that there is not an original thought, sentiment, image, or example of any of the other categories of poetic substance to be found in the half a hundred thousand verses of

y, I imagine, would have stunned him with a huge mattock of adjectives. As it is, he seems to be in two minds whether to bury or to praise him. Luckily, he has tempered his moral sense with his sense o

wishes he had been a bad son or a Uriah Heep in his friendships. It is pleasant to remember the pleasure he gave his mother by allowing her to copy out parts of his translation of the Iliad, and one respects him for refusing a pension of ￡300 a year out of the secret service money from his friend Craggs. But one wishes t

the secret history of his life and read them as the moralizings of a doll Pecksniff. Historians of literature often assert-mistakenly, I think-that Pliny's letters are dull, because they are merely the literary exercises of a man over-conscious of his virtues. But Pliny's virtues, however tip-tilted, were at least real. Pope's letters are the literary exercises of a man platitudinizing about virtues he did not possess. They have an impersonality, like that o

ional forgers and swindlers." When he published his correspondence with Wycherley, his contemporaries were amazed that the boyish Pope should have written with such an air of patronage to the aged Wycherley and that Wycherley should have suffered it. We know, now, however, that the correspondence is only in part genuine, and that Pope used portions of his correspondence

rll as a villain, and procured a friend in the House of Lords to move a resolution that Curll should be brought before the House on a charge of breach of privilege, one of the letters (it was stated) having been written to Pope by a peer. Curll took a number of copies of the book with him to the Lords, and

ublished his correspondence with Swift and then set up a pretence that Swift had been the culprit. He earned from Bolingbroke in the end a hatred that pursued him in the grave. He was always begging Swift to go and live w

e talent we

to reach

voice is l

too dea

y on each

rent studi

ts plodding

and court

reason seems to have been that he was more eager for an exchange of compliments than for friendship. He affected the attitude of a man in love, when Lady Mary saw in him only a monkey in love. He is even said to have thrown his little makeshift of a body, in its canvas bod

amonds with he

her toilet'

ragrant at an

sects, that i

d fly-blow in t

Cato in order that he might have an excuse in his turn for writing abusively of Dennis, apparently vindicating Addison but secretly taking a revenge of his own. Addison was more embarrassed than pleased by so savage a defence, and hastened to assure Dennis that he had

ined even to resent the intrusion of the commentator into the upper regions of poetry. But Pope's verse is a guide to his age and the incidents of his waspish existence, lacking a key to which one misses three-fourths of the entertainment. The Danciad without footnotes i

nt for an appetite. If he felt anything of that, he would cry out, "Oh, I have found it!" turn short round and ride home again, though they were in the midst of the fine

dited and annotated him-though he had been edited well before-but their monumental

erature richer in the daintiness of malice than the Epistle to Martha Blount and the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. The "characters" of women in the

f herself, tho

And the fickle lady, Narciss

nature, tol

, would hardly

roved to grant

sman once, to ma

ylor and the B

ron with his Gra

hills her and no

d religion tak

hen in the

, good Christia

"wants a heart," is eq

ds too painful

ell in decenc

asonable,

to love, or

lover pants u

figures on an

es her friend i

ch a chintz exc

now if you're

footman put i

ent-would you

ak your heart

ut ever ceasing to be witty. Pope has composed a masterpiece of his vanities and h

ere white curd

ifice as a French fairy-tale, the Dunciad an amusing assault of a major Lilliputian on minor Lilliputians, and the Essay on Criticism-what a regiment of witty lines to be written by a youth of twenty or twenty-one!-much nearer being a great essay in verse than is generally admitted nowadays. As for the Essay on Man, one can read! it more than