How lov'd! how honour'd thou! yet be not vain :
And sure thou art not, for I hear thee say,
All this, my friends, I owe to Homer's strain,
On whose strong pinions I exalt my lay.
What from contending cities did he gain?

And what rewards his grateful country pay?
None, none were paid-why then all this for me?
These honours, Homer, had been just to thee.

Pope's sojourn in Greece was, of course, in spirit only. MajorGeneral Withers and Colonel Disney (familiarly 'Duke' Disney) are buried side by side in Westminster Abbey; Sir Paul Methuen was Secretary of State in 1716-17; 'Arthur' may have been Arthur Moore, Commissioner of Plantations and father of James Moore Smythe, playwright, with whom a few years later Pope had a bitter quarrel; Harvey is John, Lord Hervey; Lady Wortley Montagu and Lady Murray are named along with the Misses Howard and Lepell, maids of honour to Queen Caroline. For Arbuthnot, the famous wit, see page 145. The best edition of Gay's Works, with Life and Notes, is by John Underhill (2 vols. 1893).

Alexander Pope,

born in London 22nd May 1688, claimed to be of gentle blood; his father, he said, was of a gentleman's family in Oxfordshire, the head of which was the Earl of Downe; his mother was the daughter of William Turner, Esq., of York. To this a relative of Pope's added that his grandfather was a clergyman in Hampshire, who had two sons, of whom the younger, also Alexander, the poet's father, was sent to Lisbon to be placed in a mercantile house, and there became a Roman Catholic. It has been ascertained that from 1631 to 1645 an Alexander Pope was rector of Thruxton, and held two other livings in the same county of Hampshire; but as there is no memorial of him in the church, and no entry in the register of his having had children, there is some doubt whether this rector of Thruxton was the poet's grandfather. Pope's maternal descent has been clearly traced. His grandfather, William Turner, held property in Yorkshire, including the manor of Towthorpe, which he inherited from his uncle. He was wealthy, but did not rank with the gentry. Of the reputed kinship with the Earls of Downe there is no proof; Pope's story was apparently a fiction. In 1677 the poet's father is found carrying on business as a linenmerchant in London; and having acquired a respectable competency by trade, and additional property by his marriage with Edith Turner, he retired from business before 1700 to a property

he had purchased at Binfield near Windsor. The boy was partly educated by the family priest. He was afterwards sent to a Catholic seminary at Twyford near Winchester, where he lampooned his teacher, was severely whipped, and then removed to a small school in London, at which he learned little or nothing. Returning home to Binfield in his thirteenth year, he devoted himself to a course of self-instruction and to the enthusiastic study of literature. He delighted to remember that he had seen Dryden; and as Dryden died on the 1st of May 1700, his youthful admirer could not have been quite twelve years of age. But Pope was already a poet.

As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,

I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.

At the age of sixteen he had commenced his Pastorals, translated part of Statius, and written imitations of Waller and other English poets. He soon became acquainted with some of the most eminent persons of the age-with Walsh, Wycherley, Congreve, Lansdowne, and Garth; and from this time his life was that of a popular poet enjoying high social distinction. His Pastorals were published in Tonson's Miscellany in 1709. In 1711 appeared his Essay on Criticism, which is said to have been composed two years before publication, when he was only twenty-one. Addison commended the Essay warmly in the Spectator, and it soon attained great popularity. Pope's style was now completely formed. His versification was that of his master, Dryden, but he gave the heroic couplet a peculiar terseness, correctness, and melody. The Essay was shortly afterwards followed by the Rape of the Lock (1712). The stealing of a lock of hair from a beauty of the day, Miss Arabella Fermor, by her lover, Lord Petre, was taken seriously, causing an estrangement between the families; and Pope wrote his poem to make a jest of the affair, and laugh them together again.' Though in this he did not succeed, he added greatly to his reputation by the effort. The machinery of the poem, founded upon the Rosicrucian theory that the elements are inhabited by spirits-sylphs, gnomes, nymphs, and salamanders-was added in 1713, and published in the spring of 1714. The addition forms the most perfect work of Pope's genius and art. Sylphs had been previously mentioned as invisible attendants on the fair; the idea is shadowed forth in Shakespeare's Ariel, and the amusements of the fairies in the Midsummer Night's Dream. But Pope has blended the most delicate satire with the most lively fancy, and produced the finest and most brilliant mock-heroic poem in the world. It is,' said Johnson, 'the most airy, the most ingenious, and the most delightful of all Pope's compositions.' In 1713 appeared his Windsor Forest, evidently founded on Denham's Cooper's Hill.

Pope now commenced his translation of the Iliad, for which he issued proposals in 1713; it was published at intervals between 1715 and 1720. At first the gigantic task oppressed him with its difficulty. He was but an indifferent Greek scholar; but as he gradually grew more familiar with Homer's phrases, erelong he was able to despatch fifty verses a day. Great part of the manuscript was written upon the backs and covers of letters; it was not without reason Swift called him 'paper-sparing Pope.' The translation brought its author a clear £5320. But

And thanks to Homer, since I live and thrive,
Indebted to no prince or peer alive--

was hardly a fair statement, if we consider that this large sum was in part a 'benevolence' from the upper classes of society, designed to reward his literary merit. The Odyssey was not published until 1725, and here Pope called in the assistance of his poetical friends Broome and Fenton. These two coadjutors translated twelve books, and the notes were compiled by Broome, who received from Pope £500, besides being allowed the subscriptions collected from personal friends, amounting to £70, 45. Fenton's share was only £200. Deducting the sums paid to his co-translators, Pope realised by the Odyssey upwards of £3500; together the Iliad and Odyssey had brought the poet a fortune of from eight to nine thousand pounds so princely was the patronage then extended to literature.

While engaged on the Iliad Pope removed from Binfield, his father having sold his estate there, and from April 1716 till the beginning of 1718 lived at Chiswick. Here he collected and published his works; and in this volume first appeared the most picturesque, melodious, and passionate of all his poems, the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, and the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard. At Chiswick Pope's father died (1717), and soon after the poet removed with his aged mother to Twickenham, where he had taken a lease of a house and grounds; and there he lived for the rest of his life. The villa was not large, but sufficiently commodious for the wants of an English gentleman whose friends visited himself rather than his dwelling. The taste with which Pope laid out his grounds (five acres in all) had a marked effect on English landscapegardening. The Prince of Wales took the design of his garden from the poet's; and Kent, the improver and embellisher of pleasuregrounds, received his best lessons from Pope, who thus aided materially in banishing the stiff, formal Dutch style. The classic spot where Pope was visited by Ministers of State, wits, poets, and beauties has long since been transformed his house pulled down, and his pleasuregrounds rearranged.

After the Iliad the next great undertaking an edition of Shakespeare, published in

was

1725, in six quarto volumes. The preface to
this work is the best of his prose writings,
but Pope failed as an editor; he lacked the
necessary knowledge of Elizabethan literature,
and the diligence required for collating copies
and fixing and illustrating the text. Fenton gave
assistance for this edition of Shakespeare, for
which he received £30, 14s. Pope's remunera-
tion as editor was £217, 125. In 1727 and 1728
Pope published, in conjunction with his friend
Swift, three volumes of Miscellanies, which drew
down upon the authors a torrent of invective,
lampoons, and libels, and led to the Dunciad.
This elaborate and splendid satire was first
printed in an imperfect form in May 1728,
then enlarged with notes, the Prolegomena of
Scriblerus, and other additions, and published
in April 1729. The work displays the fertile
invention of the poet, the variety of illustration
at his command, and the unrivalled force and
facility of his diction; but it is often indecorous,
and still oftener unjust towards the miserable
poets and critics against whom he waged war.
'I have often wondered,' says Cowper, 'that the
same poet who wrote the Dunciad should have
written these lines:

That mercy I to others shew,
That mercy shew to me.

Alas for Pope if the mercy he shewed to others was the measure of the mercy he received!' Sir Walter Scott was right in thinking Pope must himself have suffered most from these wretched contentions. But his propensity to satire was irresistible; he was eminently sensitive, vain, and irritable, and implacable in his resentment towards all who had questioned or slighted his poetical supremacy. Between 1731 and 1735 he had published his Epistles to Burlington, Bathurst, Cobham, and Arbuthnot-the latter, also known as the Prologue to the Satires, containing that famous 'Character of Atticus' which is the melancholy memorial of the quarrel with Addison, provoked partly by political diversities and partly by jealousy. See the article below on Tickell. To the same period belongs the Essay on Man, in four Epistles, the first of which was published anonymously in February 1733, and the second about three months afterwards. The third and fourth appeared in the winter of 1733-34. The Essay is now read not for its philosophy but for its poetry; its ethical distinctions are neglected for those splendid passages and striking incidents which irradiate the poem.

Pope's later labours were chiefly confined to satire. Misfortunes were now gathering round him. Swift was fast verging on imbecility, and was lost to the world; Atterbury and Gay died in 1732; and next year he lost his mother, whose declining years he had watched with affectionate solicitude. Between 1733 and 1739 he published his inimitable Imitations of Horace,

satirical, moral, and critical, containing the most noble and generous sentiments mixed up with withering invective and fierce denunciations. In 1742 he added a fourth book to the Dunciad, displaying the final advent of the goddess to destroy order and science, and to substitute the kingdom of the dull upon earth. Political events contributed to agitate Pope's last days. Constant excitement, added to a life of ceaseless study, telling on a frame naturally delicate and deformed from birth, had completely worn him out. He complained of his inability to think; yet shortly before his death he affirmed: 'I am so certain of the soul's being immortal, that I seem to feel it within me as it were by intuition.' Pope died at Twickenham on the 30th of May 1744.

Most of the property within his disposal he left, for her life, to Martha Blount the fair-haired Martha'-a daughter of an old Roman Catholic family at Mapledurham in Oxfordshire, who was a little younger than himself, whose acquaintance he had made in the Binfield days, and to whom he remained devoted for more than thirty years. The scandal of one of the most scandalous times in the world's history questioned whether Martha's character was as fair as her hair, and even threw doubts on her beauty, her manners, and her gratitude to Pope. But there is tolerable rebutting testimony as to her good looks: and as for the rest literary history disdains to inquire. She was certainly one of those Egerias of the greater poets whom they have at least fancied to be goddesslike, and who have inspired them to give us what is of itself not undivine. The rest may very well be silence.

[The above biographical notice of Pope is that written for the old edition by Dr R. Carruthers, revised and corrected; the critical essay that follows is by Professor Saintsbury.-ED.]

There is no English poet-and perhaps there is hardly any English writer-whose position it is more difficult, for a critic with the sense of criticism, to lay down without some misgivings than it is to lay down Pope's. The all-important historical preliminaries, so often neglected-so certain to be neglected at the neglecter's peril-are indeed here quite certain and clear. From almost his first appearance there was no doubt about Pope in the minds of his contemporaries. The very rage of his numerous foes was pretty certainly exasperated by the fact that it was rage against their own convictions. They felt that he was the poet they tried to make him out not to be. The discontent and surfeit with the obscure and 'metaphysical' style, which had first found expression at the Restoration, had not in the least exhausted itself; though little clouds-the recurrence to ballad poetry, the turn to exact description of nature, &c.-were rising on the far distance to threaten some change of weather in taste. But the first generation of 'prose and sense' had not succeeded in hitting a style of poetry that would please the general surely. The steeds of Dryden's car (to borrow the image from

one of Pope's half-rebels) needed Dryden to guide them; and, moreover, their pace was admittedly unequal. There had been no real second to Dryden, except the belated and singular genius of Butler, during the forty years of Dryden's reign. Towards the end of that reign especially, though Dryden himself wrote ever better and better, there had been unpleasant stumbles into vulgarity and slipshodness, unpleasant backslidings into Cowleian frigidity. Even before Pope, indeed, one or two writers-notably Garth-had made not quite unsuccessful attempts to conventionalise the choice of subject and treatment yet further, and to adjust the couplet so that it might be even smoother, even more pointed, and might make up for a loss of strength by an added refinement and correctness. They attempted this; Pope did it: and the age frankly accepted what he did as what it wanted. Nor-a most unusual experience did the ages or generations immediately succeeding attempt any serious revolt. There were, throughout the eighteenth century, constant movements which, looking back upon them, we now see to have been movements of a revolutionary character; but they seldom consciously menaced the sovereign. Warton himself, the first to hint reasoned doubts, put Pope above Dryden and next to Milton. Oddly enough, even when, at the close of the age, the Romantic movement came, it was at first less unjust to Pope than to Dryden; and Wordsworth, while most falsely deciding that whenever Virgil has his eye on the object Dryden spoils the passage, could find praise for such a tissue of bookish conventionalities as Windsor Forest. When Bowles accentuated Warton's doubts and lessened his praises, he was sharply opposed by men from Campbell and Byron downwards. It was only in the second Romantic generation-from 1820 of thereabouts onwards-that Pope's reputation came into serious jeopardy. Of late it has been recovering; but it is difficult to say that there is even yet more than a general agreement, which is not itself universal, and which, even where it prevails, had best not be disturbed by too inquisitive investigation of its articles. We must, however, see what positive estimate we can ourselves extract from actual survey.

The exact precociousness of Pope is, owing to his unlucky and now not denied untruthfulness, difficult to determine; but the dates of publication are not questionable. He may have written the Pastorals at sixteen-he certainly printed them at one-and-twenty; the Messiah and part of Windsor Forest may have been written as early, but the latter certainly was published by 1713, by which time The Rape of the Lock was also in existence; and the Essay on Criticism, while it may have been written in 1709, was certainly advertised for publication in 1711. The poetical characteristics of this not inconsiderable body of work are perfectly well marked, and, with slight differences and immaturities, identical from the first with each

other and those of the later poems. The poet has, so far as he understands it and so far as his own great powers will let him, adopted that theory of 'correctness' which the sixteenth and seventeenth century critics of Italy first, and of France later, had built up, as they pretended, and perhaps honestly thought, out of Aristotle, Horace, Quintilian, and even Longinus, but really to a large extent out of their own heads. In this they carried a good deal farther the mistake--a very old one, but one of which Aristotle is not himself guilty -of confusing the Mimesis or representation of nature with a more or less slavish imitation of previous works of art. According to this theory it was always tacitly assumed, and sometimes expressly asserted, that the kinds, the methods, and all but the minutest proceedings of literature had been settled once for all by the practice of the ancients. The parts of a tragedy or an oration; the construction of the 'fable' or story; the 'figures' of speech and thought; the rules for the selection of imagery; even to some extent the lines of character, and to a great extent the details of style, were imagined to exist somewhat as a set of sealed patterns,

that art is not less 'sublime' than nature; and Mr Courthope with equal ingenuity has laid stress on the non-naturalness of the metaphysical school, and on the fact that Pope himself 'returned to nature' in comparison with it. Both pleas are in themselves perfectly true and sound; but they will not quite stretch to the extent required. It is undoubtedly much easier to follow rules of art in reference to artificial than to natural objects. A table, even a brocaded dress, looks very much the same to Dick and to Tom and to Harry; there is no real difficulty, if fair ability be present, in getting

a description of it that all three can endorse. But a sunset and a wave only look alike to those who have no eyes to see them at all. In the same way the manners of the town, the common weaknesses and ways of humanity, are communia which

it may be difficult, but which it is possible, to describe with just that 'propriety,' that individual touch, which gives literary distinction; the obscurer and more singular passions and thoughts elude such treatment. Furthermore, continual reference to the standards of plot, of character, of expression, necessarily leads to convention, whether it be in the acceptance of the stock part or incident, or in the admission of the gradus epithet.

which might be worked out by the poet in different material and with a certain reasonable allowance for individual taste, but from which he was to depart always at his peril, and if he neglected them in any great degree, to his certain damnation. That 'correctness' did go so far as this has of course been denied ; but the description can be supported by an unbroken chain of justifying passages from those of Aristotle, which started the error, to Boileau and Pope himself.

Attempts have been made, sometimes with great knowledge and ability, to rebut the assertion that Pope and his school turned away from nature. Campbell very ingeniously argued, in a passage quoted at length in former editions of this work,

It is almost necessary to premise these generalities, because without them not merely is an estimate of Pope himself impossible, but even an understanding of the differences in the opinions about him is not easy. For instance, that most able defender of his who has been mentioned above urges that while The Ancient Mariner 'has neither beginning, middle, nor end,' The Rape of the Lock is above all things remarkable for the 'nature and propriety of its construction.' To others the starting-point of contrast between the wedding guest and the Ancient Mariner, the central sin of the shooting of the albatross, and the finale of purga

tion not yet complete, seem, in their supernatural order, perfectly natural and proper; while the ordered arrangement of the Rape seems to them, for all its happy brilliancy, perfectly artificial and conventional, possessing no real sequence of action whatever, and dependent for such as it appears to have upon burlesque of previous conventions and upon episodes and digressive beauties. So difficult is it to secure common ground in this matter.

In the Essay on Criticism and the Rape of the Lock, however, poems all but contemporaneous, there is no doubt that we see a writer, and even with certain limitations a poet, of the most remarkable kind. Up to this time no poets save Horace and Dante (for though Ben Jonson was a greater, and Dryden a very much greater, critic than Pope, neither had so fully co-ordinated his gifts) had so thoroughly adjusted practice to principle and principle to practice. The Essay on Criticism is very far from original; it is not exactly consistent with itself; it betrays almost schoolboy ignorance of literary and other history. But the idea of poetry which animates it is exactly the idea which would suggest work of the kind of the Rape of the Lock; and this poem carries that idea out so consummately that further perfection is almost impossible. It may be matter of some surprise that Pope's extremest admirers have not seen how damaging a fact it is that this unquestioned masterpiece of his is a mock-heroic poem: just as Boileau's Lutrin is the one unquestionably poetical thing that Boileau has done. Not, indeed, that comedy (as some of their own prophets would hold) is necessarily a low or 'non-serious' kind. But burlesque certainly is, from the mere fact that it is parasitic and second-hand. If the stock epic did not exist, the mock-epic would lose more than half its attractions. But this may pass. On Pope's principles you probably cannot have a better poem than the Rape of the Lock; and the only charge valid against it on these principles is the excessive prominence of the gradus epithet. This, it is true, might pass to some extent as parody, but it is resorted to on a scale and in contexts which more than suggest its employment as a genuine, not a mock, ornament. Windsor Forest, on the other hand, though it is not much less in accordance with the principles of the Essay on Criticism, brings out the defects of those principles by showing, not the limited excellence which at the best they can produce, but the defects which they are likely to allow. The composition, though rhetorically correct, is flat and unnatural; the descriptions (in such a poem of the very first importance) show no direct impression on the poet's mind, give no characteristic features of the scenery, and produce on the mind of the reader a picture of but the vaguest decorative effect.

But even in this, which is a failure, as in the Essay, which is a partial, and the Rape, which is a brilliant and dazzling, success of its kind, Pope's true gifts and merits—the gifts and merits which

give him a secure, though not a supreme, position among English poets-already appear. Though he has still to polish it a little, he has already rearranged the Drydenian couplet, so as to deprive it of much of its stateliness and of a very great deal of the irresistible momentum which is its great characteristic, but to substitute for these a much greater polish, a constant glitter instead of the intermittent blaze, a variety contained within dangerously narrow limits, but astonishingly great within those limits, and a sort of castanet accompaniment of rhyme which, till the ear wearies utterly of it, is singularly attractive. It is not surprising that this should have produced an extraordinary effect on the public when presented to them within the short space of three or four years only, conveying such different matter as the artificial but agreeable conventionalities of the Pastorals, the declamation of the Messiah, the argument (thoroughly in the popular taste) of the Essay on Criticism, the description of Windsor Forest, and the glittering badinage of the Rape of the Lock.

The translation of Homer, though pleasant and perhaps even useful to the time, adds nothing to Pope's proper position as a poet; indeed, it may be said to weaken that position by showing how easy it was for understrappers, like Broome and Fenton, not so much to imitate as to reproduce his style. It is, of course, 'not Homer' in any single point except that of giving the story completely in sense and with indifferent fidelity in words. But though it is no constituent of his poetical claims, it helped him to establish those claims in two ways -first, by supplying him with an independence which enabled him ever afterwards to write just as he liked; and secondly, because it exercised him in his own couplet, and so did him something like the same service which Dryden's practice in heroic plays had rendered to his master.

But two poems which appeared early in the progress of the translation itself (in 1717), and long before the bulk of Pope's satirical and didactic work, are of much more importance. The Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady (a much embellished and 'poetised' version of the story of a certain Mrs Weston) and the Epistle from Eloisa to Abelard are not only pretty, original, and very ambitious productions, but have been relied upon by the poet's admirers to support his claims as not merely a brilliant satirist and expert in other applied departments of poetry, but a serious poet. The first, which is by far the better, is almost Pope's only effort in pathos; the second is his most important effort in passion. No one can deny that the Elegy at least comes very near to success, if it does not actually achieve it, in the way of exciting in the reader the feelings designed by the writer. The only question is, whether the success is not attained rather by the rhetorical than by the poetic road. It is also very noticeable that some of the most effective passages (for instance, ii. 17-22) are still very strongly Drydenian.