HARVARD JRIVERSTY! LIBRARY. AN ESSAY ON MAN. BY ALEXANDER POPE. BIOGRAPHICAL AND EXPLANATORY NOTES, INCLUDING NEW YORK: MAYNARD, MERRILL, & Co., ALEXANDER POPE, THIS eminent English poet was born in London, May 21, 1688. His parents were Roman Catholics, and to this faith the poet adhered, thus debarring himself from public office and employ. ment. His father, a linen-merchant, having saved a moderate competency, withdrew from business, and settled on a small estate he had purchased in Windsor Forest. He died at Chiswick, in 1717. His son shortly afterwards took a long lease of a house and five acres of land at Twickenham, on the banks of the Thames, whither he retired with his widowed mother, to whom he was tenderly attached, and where he resided till death, cultivating his little domain with exquisite taste and skill, and embellishing it with a gro, temple, wilderness, and other adjuncts poetical and picturesque. In this famous villa Pope was visited by the most celebrated wits, statesmen, and beauties of the day, himself being the most popular and successful poet of his age. His early years were spent at Binfield, within the range of the Royal Forest. He received some education at little Catholic schools, but was his own instructor after his twelfth year. He never was a profound or accurate scholar, but he read Latin poets with ease and delight, and acquired some Greek, French, and Italian. He was a poet almost from infancy; he “lisped in numbers,” and when a mere youth surpassed all his contemporaries in metrical harmony and correctness. His orals and some translations appeared in 1709; but were writhree or four years earlier. These were followed by the Essay on Criticism, 1711; Rape of the Lock (when completed, the most graceful, airy, and imaginative of his works), 1712-1714; Windsor Forest, 1713; Temple of Fame, 1715. In a collection of his works printed in 1717 he included the Epistle of Eloisa and Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady, two poems inimitable for pathetic beauty and finished melodious versification. 5 From 1715 till 1726 Pope was chiefly engaged on his transla tions of the Iliad and Odyssey, which, though wanting in true Ho meric simplicity, naturalness, and grandeur, are splendid poems. In 1728-29 he published his greatest satire-the Dunciad, an attack on all poetasters and pretended wits, and or all other persons against whom the sensitive poet had conceived any enmity. In 1737 he gave to the world a volume of his Literary Correspondence, containing some pleasant gossip and observations, with choice passages of description; but it appears that the correspondence was manufactured for publication not composed of actual letters addressed to the parties whose names are given, and the collec tion was introduced to the public by means of an elaborate stratagem on the part of the scheming poet. Between the years 1731 and 1739 he issued a series of poetical essays, moral and philosophical, with satires and imitations of Horace, all admirable for sense, wit, spirit, and brilliancy. Of these delightful productions, the most celebrated is the Essay on Man, to which Bolingbroke is believed to have contributed the spurious philosophy and false sentiment; but its merit consists in detached passages, descriptions, and pictures. A fourth book to the Dunciad, containing many beautiful and striking lines, and a general revision of his works, closed the poct's literary cares and toils. He died on the 30th of May, 1744, and was buried in the church at Twickenham. Pope was of very diminutive stature, and deformed from his birth. His physical infirmity, susceptible temperament, and incessant study rendered his life "one long disease." He was, as his friend Lord Chesterfield said, "the most irritable of all the genus irritabile vatum, offended with trifles, and never forgetting or forgiving them." His literary stratagems, disguises, assertions, denials, and (we must add) misrepresentations would fill volumes. Yet when no disturbing jealousy, vanity, or rivalry intervened, was generous and affectionate, and he had a manly, independent spirit. As a poet he was deficient in originality and creative power, and thus was inferior to his prototype, Dryden; but as a literary artist, and brilliant declaimer, satirist, and moralizer in verse, he is stil unrivaled. He is the English Horace, and will as surely descend with honors to the latest posterity. THE question whether Pope was a poet has hardly yet been settled, and is hardly worth settling; for if he was not a great poet he must have been a great prose writer-that is, he was a great writer of some sort. He was a man of exquisite faculties and of the most refined taste; and as he chose verse (the most obvious distinction of poetry) as the vehicle to express his ideas, he has generally passed for a poet, and a good one. If, 'ndeed, by a great poet we mean one who gives the utmost grandeur to our conceptions of nature, or the utmost force to the passions of the heart, Pope was not, in this sense, a great poet; for the best, the characteristic power of his mind lay the clean contrary waynamely, in presenting things as they appear to the indifferent observer, stripped of prejudice and passion. * * * He was not, then, distinguished as a poet of lofty enthusiasm, of strong imagination, with a passionate sense of the beauties of nature, or a deep insight into the workings of the heart; but he was a wit, a critic, and a man of sense, of observation, and of the world; with a keen relish for the elegancies of art, or of nature when embellished by art; a quick tact for propriety of thought and manners, as established by the forms and customs of society; refined sympathy with the sentiments and habitudes of human life as he felt them within the little circle of his family and friends. Pope saw nature only dressed by art; he judged of beauty by fashion; he sought for truth in the opinions of the world; he judged of the feelings of others by his own.-THOMAS DE QUIN CEY. POPE is not only the foremost literary figure of his age, but the representative man of a system or style of writing which for a hundred years before and after him pervaded English poetry. |