Pope had been told by Walsh to be a correct poet, and such he became. Including his very first publications, everything he wrote in verse was invariably, to use a homely but expressive phrase, excellent as far as it went, The Pastorals, the Messiah, Windsor Forest, continue to give the pleasure which finished copies of verse can never fail to afford to an educated ear. Eloisa to Abelard is an equally felicitous imitation of a long-accepted style. The Rape of the Lock was a novelty in English, but not in general, literature; in execution, though made up out of two sets of materials, it nearly approaches perfection. In all these efforts he had shown mastery of form, but no original power marking out any species of poetic composition as signally his own.

He was not to find it in lyric, or dramatic, or epic poetry. The first two of these he barely attempted; his Ode on St Cecilia's Day is only a feeble duplicate of Dryden, his share in Gay's farce is not to be included in any summary of his serious performances. For epic poetry he lacked the historic sense; had he ever ventured upon an attempt in this direction it would have been, like his juvenile Alcander, a slavish imitation of the ancients, such as they appeared to his eyes. A plan for an epic on Brutus, the mythical grandson of Æneas, was found among his papers ofter his death.

There remains didactic poetry in both its direct and indirect form; the poetry which has for its express object the inculcation of principles, and which must be primarily judged according to its success in teaching the lessons which it intends to convey. The Essay on Criticism is a series of detached precepts, not the developement of a complete system. Apart from its marvellous finish as a juvenile effort, it succeeds in enforcing many truths in a form of which the incisiveness has rarely been surpassed. For the developement of a philosophical system, such as that propounded in the Essay on Man, Pope was imperfectly qualified, because, in Lessing's simple words, he was no philosopher. But here again he succeeds, by his mastery of form, in impressing upon the mind many of the precepts incidental to his system; and produces a string of poetic proverbs which will serve for many a future text. Pope's satirical poetry is also didactic in its aim. It has a positive purpose; it contrasts excellence and virtue with dulness and vice; and its examples are illustrations of its precepts. Here Pope is master; his ability in representing types of character is unsurpassed. Personal spleen may have generally suggested their selection, but this fact fails to interfere with the triumphant success of the result. The men and women of his Satires and Epistles, his Atticus and Atossa, and Sappho and Sporus, are real types, whether they be more or less faithful portraits of Addison and the old Duchess, of Lady Mary and Lord Hervey. His Dunces are the Dunces of all times; his orator Henley the mob-orator, and his awful Aristarch the don, of all epochs; though there may have been some merit in Theobald, some use even in Henley, and though in Bentley there was undoubted greatness. But in Pope's hands individuals become types; and his creative power in this respect surpasses that of the Roman satirists, and leaves Dryden himself behind.

Pope's fame as a translator was ranked by Addison on a level with that of Dryden, but even Addison can in this case be hardly admitted as a competent judge. If the art of translation consists not in carrying into an author the characteristics of the translator and his age, but in reproducing at all events the leading characteristics of that author himself, Pope's Homer must be accounted a failure. It is a noble achievement as an English poem; but it resembles those efforts in landscapegardening which require to be surveyed from particular points of view, unless their artificiality is to betray itself at once. Pope has not caught,—he could not catch,the manner of Homer. Had he succeeded in this, he might be forgiven a thousand inaccuracies more glaring than those which he has actually committed. A scholar's hand might make Dryden's Juvenal Juvenal, but to be made Homer Pope's translations need not to be revised, but recast. This is not a mere question of metre. Garrick wore a wig in Macbeth, but he moved the passions of his audience by the spirit of Shakspere. Pope had not caught that Homeric spirit which has communicated itself to at least one later translator, even when imprisoned by his own wilfulness in the machinery of a modern stanza.

As a writer of prose Pope had no ambition to achieve eminence. The majority of his prose satires are mere lampoons; the conception of the Treatise on the Bathos is that of an excursus from the leading idea of the Dunciad. His edition of Shakspere was undertaken as booksellers' work; it is in many respects a careless performance; but his ingenuity is apparent in his abundant emendations, many of which have since met with universal acceptance. Had he carried out the scheme which he entertained towards the close of his life, of writing a history of English poetry, he could hardly have produced more than an interesting, but radically imperfect performance1.

Of his poetic form Pope was master. He perfected an English metre, the heroic couplet, which for the purposes of didactic and satirical poetry has since remained the chosen vehicle of expression in our language. To his command over this metre he had attained rapidly, though not at once. His earlier poems are not free from false rhymes, and display that free introduction of an Alexandrine line which Cowley had first among English poets permitted himself, but which Pope afterwards abandoned. Whether Pope could have attained to equal mastery over other metres, seems an idle question; for none could have equally suited the peculiarity of his genius. Lady Mary was of opinion that Pope must have failed in blank verse, just as Dryden declared that Milton would have written Paradise Lost in rhymed couplets if he could. But the heroic couplet, and no other form of verse, was that adapted to the genius of Pope. He once observed that one of the great conditions of writing well is 'to know thoroughly what one writes about.' The clear conception of a thought was in each case his first step; next came the inde

1 So I judge from the scheme itself, which was first published by Ruffhead, and is given at length in Roscoe, Vol. 1.

fatigable labour of condensing and compressing it into the form in which its expression, most finished in form, is at the same time most convenient to the memory. Thus he, as it were, engraved ideas; and his poems are full of those couplets which can cleanly and without damage to themselves be taken out of their setting1. In versification Pope was, as he often said, a pupil of Dryden; but he far surpassed his master. Dryden's verse is often slovenly, and abounds in weak lines. In Pope there is never a syllable, hardly ever a line, too much. On the other hand, Pope might, with advantage to the effect of his poems as a whole, have departed more frequently from the ordinary rule as to the position of the casura in the verse. The ear is delighted after listening to a page of Pope; an entire poem is apt to weary by the regularity of the cadence, resembling the march-past of column after column of perfectly-drilled troops. It would be difficult to point out any other defect in Pope's versification. To this day, except in a few instances where the pronunciation of a diphthong or the accentuation of a word has changed, it remains a classic model. And Johnson was guilty of no Byronic extravagance when he told Boswell that 'a thousand years may elapse before there shall appear another man with a power of versification equal to that of Pope.'

Such were, as far as I can judge, the principal achievements of Pope during his life of devotion to literature. But English literature owes him more than theseshe owes him the effects of that devotion itself. It was not only that he made war upon those who degraded an art into a trade, and into the vilest of trades. The infirmity of his temper, which charity will judge with gentleness in consideration of the miserable frailty of his bodily health, led him into many self-degradations. But the master passion in his breast was not his vanity; it was his veneration for what is great and noble in intellectual life, and his loathing for what is small and mean and noxious. He could not exterminate Grub-street; but as long as he lived and battled against it, it felt that it was only Grub-street, and the world around was conscious of the fact. He served literature neither for power, like Swift; nor, like nearly all his contemporaries, for place and pay; not even for fame chiefly; but for her own sake. And the acknowledgment due to a noble and lifelong self-devotion should not be grudged to Pope, even by those who perceive his shortcomings and lament his faults.

1 The late Lord Carlisle, in a Lecture on Pope, gave a long but not exhaustive list of these familiar gems.

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE.

1720. South-Sea Year. Iliad (last volume) p.

1722. Correspondence with Judith Cowper.

1723. First return of Bolingbroke. Banishment of Atterbury.

1707. First acquaintance with the Blount 1725. Edition of Shakspere p.

Ode on St Ce-1730.

PREFACE.

I

AM inclined to think that both the writers of books, and the readers of them, are generally not a little unreasonable in their expectations. The first seem to fancy that the world must approve whatever they produce, and the latter to imagine that authors are obliged to please them at any rate. Methinks, as on the one hand, no single man is born with a right of controuling the opinions of all the rest; so on the other, the world has no title to demand, that the whole care and time of any particular person should be sacrificed to its entertainment. Therefore I cannot but believe that writers and readers are under equal obligations, for as much fame, or pleasure, as each affords the other.

Every one acknowledges, it would be a wild notion to expect perfection in any work of man and yet one would think the contrary was taken for granted, by the judgment commonly past upon Poems. A Critic supposes he has done his part, if he proves a writer to have failed in an expression, or erred in any particular point1: and can it then be wondered at, if the Poets in general seem resolved not to own themselves in any error? For as long as one side will make no allowances, the other will be brought to no acknowledgements.

I am afraid this extreme zeal on both sides is ill-placed; Poetry and Criticism being by no means the universal concern of the world, but only the affair of idle men who write in their closets, and of idle men who read there.

Yet sure upon the whole, a bad Author deserves better usage than a bad Critic: for a Writer's endeavour, for the most part, is to please his Readers, and he fails merely through the misfortune of an ill judgment; but such a Critic's is to put them out of humour; a design he could never go upon without both that and an ill temper.

I think a good deal may be said to extenuate the fault of bad Poets. What we call a Genius, is hard to be distinguished by a man himself, from a strong inclination : and if his genius be ever so great, he cannot at first discover it any other way, than by giving way to that prevalent propensity which renders him the more liable to be

1 [Cf. Essay on Criticism, 265.]