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,

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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; is 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 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 Académie 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

and Epistles are those of historical or actual persons. The principal ground for doubt is found in Pope's own words (Satires and Epistles, 1. 42), A hundred smart in Timon or in Balaam,' &c. し It is true that in these lines Pope is speaking only of the Moral Epistles, in which some fictitious characters are certainly introduced as illustrations. But really the lines referred to are only an artifice of Pope to disguise the fact that in Timon he did mean the Duke of Chandos. And we have to set against any weight which these lines may possess in the question his own declaration (Satires and Epistles, Advertisement, p. 23), ' Many will know their own pictures in it, there being not a circumstance but what is true; but I have, for the most part, spared their names,TM and they may escape being laughed at, if they please.'

But a more decisive proof that real characters are intended is an examination in detail of all the personal allusions. These in the Satires and Epistles amount to seventy-five. Of these many are named without disguise. Of those that are veiled under a pseudonym, some are so clearly indicated as to leave no room for doubt. Others are known by a tradition which may be traced up to the time of publication. There remain a few allusions which we cannot with certainty identify. (1) All the editors agree in filling up the blank, Satires and Epistles, 2. 120, with the name of Marlborough, but on what evidence I do not know. (2) In 2. 49, Mr. Carruthers explains 'Avidien or his wife' of Edward Wortley Montagu and Lady Mary, an interpretation which appears doubtful, though from the context it cannot be doubted that real persons are intended. (3) In 1. 49, Dr. Bennet affirmed that Lord Ilchester and Lord Holland were meant. But see note on the passage. (4) In 2. 87, the 'three ladies' cannot now be identified, yet Warburton, who himself cannot give the names, gives us to understand that the allusion was to fact. Other uncertain references are noticed in their place. It is true of the whole of Pope's satirical writings that there are very few fancy characters. So little did he care for playing with shadows, that even the personages in the farce Three Hours after Marriage (in which he assisted Gay and Arbuthnot) represent living persons.