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

The setting of this little poem is not large; the story is of a stolen lock of hair, and of the resentments that follow; and if one might venture upon a synopsis of so delicate a feat of workmanship, it might run in this way:-Belinda, the despoiled heroine, sleeps; sprites put dreams in her head and give warning of impending woe. "Shock" (her dog) barks and wakes her; she betakes herself to her toiletthe fairy-fingered sylphs assisting:

Some thrid the mazy ringlets of her hair; Some hang upon the pendants of her ear,

-all pictured like carving on a cherry-stone. At last, fully equipped, she goes to a fête upon the Thames; pretty glimpses of the river scenes follow; a crazy baron covets a lock of Belinda's hair. The zephyrs play; day fades; cards come; crowding sprites pile into the game, and twist all into a fairy cable. The covetous baron snips off a lock of Belinda's hair, while she bends over the tea-pot. The nimble sylphs bring from the "Cave of Spleen” a stock of shrieks, and tears, and megrims. Sir Plume ("of amber snuff-box justly vain") champions Belinda, and demands satisfaction

of the ravisher-which he does not win; so the battle rages-"Fans clap, silks rustle, and tough whale-bones crack," and in the hurlyburly the stolen lock gets wafted into "lunar spheres," and comet-like, closes the shining tale:

"This lock the muse [thus] consecrates to Fame And midst the stars inscribes Belinda's name."

Yet Belinda's sovereignty is of an ignoble sort; her tiara made up of pins and pomades; indeed the women all are as small as the sylphs; toy creatures, and creatures of toys; no nobility, in or about them; and very much to make an honest, self-respecting woman of our time fling down the silvery poem with a wearisome distaste.

All this is said with a thorough recognition of its art-its amazing dexterities of verseits playful leaps of fancy-its bright shimmer of over-nature; and yet those gossamer gnomes seem to me like an intrusion; I cannot forget that they were an afterthought of Pope himself; I cannot bring myself to think of the charming fairy-folk of Fletcher, or of Drayton's Nymphidia, or of the Midsummer Night's Dream wallowing in pomades, and straining at whalebone stays! These live

through an eternal frolic in the air; those-of the Rape of the Lock-lie in a literary showcase, like a taxidermist's trophies.

In the sobered time of life, when the iris hues have only fitful play, I think a man goes away from these earlier poems of Pope (if he reads them) with new zest, to those wonderful metric condensations of old truths, which flash and burn along the lines of his moral essays. There could be few more helpful rhetorical lessons, for boy or girl, than the effort to pack some of Pope's stinging couplets, or decades of lines, into an equal number of lines in prose; the difficulties would be great indeed and would vitalize the lesson; and the lesson, I think, would be far fuller of profitable ends, than the old "parsing" exercise, and syntactic analysis and description of sentences according to the nomenclature of Mr. Lindley Murray or of Mr. Somebody-else.

POPE'S HOMER, AND LIFE AT TWICKENHAM NOTWITHSTANDING his much writing, Pope in those early days under the beeches of Windsor forest, was not winning such financial rewards as his friends thought he deserved. The Spectator did not pay much money for little poetic

trifles-such as the Messiah; and Jacob Tonson was the screw which some publishers are. There can be no doubt that the poet, with his fine tastes, felt the restraints of a limited income; his old father, who perhaps did not carry sharp business habits into his retirement, had been compelled to leave the country house of Binfield, and had gone over to a suburban street dwelling near to Chiswick. In this emergency, (if emergency it were,) was it not the oddest thing in the world that his friends should have advised a translation of Homer?

Yet they did; and so this dauntless young fellow, not over-critical in his Greek knowledge, but with an abounding sense of the marvellous beauties that lay in the old Homeric hexameters, sets about his task; and after five years' toil accomplishes it in such a way as makes it probable that there can never be an English Homer that will quite match it. There are juster ones; there are faithfuller ones; but not one that has been so enduringly popular. Steeping himself in the mythologies and the Trojan traditions, he has grafted thereupon his stock of British word-craft: Ajax, Achilles, and the rest range to their places in the martial clank of his couplets, with a life and charm which, if not imbued with Homeric limpidities

and melodies, possess an engaging picturesqueness that belongs to few long English epics.

And the poem took: that trenchant Dean Swift strode into the ante-rooms of the great men of Court, and swore that he must have a hundred or a thousand pounds subscribed for the new Homer of Mr. Pope; and he got it; Mr. Pope was the fashion.

Up to that time in the whole history of English literature there had been no such payment for literary wares as accrued to the author of the new Homer-the sum reaching, for both Iliad and Odyssey, some £9,000; with which the shrewd poet bought an annuity (cheaper then than now) of some £500, and a long lease of the Twickenham house and gardens; where, thereafter, amidst his willows and his grottos, he lived until his death.

The house 1-if indeed any part be now the same-has been built over and enlarged, and has a jaunty suburban villa pretension that does not look Homeric; but the grotto, or tunnel, which he cut under the high road running parallel with the Thames, and through which

'The identity of the house of Pope was destroyed by a lady owner (widow of Dr. Phipps, the Court oculist) in or about 1807. Pope loved landscape gardening and was aided by Kent and Bridgeman. Warburton speaks extravagantly of the poetic graces which he lavished upon his grotto.