The elegant versification, the polished urbanity, and the serene Epicureanism of the satires and epistles of Horace were calculated in no ordinary degree to appeal to a man of Pope's tastes and habits. The form in which they were cast was peculiarly adapted to the needs of a poet who desired to string together many brilliant but disjointed thoughts. In a happy hour, therefore, Pope determined to give to England what he himself modestly termed imitations but what in reality are translations in the truest sense of the word of some of Horace's Satires and Epistles. De Quincey did not admire these productions, but few will now re-echo his condemnation. They probably constitute Pope's surest guarantee of immortality. Leslie Stephen says that the best way to learn to enjoy Pope is to get by heart the entire Epistle to Arbuthnot. Although we are occasionally gladdened by lines and couplets which everybody learns in the cradle, such as: "Who shall decide when doctors disagree;" they are kept from growing wearisome by other lines and couplets equally good in themselves and far less hackneyed. The poet's knowledge of the human heart manifests itself in more than one noble epigram: "Who combats bravely is not therefore brave;" 66 Who builds a church to God and not to fame "Proud to catch cold at a Venetian door; "Some odd old Whig, Who never changed his politics or wig." Authors, like coins, grow dear as they grow old; It is the rust we value, not the gold." Throughout all these years, Pope, though most of his attention had been given to poetry, had by no means neglected prose. While still busy with the "Odyssey," he had published an edition of Shakespeare which was wretchedly inaccurate, but which paved the way for later and better work by showing how the text might be amended; contained an excellent introduction; and, more than all, called the attention of the public to the then comparatively neglected works of our greatest poet. He had also written occasional articles for publication in the periodicals of the day. But with this he was not satisfied. He yearned for fame as a letter-writer and yet feared to make an effort to secure such fame, for it was not the fashion in those days as it is now to publish private correspondence. In this dilemma he resorted to a trick. A collection of his letters was in some mysterious way" stolen," as he chose to call it, and conveyed to a disreputable book-seller called Curll, who printed it. Upon the publication of this pirated edition, the poet, in great apparent indignation, in order, as he said, to give the people an authentic text of what he would have wished altogether unpublished, put forth an edition of his own. This differed in no essential from Curll's, and there is circumstantial evidence that Pope was in collusion with him. The merit of the letters was such as to render still more needless than it would otherwise have been this miserable subterfuge. Pope, indeed, at once took rank as one of the best of English letter-writers. Thackeray said he did not know of more delightful volumes in the range of our literature. The collection of his letters as it now stands includes epistles to and from almost every eminent person of his day. Some of them are, however, nothing but exercises in literary composition, and were never sent to anybody; while others were sent to as many as two or three correspondents with the slightest alteration possible. His prose does not and could not be expected to glitter with the same continuous brilliancy that distinguishes his poetry, but the sentences are often witty and quotable. These specimens will serve to show their quality: "Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed." "I never knew a man in my life who could not bear the misfortunes of another perfectly like a Christian." Party is the madness of many for the gain of a few." "Here I am dying of a hundred good symptoms." Throughout the years just reviewed, the poet also had written from time to time a not inconsiderable number of short poems. These are usually treated with a contempt or at best a silence which they hardly deserve. Many of them are amazingly clever and some contain real poetry. Among the earlier and more pretentious of these are "The Messiah," a well-versified imitation of Virgil's "Pollio," with added inspiration from Isaiah; "Windsor Forest," the only production of Pope which Wordsworth condescended to praise and which is in reality the dreariest and most commonplace of all his poems; "Eloisa to Abelard," a melodious but highly artificial love-letter; several cleverly written and eloquent but rather frigid imitations of Chaucer; and an "Elegy on the Death of an Unfortunate Lady," which, while immensely inferior to Gray's Elegy, is still powerful and pathetic. Sir James Mackintosh is said to have quoted the following passage from it to repel a charge of coldness brought against Pope: "By foreign hands thy dying eyes were closed, 'Tis all thou art and all the proud shall be!" Occasionally Pope wrote a clever epigram; this, for instance, is equal to the best of Prior's: "You beat your pate and fancy wit will come; His epitaph on Newton is a model of all that an epitaph should be: Nature and Nature's works lay hid in night; and his epitaph on Gay has won the warmest encomiums of the best judges. The student of Pope is forced indeed to return again and again to his friendships. So thoroughly are they woven into the fibre of his life that they can be disposed of in no isolated paragraph. They influenced not only his hours of social ease, but they determined also to a great extent the direction of his poetical activity. This had been true of the “Pastorals,” which were inspired in part at least by Walsh; of The Rape of the Lock,” which was the logical outcome of Pope's relations with what is called society "; and of “The Dunciad,” which may be traced to the brain of Swift. It was true to a still greater extent of a still loftier work, with the composition of which Pope had occupied the best efforts of more than ten of the most active years of his life. Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, is one of the most striking figures in English history. In his early days his debaucheries had been the scandal and his intellectual powers the wonder of Oxford. With Dryden he had lived on terms of intimacy. He had risen at an age when most young men are still at the university to be regarded as the most brilliant orator and the foremost statesman of his time. Under Anne he had been Secretary of State. He had been prevented from attaining the highest political honors to which a British subject may aspire only by the suspicion, which his political enemies were not slow to take advantage of, that he was plotting to restore the House of Stuart. Upon the accession of George, fearing impeachment, he had fled to France. There he remained until pardoned, when he returned to England, purchased a magnificent estate, and devoted his enforced leisure to political and philosophical studies. While thus engaged, he was introduced to Pope; their acquaintance soon ripened into friendship; and it was not long before the poet, inspired by the fascinating metaphysics of the peer, was hard at work upon a grand philosophical poem, which, he fondly hoped, would prove to be the most enduring monument of his fame. There is a pretty picture, from the pen of Bolingbroke himself, of the happy hours in which he communicated to Pope his philosophical system, when they sauntered alone, or, as he says, " with good Arbuthnot and the jocose Dean of St. Patrick's," among the multiplied scenes of the little garden at Twickenham. The design was never finished, but several fragments of it were given to the public, chief among them the " Moral Essays " and the "Essay on Man." Subsequent to the publication of his letters, Pope's literary activity sensibly declined. In spite of all his care his rickety constitution was beginning to break. That he had been able for so many years as he did to hold together a soul and body so ill cemented was really not the least of his achievements. He himself called his life one long disease. He was, however, cheerful to the last. Almost upon his death-bed he wrote to a friend, in words that recall the dying words of Charles II, " Here I am dying of a hundred good symptoms." His last work was a revision of "The Dunciad." He passed away early in the year 1744, and was buried in the chancel of Twickenham church. Previous to his death he had opportunity to taste the sweets of fame to an extent that has been enjoyed by few poets. Swift in one quatrain had owned his admiration, his envy, and his despair of rivalling his friend's verse: "In Pope I cannot read a line More sense than I can put in six." Hardly had he passed away, however, when the warmth of his eulogists began to decrease. Cowper charged Pope with having debased his art. Jeffrey thought him unnatural. Wordsworth declared that he had misused his talents. Lessing called him a literary mechanic. In our own time it has become quite the fashion among a certain class of brilliant but uncritical lecturers to refer with patronizing disapproval to " dear old Alexander, whom all of us quote and admire, and none of us read." In view of these facts, two questions naturally arise. Why was Pope so popular in his own day? Why has he since lost so much of the favor that he formerly enjoyed? The answers are not difficult ones. Poetry, like dress, is subject to the changes of fashion. These are not really dictated by caprice but by a law which is inherent in the nature of the human mind. That law leads us instinctively to shun sameness and to seek for variety. Just as inevitably as the crest of a wave is followed by a hollow, just so surely is one fashion followed by another. If the gentlemen of one decade wear narrow |