which admirers of Pope will feel presents an utterly inadequate view of the poems under consideration :

"This sort of moralising, which is the staple of Pope's Epistles, upon the ruling passion or upon avarice, strikes us now as unpleasantly obvious. We have got beyond it, and want some more refined analysis and more complex psychology. Take for example, Pope's Epistle to Bathurst, which was in hand for two years, and is just 400 lines in length. The simplicity of the remarks is almost comic. Nobody wants to be told now that bribery is facilitated by the modern system of credit.

Blest paper credit! last and best supply,
That lends corruption lighter wings to fly!"

Certainly, if this were all that we were told in the foregoing couplet, or in the Epistle generally, the information would be superfluous. But is it not obvious that the above criticism gives a very imperfect account of the contents of one of the most highly polished of Pope's compositions? Mr. Stephen himself, from his high appreciation of Pope's gifts of style, is almost immediately forced into admissions, which I venture to think are fatal to his argument.

'This triteness,' he says, 'blinds us to the singular felicity with which the observations have been verified, a felicity which makes many of the phrases still proverbial. The mark is so plain that we do scant justice to the accuracy and precision with which it is hit. Yet when we notice how every epithet tells, and how perfectly the writer does what he tries to do, we may understand why Pope extorted contemporary admiration.'

Thus Mr. Stephen admits the perfect finish and propriety of Pope's style; he admits that his poetry extorted contemporary admiration.' But if the staple of his Moral Essays was so trite and common-place as his critic declares, it certainly would not have secured the admiration of the best judges of his own time. Bolingbroke and Swift, Mr. Stephen allows, were no fools; it might, indeed, be added that they were at least as

well qualified as any man now alive to judge of good writing; and their approval would never have been bestowed on any mere exposition of conventional truisms, however polished and melodious might be the language in which they were expressed. These men were critics, who 'showed no mercy to an empty line,' but demanded from every poet the satisfaction of those conditions which Boileau boasted with justice that he had fulfilled : Ma pensée au grand jour partout s'offre et s'expose ; Et mon vers, bien ou mal, dit toujours quelque chose.

It was because Bolingbroke and Swift found in Pope the perfect expression of something that they felt ought to be said in verse, that they paid him with such profuse praise; and for the same reason he has for nearly five generations continued to be a favourite poet with thousands who have no taste for 'refined analysis and complex psychology.' Surely the reputation of a writer who has such a popular consent in his favour ought to be regarded as established. Those who require philosophical food in poetry must of course look elsewhere for it, but it is scarcely fair on Pope, because he does not provide it, to depreciate his verses as inopes rerum, nugæque canoræ.'

If we rather seek to enquire what it is in Pope's moral and satirical poetry which has so long and so deeply interested the popular imagination, we shall find that his influence springs from three main sources. In the first place he is the poet of 'common sense.' He puts before the mind of the reader 'what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed;' his reasoning may be wrong; but his language is so marvellously pregnant, that it necessarily forces us to reflect. Here again. Boileau, addressing his Verses, describes with great felicity the ideal which poets of the class, to which he and Pope belong, have always in view:

Vous croyez sur les pas de vos heureux aînés

Voir bientôt vos bons mots, passant du peuple aux princes,
Charmer également la ville et les provinces ;

Et par le prompt effet d'un sel réjouissant,
Devenir quelquefois proverbes en naissant.

Poetry of this kind may be depreciated as 'trite' and un

philosophical; but the secret of its success is the same as that of good oratory, of good painting, and of excellence in every other art; and its justification is its acceptance by the general sense of the world, 'semper, ubique, ab omnibus.'

In the next place Pope's satires are full of personal interest. As he shows such an intimate acquaintance with certain general sympathies and perceptions, and as we can always see the exact mark at which he is aiming, and take the measure of his defects or successes of expression, it is natural that we should be keenly interested in the private history of one who has so much in common with ourselves. Pope's personality is more visible in his verse, than that of any other English poet. Read in connection with the story of his life, his bright and pointed satires enable us to track minutely, through all their intricate obscurity, the windings of his remarkable character. We see him distinctly in his several relations to his friends and his enemies, to his parents and the public. The magic of his art which gives a kind of fascination to his daring literary frauds, extends its influence alike over the greatest and the humblest of those who came within the circle of his acquaintance, or on to the list of his enemies. It is easy to understand why Swift should have been so eager to be commemorated in one of his Epistles, and why poor Alderman Barber was ready to pay a small fortune for a compliment in a couplet, since even at this day he contrives to raise a certain interest in Ralph, Welsted, and Concanen, the grubs, and straws, and worms,' who have been preserved in the amber' of his verse.

Again, the personal and characteristic nature of his Satires gives them a rare historical value. If Shakespeare and Milton are the representative poets of England after the Reformation; if Dryden reflects in his verse all the influences of the Restoration, Pope was no less surely the poetical spokesman of the Revolution of 1688. From his natural genius as well as from the company he kept, he was well qualified to express the thoughts of an aristocracy which, after an age of unsettlement, had become the ruling power in the State, and

which was bent on establishing authoritative social standards of morals, taste, and breeding. Of the society which grew out of the Revolution we ourselves are the lineal descendants; and in Pope's satires we find a bright reflection of the men and things, whose influence helped to form the manners, habits, thoughts, and feelings, which, however modified by circumstances, have lasted into our own epoch. He shows us the rise of Woman as a controlling power in society and politics; the extension among the nobility of an Italian taste in painting and architecture; the hatred felt by the Catholics for the monied middle class, which was the backbone of the Revolution, the mainstay of Whiggery, and the bulwark of Protestantism. In his Satires too we see a mirror of the feelings of the Parliamentary Opposition directed by Bolingbroke and Pulteney; of their rancour against Walpole's foreign and domestic policy; of the relations between the Court and the party of the Prince of Wales; of the popular dislike of the Hanoverian dynasty and of Low Church principles. Besides, we have suggestive glimpses of the interior of society at a time when St. James's was the extreme West End of London, and old Burlington House was but just built. The British youth' appear at their diversions at White's Chocolate House, Hockley-in-the-Hole, or Fig's Academy. Complaints are heard from polite society of the degradation of the stage in consequence of the public passion for spectacles. The penniless man of rhyme walks forth' from the Mint; and the dealings of the ill-lodged bard of Drury Lane with his aristocratic or commercial patrons, are exposed in the full light of pitiless ridicule. As we read, the society of the past rises before the imagination in its dramatic reality. The age, in many respects, may have had the defects of its poet; but like him it was not without generous qualities ; it is at least full of human and historical interest, whether it be regarded as the period when the British Empire first began to rise, or as the aristocratic stage of English society, in which the realities of character displayed themselves with a frankness wanting in our own democratic times, when the individual

is apt to disguise his natural impulses in deference to public opinion. It is a time too abounding in action and incident. Whoever chooses to master the details of the South Sea mania, and of the different frauds of the monied interest exposed in the House of Commons, and realises Pope's attitude of mind towards this class, will certainly read the Epistle to Lord Bathurst with fresh intelligence; and it may safely be predicted that he will be more struck with the keen irony of the poet's satire than with the simplicity of his remarks.'

In editing this portion of Pope's works, an endeavour has been made to draw out the full force and meaning of the text, which for various reasons has hitherto been only partially explained. The Moral Essays and Satires deserve to be read with the same attention as the works of Horace and Juvenal, and, in order to appreciate the extraordinary art and beauty of Pope's language, we must try ourselves to realise things exactly as they presented themselves to his thought. No attempt has been made in the following pages to claim for the poet either moral or artistic perfection. On the contrary it has been felt that, even with regard to the reputation of one's author, which every editor is bound to consider, it is kindest to Pope to put his dealings fully before the public, without reserve or palliation. While his literary conspiracies cannot be excused, still, in their intricacy and ingenuity, they are full of interest as illustrating one side of his character. Pope is the most fascinating of satirists, because his poetry is so largely coloured by his own personality; and his satires can only be properly understood when they are exhibited with their conflicting elements of truth and injustice; of vindictiveness and pathos; of intellectual unscrupulousness and poetical art; of passion and irony; of bold invective and ambiguous evasion. And, for the same reason, since his process of composition is so interesting in itself, and the general excellence of his workmanship is so obvious, I have thought the extent of his poetical achievements may be better appreciated if attention be called to passages, in which he has succumbed to difficulties of thought and