effect of satire is not confined to daunting vice; virtue feels her confidence increased by being armed with such weapons, and her conscious dignity and scorn augmented in beholding vice publicly humbled. There can be no doubt that Pope's shafts of satire, pointed by wit and winged by verse, have struck on many a heart callous to all but the dread of infamy; and this not merely in the individuals actually exposed, but in all of every age who recognise the same character in themselves, or fear the application of it by others.'

But he who undertakes satire as a public duty must possess an elevation of soul and an impassioned intelligence to which Pope cannot lay claim. Yet Pope had before him two models—models of excellence in very different kinds of satire, but both agreeing in this, that their satire enforced the public reason, and was not the instrument of private vengeance. Pope was well acquainted with the writings of both, but from neither of them could he learn this lesson.

De Quincey has strenuously denied the propriety of denominating Pope and his followers the 'French School.' Without enquiring how far this is true, no student of our poetry can fail to see the influence of Boileau upon Pope's style. In the Notes to this edition a number of direct imitations are pointed out. But the resemblance is much more general and diffused than that of single imitations. All that distinguishes Pope from his predecessors of the school of Dryden-his chastized severity of style, as opposed to their florid facility-is due to the example of Boileau. But while thus learning composition from Boileau, Pope neglected to learn what Boileau lays down as the rule of his poetry, 'Rien n'est beau que le vrai.' Boileau is a classic, not only by reason of his style, but in virtue of his judgments. His dicta are so many axioms. When he condemns or commands it is the verdict of common sense that we hear. And Boileau never transgresses the bounds of legitimate criticism. He had no libels on his conscience. He did indeed rouse the wrath of fashionable authors, and of grandees. He refused homage alike to false taste in writing, and to the noble patrons of that false

taste. But he did it in tones of manly rebuke, or polished sarcasm. All the forms of eloquent raillery, and well-bred contempt, the keen strokes of wit which it is impossible to parry or to resent, these only are Boileau's weapons. Hence the classic durability of Boileau. His personal allusions are so many principles clothed in concrete form. (Nisard, 2. 382.) 'Changez les noms des poëtes immolés par Boileau sous d'autres noms je vois les mêmes défauts. Les Chapelain, les Scudéry, les Cotin, ne sont si populaires que par ce que les défauts qui se personnifient en eux sont éternels. Tel novateur n'est qu'un vieil ennemi de l'esprit français; il y a près de deux siècles, on le nommait Pradon.' Boileau is consequently a standard at once for the language and the literature of his country. His verdicts are unimpeachable, his decisions without appeal. His Satires and Epistles have made, for more than a century, an integral part of all liberal education in France. They do not require the qualifications and abatements which are necessary in putting Pope into the hands of the young.

Another example nearer home was before Pope in Addison, whose pen, in the words of Sainte-Beuve, was 'sans mollesse, et sans amertume.' 'No kind of power (Macaulay, Essays, 2.342) is more formidable than the power of making men ridiculous; and that power Addison possessed in boundless measure. How grossly that power was abused by Swift and by Voltaire is well known. But of Addison it may be confidently affirmed that he has blackened no man's character, nay, that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find in all the volumes which he has left us a single taunt which can be called ungenerous or unkind. Yet he had detractors; he was a politician; he was the best writer of his party; he lived in times of fierce excitement, in times when persons of high character and station stooped to scurrility such as is now practised only by the basest of mankind. Yet no provocation and no example could induce him to return raillery for raillery.'

These are heavy deductions to make from the merit both of the author and his writings. If these defects are found in Pope,

it may be asked-How comes he to be a classic at all, and his poetry to be put forward still as a study, while that of his contemporaries is allowed to fall into oblivion?

The answer has been anticipated in some remarks in Part I. (See Essay on Man, Introd., p. 17.) Pope lives, and must continue to live as long as the English language, by the perfection of his form. Our language is not feeble as a vehicle of emotion, or scanty as a medium of ideas. But it is, in its ordinary employment by our writers, clumsy, cumbrous, without grace, loaded with superfluities, circumlocution, and indirectness. English writers have in general been intent upon some immediate purpose, and have not stayed to finish. In Pope, on the contrary, we have the constant effort to condense, to concentrate meaning. The thought has been turned over and over, till it is brought out finally with a point and finish which themselves elicit admiration. Sometimes, but rarely, does the severity of the writer's taste allow him to overpoint what he wishes to say, and to let the epigram run away with him. If we compare Pope in this respect with our elder writers, even the greatest of them, Shakspeare, Bacon, Taylor, we find them often leaving the track in the pursuit of mere wit-wit which is not subordinate to the general effect, but consists in verbal quibble or far-fetched allusion. Pope's wit is of that perfect kind which does not seem to be sought for its own sake, but to be the appropriate vehicle of the meaning. We are not made to feel that he is constraining himself to write in couplets, but that his couplets are the shape in which he can best make his thoughts tell. He used to say himself that he had found by trial that he could express himself more forcibly in rhyme than in any other form.

Cowper says (Letters, Jan. 5, 1782),' Writers who find it necessary to make such strenuous and painful exertions are generally as phlegmatic as they are correct; but Pope was, in this respect, exempted from the common lot of authors of that class. With the unwearied application of a plodding Flemish painter, who draws a shrimp with the most minute exactness, he had all the genius of one of the first masters. Never, I believe, were such talents and such drudgery united.'

It must not be hence inferred that every line written by Pope is as perfect as it should be, or may be taken as a model. Writing is a sustained endeavour to express meaning, and the artist is perpetually dropping below his own ideal. Besides, a long piece is to be regarded in its effect as a whole. The attempt to make it all point would result in a string of epigrams, not in a complete poem, which must be compounded of complementary parts. Incessant brilliance is unnatural, and fatigues the attention. Pope is at times flat, and below himself; sometimes fails in putting his meaning clearly; occasionally clumsy; often ungrammatical. But in the art of adjustment of parts, of leading up to the point, of rising and falling, of knowing when to stimulate attention, and when to let it repose, he has few equals in our literature. The failures and the successes of such an artist in language are equally instructive to a learner.

This exquisite skill of literary composition is that which places Pope in the first rank of English classics. But over and above the workmanship, the materials of the Satires and Epistles are not without qualities of permanent value. These enduring qualities may be referred to two heads.

1. The social ideas expressed, and the ethical standard implied, have the character of universality. The grave defects we have found in Pope's conception of life, and of human nature, will not allow him to be classed among the leading minds of his country. But though wanting himself the breadth of the highest genius, he lived in an age which was prepared and accustomed to have the understanding appealed to rather than the passions. This will become more intelligible by contrasting Pope with our• elder writers generally.

In our elder writers, from the Elizabethan age downwards, is found a wealth of imagery and a compass of language, by the side of which Pope seems at first sight impoverished. Yet none of our poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Milton alone excepted, have left works which can pass down to all time as classics of the language. They revel in an exuberant lawlessness of thought as well as of words. They are full of genius, but

destitute of that art which alone can make genius tell. Their ideas follow no law, they are whimsical, fanciful, individual. They do not appeal to the universal human sentiment, but to some 'idola tribus.' Pope indeed wrote for his contemporaries, and 'for the Town,' and his Satires and Epistles teem with personal allusions. But the reason is dominant throughout. These special cases are all brought up for judgment before that common sense which belongs to no age or country, but must be equally accepted by all. Indeed, the progress of cultivation consists in the ascendency gradually acquired by the intellectual associations over the suggestions of personal feeling. Pope's special judgments are constantly at fault, because he is biased by personal spite, or party zeal. But the law under which he is compelled to pronounce judgment, is the law of universal reason. He is in our poetry what Boileau is in French (Nisard, Lit. Franç. 2. 294), 'the type of the spirit of discipline and choice, of law and proportion, of the effort to raise the idea to its highest degree of generality. This ideal is one towards which all the great writers of the seventeenth century (in France) aspired. Descartes, Pascal, the Port Royal, the Academie have all recognised this universality as the supreme law of good writing.'

2. Pope's Satires and Epistles have a value for us as a contemporary record, inasmuch as they present the characters, and reflect the manners of the period. In this respect they are a composite result of a retrospective sentiment reacting against the poet's actual position. The days of Queen Anne are in Pope's mind, the personages of the court of George II. and Caroline under his pen. Pope's Satires and Epistles certainly do not equal Lord Hervey's Memoirs in truth, or fulness and development of detail. But they stand next to those Memoirs as a lively picture of a section of social life between 1730-40. Lord Hervey presents us with the Court interior, Pope with the literary and opposition side of London life. All this would have been lost to us if Pope, like Bishop Hall in his Satires, had satirised abstract vices, or abused fictitious characters.

It has been made a question if all the names in these Satires