and patches. Airs, languid airs, breathe around; the atmosphere is perfumed with affectation. A toilette is described with the solemnity of an altar raised to the goddess of vanity, and the history of a silver bodkin is given with all the pomp of heraldry. No pains are spared, no profusion of ornament, no splendour of poetic diction, to set off the meanest things. The balance between the concealed irony and the assumed gravity is as nicely trimmed as the balance of power in Europe. The little is made great, and the great little. You hardly know whether to laugh or weep. It is the triumph of insignificance, the apotheosis of foppery and folly. It is the perfection of the mock-heroic.

  The most exquisite monument of playful fancy that universal literature offers.

  If dramatic pieces be left out of the question, the “Rape of the Lock” is probably one of the longest occasional poems in any literature; and yet French literature itself may be challenged to match the sparkling vivacity of its execution no less than the airy grace of its plot and underplot.

  Consider “The Rape of the Lock” as a whole; it is a buffoonery in a noble style.

  The whole poem more truly deserves the name of a creation than anything Pope ever wrote. The action is confined to a world of his own, the supernatural agency is wholly of his own contrivance, and nothing is allowed to overstep the limitations of the subject. It ranks by itself as one of the purest works of human fancy; whether that fancy be strictly poetical or not is another matter. If we compare it with the “Midsummer-night’s Dream,” an uncomfortable doubt is suggested. The perfection of form in the “Rape of the Lock” is to me conclusive evidence that in it the natural genius of Pope found fuller and freer expression than in any other of his poems. The others are aggregates of brilliant passages rather than harmonious wholes.

  No more brilliant, sparkling, vivacious trifle is to be found in our literature than the “Rape of the Lock,” even in this early form…. Pope declared, and critics have agreed, that he never showed more skill than in the remodelling of this poem; and it has ever since held a kind of recognized supremacy amongst the productions of the drawing-room muse…. The successive scenes are given with so firm and clear a touch—there is such a sense of form, the language is such a dexterous elevation of the ordinary social twaddle into the mock-heroic, that it is impossible not to recognize a consummate artistic power. The dazzling display of true wit and fancy blinds us for the time to the want of that real tenderness and humour which would have softened some hard passages, and given a more enduring charm to the poetry. It has, in short, the merit that belongs to any work of art which expresses in the most finished form the sentiment characteristic of a given social phrase; one deficient in many of the most ennobling influences, but yet one in which the arts of converse represent a very high development of shrewd sense refined into vivid wit.

  Pope’s execution is so clever as always to charm us even when his subject is most devoid of interest. The secret of the peculiar fascination of “The Rape of the Lock” lies, I believe, not merely in the art and management, but in the fact that here, for the first time, Pope is writing of that which he knew, of the life he saw and the people he lived with. For Windsor Forest, though he lived in it, he had no eyes; but a drawing-room, a fop, and a belle, these were the objects which struck his young fancy when he emerged from the linen-draper’s villa, and he had studied them.

  I may as well own frankly that I am unable to admire the poem. It is, of course, clever, but I fail to get such delight from its lines as has rewarded the eminent men who have written about it. It is impossible to avoid the thought that patriotism is in part the cause of this admiration.

  Blameless in its beauty and perfect in its charm as is that sovereign flower of social satire.

  This apparently hazardous experiment was perfectly successful, and the “Rape of the Lock” became what it remains, the typical example of raillery in English verse—the solitary specimen of sustained and airy grace. If it has faults, they are the faults of the time, and not of the poem, the execution of which is a marvel of ease, good humour, and delicate irony.

  The “Rape of the Lock” stands as far above “Le Lutrin” as the latter does above “La Secchia Rapita.”… The style of the “Rape of the Lock” is a happy compound of the best elements of burlesque in Tassoni’s and Boileau’s manner, with an epic loftiness which is all Pope’s own…. In his machinery Pope is neither driven like Tassoni to employ obsolete Pagan mythology, nor like Boileau to resort to moral abstractions; by a supreme effort of invention he has made his supernatural agents credible to the modern imagination. Hence he has successfully encountered all those difficulties in the way of mock-heroic poet on which I have dwelt in the foregoing pages. A slight incident of social life has been made, the basis of a well-connected epic narrative; the sayings and doings of persons belonging to existing society are invested with heroic dignity; the whole delicate creation breathes a justly diffused moral air, which saves it from the reproach of triviality, without making it obtrusively didactic. Pope has succeeded in embalming a fleeting episode of fashionable manners in a form which can perish only with the English language.

  “The Rape of the Lock” is very witty, but through it all don’t you mark the sneer of the contemptuous, unmanly little wit, the crooked dandy? He jibes among his compliments; and I do not wonder that Mistress Arabella Fermor was not conciliated by his long-drawn cleverness and polished lines.

  “The celebrated lady herself,” the poet wrote, “is offended, and which is stranger, not at herself but me. Is not this enough to make a writer never be tender of another’s character or fame?” But Pope, whose praise of women is too often a libel upon them, was not as tender as he ought to have been of the lady’s reputation. The offence felt by the heroine of the poem is now unheeded; the dainty art exhibited is a permanent delight, and our language can boast no more perfect specimen of the poetical burlesque than the “Rape of the Lock.” THe machinery of the sylphs is managed with perfect skill, and nothing can be more admirable than the charge delivered by Ariel to the sylphs to guard Belinda from an apprehended but unknown danger.

  It does not seem to me to furnish very inspiring reading.

  The most brilliant occasional poem in our language.

  We may draw attention to the fact, already averted to, that, poetic excellence and merit altogether apart, “The Rape of the Lock” presents us with the most perfect picture in miniature possible of life at Hampton Court during the reign of Queen Anne. We have already cited at the beginning of this chapter the opening lines of the third canto, beginning with the words, “Close by those meads,” etc.: the verses that follow them, with their delicate irony on the fashionable frivolities of the inhabitants of Hampton Court at that time, give us a peep into the interior social life of the palace, than which nothing could be more vivid…. Thus it comes about the subject-matter of these pages is associated with the most brilliant and exquisite mock-heroic poem in the English, or perhaps any, language, replete with all the subtlest delicacies of humour, satire, language, and invention, and redolent of the refined and airy graces of the artificial world which it so intimately describes.

  Is Pope’s masterpiece.

Windsor Forest, 1718

  WINDSOR FOREST. | To the Right Honorable George, Lord Landsdown. | By Mr. Pope.

	Non injussa cano: te nostræ, Vare, myricæ,
	Te nemus omne canet; nec Phœbo gratior ulla est,
	Quam sibi quæ Vari præscripsit pagina nomen.—Virg.

London: Printed for Bernard Lintott, at the Cross-keys, | in Fleet Street.

  Mr. Pope has published a fine poem called “Windsor Forest.” Read it.

  I should have commended his poem on “Windsor Forest” much more, if he had not served me a slippery trick; for you must know I had long since put him upon this subject, gave several hints, and at last, when he brought it, and read it, and made some little alterations, &c., not one word of putting in my name till I found it in print.

Ode on St. Celia’s Day, 1713

  Many people would like my Ode on Music better, if Dryden had not written on that subject. It was at the request of Mr. Steele that I wrote mine; and not with any thought of rivalling that great man, whose memory I do and always have reverenced.

  Must be reckoned amongst his utter failures.

The Temple of Fame, 1714

  The hint of the following piece was taken from Chaucer’s “House of Fame.” The design is in a manner entirely altered, the descriptions and most of the particular thoughts my own: yet I could not suffer it to be printed without this acknowledgment, or think of a concealment of this nature the less unfair for being common. The reader who would compare this with Chaucer, may begin with his third Book of Fame, there being nothing in the two first books that answers to their title. Whenever any hint is taken from him, the passage itself is set down in the marginal notes.

  It was probably the similarity of taste that induced Pope when young to imitate several of the pieces of Chaucer, and in particular to write his “Temple of Fame,” one of the noblest, although one of the earliest of his productions. That the hint of the piece is taken from Chaucer’s “House of Fame,” is sufficiently obvious, yet the design is greatly altered, and the descriptions, and many of the particular thoughts, are his own; notwithstanding which, such is the coincidence and happy union of the work with its prototype, that it is almost impossible to distinguish those portions which are originally Pope’s, from those for which he has been indebted to Chaucer.

  Pope, who reproduced parts of the “House of Fame,” in a loose paraphrase, in attempting to improve the construction of Chaucer’s work, only mutilated it.

  One of Pope’s least attractive pieces.

Homer’s Iliad, 1715–20

  I am pleased beyond measure with your design of translating Homer. The trials you have already made and published on some parts of that author have shown that you are equal to so great a task; and you may therefore depend upon the utmost services I can do in promoting this work, or anything that may be for your service.

  Then he [Swift] instructed a young nobleman that the best poet in England was Mr. Pope (a Papist), who had begun a translation of Homer into English verse, “for which he must have them all subscribe; for,” says he, “the author shall not begin to print till I have a thousand guineas for him.”

  I borrowed your Homer from the bishop, (mine is not yet landed), and read it out in two evenings. If it pleases others as well as me, you have got your end in profit and reputation: yet I am angry at some bad rhymes and triplets; and pray in your next do not let me have so many unjustifiable rhymes to war, and gods. I tell you all the faults I know, only in one or two places you are a little too obscure, but I expected you to be so in one or two-and-twenty…. Your notes are perfectly good, and so are your preface and essay.

	Did I not see when thou first sett’st sail
	To seek adventures fair in Homer’s land?
	Did I not see thy sinking spirits fail,
	And wish thy bark had never left the strand?
	Even in mid ocean often didst thou quail,
	And oft lift up thy holy eye and hand,
	Praying the Virgin dear and saintly choir,
	Back to the port to bring thy bark entire.
	Cheer up, my friend! thy dangers now are o’er;
	Methinks,—nay, sure the rising coasts appear;
	Hark! how the guns salute from either shore,
	As thy trim vessel cuts the Thames so fair:
	Shouts answering shouts from Kent and Essex roar,
	And bells break loud through every gust of air:
	Bonfires do blaze, and bones and cleavers ring,
	As at the coming of some mighty king.

  I have as yet read only to the end of the eighth Iliad; but, as far as I can judge, this is one of the finest translations in the English language; and, what is very extraordinary, it appears to the best advantage when compared with the original. I have read both carefully so far, and written remarks as I went along; and I think I can prove that where Pope has omitted one beauty he has added or improved four….

  All the crime that I have committed is saying that he is no master of Greek; and I am so confident of this, that if he can translate ten lines of Eustathius I’ll own myself unjust and unworthy.

  In order to sink in reputation, let him take it into his head to descend into Homer (let the world wonder, as it will, how the devil he got there), and pretend to do him into English, so his version denote his neglect of the manner how.

	Three times I’ve read your Iliad o’er;
	The first time pleas’d me well;
	New beauties unobserv’d before,
	Next pleas’d me better still.
	Again I try’d to find a flaw,
	Examin’d ilka line;
	The third time pleas’d me best of a’,
	The labour seem’d divine.
	Henceforward I’ll not tempt my fate,
	On dazzling rays to stare,
	Lest I should tine dear self-conceit,
	And read and write nae mair.

  The “Iliad” took me up six years; and during that time, and particularly the first part of it, I was often under great pain and apprehension. Though I conquered the thoughts of it in the day, they would frighten me in the night.—I sometimes, still, even dream of being engaged in that translation; and got about half way through it: and being embarrassed and under dread of never completing it.

  They can have no conception of his [Homer’s] manner, who are acquainted with him in Mr. Pope’s translation only. An excellent poetical performance that translation is, and faithful in the main to the original. In some places, it may be thought to have even improved Homer. It has certainly softened some of his rudenesses, and added delicacy and grace to some of his sentiments. But withal, it is no other than Homer modernized. In the midst of the elegance and luxuriancy of Mr. Pope’s language, we lose sight of the old bard’s simplicity.

  Pope’s translation is a portrait endowed with every merit, excepting that of likeness to the original. The verses of Pope accustomed my ear to the sound of poetic harmony.

  To what a low state knowledge of the most obvious and important phenomena had sunk, is evident from the style in which Dryden has executed a description of Night in one of his Tragedies, and Pope his translation of the celebrated moonlight scene in the “Iliad.” A blind man, in the habit of attending accurately to descriptions casually dropped from the lips of those around him, might easily depict these appearances with more truth. Dryden’s lines are vague, bombastic, and senseless; those of Pope, though he had Homer to guide him, are throughout false and contradictory. The verses of Dryden, once highly celebrated, are forgotten; those of Pope still retain their hold upon public estimation,—nay, there is not a passage of descriptive poetry, which at this day finds so many and such ardent admirers. Strange to think of an enthusiast, as may have been the case with thousands, reciting those verses under the cope of a moonlight sky, without having his raptures in the least disturbed by a suspicion of their absurdity!

  In the course of one of my lectures, I had occasion to point out the almost faultless position and choice of words in Pope’s original compositions, particularly in his Satires, and Moral Essays, for the purpose of comparing them with his translation of Homer, which I do not stand alone in regarding as the main source of our pseudo-poetic diction.

  The age of Pope was the golden age of poets,—but it was the pinchbeck age of poetry. They flourished in the sunshine of public and private patronage; the art meantime was debased, and it continued to be so as long as Pope continued lord of the ascendant. More injury was not done to the taste of his countrymen by Marino in Italy, nor by Gongora in Spain, than by Pope in England. The mischief was affected not by his satirical and moral pieces, for these entitled him to the highest place among poets of his class; it was by his Homer. There have been other versions as unfaithful; but none were ever so well executed in as bad a style; and no other work in the language so greatly vitiated the diction of English poetry. Common readers (and the majority must always be such) will always be taken by glittering faults, as larks are caught by bits of looking-glass; and in this meretricious translation, the passages that were most unlike the original, which were most untrue to nature, and therefore most false in taste, were precisely those which were most applauded, and on which critic after critic dwelt with one cuckoo note of admiration.

  Chapman’s translation, with all its defects, is often exceedingly Homeric; a praise which Pope himself seldom attained.

  Between Pope and Homer there is interposed the mist of Pope’s literary artificial manner, entirely alien to the plain naturalness of Homer’s manner…. In elevated passages he is powerful, as Homer is powerful, though not in the same way; but in plain narrative, where Homer is still powerful and delightful, Pope, by the inherent fault of his style, is ineffective and out of taste.

  Pope’s translations of the Homeric poems are achievements not only unmatched but unapproached. His thorough command over his native tongue gave him an active sense of its capacities and its deficiencies, and therefore he took the two narratives, each with all its parts and their sequence, but he told the two stories in his own way. Passing his early youth in a heroic period, when the bells pealed at short intervals for victory after victory, he had the best of all possible opportunities for drinking in heroic sensations; and with thorough power and efficiency “he sang of battles and the breath of stormy war and violent death.” His successors, professing to perform the same work, and to do it more accurately, have in that vain effort made repeated failures.

	The Pity of it! And the changing Taste
	Of changing Time leaves half your Work a Waste!
	My Childhood fled your couplet’s clarion tone,
	And sought for Homer in the Prose of Bohn.
	Still through the Dust of that dim Prose appears
	The Flight of Arrows and the Sheen of Spears;
	Still we may trace what Hearts heroic feel,
	And hear the Bronze that hurtles on the Steel!
	But, ah, your Iliad seems a half-pretence,
	Where Wits, not Heroes, prove their Skill in Fence,
	And great Achilles’ Eloquence doth show
	As if no Centaur trained him, but Boileau!

  One hundred and seventy years have since gone by, and many attempts have been made by writers of distinction to supply the admitted deficiencies in Pope’s work. Yet his translation of the “Iliad” occupies a position in literature which no other has ever approached. It is the one poem of the kind that has obtained a reputation beyond the limits of the country in the language of which it is written, and the only one that has fascinated the imagination of the unlearned. Many an English reader, to whom the Greek was literally a dead language, has followed through it the action of the Iliad with a livelier interest than that of the “Faery Queen” or of “Paradise Lost.” The descriptions of the single combats and the funeral games have delighted many a schoolboy, who has perhaps revolted with an equally intense abhorrence from the syntax of the original.

  Many scholars and many poets have scoffed at his translations of Homer, but generations of English schoolboys have learned to love the “Iliad” because of the way in which Pope has told them the story, and as to the telling of a story the judgment of a schoolboy sometimes counts for more than the judgment of a sage. Pope’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey” are certainly not for those who can read the great originals in their own tongue, or even for those who have a taste strong and refined enough to enjoy the severe fidelity of a prose translation. But Pope has brought the story of Achilles’ wrath, and Helen’s pathetic beauty, and Hector’s fall, and Priam’s agony home to the hearts of millions for whom they would otherwise have no life.

  We may add that neither its false glitter nor Pope’s inability—shared in great measure with every translator—to catch the spirit of the original, can conceal the sustained power of this brilliant work. Its merit is the more wonderful since the poet’s knowledge of Greek was extremely meagre, and he is said to have been constantly indebted to earlier translations. Gibbon said that his “Homer” had every merit except that of faithfulness to the original; and Pope, could he have heard it, might well have been satisfied with the verdict of Gray, a great scholar as well as a great poet, that no other version would ever equal his. All that has been hitherto said with regard to Pope and Homer relates to his version of the “Iliad.” On that he expended his best powers, and on that it is evident he bestowed infinite pains.

  His translation of Homer resembles Homer as much as London resembles Troy, or Marlborough Achilles, or Queen Anne Hecuba. It is done with great literary art, but for that very reason it does not make us feel the simplicity and directness of his original. It has neither the manner nor the spirit of the Greek, just as Pope’s descriptions of nature have neither the manner nor the spirit of nature.

  He could not have turned out a true translation, indeed, when his lack of Greek learning threw him back upon French and Latin versions, upon earlier English translations, or upon assistance of more scholarly but less poetic friends. He worked from a Homer minus Homer’s force and freedom, a Homer ornamented with epigrams to suit the taste of the age. His tools were a settled diction and a ready-made style, regular, neat, and terse. The result could never have been Homer, but it is an English poem of sustained vivacity and emphasis, a fine epic as epics went in the days of Anne—“A very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but not Homer.”

  Although Pope has also a certain rapidity of movement, it is not the smooth, subtly-varied swiftness of Homer, but a jogging and rather monotonous briskness. He impedes the progress of the action, even in his translation, by introducing reflective phrases, fanciful asides, and lingering appreciation of passages elaborated for their own sakes, to their detriment as humble parts of a swift narrative. His eye is not fixed clearly on the moving objects, but on the thoughts and feelings he lets them suggest.

Odyssey, 1725

  I think I need not recommend to you further the necessity of keeping this whole matter to yourself, as I am very sure Fenton has done, lest the least air of it prejudice with the town. But if you judge otherwise, I do not prohibit you taking to yourself your due share of fame. Take your choice also in that…. The public is both an unfair and a silly judge unless it be trepanned into justice.

  Pope’s “Homer’s Odyssey,” surely a very false, and though ingenious and talented, yet bad translation.

  He made over 3500£. after paying Broome 500£. (including 100£. for notes) and Fenton 200£.—that is, 50£. a book. The rate of pay was as high as the work was worth, and as much as it would fetch in the open market. The large sum was entirely due to Pope’s reputation, though obtained, so far as the true authorship was concealed upon something like false pretences. Still, we could have wished that he had been a little more liberal with his share of the plunder…. The shares of the three colleagues in the Odyssey are not to be easily distinguished by internal evidence. On trying the experiment by a cursory reading, I confess (though a critic does not willingly admit his fallibility) that I took some of Broome’s work for Pope’s, and, though closer study or an acuter perception might discriminate more accurately, I do not think that the distinction would be easy. This may be taken to confirm the common theory that Pope’s versification was a mere mechanical trick. Without admitting this, it must be admitted that the external characteristics of his manner were easily caught; and that it was not hard for a clever versifier to produce something closely resembling his inferior work, especially when following the same original. But it may be added that Pope’s Odyssey was really inferior to the Iliad, both because his declamatory style is more out of place in its romantic narrative, and because he was weary and languid, and glad to turn his fame to account without more labour than necessary.

Eloisa to Abelard, 1717

  Abelard and Eloisa flourished in the twelfth century; they were two of the most distinguished persons of their age in learning and beauty, but for nothing more famous than for their unfortunate passion. After a long course of calamities, they retired each to a several Convent, and consecrated the remainder of their days to religion. It was many years after this separation, that a letter of Abelard’s to a Friend, which contained the history of his misfortune, fell into the hands of Eloisa. This awakening all her Tenderness, occasioned those celebrated letters (out of which the following is partly extracted) which gives so lively a picture of the struggles of grace and nature, virtue and passion.

	O Abelard, ill-fated youth,
	Thy tale will justify this truth:
	But well I weet, thy cruel wrong
	Adorns a nobler poet’s song.
	Dan Pope, for thy misfortune grieved,
	With kind concern and skill has weaved
	A silken web; and ne’er shall fade
	Its colours; gently has he laid
	The mantle o’er thy sad distress:
	And Venus shall the texture bless.
	He o’er the weeping nun has drawn
	Such artful folds of sacred lawn;
	That love, with equal grief and pride,
	Shall see the crime he strives to hide;
	And, softly drawing back the veil,
	The god shall to his votaries tell
	Each conscious tear, each blushing grace,
	That deck’d dear Eloisa’s face.

  The harmony of numbers in this poem is very fine. It is rather drawn out to too tedious a length, although the passions vary with great judgment. It may be considered as superior to anything in the epistolary way; and the many translations which have been made of it into the modern languages are in some measure a proof of this.

  The epistle of “Eloise to Abelard” is one of the most happy productions of human wit; the subject is so judiciously chosen, that it would be difficult, in turning over the annals of the world, to find another which so many circumstances concur to recommend.

  Mr. Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard” is such a chef-d’œuvre that nothing of the kind can be relished after it. Yet it is not the story itself, nor the sympathy it excites in us, as Dr. Johnson would have us think, that constitutes the principal merit in that incomparable poem. It is the happy use he has made of the monastic gloom of the Paraclete, and of what I will call papistical machinery, which gives it its capital charm, so that I am almost inclined to wonder (if I could wonder at any of that writer’s criticisms) that he did not take notice of this beauty, as his own superstitious turn certainly must have given him more than a sufficient relish for it.

  It is fine as a poem; it is finer as a piece of high-wrought eloquence. No woman could be supposed to write a better love-letter in verse. Besides the richness of the historical materials, the high gusto of the original sentiments which Pope had to work upon, there were perhaps circumstances in his own situation which made him enter into the subject with even more than a poet’s feeling. The tears shed are drops gushing from the heart; the words are burning sighs breathed from the soul of love. Perhaps the poem to which it bears the greatest similarity in our language is Dryden’s “Tancred and Sigismunda,” taken from Boccaccio. Pope’s “Eloise” will bear this comparison; and after such a test, with Boccaccio for the original author, and Dryden for the translator, it need shrink from no other.

  He has rendered this one of the most impressive poems of which love is the subject; as it is likewise the most finished of all his works of equal length, in point of language and versification.

  Had Pope never written but this poem, it should suffice to render him immortal, for all the united efforts of art and study,—of perseverance and toil,—could never have produced it, devoid of that exquisite sensibility, without which no poet ever excelled in the pathetic.

  I read it again, and am bored: this is not as it ought to be; but, in spite of myself, I yawn, and I open the original letters of Eloisa to find the cause of my weariness…. Declamation and commonplace; she sends Abelard discourses on love and the liberty which it demands, on the cloister and peaceful life which it affords, on writing and the advantages of the post. Antitheses and contrasts, she forwards them to Abelard by the dozen; a contrast between the convent illuminated by his presence and desolate by his absence, between the tranquillity of the pure nun and the anxiety of the culpable nun, between the dream of human happiness and the dream of divine happiness. In fine, it is a bravura with contrasts of forte and piano, variations and change of key. Eloisa makes the most of her theme, and sets herself to crowd into it all the powers and effects of her voice. Admire the crescendo, the shakes by which she ends her brilliant morceaux…. Observe the noise of the big drum, I mean the grand contrivances, for so may be called all that a person says who wishes to rave and cannot…. This kind of poetry resembles cookery; neither heart nor genius is necessary to produce it, but a light hand, an attentive eye, and a cultivated taste.

  Pope always resembles an orator whose gestures are studied, and who thinks, while he is speaking, of the fall of his robes, and the attitude of his hands. He is throughout academical; and though knowing with admirable nicety how grief should be represented, and what have been the expedients of his best predecessors, he misses the one essential touch of spontaneous impulse. One other blemish is perhaps more fatal to the popularity of the “Eloisa.” There is a taint of something unwholesome and effeminate. Pope, it is true, is only following the language of the original in the most offensive passages; but we see too plainly that he has dwelt too fondly upon those passages, and worked them up with especial care. We need not be prudish in our judgment of impassioned poetry; but when the passion has this false ring, the ethical coincides with the æsthetic objection.

  The “Elegy on the Unfortunate Lady” is good, but I do not find much human feeling in him, except perhaps in “Eloisa to Abelard.”

  His “Eloisa,” splendid as is its diction, and vigorous though be the portrayal of the miserable creature to whom the poem relates, most certainly lacks “a gracious somewhat,” whilst no less certainly is it marred by a most unfeeling coarseness. A poem about love it may be—a love poem it is not.

  In the “Eloisa to Abelard” there is undoubtedly much that no longer rings true to the modern ear; there are passages here and there which it is difficult to think of as having ever rung true to the ear of any man, even to that of the poet himself; there are lines in it, though but a few, which are of a taste that never could be otherwise than false and unsound in any poet of any age; it contains at least one line of which we can agree with Mr. Swinburne in thinking that “no woman could read it without a blush, nor any man without a laugh.” Yet he who can read its last hundred lines, with the struggle between love and devotion thrilling and throbbing through them, and not hear in them the true note, the unmistakable cry of human passion, uttered as only poetry can give it utterance, may rest assured that his natural sympathies and sentiments have been dwarfed and sophisticated by theory, and that from dogmatizing overmuch about what poetry ought to be he has blunted some of the sensibilities which should tell him what poetry is.

  It is unique in English literature for passionate eloquence of language and for melody of numbers. As his imagination dwelt upon the figure of Heloise in her devotion and her despair, as he pictured to himself the conflict in her soul between religious feeling and the memory of earthly passion, he poured his whole soul into his dramatic creation.

  A mystery surrounds the “Elegy”—we do not know the circumstances by which it was conceived; but the warmth of “Eloisa” may be largely explained on purely personal grounds, which fact, of course, robs it of much of its significance as an index to Pope’s general taste in poetry. No one who reads Pope’s correspondence with Lady Mary can avoid the conclusion that the poet embodied in this Epistle much of his own sentimental longings; for Pope’s attitude toward the brilliant society woman was certainly more than that of conventional gallantry.

Edition of Shakespeare, 1725

	If aught on earth, when once this breath is fled,
	With human transport touch the mighty dead,
	Shakespear, rejoice! his hand thy page refines;
	Now ev’ry scene with native brightness shines;
	Just to thy fame he gives thy genuine thought;
	So Tully published what Lucretius wrote;
	Pruned by his care, thy laurels loftier grow,
	And bloom afresh on thy immortal brow.

  He [Pope] never valued himself upon it enough to mention it in any letter, poem, or other work whatsoever.

  Mr. Pope discharged his duty so well, as to make his editions the best foundation for all future improvements.

  Pope, in his edition, undoubtedly did many things wrong, and left many things undone; but let him not be defrauded of his due praise. He was the first that knew, at least the first that told, by what helps the text might be improved. If he inspected the early editions negligently, he taught others to be more accurate. In his preface he expanded with great skill and elegance the character which had been given to Shakespeare by Dryden; and he drew the public attention upon his works, which, though often mentioned, had been little read.

  Pope asserts, that he [Shakspeare] wrote both better and worse than any other man. All the scenes and passages which did not suit the littleness of his taste, he wished to place to the account of interpolating players; and he was in the right road, had his opinion been taken, of mangling Shakspeare in a most disgraceful manner.

  Pope would have given us a mutilated Shakespeare! but Pope, to satisfy us that he was not insensible to the fine passages of Shakespeare, distinguished by inverted commas all those which he approved!—so that Pope thus furnished for the first time what have been called “the beauties of Shakespeare”! But, amid such a disfigured text, the faults of Shakespeare must have been too apparent! Pope but partially relished, and often ill understood, his Shakespeare; yet, in the liveliest of prefaces, he offers the most vivid delineation of our great bard’s general characteristics. The genius of Shakespeare was at once comprehended by his brother poet; but the text he was continually tampering with ended in a fatal testimony, that POPE had no congenial taste for the style, the manner, and the whole native drama, of England.

  His Preface is a masterly composition, containing many just views elegantly expressed. The criticism is neither profound nor original; but there is a tone of quiet sense about it which shows that Pope properly appreciated Shakspere’s general excellence. He believes, in common with most of his time, that this excellence was attained by intuition, and that the finest results were produced by felicitous accidents.

  This was, perhaps, the first decided failure in any of the publications by Pope. He was deficient in some important requisites for the task he had undertaken. The irksome but necessary duty of collation was indifferently performed; he wanted patience, and he could not command all the early copies. He was not sufficiently read in the literature of Shakspeare’s contemporaries, and thus missed many points of illustration confirming or elucidating the text. He also somewhat arbitrarily and unwarrantably altered or suppressed lines and passages, which he conceived to have been interpolated or vitiated by the players and transcribers.

  Rowe was succeeded, as an editor of Shakespeare, by Pope, who published a superb edition, in six volumes, quarto, in 1725. Pope, like most of those authors of eminence in other departments of literature, who have undertaken to regulate the text of Shakespeare, made a very poor editor. He used the quartos somewhat to the advantage, but more to the detriment of his author; foisting into the text that which Shakespeare himself had rejected. He gave us a few good, and several very pretty and plausible conjectural emendations of typographical errors; but he added to these so many which were only exponents of his own conceit and want of kindred appreciation of Shakespeare’s genius, that his text, as a whole, is one of the poorest which remain to us.

  With a few happy emendations, and with a singularly interesting and well-written Preface, begins and ends all that is of any value in Pope’s work as an editor of Shakspeare. For the correction of the text he did as little as Rowe. To its corruption he contributed more than any other eighteenth-century editor, with the exception, perhaps, of Warburton. He professed to have based his text on a careful collation of the quartos and folios. Nothing can be more certain than that his text is based simply on Rowe’s, and that he seldom troubled himself to consult either the quartos or the folios. In “correction” his process is simple. If he cannot understand a word, he substitutes a word which he can: if a phrase is obscure to him, he rewrites it.

  Pope had few qualifications for the task, and the venture was a commercial failure…. His innovations are numerous, and are derived from “his private sense and conjecture,” but they are often plausible and ingenious. He was the first to indicate the place of each new scene, and he improved on Rowe’s subdivision of the scenes.

The Dunciad, 1728–43

  The | Dunciad | An Heroic Poem | In Three Books. | Dublin | Printed, London Re | printed for A. Dodd. 1728.

  There is a general outcry against that part of the poem which is thought an abuse on the Duke of Chandos. Other parts are quarrelled with as obscure and inharmonious; and I am told that there is an advertisement that promises a publication of Mr. Pope’s Epistle verified…. I am surprised Mr. Pope is not weary of making enemies.

  On the 12th of March, 1729, at St. James’s, that poem was presented to the King and Queen (who had before been pleased to read it) by the Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole: and some days after the whole impression was taken and dispersed by several noblemen and persons of the first distinction. It is certainly a true observation, that no people are so impatient of censure as those who are the greatest slanderers: which was wonderfully exemplified on this occasion. On the day the book was first vended, a crowd of authors besieged the shop; entreaties, advices, threats of law, and battery, nay, cries of treason were all employed, to hinder the coming out of the “Dunciad;” on the other side, the booksellers and hawkers made is great efforts to procure it: what could a few poor authors do against so great a majority as the public? There was no stopping a torrent with a finger, so out it came. Some false editions of the book having an owl in their frontispiece, the true one, to distinguish it, fixed in its stead an ass laden with authors. Then another surreptitious one being printed with the same ass, the new edition in octavo returned for distinction to the owl again. Hence arose a great contest of booksellers against booksellers, and advertisements against advertisements; some recommended the “Edition of the Owl,” and others the “Edition of the Ass;” by which names they came to be distinguished, to the great honour also of the gentlemen of the “Dunciad.”

  The Dunciad cost me as much pains as anything I ever wrote.

  It was a victory over a parcel of poor wretches, whom it was almost cowardice to conquer. A man might as well triumph for having killed so many silly flies that offended him. Could he have let them alone, by this time, poor souls! they had all been buried in oblivion.

  The fifth volume contains a correcter and completer edition of the Dunciad than hath been hitherto published, of which, at present, I have only this further to add, that it was at my request he laid the plan of a fourth book. I often told him, it was a pity so fine a poem should remain disgraced by the meanness of its subject, the most insignificant of all dunces,—bad rhymers and malevolent cavillers; that he ought to raise and ennoble it by pointing his satire against the most pernicious of all,—minute philosophers and free-thinkers. I imagined, too, it was for the interest of religion to have it known, that so great a genius had a due abhorrence of these pests of virtue and society. He came readily into my opinion; but, at the same time, told me it would create him many enemies. He was not mistaken, for though the terror of his pen kept them for some time in respect, yet on his death they rose with unrestrained fury in numerous coffee-house tales, and Grub Street libels. The plan of this admirable satire was artfully contrived to show, that the follies and defects of a fashionable education naturally led to, and necessarily ended in, freethinking, with design to point out the only remedy adequate to so destructive an evil.

  He (Dryden) died, nevertheless, in a good old age, possessed of the kingdom of wit, and was succeeded by king Alexander, surnamed Pope. This prince enjoyed the crown many years, and is thought to have stretched the prerogative much farther than his predecessor: he is said to have been extremely jealous of the affections of his subjects, and to have employed various spies, by whom if he was informed of the least suggestion against his title, he never failed of branding the accused person with the word dunce on his forehead in broad letters; after which the unhappy culprit was obliged to lay by his pen forever, for no bookseller would venture to print a word that he wrote. He did indeed put a total restraint upon the liberty of the press; for no person durst read anything which was writ without his license and approbation; and this license he granted only to four during his reign, namely, to the celebrated Dr. Swift, to the ingenious Dr. Young, to Dr. Arbuthnot, and to one Mr. Gay, four of his principal courtiers and favourites. But, without diving any deeper into his character, we must allow that king Alexander had great merit as a writer, and his title to the kingdom of wit was better founded, at least, than his enemies have pretended.

  “The Dunciad” of Mr. Pope is an everlasting monument of how much the most correct, as well as the most elegant and harmonious, of all the English poets, had been hurt by the criticisms of the lowest and most contemptible authors.

  I thought you might possibly whip me at the cart’s tail in a note in the “Divine Legation,” the ordinary place of your literary execution; or pillory me in the “Dunciad,” another engine which as legal proprietor, you have very ingeniously and judiciously applied to the same purpose; or perhaps have ordered me a kind of Bridewell correction, by one of your beadles, in a pamphlet.

  “The Dunciad” is blemished by the offensive images of the games; but the poetry appears to me admirable; and, though the fourth book has obscurities, I prefer it to the three others: it has descriptions not surpassed by any poet that ever existed, and which surely a writer merely ingenious will never equal. The lines on Italy, on Venice, on Convents, have all the grace for which I contend as distinct from poetry, though united with the most beautiful.

  In richness of ideas, in strength of diction, and in intensity of feeling, this production surpasses all that Pope had previously done, and is perhaps the finest specimen of literary satire which exists in any language in the world. The whole vocabulary of irony is exhausted. The whole universe of contempt is ransacked. We find the combined merits of the most dissimilar satirists—the wild, fearless, inventive, picturesque extravagance of Aristophanes, the bitter irony and cold sarcasm of Lucian, the elegant raillery of Horace, and Juvenal’s strange union of moral severity and grim pleasantry.

  The thong with which he lashed them was dreadful; he fired upon that howling crew such shafts of flame, and poison, he slew and wounded so fiercely, that in reading “The Dunciad” and the prose lampoons of Pope, one feels disposed to side against the ruthless little tyrant, at least to pity those wretched little folks upon whom he was so unmerciful…. The condition of authorship began to fall from the days of the “Dunciad:” and I believe in my heart that much of that obloquy which has since pursued our calling was occasioned by Pope’s libels and wicked wit. Everybody read those. Everybody was familiarised with the idea of the poor devil author. The manner is so captivating, that young authors practise it, and begin their career with satire. It is so easy to write, and so pleasant to read! to fire a shot that makes a giant wince, perhaps; and fancy one’s self his conqueror. It is easy to shoot—but not as Pope did—the shafts of his satire rise sublimely.

  It is unquestionable that the poet had received innumerable provocations—the ordinary declarations of envy and hostility against a successful rival; but his true friends, and Atterbury amongst them, considered the work a waste of talent and of feeling. “The rats and mice, and such small deer,” of Grub Street, were not worth so much attention. His attacks, too, are indiscriminate. Bentley was despotic and arrogant, but was a profound scholar. It was gross injustice to class him with dunces. Ducket and Aaron Hill were as unjustifiably treated; and the insignificance of the mere scribblers should have been their security. Unfortunately Pope, with much greatness of soul, had some littleness: his vanity would not permit him to be indifferent to criticism that questioned his superiority. It is hard to believe that the same spirit which defended and consoled Atterbury could betray the malevolence that has gibbeted Theobald and Cibber: but the proverb, “Extremes meet,” was forcibly illustrated by him. It should be a consolation of his innumerable admirers to know that many a creditable set-off may be found against his personal attacks.

  We need much self-command not to throw down this masterpiece as insipid, and even disgusting. Rarely has so much talent been spent to produce greater tedium.

  However great his merit in expression, I think it impossible that a true poet could have written such a satire as the “Dunciad,” which is even nastier than it is witty. It is filthy even in a filthy age, and Swift himself could not have gone beyond some parts of it. One’s mind needs to be sprinkled with some disinfecting fluid after reading it. I do not remember that any other poet ever made poverty a crime. And it is wholly without discrimination. De Foe is set in the pillory forever; and George Wither, the author of that charming poem, “Fair Virtue,” classed among the dunces. And was it not in this age that loose Dick Steele paid his wife the finest compliment ever paid to woman, when he said “that to love her was a liberal education?”

  Looked at apart from personal questions, the “Dunciad” is the greatest feat of the humorous imagination in English poetry.

  Extinct as they may or as they may not be now, it is indisputable that such noisome and unmentionable vermin were daily and nightly “about the path and about the bed” of the great and gallant man who embalmed the types of them for all time in the black-spooted and ill-savoured amber of the “Dunciad.” And it was inevitable that the unseemly accident of their “villainous company” or controversy should exasperate as with infectious virulence the habit of mind which physical infirmity or deformity is proverbially liable to engender. Pope was by nature undeniably “malin comme un bossu”—no more and no less: for he surely was not malignant or malevolent; but as surely the untranslatable French epithet hits off the nature of his quality to a hair.

  As for Pope, it must be confessed that he led off in the long, cruel, and degrading attacks of poet on poet, of author on author. What can be more venomous, what can be more malignant, than the “Dunciad?”

Moral Essays, 1731–35

  In the “Moral Poem,” I had written an address to our Saviour; imitated from Lucretius’s compliment to Epicurus: but omitted it by the advice of Dean Berkley.—One of our priests, who are more narrow-minded than yours, made a less sensible objection to the “Epistle on Happiness:” he was very angry that there was nothing said in it of our eternal happiness hereafter, though my subject was expressly to treat only of the state of man here.

  These Epistles, in which Poetry has condescended to become the handmaid of Philosophy, to decorate, and set her off to advantage, are written with a spirit and vivacity not exceeded by any production of the kind in any country or language. Their nearest prototypes are the Epistles of Horace and Boileau, and the Satires of Ariosto and Bentivoglio, to none of which they are inferior. In our own language they may be considered as the first attempt to unite sound sense and deep research with the lighter graces of elegant composition, and to promote the cause of virtue and morality by conveying the purest precepts in the most impressive language, and illustrating them by examples which strike the imagination with all the force of reality. As they had in this country no example, so they have as yet had no rival; nor until a genius shall arise that shall unite in himself, in an equal degree, the various endowments by which their author was distinguished, is it likely they ever will.

  Warton preferred “Windsor Forest” and “Eloisa” to the “Moral Essays” because they belonged to a higher kind of poetry. Posterity likes the “Moral Essays” better because they are better of their kind. They were the natural fruit of Pope’s genius and of his time, while the others were artificial. We can go to Wordsworth for nature, to Byron for passion, and to a score of poets for both, but Pope remains unrivaled in his peculiar field. In other words, we value what is characteristic in the artist; the one thing which he does best, the precise thing which he can do and no one else can.

Essay on Man, 1732–34

	Let others now translate; thy abler pen
	Shall vindicate the ways of God to men;
	In Virtue’s cause shall gloriously prevail,
	When the bench frowns in vain, and pulpits fail.
	Made wise by thee, whose happy style conveys
	The purest morals in the softest lays.

  The poem of Pope alleviates my troubles and encourages me to be patient?

  If I had undertaken to exemplify Pope’s felicity of composition before a rigid critic, I should not select the “Essay on Man;” for it contains more lines unsuccessfully laboured, more harshness of diction, more thoughts imperfectly expressed, more levity without elegance, and more heaviness without strength, than will easily be found in all his other works.

  In the year 1763, being at London, I was carried by Dr. John Blair, prebendary of Westminster, to dine at old Lord Bathurst’s, where he found the late Mr. Mallet, Sir James Porter, &c. The conversation turning on Mr. Pope, Lord Bathurst told us that the “Essay on Man” was originally composed by Lord Bolingbroke in prose, and that Mr. Pope did no more than put it into verse; that he had read Lord Bolingbroke’s manuscript in his own handwriting, and remembered well that he was at a loss whether most to admire the elegance of Lord Bolingbroke’s prose or the beauty of Mr. Pope’s verse. When Lord Bathurst told this, Mr. Mallet bade me attend, and remember this remarkable piece of information, as by the course of nature I might survive his Lordship and be a witness of his having said so.

  Pope has shown how high poetry can soar on the wings of philosophy.

  Dr. Joseph Warton, talking last night at Sir Joshua Reynold’s of Pope’s “Essay on Man,” said that much of his system was borrowed from King’s book on the “Origin of Evil.” This was first published in Dublin, in Latin, in 1704, and translated into English by Bishop Law, in 1731, not very long before the “Essay on Man” was written. Dr. Warton mentioned that Lord Lyttleton told him that he lived much with Pope at that time, and that Pope was then undoubtedly a Free-thinker; though he afterwards either changed his opinion or thought it prudent to adopt Warburton’s explanation and comment, who saw his meaning as he chose to express it, “better than he did himself.” Dr. Warton forbore to state this in his “Essay on Pope.”

  Various and discordant have been the opinions of critics and commentators respecting this celebrated performance. That it possesses a distinguished share of poetic excellence none, however, have yet ventured to deny. M. Voltaire goes so far as to affirm, that to this Essay Pope stands indebted for that pre-eminence which he ascribes to him, when compared with his illustrious predecessor Dryden. But that Pope is actually entitled to this claim of superiority is, at least, very problematical; and if it was allowed, the “Rape of the Lock,” the “Epistle of Eloise,” the “Eclogue of the Messiah,” and some other pieces that might be mentioned, would generally be considered as affording a better foundation for this claim to rest upon than the “Essay on Man,” in which poetry holds a subordinate place; and in which it is merely employed, though with the happiest success, to embellish and illustrate the most abstruse lessons of philosophy…. It is well known that the general plan of this Essay was originally framed by Lord Bolingbroke, and it is universally believed that Pope was ignorant of the ultimate, and indeed the obvious tendency of his own arguments.

  The author of the “Essay on Man,” from a want of precision in his metaphysical ideas, has unconsciously fallen into various expressions, equally inconsistent with each other and with his own avowed opinions.

  The “Essay on Man” is not Pope’s best work…. All that he says, “the very words, and to the self-same tune,” would prove just as well that whatever is is wrong, as that whatever is is right.

  Bolingbroke had himself sufficient vigor of imagination and brilliancy of style to have written a prose essay which might engage the attention of persons fond of moral and philosophical speculation; but by judiciously borrowing the Muse of Pope, he has diffused his sentiments on these topics through all classes and ages of English literature; has made them familiar to our early and our mature conceptions; and stamped them in indelible characters on the language of the country. This conversion of a dry and argumentative subject into a splendid and popular one, is a miracle of the poetic art; and an inquiry into the means by which it has been effected will probably go far into the elucidation of that essential character of poetical composition which distinguishes it from prose.

  The success of this enterprise was astonishing. Be the philosophy what and whose it may, the poem revived to the latest age of poetry the phenomenon of the first, when precept and maxim were modulated into verse, that they might write themselves in every brain, and live upon every tongue. The spirit and sweetness of the verse, the lucid and vivid expressions, the pregnant brevity of the meanings, the marrying of ardent and lofty poetical imaginings to moral sentiments and reflections, of which every bosom is the birth-home, the pious will of the argument, which humbles the proud and rebellious human intellect under the absolute rectitude and benevolence of the Deity—nor, least of all, the pleasure of receiving easily, as in a familiar speech, thoughts that were high, and might be abstruse, that, at all events, wore a profound and philosophical air—with strokes intervening of a now playful, now piercing, but always adroit wit—and with touches, here and there strewn between, of natural painting, and of apt unsought pathos—these numerous and excellent qualifications met upon the subject of all subjects nearest to all—MAN—speedily made the first great, original, serious writing of Pope a text-book and a manual for its branch of ethico-theosophy, in every house where there were books in England. These powerful excellences of this great poem did more. They inwove its terse, vigorous, clear, significant, wise, loving, noble, beautiful, and musical sentences—east, west, north, south,—with all memories, the mature and the immature—even as in that old brave day of the world or ever books were.

  If the question were asked, What ought to have been the best among Pope’s poems? most people would answer, the “Essay on Man.” If the question were asked, what is the worst? all people of judgment would say, the “Essay on Man.” Whilst yet in its rudiments, this poem claimed the first place by the promise of its subject; when finished, by the utter failure of its execution, it fell into the last.

  The “Essay on Man” has been supposed to derive all its worth from the doctrines which Bolingbroke has contributed to it. Might it not be much more fairly described as a stately mausoleum in which these doctrines have been saved from putrefaction? They are not more vague and declamatory in their rhymed than in their prose form, but far more distinct and pointed. The folds of affectation and conceit in which they were wrapped have in great measure been stripped off from them. We now see what there was in them which accorded with the temper of the age, what had a suitableness to the poet’s own temper and circumstances, what had a permanent worth.

  Everywhere, in the pulpit, in the coffee-houses, in every pamphlet, argument on the origin of evil, on the goodness of God, and the constitution of the world was rife. Into the prevailing topic of polite conversation Bolingbroke, who returned from exile in 1723, was drawn by the bent of his native genius. Pope followed the example and impulse of his friend’s more powerful mind. Thus much there was of special suggestion. But the arguments or topics to the poem are to be traced to books in much vogue at the time; to Shaftesbury’s “Characteristics” (1711), King on the “Origin of Evil” (1702), and particularly to Leibnitz, “Essais de Théodicée” (1710).

  A great poem should be a natural growth from one root, with all the graceful proportions of nature: Pope in the Essay has packed together, as his editor allows, a number of incongruous doctrines; there is no central thought, no even unity of feelings, to connect them. His art no doubt is great; but it is the art which begins by elaborating the parts, and afterwards endeavours to fit them together by diligently plastering over the interstices; the art of a Milton works from within outwards, fusing all the materials into one solid mass by its own central heat.

  Every word is effective: every passage must be read slowly; every epithet is an epitome; a more condensed style was never written.

  It is a droll illustration of the inconsistencies of human nature, a more profound satire than Pope himself ever wrote, that his fame should chiefly rest upon the “Essay on Man.” It has been praised and admired by men of the most opposite beliefs, and men of no belief at all. Bishops and free-thinkers have met here on a common ground of sympathetic approval. And, indeed, there is no particular faith in it. It is a droll medley of inconsistent opinions. It proves only two things beyond a question,—that Pope was not a great thinker; and that wherever he found a thought, no matter what, he could express it so tersely, so clearly, and with such smoothness of versification as to give it an everlasting currency.

  This philosophy in verse speaks much of God and virtue, but it is decidedly a philosophy of egotism.

  Pope, as the mouthpiece of Spinoza or of Hobbes, might have written an impressive poem, if he had not attained to the level of Lucretius. But the age was not favourable to consistency and thoroughness. The “Essay on Man” remains radically unsatisfactory considered as a whole, though there are many brief passages marked by Pope’s special felicity of touch; many in which the moral sentiment is true and tender, and many in which he forgets for a moment the danger of open heterodoxy, and utters with genuine force some of the deeper sentiments which haunt us in this mysterious universe.

  The tedious and stilted effort.

  The noblest of his works, the most influential, and the surest guarantee of his immortality.

  It is bare justice to say that those who accuse him of merely superficial thinking raise a suspicion that they themselves have been guilty of hasty and careless reading. Nor can they justify their charge by the plea that Pope simply versified the thought of Bolingbroke. What is the explanation of the fact that to-day, though Pope is not read as he ought to be read, the readers of the “Essay on Man” are numbered by thousands, while readers of Bolingbroke,—one of the most brilliant writers of English prose—are numbered by units? No explanation is possible but this,—that Pope, though he may not have originated the intellectual substance of the “Essay” has given to it the finally satisfying expression; and this he could not have done by merely translating it from prose into verse, but only by thinking it, as it were, over again, for no one can rightly utter the thought that he has not made his own.

  His attempt to “vindicate the ways of God to man” is confused and contradictory, and no modern reader, perplexed with the mystery of existence, is likely to gain aid from Pope. Nominally a Roman Catholic, and in reality a deist, apart from poetry he does not seem to have had strong convictions on any subject, and was content to be swayed by the opinions current in society. In undertaking to write an ethical work like the “Essay” his ambition was greater than his strength, yet if Pope’s philosophy does not “find” us, to use Coleridge’s phrase, it did appeal to a large number of minds in his own day, and had not lost its popularity at a later period. The poem has been frequently translated into French, into Italian, and into German; it was pronounced by Voltaire to be the most useful and sublime didactic poem ever written in any language; it was admired by Kant and quoted in his lectures; and it received high praise from the Scotch philosopher, Dugald Stewart. The charm of poetical expression is lost or nearly lost in translations, and while the sense may be retained the aroma of the verse is gone. The popularity of the “Essay” abroad is therefore not easily to be accounted for, unless we accept the theory that the shallow creed on which it is based suited an age less earnest than our own.

  The “Essay on Man” did more to spread English deism in France than all the works of Shaftesbury. At bottom the doctrine is Shaftesbury’s, but it is shorn of his aggressiveness, purified from all leaven of scepticism and pantheism, rendered more vague and indefinite, and therefore more poetical.

Imitations of Horace, 1737

  I have perused the last lampoon of your ingenious friend, and am not surprised you did not find me out under the name of Sappho, because there is nothing I ever heard in our characters and circumstances to make a parallel; but as the town (except you, who know better) generally suppose Pope means me, whenever he mentions that name, I cannot help taking notice of the horrible malice he bears against the lady signified by that name, which appears to be irritated by supposing her writer of the Verses to the Imitator of Horace.

  His imitations of Horace equal their archetypes in elegance, and often surpass them in energy and fire.

  His imitations of Horace are so peculiarly happy, that one is at a loss, whether most to admire the original or the copy; and they are among the few imitations extant, that have all the grace and ease of an original.

  Few portions of the poetry of Pope have been more popular than these “Imitations of Horace,” with their accompanying Prologue and Epilogue. Though the satire be often too severe, and too much tinged with party rancour, or private spleen, the allusions are so apt, and the parallel passages so happy, that every reader must feel gratified in comparing the two poets, and in remarking the exquisite art and address of the English satirist, who has never in any instance servilely copied his original, but has merely pursued the train of thought which Horace had suggested; and in so doing has ably filled up the outline which is sometimes but faintly traced on the page of the Roman classic. The Prologue and Epilogue, especially the latter, are still more poignant and keen than the Imitations, to which, perhaps, they were at first, with no great propriety, annexed.

  They are sometimes nearer to, and sometimes recede from,—in some points fall below, and in others rise above,—the original; and hence the materials are afforded for an interesting comparison between the characteristic aims and endowments of the two satirists.

  In these Pope’s verse is as perfect as it is anywhere, and his subject is borrowed, not from his commonplace book, but from his own experiences. He wants the careless ease, the variety, the unemphatic grace of Horace, it is true. But he has many of the qualities of his master, and it is probable that only when men weary of hearing how Horace strolled down the Sacred Way and met an intolerable Bore—only then, or perhaps a little earlier, will they cease to hearken how Alexander Pope bade John Searle bar the door at Twickenham against the inroads of Bedlam and Parnassus.

Letters

  I have read the collection of letters you mention and was delighted with nothing more than that air of sincerity, those professions of esteem and respect, and that deference paid to his friend’s judgment in poetry which I have sometimes seen expressed to others, and I doubt not with the same cordial affection. If they are read in that light, they will be very entertaining and useful in the present age; but in the next, Cicero, Pliny, and Voiture may regain their reputation.

  If I could receive letters from you and Mr. Pope as you had leisure, I would never come in town as long as I live. In that way of conversing I should have all the pleasure that I can possibly propose, without the disappointment when Mr. Pope falls asleep, nor the dread of your taking leave because you are weary.

  There cannot be a stronger proof of his being capable of any action for the sake of gain than publishing his literary correspondence, which lays open such a mixture of dulness and iniquity, that one would imagine it visible even to his most passionate admirers.

  In all his letters, as well as in those of Swift, there runs a strain of pride, as if the world talked of nothing but themselves.

  It is a mercy to have no character to maintain. Your predecessor, Mr. Pope, laboured his Letters as much as the “Essay on Man;” and, as they were written to everybody, they do not look as if they had been written to anybody.

  A taint of affectation, more or less strong, runs through the whole of Pope’s Letters: those to the ladies, particularly, are stuffed with miserable and frigid attempts to be gay and gallant.

  Pope’s private correspondence … filled the nation with praises of his candour, tenderness, and benevolence, the purity of his purposes, and the fidelity of his friendship.

  I found this consequence attending, or likely to attend the eulogium you bestowed,—if my friend thought me witty before, he shall think me ten times more witty hereafter; where I joked once, I will joke five times, and for one sensible remark I will send him a dozen. Now this foolish vanity would have spoiled me quite, and would have made me as disgusting a letter-writer as Pope, who seems to have thought that unless a sentence was well-turned, and every period pointed with some conceit, it was not worth the carriage. Accordingly he is to me, except in very few instances, the most disagreeable maker of epistles that I ever met with.

  Pope very frequently imitated Voiture…. The object was to say what meant little, with the utmost novelty in the mode, and with the most ingenious compliment to the person addressed; so that he should admire himself and admire the writer. They are, of course, very tiresome after a short time; yet their ingenuity is not without merit. Voiture seems to have fancied that good sense spoils a man of wit. But he has not so much wit as esprit; and his letters serve to exemplify the meaning of that word. Pope, in addressing ladies, was nearly the ape of Voiture. It was unfortunately thought necessary, in such a correspondence, either to affect despairing love, which was to express itself with all possible gayety, or, where love was too presumptuous, as with the Rambouillets, to pour out a torrent of nonsensical flattery, which was to be rendered tolerable by far-fetched turns of thought.

  No one can read them without feeling that they were written for more eyes than those of his correspondents. There is a laboured smartness, a constant exhibition of fine sentiment, which is strained and unnatural. His repeated deprecation of motives of aggrandizement argues “a thinking too precisely” on the very subject; and no man whose chief ambition was to gain a few friends would so habitually proclaim it. These tender and delicate aspirations live in the secret places of the heart…. True sentiment is modest.

  If any of my hearers, as I hope they may, should take a fancy to look at Pope’s correspondence, let them pass over that first part of it; over, perhaps, almost all Pope’s letters to women; in which there is a tone of not pleasant gallantry, and, amidst a profusion of compliments and politenesses, a something which makes one distrust the little pert, prurient bard. There is very little indeed to say about his loves, and that little not edifying. He wrote flames and raptures, and elaborate verse and prose for Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; but that passion probably came to a climax in an impertinence and was extinguished by a box on the ear, or some such rebuff, and he began on a sudden to hate her with a fervour much more genuine than that of his love had been. It was a feeble, puny grimace of love, and paltering with passion. After Mr. Pope had sent off one of his fine compliments to Lady Mary, he made a second draught from the rough copy, and favoured some other friend with it. He was so charmed with the letter of Gay’s, that I have just quoted, that he had copied that and amended it, and sent it to Lady Mary as his own. A gentleman who writes letters à deux fins, and after having poured out his heart to the beloved, serves up the same dish rechauffé to a friend, is not very much in earnest about his loves, however much he may be in his piques and vanities when his impertinence gets its due. But, save that unlucky part of the Pope Correspondence, I do not know, in the range of our literature, volumes more delightful. You live in them in the finest company in the world. A little stately, perhaps; a little apprêté and conscious that they are speaking to whole generations who are listening; but in the tone of their voices—pitched, as no doubt they are, beyond the mere conversation key—in the expression of their thoughts, their various views and natures, there is something generous, and cheering, and ennobling. You are in the society of men who have filled the greatest parts in the world’s story—you are with St. John the statesman; Peterborough, the conqueror; Swift, the greatest wit of all times; Gay, the kindliest laughter—it is a privilege to sit in that company.

  I do not hesitate to say that Pope’s correspondence, as originally published, has little of either the lighter or the graver merits of familiar letters. I at least remember none more barren of matter, less enlivened by wit, or less explanatory of the history of either the writer or the times.

  Every examination into the history of the letters was slight before Mr. Dilke engaged into the laborious task. His familiarity with the books, pamphlets and periodicals of the time could not be exceeded, and his doubts once awakened he accepted nothing upon trust. With an immense amount of research and skill he proceeded to track Pope through his tortuous courses. He laid bare the ramifications of the plot against Curll, which was only known in a few of its prominent particulars. He detected, what none of the editors and biographers had perceived, base manœuvres and deceit which accompanied the publication of the “Letters to and from Dr. Swift.” He was originally put upon his investigations by the manuscript collection of Pope’s letters to Caryll and these revealed a new set of frauds in the evidence they supplied of letters converted into a fictitious correspondence. His inclination was to favour Pope whenever there was an opening for a liberal interpretation, and it was not from hostility that he exposed the net-work of fraud, and brought out the dark traits of a dishonourable disposition with new and terrible force. He printed his discoveries in the Athenæum, and after studying the facts afresh by the light of his essays, I am compelled to adopt his conclusions. The evidence, upon which they rest is often circumstantial and intricate, and cannot be followed to the end without steady attention, and some trial of patience.

  Pope, in fact, was evidently ashamed of the attitude which he had so unnaturally adopted to his correspondent. The first man of letters of his day could not bear to reveal the full degree in which he had fawned upon the decayed dramatist, whose inferiority to himself was now plainly recognized. He altered the whole tone of the correspondence by omission, and still worse by addition. He did not publish a letter in which Wycherley gently remonstrates with his young admirer for excessive adulation; he omitted from his own letters the phrase which had provoked the remonstrance; and, with more daring falsification, he manufactured an imaginary letter to Wycherley out of a letter really addressed to his friend Caryll. In this letter Pope had himself addressed to Caryll a remonstrance similar to that which he had received from Wycherley. When published as a letter to Wycherley, it gives the impression that Pope, at the age of seventeen, was already rejecting excessive compliments addressed to him by his experienced friend. By these audacious perversions of the truth, Pope is enabled to heighten his youthful independence, and to represent himself as already exhibiting a graceful superiority to the reception or the offering of incense; while he thus precisely inverts the relation which really existed between himself and his correspondent.

General

  I am always highly delighted with the discovery of any rising genius among my countrymen. For this reason I have read over, with great pleasure, the late miscellany published by Mr. Pope, in which there are many excellent compositions of that ingenious gentleman.

	When Pope’s harmonious Muse with pleasure roves,
	Amidst the plains, the murm’ring streams, and groves,
	Attentive Echo pleas’d to hear his songs,
	Thro’ the glad shade each warbling note prolongs;
	His various numbers charm our ravish’d ears,
	His steady judgment far out-shoots his years,
	And early in the youth the god appears.

	But in his other works what beauties shine,
	While sweetest music dwells on every line!
	These he admired, on these he stamped his praise,
	And bade them live to brighten future days.

	’Tis true, if finest notes alone could show
	(Tuned justly high or regularly low)
	That we should fame to these mere vocals give,
	Pope more than we can offer should receive;
	For when some gliding river is in his theme,
	His lines run smoother than the smoothest stream.

	Durgen’s sweet Pen, we know, the World admires,
	He’s bless’d with a kind Muse that never tires;
	Skill’d in all antient Tongues, and modern Arts,
	A prodigy in Person, and in Parts;
	A half-bred Deity, made up of Thought,
	A something, but no mortal Man knows what;
	A living Chaos, whose prolifick Brain,
	Does e’ery thing in miniature contain;
	Has Wit at Will, and is, without dispute,
	A wondrous Creature, neither Man nor Brute;
	Who, to delight himself, and vex the Town,
	Spent twice three Years in writing one Lampoon;
	And, if no Rival does his Scheme defeat,
	Will waste six more to make the work compleat;
	A task, that when it’s finish’d, must command
	Laudative Poems from each skilful Hand,
	Especially each poor neglected Muse,
	His gen’rous Satyr does so kindly use,
	Forgetful of the hard unhappy fate
	Of Poets more sublime, and Wits more great,
	Than those that wrong the Mem’ry of the Dead,
	And stifle Conscience for the sake of Bread,
	Slander the living, with a spightful Pen,
	And prostitute the Fame of worthy Men.
	So the proud Cit, possess’d of an Estate,
	For nothing good, tho’ worshipfully Great,
	Triumphs o’er Dealers of a low Degree,
	More honest, tho’ less prosperous than he.

	In Pope I cannot read a line,
	But with a sigh I wish it mine;
	When he can in one couplet fix
	More sense than I can do in six;
	It gives me such a jealous fit,
	I cry, “Pox take him and his wit!”

  Pope and Boileau are certainly the two best poets of all the moderns. They both write extremely well; but I should prefer Pope to Boileau, because he excels in what is most material in the character of a poet. Boileau writes more correctly, and better than Pope; but Pope thinks more nobly, and has much more of the true spirit of poetry than Boileau.

  He is, in my opinion, the most elegant, the most correct poet; and at the same time the most harmonious (a circumstance which redounds very much to the honour of this muse) that England ever gave birth to. He has mellowed the harsh sounds of the English trumpet to the soft accents of the flute. His compositions may be easily translated, because they are vastly clear and perspicuous; besides, most of his subjects are general, and relative to all nations.

  —“Don’t you really think so, Sir?”—I think, madam, that he writes verses very well.—“Yes, he writes verses so well, that he is in danger of bringing even good verse into disrepute! from his all tune and no meaning.”

  Mr. Pope, as you with equal keenness and propriety express it, is gone out. I told a friend of his, who sent me the first news of it, that I was very sorry for his death, because I doubted whether he would live to recover the accident. Indeed it gives me no surprize to find you thinking he was in the wane of his popularity. It arose, originally, but from meditated little personal assiduities, and a certain bladdery swell of management. He did not blush to have the cunning to blow himself up, by help of dull, unconsciousness instruments, whenever he would seem to sail as if his own wind moved him. In fact, if anything was fine, or truly powerful, in Mr. Pope, it was chiefly centred in expression; and that rarely, when not grafted on some other writer’s preconceptions. His own sentiments were low and narrow, because always interested; darkly touched, because conceived imperfectly; and sour and acrid, because writ in envy. He had a turn for verse without a soul for poetry. He stuck himself into his subjects, and his muse partook his maladies; which, with a kind of peevish and vindictive consciousness, maligned the healthy and the satisfied.

  This great man is allowed to have been one of the first rank amongst the poets of our nation, and to acknowledge the superiority of none but Shakespear, Milton, and Dryden. With the two former, it is unnatural to compare him, as their province in writing is so very different. Pope has never attempted the drama, nor published an Epic Poem, in which these two distinguished genius’s have so wonderfully succeeded. Though Pope’s genius was great, it was yet of so different a cast from Shakespear’s and Milton’s, that no comparison can be justly formed. But if this may be said of the former two, it will by no means hold with respect to the latter, for between him and Dryden, there is a great similarity of writing, and a very striking coincidence of genius.

  I revere the memory of Pope, I respect and honour his abilities; but I do not think him at the head of his profession. In other words, in that species of poetry wherein Pope excelled, he is superior to all mankind: and I only say that this species of poetry is not the most excellent one of the art.

  Pope, the prince of lyric poetry, unrivalled in satire, ethicks, and polished versification.

  Had Milton never wrote, Pope would have been less to blame; but when in Milton’s genius, Homer, as it were, personally rose to forbid Britons doing him that ignoble wrong, it is less pardonable, by that effeminate decoration, to put Achilles in petticoats a second time. How much nobler had it been, if his numbers had rolled on in full flow, thro’ the various modulations of masculine melody, into those grandeurs of solemn sound which are indispensably demanded by the native dignity of heroic song! How much nobler if he had resisted the temptations of that Gothic demon which modern poesy, tasting, became mortal!… Harmony, as well as eloquence, is essential to poesy; and a murder of his music is putting half Homer to death. “Blank” is a term of diminution; what we mean by “blank verse” is verse, unfallen, uncursed; verse reclaimed, re-inthroned in the true language of the gods; who never thundered, nor suffered their Homer to thunder, in rhyme.

  His great, will not say greatest, merit lay in what we call the mechanic of poetry.

	In polish’d numbers and majestic sound,
	Where shall thy rival, Pope! be ever found?
	But whilst each line with equal beauty flows,
	E’en excellence, unvaried, tedious grows.
	Nature through all her works, in great degree,
	Borrows a blessing from variety.
	Music itself her needful aid requires
	To rouse the soul, and wake our dying fires.
	Still in one key, the nightingale would tease;
	Still in one key, not Brent would always please.

  Pope’s talent lay remarkably in what one may naturally enough term the condensation of thoughts. I think no English poet ever brought so much sense into the same number of lines with equal smoothness, ease, and poetical beauty. Let him who doubts of this peruse the “Essay on Man” with attention.

  If the opinion of those critics be true, who hold that the highest regions of Parnassus are appropriated to pathos and sublimity, Dryden must after all confess, that he has never ascended so far as his illustrious imitator: there being nothing in the writings of the first so pathetic as the “Epistle of Eloisa,” or the “Elegy on the Unfortunate Lady;” nor so uniformly sublime as the “Essay on Man,” or the “Pastoral of the Messiah.” This last is indeed but a selection and imitation of choice passages; but it bespeaks a power of imitation, and a taste in selection, that Dryden does not seem to have possessed. To all which may I not be permitted to add, what I think I could prove, that the pathos of Homer is frequently improved by Pope, and that of Virgil very frequently debased by Dryden?

  In the last Review, I mean in the last but one, I saw Johnson’s critique upon Prior and Pope. I am bound to acquiesce in his opinion of the latter, because it has always been my own. I could never agree with those who preferred him to Dryden; nor with others (I have known such, and persons of taste and discernment too), who could not allow him to be a poet at all. He was certainly a mechanical maker of verses, and in every line he ever wrote, we see indubitable marks of the most indefatigable industry and labour. Writers who find it necessary to make such strenuous and painful exertions, are generally as phlegmatic as they are correct; but Pope was, in this respect, exempted from the common lot of authors of that class. With the unwearied application of a plodding Flemish painter, who draws a shrimp with the most minute exactness, he had all the genius of one of the first masters. Never, I believe, were such talents and such drudgery united. But I admire Dryden most, who has succeeded by mere dint of genius, and in spite of a laziness and carelessness almost peculiar to himself. His faults are numberless, but so are his beauties. His faults are those of a great man, and his beauties are such (at least sometimes), as Pope with all his touching and retouching could never equal.

	Then Pope, as harmony itself exact,
	In verse well disciplined, complete, compact,
	Gave virtue and morality a grace,
	That, quite eclipsing pleasure’s painted face,
	Levied a tax of wonder and applause,
	E’en on the fools that trampled on their laws.
	But he (his musical finesse was such,
	So nice his ear, so delicate his touch)
	Made poetry a mere mechanic art;
	And every warbler has his tune by heart.

  Pope’s works are superabundant with superfluous and unmeaning verbage; his translations are even replete with tautology, a fault which is to refinement as midnight is to noon day. What is truly surprizing is, that the fourth book of the “Dunciad,” his last publication, is more full of redundancy and incorrectness than his Pastorals, which are his first.

  All that was wanting to his illustrious predecessor found its consummation in the genius, knowledge, correct sense, and condensation of thought and expression, which distinguish this poet.

  The fourteenth chapter of Scriblerus, it is true, possesses humour, but the Second Satire from Horace has nothing to palliate its grossness. It were much to be wished also that every future editor would expel not only these offensive pages, but the Imitations likewise of Chaucer and Spenser, neither of which have a particle of merit, and the last impresses an idea of the genius of the poet totally void of all verisimilitude.

  Shall I venture to own to you, that in mental power, I give him only the third place among the wits of his time? In talent, that is, in power formed and directed by habit to one sort of exertion, his place may be higher. He had a greater talent for brilliant and sententious verses than perhaps any of his contemporaries had for any other kind of literary excellence. I really think that his great merit is the same with that of a writer of maxims. His observations on life are both sensible and fine, but they are seldom his own; they have not the truth of immediate experience; and in his maxims, like those of his brethern, the truth is always in part sacrificed to the brilliancy; some part of the jewel is cut away in polishing. A talent very inferior to a man’s general power of mind, especially when joined to mannerism, strikes me as a sort of knack. Estimated by the two great faculties of the human mind, his place must be where I have assigned it. Swift was as much above him in understanding, as Addison in imagination,—not to mention taste. Both Swift and Addison were more classical writers; that is, their writings approach more near to the models of beauty in their respective kinds.

  The poetic fame of Pope, however, has been the bane of religion; for independent of the seductive lustre which he has given to the dæmonology of Homer, and the unblushing deism of his “Essay on Man,” pure heathenism, in spite of a few solitary truths introduced for the sake of the rhyme, ever feeds his lamp and scents his works, which paganise the taste of thousands.

	But ever since Pope spoiled the ears of the town
	With his cuckoo-song verses, half up and half down.

  We shall not enter into the question whether Pope had most taste or genius. Perhaps he was destined by nature for bold invention; but in fact he has, in general, imitated with taste. The same thing may be said of Horace, Vida, and Boileau. Pope, like them, was a critic as well as a poet. It is a curious observation that no poet of the first rank has ever spoken of the mechanism of his art, while poets of inferior station have laboriously displayed its rules in verse.

  The question, whether Pope was a poet, has hardly yet been settled, and is hardly worth settling; for, if he was not a great poet, he must have been a great prose-writer, that is, he was a great writer of some sort. He was a man of exquisite faculties, and of the most refined taste; and as he chose verse (the most obvious distinction of poetry) as the vehicle to express his ideas, he has generally passed for a poet, and a good one. If, indeed, by a great poet, we mean one who gives the utmost grandeur to our conceptions of nature, or the utmost force to the passions of the heart, Pope was not in this sense a great poet; for the bent, the characteristic power of his mind, lay the clear contrary way.

  Pope is a satirist, and a moralist, and a wit, and a critic, and a fine writer, much more than he is a poet. He has all the delicacies and proprieties and felicities of diction—but he has not a great deal of fancy, and scarcely ever touches any of the greater passions. He is much the best, we think, of the classical Continental school; but he is not to be compared with the masters—nor with the pupils—of that Old English one from which there had been so lamentable an apostasy. There are no pictures of nature or of simple emotion in all his writings. He is the poet of town life, and of high life, and of literary life; and seems so much afraid of incurring ridicule by the display of natural feeling or unregulated fancy, that it is difficult not to imagine that he would have thought such ridicule very well directed.

  Pope gave our heroic couplet its strictest melody and tersest expression.

D’un mot mis en sa place il enseigne le pouvoir.

If his contemporaries forgot other poets in admiring him, let him not be robbed of his just fame on pretence that a part of it was superfluous. The public ear was long fatigued with repetitions of his manner; but if we place ourselves in the situation of those to whom his brilliancy, succinctness, and animation were wholly new, we cannot wonder at their being captivated to the fondest admiration…. But let us look to the spirit that points his antithesis, and to the rapid precision of his thoughts, and we shall forgive him for being too antithetic and sententious…. That Pope was neither so insensible to the beauties of nature, nor so indistinct in describing them as to forfeit the character of a genuine poet, is what I mean to urge, without exaggerating his picturesqueness. But before speaking of that quality in his writings, I would beg leave to observe, in the first place, that the faculty by which a poet luminously describes objects of art is essentially the same faculty which enables him to be a faithful describer of simple nature; in the second place, that nature and art are to a greater degree relative terms in poetical description than is generally recollected; and, thirdly, that artificial objects and manners are of so much importance in fiction, as to make the exquisite description of them no less characteristic of genius than the description of simple physical appearances. The poet is “creation’s heir.”

  I have loved and honoured the fame and name of that illustrious and unrivalled man, far more than my own paltry renown, and the trashy jingle of the crowd of “schools” and upstarts, who pretend to rival, or even surpass him…. The most perfect of our poets and the purest of our moralists…. He is the moral poet of all civilisation, and as such, let us hope that he will one day be the national poet of mankind. He is the only poet that never shocks; the only poet whose faultlessness has been made his reproach.

  When he left his own laurel circus at Twickenham, he was lifted into his chariot or his barge; and with weak eyes, and tottering strength, it is physically impossible he could be a descriptive bard. Where description has been introduced among his poems, as far as his observation could go, he excelled; more could not be expected. In the descriptions of the cloister, the scenes surrounding the melancholy convent, as far as could be gained by books, suggested by imagination, he was eminently successful; but even here, perhaps, he only proved that he could not go far.

  Neither time, nor distance, nor grief, nor age can ever diminish my veneration for him, who is the great moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of all stages of existence. The delight of my boyhood, the study of my manhood, perhaps (if allowed to me to attain it) he may be the consolation of my age. His poetry is the Book of Life. Without canting, and yet without neglecting religion, he has assembled all that a good and great man can gather together of moral wisdom clothed in consummate beauty.

  It really seems to us absurd, and somewhat conceited to inquire at this time of day, if Pope be really a poet. If the wise men of Europe had not been grossly deceived for the last hundred years, (a pretty fair term of time to settle the pretensions of an author), he is one of the most eminent. It, after all, amounts to a mere verbal dispute; whether our definition of a poet is the same that it was a century ago; as relates to ourselves, we see no reason to doubt it. We study and admire the same great models that were then admired; we acknowledge in Pope the sprightliness of an elegant fancy, graceful dignity of sentiment, a wit unceasing yet never tiring, satire playful yet severe, an accurate taste, a sententiousness of expression neither weakened by affectation, nor clouded by ambiguity, and an uniform polish of language never rivalled…. It is not by an indiscriminate commendation of Pope, that we may hope to preserve his poetical character from the unmerited contempt, into which it has fallen of late years; chiefly occasioned by the example of a few captivating but lawless writers. We must meet him on his own ground, which is surely too high to demand the aid of extravagant eulogium; acknowledge his deficiencies, that we may be more readily credited in speaking of his merits; hold him up to imitation as a perspicuous, elegant, and correct writer, abounding in wit and fancy but not sublime; natural but not tender.

  Who can be “at fault” with any edition, where the text is pure, and the annotations are brief and apposite? There is only one feeling, while discoursing of this incomparable poet, which I trust it may be permitted me to avow; that is, that, in the present age of prying research into the documents left of the illustrious dead, no officious zeal, misguided vanity, or base love of lucre, will lead to the publicity of every thing yet existing, unrecorded, of the muse of Pope: a name, which should be ever connected with all our better feelings of admiration and gratitude.

  Pope exhibits more of the accuser than the Judge. Petty interests, and personal malice, instead of a love of justice, and a hatred of vice, appear to be the powers which nerve his arm. The victim is sure to fall beneath his blow, but the deed, however righteous, inspires us with no very affectionate feelings for his executioner.

  These three writers, Thomson, Collins, and Dyer, had more poetic imagination than any of their contemporaries, unless we reckon Chatterton as of that age. I do not name Pope, for he stands alone, as a man most highly gifted; but unluckily he took the plain when the heights were within his reach.

  Pope formed his style on that of Dryden. He has less enthusiasm, less majesty, less force of thought, than his great model, but he has more delicacy of feeling, more refinement and more correctness. If he never soars to the height which Dryden reached when “the full burst of inspiration came,” he never sinks so low as his master ofttimes fell. While soothed by the exquisitely sweet, but somewhat monotonous couplets of Pope, we occasionally long for the bolder and more varied music of Dryden’s lines.

  Nothing in the English language can be more perfect than the terseness, elegance, and condensation of Pope’s sentiments, diction, and rhyme.

  Pope was hardly the man to criticise Milton.

  What fiction has he formed to embody truth? Are not all his illustrations drawn from observance? Even his beautiful “Eloisa” is no original invention; it is the conception of a powerful and passionate fancy,—not invention. The genius is secondary, because it lies solely in the language and versification. But who can put it in the same class with the inventions of Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton? When Byron wrote “Manfred,” and “Cain” and “Heaven and Earth,” he was a great inventor: why therefore does he affect to despise himself for not following Pope’s model? I am sorry to say, that this seems nothing less than perverse affectation. I have taken the same side on this Pope-argument all my life; and,—strangely enough,—made many people angry by it. Pope is an unrivalled favourite with the matter-of-fact people; and they think it an actual affront to them to doubt his pre-eminence.

  In our own times, not merely has the depreciation of the unities gained ground, but the poets of the age of Anne have been censured as carrying too far the smoothness and correctness of versification. Pope especially, as the foremost of this class, has been nibbled at by men whom, when alive, a single brandish of his pen would have silenced and struck down. He has been denied imagination, variety, true poetic genius, and allowed scarce any thing beyond the talent of harmonious numbers. But his defence has been promptly undertaken by gifted hands, and conducted in a manner worthy of himself and of them…. The real truth seems to be, that Pope’s was not the highest class of poetry, but that in the second class he deserves to hold the very highest rank. It may also be observed, that this class, though inferior in the scale of merit, is perhaps more generally and permanently pleasing than any other.

  It is no use to decide the disputed question as to whether he were a poet or not, in the strict sense of the term; in any case, his was one of the finest heads ever known, full of deep sayings, uttered in the shape of couplets—rhymed couplets.

  We will admit to our reader in the confessional, that, however convinced in our innermost opinion of the superiority of Dryden’s genius, we have more pleasure in reading Pope than we ever could enjoy or imagine under Pope’s master. We incline to believe that Dryden being the greatest poet-power, Pope is the best poet-manual; and that whatever Dryden has done—we do not say conceived, we do not say suggested, but done—Pope has done that thing better. For translations, we hold up Pope’s Homer against Dryden’s Virgil and the world. Both translations are utterly and equally contrary to the antique, both bad with the same sort of excellence; but Pope’s faults are Dryden’s faults, while Dryden’s are not Pope’s. We say the like of the poems from Chaucer; we say the like of the philosophic and satirical poems: the art of reasoning in verse is admirably attained by either poet, but practised with more grace and point by the later one. To be sure, there is the “Alexander’s Feast” ode, called, until people half believed what they said, the greatest ode in the language! But here is, to make the scales even again, the “Eloisa” with tears on it,—faulty but tender—of a sensibility which glorious John was not born with a heart for. To be sure, it was not necessary that John Dryden should keep a Bolingbroke to think for him: but to be sure again, it is something to be born with a heart, particularly for a poet. We recognise besides in Pope, a delicate fineness of tact, of which the precise contrary is unpleasantly obvious in his great master; Horace Walpole’s description of Selwyn, un bête inspiré with a restriction of bête to the animal sense, fitting glorious John like his crown. Now there is nothing of this coarseness of the senses about Pope; the little pale Queen Anne’s valetudinarian had a nature fine enough to stand erect upon the point of a needle like a schoolman’s angel; and whatever he wrote coarsely, he did not write from inward impulse, but from external conventionality, from a bad social Swift-sympathy. For the rest, he carries out his master’s principles into most excellent and delicate perfection: he is rich in his degree. And there is, indeed, something charming even to an enemy’s ear in this exquisite balancing of sounds and phrases, these “shining rows” of oppositions and appositions, this glorifying of commonplaces by antithetic processes, this catching, in the rebound, of emphasis upon rhyme and rhyme; all, in short, of this Indian jugglery and Indian carving upon—cherry-stones!

  Though charity may find much in him that needs to be forgiven, though justice may even sometimes class him with those moral assassins who wear, like Cloten, their daggers in their mouths, yet still great merit cannot be denied to the poet and the man who scourged hypocrisy and baseness, at a time when baseness paved the way to power, and hypocrisy distributed the spoils of fraud.

  It was unlucky for him (if indeed it did not produce a lucky variety for the reading world) that Dryden came immediately before him. Dryden, a robuster nature, was just great enough to mislead Pope and French ascendency completed his fate. Perhaps, after all, nothing better than such a honey and such a sting as this exquisite writer developed, could have been got out of his little delicate pungent nature; and we have every reason to be grateful for what they have done for us. Hundreds of greater pretensions in poetry have not attained to half his fame, nor did they deserve it; for they did not take half his pains.

  This prince of poets.

  The mellifluence of Pope, as Johnson called it, has the defect of monotony. Exquisite in the sweet rising and falling of its clauses, it seldom or never takes the ear prisoner by a musical surprise. If Pope be the nightingale of our verse, he displays none of the irregular and unexpected gush of the songster. He has no variations. The tune is delicate, but not natural. It reminds us of a bird, all over brilliant, which pipes its one lay in a golden cage and has forgotten the green wood in the luxury of confinement. But Dryden’s versification has the freedom and the freshness of the fields. Pope’s modulation is of the ear; Dryden’s of the subject.

  I admire Pope in the very highest degree; but I admire him as a pyrotechnic artist for producing brilliant and evanescent effect out of elements that have hardly a moment’s life within them. There is a flash and startling explosion, then there is a dazzling coruscation, all purple and gold; the eye aches under the suddenness of a display, that, springing like a burning arrow out of darkness, rushes back into darkness with arrowy speed, and in a moment all is over.

  No poet ever enjoyed greater popularity, or had more influence on the taste of his age. In versification this was immediate and direct. His style was copied by innumerable imitators, until the public ear was cloyed with the everlasting echo of the heroic couplet. In his own didactic poems Pope was too uniform in his pauses and construction. The reader is apt to be fatigued with the regular recurrence of terse and pointed lines, the balanced verse and striking antithesis, unless attention be closely fixed on the weighty truths, the admirable sentiments, and marvellous felicity of diction which are compressed within these brilliant couplets. But, besides harmonious versification, Pope taught correctness and precision of thought, and brought slovenly execution into irredeemable disgrace. Thomson would not have thrice corrected, and almost rewritten his “Seasons,” improving them on each revision, if Pope had not raised the standard of public taste with respect to poetical composition. It has been said by one who is himself a true poet, Professor Aytoun, that Pope founded no school of poetry, or if he did it was soon extinct, driven out by Percy’s “Reliques,” by Cowper, and Burns. The attempt to rival Pope on his own peculiar ground was hopeless.

  The taste and sensibilities of Pope, which led him to cultivate the society of persons of fine manners, or wit, or taste, or beauty, caused him to shrink equally from that shabby and boisterous crew which formed the rank and file of literature in his time: and he was as unjust to these men as they to him. The delicate little creature sickened at habits and company which were quite tolerable to robuster men: and in the famous feud between Pope and the Dunces, and without attributing any peculiar wrong to either, one can quite understand how the two parties should so hate each other. As I fancy, it was a sort of necessity that when Pope’s triumph passed, Mr. Addison and his men should look rather contemptuously down on it from their balcony; so it was natural for Dennis and Tibbald, and Webster and Cibber, and the worn and hungry pressmen in the crowd below, to howl at him and assail him. And Pope was more savage to Grub-street, than Grub-street was to Pope.

  In Pope’s writings, whatsoever he may not find, he will find the very excellencies after which our young poets strive in vain, produced by their seeming opposites, which are now despised and discarded; naturalness produced by studious art; daring sublimity by strict self-restraint; depth by clear simplicity; pathos by easy grace; and a morality infinitely more merciful, as well as more righteous, than the one now in vogue among the poetasters, by honest faith in God. If he be shocked by certain peculiarities of diction, and by the fondness for perpetual antithesis, let him remember, that what seems strange to our day was natural and habitual in his; and that, in the eyes of our grandchildren, Keats’s and Shelley’s peculiarities will seem as monstrous as Pope’s or Johnson’s do in ours.

  Pope our classical English Satirist. No controversies, as to his being a “poet” or not, will ever drive him from his place by the side of Horace and Juvenal; from his leading position in the group of those great and fine intellects who have in various ages seized the very spirit of human society, and depicted it in their pages, or corrected its corruptions, by the force of their inspiration from the sources of moral truth. For the sake of the finished excellence which proves him to have been a great man and a great artist, we must make what allowances we can for drawbacks which it is impossible to hide and useless to ignore.

  Pope is once again in the ascendant. For a moment a thin filmy shadow passed over his name and fame; but time has restored “all its original brightness,” and Pope now stands, where he ever will stand, amongst the foremost men in the annals of his country’s literature.

  He was, some one we think has said, the sort of a person we cannot even conceive existing in a barbarous age. His subject was not life at large, but fashionable life. He described the society in which he was thrown, the people among whom he lived; his mind was a hoard of small maxims, a quintessence of petty observations. When he described character, he described it, not dramatically nor as it is in itself, but observantly and from without; calling up in the mind not so much a vivid conception of the man—of the real, corporeal, substantial being—as an idea of the idea which a metaphysical bystander might refine and excruciate concerning him. Society in Pope is scarcely a society of people, but of pretty little atoms, colored and painted with hoops or in coats,—a miniature of metaphysics, a puppet-show of sylphs. He elucidates the doctrine that the tendency of civilized poetry is towards an analytic sketch of the existing civilization.

  Whatever was his power of imagination, of fancy, his command of language, or flow of verse, his genius had not that spiritual healthfulness which is a characteristic of our greatest English poets. There is, running through all the writings of Pope, a large vein of misanthropy. It was his habit to proclaim contempt of the world, antipathy to his fellow-beings, except a few choice friends, whom he clung to most faithfully.

  Thus poetry is degraded and made ornamental. Pope and his school wrote poetry fit to put round frosted cake.

  Of all English authors he [Porson] seems to have had the greatest liking for Pope. He admired, with all the world, Pope’s vigour of thought and accuracy and beauty of language. Mr. Maltby has seen the tears roll down his cheeks while he was repeating Pope’s “Epistle to the Earl of Oxford,” prefixed to Parnell’s Poems. Walking with Maltby and Rogers over Pope’s Villa at Twickenham, he exclaimed, “Oh, how I should like to pass the remainder of my days in a house which was the abode of a man so deservedly celebrated!”

  If he be not a universal poet in the most striking sense now, none the less is he really a poet, though belonging to a less vehement, less passionate, less startling class, in an embellished, correct and pure fashion. He is far superior to Boileau in extent of ideas and also in taste for the picturesque.

  The time has gone by for Pope to be ranked among the master-geniuses of our literature.

  Sententious, acute, brilliant, and felicitous, the servant of an age which he was content to flatter and to please, but never attempted to elevate, who fixed for English poetry that factitious and stilted poetic diction which echoed and re-echoed by imitators till it became ashamed and vexed at its own empty reiterations.

  The serene and just benevolence which placed Pope, in his theology, two centuries in advance of his time, and enabled him to sum the law of noble life in two lines which, so far as I know, are the most complete, the most concise, and the most lofty expression of moral temper existing in English words:—

	Never elated, while one man’s oppress’d;
	Never dejected, while another’s bless’d.

I wish you also to remember these lines of Pope, and to make yourselves entirely masters of his system of ethics; because, putting Shakespeare aside as rather the world’s than ours, I hold Pope to be the most perfect representative we have, since Chaucer, of the true English mind; and I think the “Dunciad” is the most absolutely chiselled and monumental work “exacted” in our country. You will find, as you study Pope, that he has expressed for you, in the strictest language and within the briefest limits, every law of art, of criticism, of economy, of policy, and, finally, of a benevolence, humble, rational, and resigned, contented with its allotted share of life, and trusting the problem of its salvation to Him in whose hands lies that of the universe.

  Whatever may be said in his dispraise, he is likely to be quoted as long as the English is a living language.

  He was like those little musicians, infant prodigies, who, brought up at the piano, suddenly acquire a marvellous touch, roll out scales, brilliant shakes, makes the octavos vault with an agility and justice which drive off the stage the most famous artists…. In fine, his great cause for writing was literary vanity; he wished to be admired, and nothing more, his life was that of a coquette studying herself in a glass, bedecking herself, smirking, paying compliments to herself, yet declaring that compliments weary her, that painting the face makes her dirty, and that she has a horror of affectation. Pope has no dash, no naturalness or manliness; no more ideas than passions; at least such ideas as a man feels it necessary to write, and in connection with which we lose thought of words. Religious controversy and party quarrels resound about him; he studiously avoids them; amidst all these shocks his chief care is to preserve his writing desk; he is a very lukewarm Catholic, all but a deist, not well aware of what deism means; and on this point he borrows from Bolingbroke ideas whose scope he cannot see, but which he thinks suitable to be put into verse…. I wish I could admire Pope’s works of imagination, but I cannot. In vain I read the testimony of his contemporaries, and even that of the moderns, and repeat to myself that in his time he was the prince of poets.

  As truly as Shakespeare is the poet of man, as God made him, dealing with great passions and innate motives, so truly is Pope the poet of society, the delineator of manners, the exposer of those motives which may be called acquired, whose spring is in institutions and habits of purely worldly origin.

  He is in a peculiar degree the mirror of the social passions and sentiments, the modes and tone of his day. To comprehend how much this is so, we have only to suppose the ten volumes of Pope’s works annihilated. What chasm would be created by the act of destruction! But in what? Not a single discovery, or truth, or thought, or idea, or character, or image, which counts among the treasured possessions of human intelligence, would be thereby lost. But in the history of English literature and life what a gap would be occasioned! There is no other book in the language, the loss of which would obliterate so much personal anecdote, so much scandal, if you will, but also so much true and firm drawing of character and personal relations, such felicitous touches of manners and contemporary tone.

  Dryden was his great model. Perhaps his highest excellence lies in the same direction as that of Dryden lay,—in the power of sketching characters. He, too, was a skillful portrait-painter; but his style is very different from Dryden’s. In one instance he has ventured to challenge comparison with his master, in his picture of Villiers of Zimri, forlorn and dying. A careful juxtaposition of the two masterpieces will well illustrate the affinities and the differences of their authors.

  Pope said that the proper study of mankind was Man. But he approached that study from the side of the intellect alone. It was by the criticism of the understanding, not by the emotion of the heart that he worked on his subject. The result was cold speculation and brilliant satire, and in neither of those tempers is any one fit to write fairly or nobly about the whole of Human Nature; though he is fitted to write about that which Man does, or Man has, up to a certain point. The surface of the “study of mankind” is touched it may be in all its points, but the writer does not penetrate into its depths. It is just the difference between Ben Jonson and Shakespeare: the one not seriously caring for his characters, but only how he may develop them; the other loving, pitying, being personally indignant with his characters: so that in the one we study not men, but the humours of men; in the other we study men, nay mankind. The one creates images of men and dresses them and makes them play their part by strings upon his stage: the other creates living men, and bids them act, and sits by watching them with passion. There is the same kind of difference between Pope’s study of man and that study of him to which Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron have accustomed us.

  His writings resemble those fireworks which, after they have fallen to the ground and been apparently quenched, suddenly break out again into sputtering explosions. The waters of a literary revolution have passed over him without putting him out. Though much of his poetry has ceased to interest us, so many of his brilliant couplets still survive that probably no dead writer, with the solitary exception of Shakespeare, is more frequently quoted at the present day. It is in vain that he is abused, ridiculed, and often declared to be no poet at all.

  Pope’s English is not only correct, it is also, as Dryden’s is, modern. There is no substantial difference between it and the English of the present day, except that Pope is more exact than most modern authors in the use of words…. It is Pope’s modernness as well as correctness, that makes him so valuable a model for the student of modern English. I know few better or more valuable lessons in the choice of English words than, after reading a passage of Pope, to shut the book and to have the verses repeated with blanks here and there for the students to fill up. By comparing one’s failures with the original, one learns to appreciate the unerring exactitude with which Pope elaborated every couplet till it reached absolute perfection. Pope is one of the few poets whose lines cannot be misquoted with impunity.

  The Poet of the Understanding.

  Loyal as he was to his friends, he was yet more loyal to his verse. His vanity never led him to literary self-sufficiency; no artist ever showed a truer lowliness before the ideal of his art; no poet ever corrected so much, or so invariably bettered his work by each correction. One of his finest characteristics, indeed, was his high sense of literary dignity. From the first he carried on the work of Dryden by claiming a worth and independence for literature; and he broke with disdain through the traditions of patronage which had degraded men of letters into hangers-on of the great.

  And not only is Pope’s style still popular in the truest sense of the word, but it forms the foundation on which have been built many of the most popular poems in the language. There is scarcely a distinguished poet in the eighteenth century who does not owe something of his style to Pope. However much they may differ from him and from each other, Gray, Collins, Johnson, Goldsmith, and Crabbe all do silent homage to his genius; and if it had not been for the exactness and propriety of metrical expression which Pope erected as a standard, it may well be doubted whether we should have enjoyed the beauty of form which we find in the “Elegy in the Country Churchyard” or the “Ode to Evening;” the striking moral manner that arrests the imagination in the “Vanity of Human Wishes” or the “Deserted Village;” or the dramatic force of the character painting in the “Borough.” Added to which, the author of “Childe Harold,” the greatest master of idiomatic poetical English that this century has seen, was never wearied in proclaiming his admiration for the genius of Pope, and the extent of his own obligations to him.

  He felt what Cowper calls the “musical finesse” of Pope, and admired single lines and couplets very much; but he found the “regular da da, da da” of his heroic metre monotonous. He quoted

“What dire offense from amorous causes springs.”

“Amrus causiz springs,” horrible! I would sooner die than write such a line!!

  When he arrived at the age of discretion, which was at an early period, for he was alert and precocious, he made Dryden his master. He was thought to have bettered the music of Dryden in his more polished numbers, and he certainly carried the art of writing the heroic couplet (as he and his contemporaries understood it) to the highest perfection. The bent of his mind was not poetical, but reflective and didactic. He was witty, sarcastic, merciless,—qualities that are inconsistent with a great genius, or a good heart. It was his misfortune to have a crooked mind in a crooked body, and to learn from woman nothing but the exercise of her foibles.

  It rouses the blood, it kindles the heart, to remember what an indomitable force of heroic spirit, and sleepless always as fire, was inclosed in the pitiful body of the misshapen weakling whose whole life was spent in fighting the good fight of sense against folly, of light against darkness, of human speech against brute silence, of truth and reason and manhood against all the banded bestialities of all dunces and all dastards, all blackguardly blockheads and all blockheaded blackguards, who then as now were misbegotten by malignity on dullness. We are easily tempted and naturally apt to set against the high qualities of such warriors on the side of all men worthy of their help, by way of counterpoise to their glory and subtraction from our own debt of gratitude and esteem, the fierceness of their habitual mood and the foulness of their occasional missiles. We are less apt, possibly, to remember the conditions of their life-long fight.

	“But Pope, poor D——l, lied from Hand to Mouth;
	Affected, hypocritical, and vain,
	A Book in Breeches, and a Fop in Grain;
	A Fox that found not the high Clusters sour,
	The Fanfaron of Vice beyond his power,
	Pope yet possessed”—(the Praise will make you start)—
	“Mean, morbid, vain, he yet possessed a Heart!
	And still we marvel at the Man, and still
	Admire his Finish, and applaud his Skill:
	Though, as that fabled Barque, a phantom Form,
	Eternal strains, nor rounds the Cape of Storm,
	Even so Pope strove, nor ever crossed the Line
	That from the Noble separates the Fine!”

  I do not know, after all, that Pope is greatly esteemed in the present day. He was, like many poets, vain and ill-tempered. Moreover, he had the fault common to so many of his day—he did not know when to leave off. If Pope had not sung to such interminable length he would be more tolerable.

  Satirist after satirist has chirped like a wren from the head of Pope; where are they now? Where is the great, the terrific, the cloud-compelling Churchill? Meanwhile, in the midst of a generation persistently turned away from all his ideas and all his models, the clear voice of Pope still rings from the arena of Queen Anne.

  Everyone knows that Byron loved and defended Pope, and looked upon Pope as an impeccable master; and Pope deserved the recognition of Byron. For lucidity, for sharpness and brilliance of phrase, for delicate force and effect, it is hard to surpass the finest work of Pope. But gradually men came to see that Pope’s “Essay on Man” was not the last possibility of English poetry.

  Pope’s place in English poetry may be taken now as settled. He stands high and stands firmly in the second class: that is, in the class just below Shakespeare and Milton and a very few others. He has been extravagantly censured and extravagantly praised. Byron at one time maintained that he was the greatest English poet, and many vehement arguments have been used to prove that he was not a poet at all. One English critic believed he had settled the question for ever when he described Pope as “a musical rocking-horse.” Again and again the world has been told that Pope has disappeared from the sky of literature, but the world looks up, and behold, there is the star shining just as before.

  The mention of Pope reminds me that he is the traditional exemplar of the didactic heresy, so much so that the question is still mooted whether he was a poet at all. As to this, one can give only his own impression, and my adverse view has somewhat changed,—possibly because we grow more sententious with advancing years. Considering the man with his time, I think Pope was a poet; one whose wit and reason exceeded his lyrical feeling, but still a poet of no mean degree. Assuredly he was a force in his century, and one not even then wholly spent. His didacticism was inherent in the stiff, vicious, Gallic drum-beat of his artificial style—so falsely called “classical,” so opposed to the true and live method of the antique—rather than in his genius and quality. It is impossible that one with so marked a poetic temperament, and using verse withal as almost his sole mode of expression, should not have been a poet. In the manner of his time, how far above his rivals!

  If the poetry of Pope has not the vogue it once had, the fame of the most brilliant of poets is secure. He may not have the homage of the multitude, but he will have in every generation, as long as our language lasts the homage of all who can discern. He stands indeed with Horace, Juvenal, and Dryden at the head of a great department of poetry—the poetry of ethics and satire.

  He was able only to play on one instrument, the heroic couplet. When he attempted any other form of verse the result, if not total failure, was mediocrity…. The fine wine of his poetry was rarely free from bitterness in the cup…. In poetry Pope takes a first place in the second order of poets. The deficiencies which forbid his entrance into the first rank are obvious. He cannot sing, he has no ear for the subtlest melodies of verse, he is not a creative poet, and has few of the spirit-stirring thoughts which the noblest poets scatter through their pages with apparent unconsciousness. There are no depths in Pope and there are no heights; he has neither eye for the beauties of Nature, nor ear for her harmonies, and a primrose was no more to him than it was to Peter Bell. These are defects indeed, but nothing is more unfair says a great French critic than to judge notable minds solely by their defects, and in spite of them Pope’s position is so unassailable that the critic must take a contracted view of the poet’s art who questions his right to the title. His merits are of a kind not likely to be affected by time; a lively fancy, a power of satire almost unrivalled, and a skill in using words so consummate that there is no poet, excepting Shakespeare, who has left his mark upon the language so strongly. The loss to us if Pope’s verse were to become extinct cannot readily be measured. He has said in the best words what we all know and feel, but cannot express, and has made that classical which in weaker hands would be commonplace. His sensibility to the claims of his art is exquisite, the adaptation of his style to his subject shows the hand of a master, and if these are not the highest gifts of a poet, they are gifts to which none but a poet can lay claim.

  It appears to me that, in spite of the occasional stains which disfigure his pages—stains attributable rather to the age than to the man—we must regard him as one of the most effective powers for good in English literature. In that great conflict which is waged through the ages between God and the enemies of God, Pope fought strenuously, however ignorantly, on the right side. It is true that his hold upon Christian doctrines was feeble and ill-assured, but it is also true, as one of the most recent and assuredly not one of the least able of his critics has pointed out, that the influence of Catholic teaching may be clearly traced in many of his poems. And it is quite certain that his sympathies were with the defenders of Christianity, which, however imperfect his apprehension of it, he regarded as the complement and perfection of the Theism taught by Nature herself. No one can doubt his earnest sincerity when he proclaims in his magnificent verse that august verities of natural Religion, the Commanding sanctities of Natural Morality. And his exposition is the more penetrative with a certain class of minds—a large class, too—because it is delivered, not by a professed metaphysician, not by an accredited divine, but by a man of the world who, as he himself said of Horace, “without method talks us into sense.”

  Pope, the very high-priest of English Classicism, accepts Classic standards only to ignore them at will.

  With regard to the form of his didactic poetry there is not room for two opinions as to its excellence. The lines have been polished and refined till they are positively brilliant; their lustre may be somewhat metallic, but it is unmistakably real and effective. The expression has been pruned till it is the ideal of succinct epigrammatic utterance; indeed, one could adduce cases where compression has been so eagerly sought that grammar and even sense have been sacrificed.

  I know that this poet works in harness, and has not the free movement of one who gallops under a loose rein; the couplets fetter him; may be they cramp him; but there is a blithe, strong resonance of true metal, in the clinking chains that bind him. No, I do not think that Pope is to be laughed out of court, in our day, or in any day, because he labored at form and polish, or because he loved so much the tingle of a rhyme; I think there was something else that tingled in a good deal that he wrote and will continue to tingle so long as Wit is known by its own name.

  If we are to deny the name of poet simpliciter to the master of a versification at once so consummate and to a great extent so novel, to the author of such really magnificent examples of their own kind of verse as the character of Atticus and the conclusion of the “Dunciad,” to the man who, for nearly an entire century, gave more poetic pleasure to a greater number of his own countrymen than any other writer—then talk about poetry becomes a mere logomachy.

  To the exuberance of the passions, Voltaire, like Pope, opposes restraint of social obligations. But this restraint is lax and feeble, and Pope still remains one of the inaugurators of the movement which led the age of Rousseau to magnify passion, regarded as the true end of man. Further, he never had anything but pity for that philosophy of the humble-minded which pretends “to chasten men under the pretence of exalting him.” For Pope the passionate man alone is complete. He venerates passion as the ruling power in man, not so much because it is moral, as because it is beautiful and renders man more great. That is as much as to say that in certain pages of the “Essay on Man” there is, as it were, a foretaste of Rousseau. Above all, the author makes a complacent parade of that vague and maudlin spirit of benevolence so dear to the whole period. If Pope does not actually cause our tears to flow, he at least excites a certain tender feeling and a certain melting mood, which he regards as creditable to man. Sensitiveness, if it is not virtue, is at least the beginning of virtue.

  Keenly alive to the foibles of his time, and with powers of observation carefully trained by practice, Pope failed as an essayist for lack of sympathetic humour and of ability to conceal his art.

  I admire not a little of Gray, and a good deal of Pope. The felicity of Pope’s language and the energy seem to be the outcome of a vivid imagination…. He will be read till the world, with its insatiable maw, will have got from him all that it wants to get—all that he has to give.

  On the whole, it is as a satirist we must think of him, and the second greatest in the language. The gods are in pairs, male and female; and if Dryden was the Mars of English satire, Pope was the Venus—a very eighteenth century Venus, quite as conspicuous for malice as for elegance. If a woman’s satire were informed with genius, and cultivated to the utmost perfection of form by lifelong and exclusive literary practice, one imagines it would be much like Pope’s. His style seems to me feminine in what it lacks; the absence of any geniality, any softening humour to abate its mortal thrust. It is feminine in what it has, the malice, the cruel dexterity, the delicate needle point which hardly betrays its light and swift entry, yet stings like a bee. Even in his coarseness—as in the “Dunciad”—Pope appears to me female. It is the coarseness of the fine ladies of that material time, the Lady Maries and the rest of them. Dryden is a rough and thick-natured man, cudgelling his adversaries with coarse speech in the heat of brawl and the bluntness of his sensibilities; a country squire, who is apt at times to use the heavy end of his cutting whip; but when Pope is coarse he is coarse with effort, he goes out of his way to be nasty, in the evident endeavour to imitate a man. It is a girl airing the slang of her schoolboy brother. The one thing, perhaps, which differentiates him from a woman, and makes it possible to read his verse with a certain pleasure, without that sense of unrelieved cruelty which repels one in much female satire, is his artist’s delight in the exercise of his power.

  For more than thirty years Pope was so completely the center of political attention in England that he may almost be said to have comprised the poetry of his time. There is no second instance of an English poet preserving for so long a period a supremacy comparable to his. It is possible to defend the position that one or two other versemen of the age did some particular thing better than Pope, though even this requires argument; but it is quite certain that he alone excelled over a wide range of subjects. The fact of Pope’s poetical ubiquity, however, is rendered much less miraculous by the consideration that if he triumphed over the entire field, the area of that field was extremely restricted.

  Pope’s success with the couplet in didactic verse is due to the fact that he never had any consecutive thought to express. Thinking in jets, he naturally wrote in couplets, and his verse falls apart into brilliant epigrams and maxims.

  His malignities in criticism are introductory to the magisterial method of Johnson and the literary personalities of Southey and Gifford. The canons of his school made “poetry prosaic” and undermined the scientific comparative method of criticism in process of construction during the previous century. But his power shows also in his contribution to literary ethics; the establishment of independent authorship and the consequent destruction of the habit of dedications. After him the influence of patronage waned steadily, till with Johnson it expired. Thereafter, the public and the publisher became arbiters of fate in matters both creative and critical.

  In his life we find much to admire and much to condemn; but we cannot deny him the tribute of greatness…. As a poet, it is too much to claim that his verses attained the highest imaginative flights, such as we find in Shakespeare and Tennyson. He was not swayed by the fine frenzy, the overmastering convictions, and the tormenting passions that irresistibly force an utterance. He conformed his writings to a conventional form. He sought above all, in imitation of classical models, correctness of style.