His emotion is always slight, his fancy usually sportive; he shuns the heroic and the tragic-they could take no abiding root in a hothouse regulated by a thermometer. To a heroine floating in her boat on the shoreless sea, he prefers one

'Launched on the bosom of the silver Thames.'

A ravished lock of hair is a more fitting subject for his poetry than the real loss that makes the heart with sleepless sorrow ache. He sees in the moon, not the pageant of the universe, but the chandelier of the drawing-room. A gewgaw in a lady's head-dress inspires his muse more than the one white flower among the rocks. Occasional gleams there are, as we have seen, from the deeps of feeling and the heights of thought, but they are meteoric. We read, and are instructed-if we read slowly, and are not dazed by the shower of sparkles or entranced by the wonder-working sounds that roll so nimbly and brilliantly along; but he touches no chord of the heart, lifts us into no region of high aspiration, wraps us in no dream of the infinite. He moved and felt within a retired and narrow circle. The men and women of fashion, their opinions and customs, their oddities and vanities, his own loves and hatreds, were his favorite themes, which he treats without the enthusiasm or depth of greatness. It is said that he never tried to be pathetic but twice. He has somewhere given a receipt for making an epic. It would be a phenomenal cook whose pudding should give us a deep insight into the workings of the heart, or inspire us with cravings after the ideal! He was a sceptic in poetry, as Hume in religion. The age required it. He wrote for a finical society, that preferred railery, compliments, and epigrams, to the beautiful, the grand, and the impassioned. In all things he displayed the same critical taste and exactness,-in his letters, in his dress, in his surroundings. As a landscape gardener, he was famous. From him the Prince of Wales took the design of his garden. From him, Kent, the improver and embellisher of pleasure grounds, received his best lessons.

Without the universality of Shakespeare or the sublimity of Milton, he is, among the poets of artificial life and manners, the most brilliant and accomplished.

Character. A collection of contradictions. Professing contempt of the world, he lived upon its pleasure. Pretending to neglect fame, he courted it. Affecting to ignore the critics, he writhed under their attacks. Scorning the great, he loved to enumerate the men of high rank with whom he was acquainted. Tells his friends that 'he has a heart for all, a house for all, and, whatever they may think, a fortune for all,' yet entertained scantily; as when he would set a single pint upon the table, and, having himself drank two small glasses, would retire, and say, 'Gentlemen, I leave you to your wine.' Avowing benevolence, he was guilty of

meanness which it is impossible to defend. Secretly or openly, he pursued, with an implacable vengance, whoever questioned or slighted his poetical supremacy; yet wrote,

Teach me to feel another's woe,

To hide the faults I see;

That mercy I to others show,
That mercy show to me.*

Dennis, who had been wantonly assailed, speaks of him as a 'little afaffected hypocrite, who had nothing in his mouth at the same time but truth, candour, friendship, good-nature, humanity, and magnanimity.' In social intercourse he delighted in artifice, and was always an actor. If he wanted a favor, he contrived to obtain it indirectly, by unsuspected hints at its general convenience. It is said that he hardly drank tea without a stratagem, and used to play the politician about cabbages and turnips. He resembles a coquette, who,

'In hopes of contradiction oft will say,
Methinks I look most horrible to-day.'

He has left us an account of a rehearsal before Lord Halifax, which, if it be not duplicity, lies on the border-land, and is characteristic:

"The famous Lord Halifax was rather a pretender to taste than really possessed of it. When I had finished the two or three first books of my translation of the 'Iliad,' that Lord desired to have the pleasure of hearing them read at his house. Addison, Congreve, and Garth, were there at the reading. In four or five places, Lord Halifax stopped me very civilly, and with a speech each time of much the same kind, 'I beg your pardon, Mr. Pope; but there is something in that passage that does not quite please me. Be so good as to mark the place, and consider it a little at your leisure. I am sure you can give it a little turn,'-I returned from Lord Halifax's with Dr. Garth, in his chariot; and, as we were going along, was saying to the Doctor, that my lord had laid me under a great deal of difficulty by such loose and general observations; that I had been thinking over the passages alınost ever since, and could not guess at what it was that offended his lordship in either of them. Garth laughed heartily at my embarrassment: said, I had not been long enough acquainted with Lord Halifax to know his way yet; that I need not puzzle myselt about looking those places over and over when I got home. 'All you need do (says he) is to leave them just as they are; call on Lord Halifax two or three months hence, thank him for his kind observations on those passages, and then read them to him as altered. I have known him much longer than you have, and will be answerable for the event.' I followed his advice; waited on Lord Halifax some time after; said, I hoped he would find his objections to those passages removed; read them to him exactly as they were at first; and his lordship was extremely pleased with them, and cried out, 'Ay, now they are perfectly right; nothing can do better.'"

In religion, as we have seen, he was a man of easy, somewhat elastic piety. A worldly poet must be such. Like Swift, but with less excuse, he found pleasure in filthy images. His verse is often the receptacle of dirt. Some of his passages Swift alone might have seemed capable of

writing.

With all his literary vanity, he is said never to have flattered, in

*Universal Prayer.

print, those whom he did not love, nor to have praised those whom he did not esteem. Certainly, his independence secured him from the servile drudgery of offering praise and congratulations for sale. He was a fond and faithful friend to the chosen few. 'I never in my life,' said Bolingbroke, 'knew a man that had so tender a heart for his particular friends, or a more general friendship for mankind.' It may be remembered, against many faults, that, while resentful and irritable to others, he was uniformly gentle and reverential to his venerable parents:

Me let the tender office long engage,

To rock the cradle of reposing age;

With lenient arts extend a mother's breath,

Make languor smile and soothe the bed of death;
Explore the thought, explain the asking eye,

And keep at least one parent from the sky.

His generous sentiments would seem to have been the colors of his better and present moments. He had the feeling and the admiration of moral excellence, and has described it admirably; but the wingless brute was stronger than the winged seraph, and was constantly dragging him down.

Influence.-To Pope the English language will always be indebted. He, more than any other before or since, discovered its power of melody, enriched it with poetical elegances, with happy combinations of words, and developed its capacities for terse and brilliant expression. In the form of his verse-the rhymed decasyllabic line, which he made for a time supreme-his influence is no longer felt; but, in the taste he created for correct diction and polished versification, his influence will never

cease.

By his satires, he was a public benefactor. The poet may influence the mind to virtue directly, by warnings and exhortations; or indirectly, by scourging vice and exposing folly. The latter is the method of the satirist, who is the Judge Lynch of civilized society. The case-hardened, with whom serious admonition is vain, he exposes to the public gaze for the public sport, not to effect any improvement in them, but, by showing their example to be intrinsically contemptible, to prevent the communication of their disease to others. Thus, Pope was serviceable to his generation by satirizing its false taste, false virtue, false happiness, false life; and, in the character of satirist, may claim a moral purpose,—

Hear this and tremble, you who escape the laws;
Yes, while I live, no rich or noble knave

Shall walk the world in credit to his grave.*

We must acknowledge his service to us in reflecting, with curious completeness, the thoughts of his day. He resembles a plastic material,

* Pope's Imitations of Horace.

which has taken, with singular sharpness and fidelity, the main peculiarities of the time. A semi-deist, without well knowing what deism meant, he exhibits in the Essay on Man the religious creed of the age-a creed which, by refining the Deity into an abstraction, leaves religion soullessa bare skeleton of logic. In his translation of Homer's Iliad, he exemplifies in its utmost excellence the theory of artificial poetry. His various satires are significant of the social structure.

In spiritual interests, his influence will ever be one of mixed good and evil. The reason is simple, he had not spiritual healthfulness. No man can inspire and sustain his fellow-beings with high and happy emotions, who has not religious realization and a just sense of the dignity of human nature. Here is his characteristic view of human life:

Behold the child, by nature's kindly law,
Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw;

Some livelier play-thing gives his youth delight,

A little louder, but as empty quite;

Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper age,

And beads and prayer-books are the toys of age;
Pleased with this bauble still, as that before,

Till tired he sleeps, and life's poor play is o'er.

The "rattle," the "straw," the "beads," and the "prayer-books" are equally baubles, and end alike in weariness and death. This is deliberate and final—the sum of "life's poor play!" The greatest men have indeed had a sense of the pettiness of our lives-no great soul could ever be without it, but mark the difference: life is a brief dream, vanishing into the vast abyss of ever-present mystery-be humble; it is a shifting scene, but Heaven is behind the veil of phenomena-be of good cheer amid your frailties; you are gifted with an immortal spirit, but you stand in the shadow of the great darkness-be lowly wise. We would have it considered well, that he who would give enduring and efficient utterance to those echoing sentiments which search the heart, and in virtue of which poetry fulfills its truest mission of soothing and elevating the soul; he who would gain the orbit of the high, the holy, and the real, see them in their eternal beauty, feel them in their universal interest, and exert the measure of their power on the minds of his readers;-must have first a profound reverence for the divine, and a profound sympathy for the human -its hopes and its sorrows, its infirmities and its aspirations.

What we would commend to the student's careful remembrance, as of practical moment, is Pope's admirable unity of method. He searched the pages of Dryden for the best fabric of verse, and, having found it, used it habitually. He read, first to know, then to judge,—always with reference to a fixed object. As he read, he posessed himself of the beauties of speech, gleaned what he thought to be brilliant or useful, and preserved it all in a regular collection. His intelligence was perpetually

on the wing. Not content with well-done, he endeavored to do better. In his highest flights, he wished to go higher. Having written, he revised often, retouched every part with an unsparing hand and an attentive eye. Here is a specimen indicative of his continual corrections and critical erasures:

The wrath of Peleus' son, the direful spring

Of all the Grecian woes, O Goddess, sing,

That wrath which hurl'd to Pluto's gloomy reign
The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain.*—Iliad.

Milton, Addison, Tasso, Balzac, Pascal, felt similar anxieties. The first was solicitous after correct punctuation, the second after the minutiae of the press. The manuscripts of the third, still preserved, are illegible from the vast number of corrections. Balzac, dissatisfied with his first thoughts, would expend a week on a single page, and Pascal frequently occupied twenty days on one of his Provincial Letters. They realized that posterity will respect only those who

file off the mortal part

Of glowing thought with Attic art.

A little thing gives perfection,' said an ancient philosopher, 'but perfection is not a little thing.'

*As printed.

Corresponding lines of the original manuscript, the words in italics being erased, and those under them adopted instead. Between this copy and the printed one, was, of course, an intermediate manuscript.