His purple crest and scarlet-circled eyes;

the vivid green his shining plumes unfold,

His painted wings, and breast that flames with gold?

But Pope is never so much a child in the presence of nature, that he forgets his business; never so rivited by the vision of beauty, that he forgets to count his syllables, to round his periods, to finish his picture; and so the lily of the field becomes, in his hand, a hot-house plant, and the living rose is transformed into a flower of diamonds.

The Dunciad (1728), or Iliad of the dunces; written to avenge himself on his literary enemies. Public games are instituted, and the authors of the time contend for the palm of stupidity. TheobaldPope's successful rival in editing Shakespeare-wins, mounts the throne of Dullness, but is subsequently deposed from his pre-eminence to make room for Cibber, an actor and dramatic scribbler whose chief distinction is, that that he has been thus embalmed in the lava of Pope's volcanic wrath. This savage satire had the desired effect,-it blasted the characters it touched. Some were in danger of starving, as the booksellers had no longer any confidence in their capacity. On the day the book was first put upon the market, a crowd of writers beseiged the shop, endeavoring, by entreaties and threats to suppress the sale. Pope was executed in effigy.

The 'Dunces'-as they were now known-held weekly clubs to determine plans of retaliation. A surreptitious edition was printed, with an owl in the frontispiece. For distinction, the true one adopted, in stead, an ass laden with authors.

The work displays fertility of invention, variety of illustration, force of diction; but is often indelicate, oftener unjust, and without general interest. Insipid and heavy as a whole, it is splendid in parts, as in the closing sketch of the decline and eclipse of learning and taste before the darkening empire of advancing Dullness:

She comes! she comes! the sable throne behold
Of night primeval, and of Chaos old!
Before her Fancy's gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying rainbows die away.
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.
As one by one, at dread Medea's strain,
The sick'ning stars fade off th' ethereal plain;
As Argus' eyes, by Hermes' wand oppressed,

Closed one by one to everlasting rest;

Thus, at her felt approach and secret might,

Art after art goes out, and all is night.

Essay on Man (1733), the noblest of his works, the most influential, and the surest gurantee of his immortality. The essay consists of four 'Epistles'. The first considers man in his relation to the universe; the second his relation to himself; the third, his relation to society; the

forth, his relation to happiness. The design is to reconcile, on principles of human reason, the contradictions of human life; to vindicate the ways of God to man, by representing evil, moral and physical, to be a part of the Divine scheme for the government of the world. But what is more ridiculous than a musician in the chair of wisdom? For once, Pope was not master of his subject, and undertook to teach what he had not learned, and could not comprehend. He aspired to harmonize conflicting systems of thought, and succeeded in making a chaos. Why approve or condemn at every step, if—

One truth is clear: Whatever is, is right?

What becomes of moral responsibility, if—

Who heaves old ocean, and who wings the storms,
Pours fierce ambition in a Caesar's mind?

What becomes of Godward aspirations, if God, withdrawn into the far depths of an eternal science, never touches the circle of human interests? Go ask the pestilence to excuse your frailties, and the earthquake to forgive your sins! Eat, drink, and be merry, for you are shut up in the prison-house of Fate! In truth, we might say of the Essay on Man what its author has said less justly of the Bible,—

This is the book where each his dogma seeks,

This is the book where each his dogma finds.

Bolingbroke, whom Pope apostrophized as his genius, guide, and friend, privately ridiculed him, as having adopted and applied principles of which he did not perceive the consequence, and as blindly propagating opinions contrary to his own. The principles of the Essay were not immediately examined, and so little was any evil tendency at first discovered, that by many it was read as a manual of piety. We do not look for vipers in a bouquet of flowers. Criticism, however, soon revealed that its positions, for the most part, terminated fatally to the highest hopes and interests of mankind, and Pope was under the bane of rejecting Revelation and favoring atheism. He begins to distrust himself, to doubt the tendency of his teachings, shrinks back from his conclusions appalled, and writes his gratitude to the man who had sought to give to the obnoxious parts an innocent and consistent interpretation:

'You have made my system as clear as I ought to have done, and could not. It is indeed the same system as mine, but illustrated with a ray of your own, as they say our natural body is the same still when it is glorified. I am sure I like it better than I did before, and so will every man else. I know I meant just what you explain, but I did not explain my own meaning so well as you. You understand me as well as I do myself, but you express me better than I could express myself.'

Aware of his weakness, brought face to face with the inscrutable enigma, he turns his back upon the infinite, abandons the problem, and writes The Universal Prayer, as a compendious exposition of the meaning which he desired to be attached to the Essay,—the forgetful, genuine cry of a soul that once, if never again, feels the sadness of the universe, and sinks in a sense of divine mystery:

FATHER of all! in every age,

In ev'ry clime ador'd,

By saint, by savage, and by sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!

Thou great First Cause, least understood;
Who all my sense confin'd

To know but this, that Thou art God,
And that myself am blind :

Yet gave me, in this dark estate,

To see the good from ill;
And binding nature fast in fate,
Left free the human will.

What conscience dictates to be done

Or warns me not to do,

This, teach me more than hell to shun,
That more than heaven pursue.

Again it is to be observed, here as elsewhere, that, while the whole is unsatisfactory, the details are admirable-less admirable, indeed, for the ideas, than for the art of expressing them. That we see but little; that God is wise, though we are fools; that self-interest, well understood, will produce social concord; that mutual benefits are a mutual gain; that our true honor is, not to have a great part, but to act it well; that evil is made subservient to good; that happiness lies in virtue and in submission to the Divine Will;-these, though salutary truths, are common property: but splendor of imagery, inimitable workmanship, give to these commonplaces a potent charm, and secure for them an abiding place in the gallery where beauty garners immortally her own. What gives to the Essay on Man the perpetuity of its thought is the marvelous expression. Never was familiar knowledge expressed in words more effective, in style more condensed, in melody more sweet, in contrasts more striking, in embellishments more blazing. Mark the multiplied treasures in the following-nearly every line an antithesis and an ab

stract:

Know then thyself, presume not Got to scan,

The proper study of mankind is man.
Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great;
With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest,
In doubt to deem himself a God or beast;

In doubt his mind or body to prefer,
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Chaos of thought and passion, all confus'd;
Still he himself abus'd or disabus'd;

Created half to rise, and half to fall;

Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;

Sole judge of truth, in endless errer hurl'd,

The glory, jest, and ridle of the world.

With what luxuriance and care he amplifies his thought in the noble but vain attempt to define the Deity without subjecting him to the limitations of matter:

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,

Whose body nature is, and God the soul;

That, chang'd through all, and yet in all the same;

Great in the earth, as in th' ethereal frame;

Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,

Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees;
Lives through all life, extends through all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent ;
Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part,
As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart;

As full, as perfect, in vile man that mourns,
As the rapt seraph that adores and burns :

To him no high, no low, no great, no small

He fills, he bound-, connects, and equals all.

In lines like the following, he speaks with a dignity which perhaps has never been exceeded among the sons of men:

Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor'd mind,
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;
His soul proud science never taught to stray

Far as the solar walk, or milky way;

Yet simple nature to his hope has given,
Behind the cloud-topt hill, an humbler heaven:
Some safer world, in depth of woods embrac'd,

Some happier island in the watery waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no christians thirst for gold.
To be, contents his natural desire,

He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire;

But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,

His faithful dog shall bear him company.

Superior excellence of form explains why no English poet-Shakespeare excepted-has supplied to our current literature and conversation a larger number of apt and happy quotations. His maxims, as the following from the Essay, have become proverbs:

'An honest man's the noblest work of God'.
'Reason's whole pleasure, all the joys of sense,
Lie in three words, health, peace, and competence.'
'Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be blest.
The soul, uneasy and confined from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.'

'For forms of government let fools contest;
Whate'er is best administered, is best.
For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight;
His can't be wrong whose life is in the right.
In faith and hope mankind may disagree,
But all the world's concern is charity.'

Style.-Refined, ornate, antithetical, pointed, terse, regular, graceful,

musical.

Rank. In every literary work there are two constituents,-the substance and the form. These two, while they exist in and by each other, may be given different degrees of prominence. If the attention is bent chiefly to thought and feeling, the result is pre-eminently substantial or creative merit; if to expression, the result is pre-eminently formal or critical merit. Corresponding to these two attitudes of the mind, there are two classes of poets,-the creative, and the critical; the sublime, and the beautiful; the powerful and free, and the painstaking and constrained ;— the natural and the artificial. The first charm more by their massive grandeur of thought, the second by their careful finish of detail; the first please rather the earnest, the second the elegant; the first view nature and man through telescopes, the second through microscopes; the first give us, for our field of vision, a natural landscape, with its diversities of mountain and valley, of forest and meadow, the second 'a velvet lawn, shaven by the scythe, and leveled by the roller.'

In the age of Pope, the critical spirit was uppermost, and he was its best embodiment. His rank, therefore, is not in the first order of poets, but in the second; and here he is pre-eminent. He proposed at the start to make correctness the basis of his fame. A friend had told him that only one way of excelling was left. 'We had several great poets,' said Walsh, 'but we never had one great poet that was correct; and he advised me to make that my study and aim.' Correct poetry, then, was a business, from which he was never diverted. His first study was to make verses— his last, to mend and adorn them. With what nice regard he fabricates his verse! 'The fourth and fifth syllables', he says, 'and the last but two are chiefly to be minded; and one must tune each line over in one's head, to try whether they go right or not.' Far and wide he searched, not for passions, but for style; not for great ideas, but for colors. To this career of cold, outside scrutiny he was born. Of the fine frenzy in which we lose thought of words, he was by nature incapable. In him were no sovereign sympathies, no impetuous images, no tormenting convictions, no internal tempests, no sombre madness, which urge forward a Shakespeare, a Milton, a Bunyan, a Byron, and move them to write from an overcharged soul; but the calm reasonings, the self-command, which box up a subject in a regular plan, divide it by rule and compass, and dispose the ideas in files mathematically exact. In religion, he was lukewarm; in politics, indifferent; in everything, studious of his own tranquility:

'In my politics, I think no further than how to prefer the peace of my life, in any government under which I live; nor in my religion, than to preserve the peace of my conscience in any church with which I communicate. I hope all churches and governments are so far of God, as they are rightly understood and rightly administered: And where they err, or may be wrong, I leave it to God alone to mend or reform them.'