The method which they had recommended by their practice Pope sought consciously to establish as a code of taste by a regular system of reasoning. Looking back over centuries full of insipid allegory and meaningless revivals of mytho logy, he found Homer, in an uncritical and almost an unlettered age, describing natural objects in a style at once sublime and tasteful. As he passed on to the philosophical era of Augustus, he came upon Virgil in a state of society which, in respect of development of thought and language, bore a marked resemblance to his own, studying the poems of Homer with minute attention, and adapting the practice of the Greek poet with admirable elegance and propriety to the requirements of his own fable. He could not but be impressed with a phenomenon so remarkable:

"When first young Maro in his boundless mind,
A work t'outlive immortal Rome designed,
Perhaps he seemed above the critic's law,
And but from Nature's fountain scemed to draw,
But when t' examine every part he came,

Nature and Homer were, he found, the same."

More than this. Pope found the best critics of Greece and Rome, Aristotle and Quintilian, drawing all the rules and examples of just rhetoric from the ancient authors, and at the same time reasoning, by the light of natural good sense, on contemporary aberrations from taste and propriety, precisely analogous to the affectations of his own age and country. The conclusion seemed inevitable. Amid all the fluctuations of society, Nature and the mind of man remained unchanged; there was accordingly a law of taste; and this was to be discovered not in the passing barbarisms of ephemeral fashion, in Euphuism, Marinism, Gongorism, and the like, but in the principles observed by those whose conception of Nature had survived the decay of language, empire, and religion:

"Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteci ;

To copy Nature is to copy them."

The effect of the 'Essay on Criticism,' or at least of the

current of thought which it represents, on the taste of the age was profound. Wit, or the practice of finding resemblances in objects apparently dissimilar, as it was cultivated throughout the seventeenth century by poets like Donne, Crashaw, Quarles, and Cowley, disappears altogether from the literary aims of the eighteenth century. With it vanishes the crowd of metaphors, similes, and hyperboles by which these poets sought to recommend their manner of thinking. Wit, as we see from the Essay on Criticism,' was regarded in the early part of the century as a proper object in poetry, but as the conceptions of the poet were now based upon Nature itself, its operations gradually restricted themselves to satire or to moral and didactic reflection. Thus, while the range of imagi nation became more limited, its objects became more clear and definite. An analogous change took place in the form of poetry. In emulation of the classical authors, the followers of the new mode paid great attention to the selection of subject, to the arrangement of the fable or design of their composition, and to the just distribution of all its parts. Instead of ingenuity in the discovery of unheard-of metaphors, which was the ambition of the typical seventeenth-century poet, the poet of the eighteenth century sought to present a general thought in the language best adapted to bring it forcibly before the mind of the reader. In this respect, works so unlike each other as Thomson's 'Seasons,' Gray's ' Elegy in a Country Churchyard,' the 'Deserted Village' of Goldsmith, and The Village' of Crabbe, may all be said to be the fruits of the Essay on Criticism.'

I do not for a moment seek to deny that Pope's enthusiasm for classical antiquity frequently betrayed him into narrow and fallacious views. In his rebound from the affectations of an obsolete mediævalism, he closed his eyes to the fact that the works of the great medieval authors were founded on a perception of Nature fundamentally as true and clear as that of Homer himself. He failed to perceive, also, what scope and extension the materials of romance and theology gave to the

imagination of later poets such as Shakespeare and Milton; what delightful associations of idea, and what subtle melodies of language, were at the command of those who, living on the verge of the old and new worlds, were able to invest genuinely classical modes of conception with all the richness and colour of Gothic fancy.

The critical defects of a work so designed lie naturally on the surface. The Essay has many incorrect observations, and, in spite of its own axioms, many bad rhymes, many faulty gram- . matical constructions. But these cannot weigh against the substantial merit of the performance. They cannot obscure the truth that the poem is, what its title pretends, an 'Essay on Criticism,' an attempt made, for the first time in English literature, and in the midst of doubts, perplexities, and distractions, of which we, in our position of the idle heirs of that age, can only have a shadowy conception, to erect a standard of judgment founded in justice of thought and accuracy of expression. Nor will it be denied that, as a poem, the critical and philosophical nature of the subject is enlivened by bold, brilliant, and beautiful imagery. Lastly, when it is remembered that this extraordinary soundness of judgment and maturity of style are exhibited by a young man who was only twenty-three when the poem was published, and may have been under twenty-one when it was composed, the panegyric of Johnson, startling as it seems at first sight, will not be thought after all to be greatly exaggerated.

CHAPTER IV.

INTRODUCTION TO LONDON LIFE.

Correspondence with Wycherley, Cromwell, and Caryll Will's Coffee House-Button's-Addison-Rowe-Stecle-Jervas - Completion of 'Windsor Forest'-Prologue to 'Cato'-Satires on Dennis and Ambrose Philips.

1704-1713.

We know little or nothing of the manner of Pope's introduction to society. It would have been most interesting to learn how the solitary student of Windsor Forest really felt and behaved when making his first appearance on the scene of life and action. Letters of his indeed survive, which either were, or profess to have been, written at that period. These are valuable as revelations of his character. But, even when they are authentic, it must be allowed that they are singularly empty of incident, and that, as records of genuine feeling and opinion, they are almost worthless.

It was a misfortune for Pope that he had no youth. Deprived of the advantages of friendships with his equals at school, and brought up, by force of circumstances, in the constant company of elderly parents who denied him nothing, he obtained his first ideas of men and things exclusively from intercourse with books. On the other hand, the precocity of his intellect brought him early into contact with men much older than himself, who, while admiring his genius and deferring to his judgment, treated him with an air of patronage natural to their superior age and knowledge of the world. To place himself as far as he could on an equality with these elderly. friends, he put forth all his power to make his letters to them appear worthy of his genius, and he thus acquired an artificial

manner which spoiled him as a writer of English prose. In after years he came to perceive that letters written with such a motive were of little value even as compositions.

"This letter," he writes to Swift in 1729, "like all mine, will be a rhapsody: it is many years ago since I wrote as a wit. How many occurrences or informations must one omit if one determined to say nothing that one could not say prettily. I lately received from the widow of one dead correspondent, and the father of another, several of my own letters of about fifteen and twenty years old; and it was not unentertaining to myself to observe how, and by what means, I ceased to be a witty writer, as either my experience grew on the one hand, or my affection to my correspondents on the other."1

He speaks here with very imperfect self-knowledge. To the end of his life the self-conscious habits he had acquired in his boyhood prevented him from writing to any correspondent naturally and conversationally: with none, when the opportunity presented itself, did he ever forbear from saying a thing 'prettily,' or hesitate to substitute fiction for fact, pointed sentences for heart-felt convictions. Swift justly criticised this method of letter writing:

“I find,” he says in his answer to Pope's letter just cited, "you have been a writer of letters almost from your infancy; and by your own confession had schemes even then of epistolary fame. Montaigne says that if he could have excelled in any kind of writing it would have been in letters; but I doubt they would not have been natural, for it is plain that all Pliny's letters were written with a view of publishing, and I accuse Voiture himself of the same crime, although he be an author I am fond of. They cease to be letters when they become a jeu d'esprit,"

This motive, the desire of public applause, accounts equally for the character of Pope's letters to his early correspondents, and for the unscrupulousness with which in later years he mutilated, corrected, and even invented the letters he published during his own lifetime. He was fond of quoting the lines of Seneca :

"Infelix ille ! Qui notus nimis omnibus Ignotus moritur sibi."

Pope to Swift, Nov. 28, 1729.

Swift to Pope, Feb. 26, 1729-80.