old, and as such it appears a positive marvel. But he had now entered a field on which he was quite a master—the domain of good sense and of good taste, applied to the current literature of a scholar, and the common topics of life.

Very soon after, however, as if to show that, if he had willed it, he could have exercised as full a mastery over the region of light fancy and sportive imagery, as of sober reflection and practical wisdom, he wrote what is termed a heroi-comic poem, the Rape of the Lock. Dr. Johnson calls this the most exquisite example of ludicrous poetry, though I do not think the word ludicrous a happy epithet of the Doctor's; Dr. Warton calls it the best satire extant; and we are told that Pope himself considered the intermixture of the machinery of the Sylphs with the action of the story, as the most successful exertion of his art. As my business to-night is more with Pope on the whole as a poet, than with the details and the conduct of his single poems, I must not suffer myself to linger on the details of this delicious work. It is so finished and nicely fitted together that it would scarcely answer to separate any isolated passages from the context; besides, exquisite as the entire poem is, yet, the subject being professedly trivial, any single extract might appear deficient in importance and dignity. The whole is as sparkling as the jewelled cross upon the bosom of the heroine, —

"On her white breast a sparkling cross she bore,
Which Jews might kiss, and Infidels adore."

It is as stimulating as the pinch of snuff he so compactly describes,

"The pungent grains of titillating dust."

But there was one other chord of the poetic lyre which Pope, still young in years, had yet to show his power to strike, and it is the most thrilling in the whole compass of song- the poetry of the passions and the heart. To this class I assign the Elegy to the Memory of an unfortunate Lady, and the ever memorable Epistle from Eloisa to Abelard. A few words will suffice here for the Elegy; its moral tendency cannot be defended, as it appears, incidentally at least, to excuse and consecrate suicide. In its execution it combines in a high degree poetic diction with pathetic feeling. The concluding lines are most touching:

B

"Poets themselves must fall, like those they sung,
Deaf the praised ear, and mute the tuneful tongue.
Ev'n he, whose soul now melts in mournful lays,
Shall shortly want the generous tear he pays;
Then from his closing eyes thy form shall part,
And the last pang shall tear thee from his heart,
Life's idle business at one gasp be o'er,

The Muse forgot, and thou belov'd no more."

I must pause somewhat longer on the Epistle from Eloisa to Abelard. I ought, however, before I give vent to the full glow of panegyric, to make two admissions; one, that a sensitive delicacy would have avoided the subject; the other, that the matter is not original, but is supplied in great degree by the actual letters of the distinguished and unfortunate pair who gave their names to the epistle. Where the adaptation, however, is so consummate, this makes a very slight deduction from the merit of the author. The poem is not long, but in point of execution it appears to me one of the most faultless of human compositions; every thought is passion, and every line is music. The struggle between aspiring piety and forbidden love forms its basis, and the scenery and accessaries of monastic life and the Roman Catholic ritual furnish a back-ground highly congenial, solemn, and picturesque.

I must endeavour to justify my panegyric by a few quotations. The commendation of letter-writing is well known.

"Heaven first taught letters for some wretch's aid,

Some banish'd lover, or some captive maid;

They live, they speak, they breathe what love inspires,
Warm from the soul, and faithful to its fires,

The virgin's wish without her fears impart,
Excuse the blush, and pour out all the heart;
Speed the soft intercourse from soul to soul,
And waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole."

I give the description of the Convent founded by Abelard :

"You rais'd these hallowed walls; the desert smil'd,
And Paradise was open'd in the wild.

No weeping orphan saw his father's stores

Our shrines irradiate, or emblaze the floors;

:

No silver saints, by dying misers given,
Here bribe the rage of ill-requited heaven;
But such plain roofs as piety could raise,
And only vocal with the Maker's praise."

There is the same scene coloured by Eloisa's own state of mind:

"But o'er the twilight groves and dusky caves,
Long sounding aisles, and intermingled graves,
Black Melancholy sits, and round her throws
A death-like silence, and a dread repose.
Her gloomy presence saddens all the scene,
Shades every flower, and darkens every green,
Deepens the murmur of the falling floods,

And breathes a browner horror o'er the woods."

This is surely eminently poetical and expressive.

Let me give the description of her first acquaintance with Abelard :

:

"Thou know'st how guiltless first I met thy flame,
When love approach'd me under friendship's name;
My fancy form'd thee of angelic mind,

Some emanation of th' All-beauteous mind.
Those smiling eyes, attemp'ring every ray,
Shone sweetly lambent with celestial day.
Guiltless I gaz'd; heaven listened while you sung,
And truths divine came mended from that tongue."

In that beautiful line, the force of human passion seems to obtain the mastery over the concerns of another life; but I will close my extracts from this poem with the wishes she forms for their last meeting, in which piety appears finally to predominate over passion:

"Thou, Abelard! the last sad office pay,

And smooth my passage to the realms of day.
See my lips tremble, and my eye-balls roll,

Suck
my last breath, and catch my flying soul !
Ah no in sacred vestments may'st thou stand,
The hallowed taper trembling in thy hand.

(You remark all the force in that word "trembling :" in the next line, observe how the words "present" and "lifted" carry on the drama of the scene):

Present the cross before my lifted eye,

Teach me at once, and learn of me to die;
Ah then, thy once-loved Eloisa see,

It will be then no crime to gaze on me.

(That is, I think, a highly impassioned and pathetic line.)

See from

my

cheek the transient roses fly.

("Transient," in the literal meaning of the word, passing off.)

See the last sparkle languish in my eye!
Till every motion, pulse, and breath be o'er;
And ev'n my Abelard be loved no more.
O death, all eloquent! you only prove,

What dust we doat on when 'tis man we love."

It would be a strange omission in an estimate of the poetical achievements of Pope, to make no mention of his translation of Homer, though the fact of its being a translation, and its length, would both rather put it beyond the limits of my present criticism. Dr. Johnson calls his Iliad, and I am inclined to believe with no more than perfect truth, the noblest version of poetry which the world has ever seen. The main objection alleged against it is, that being a professed translation of Homer, it is not Homeric,—that it is full of grace and sparkle, but misses the unmatched simplicity and majesty of that great father of verse, that, if I may so express myself, it has not the twang of Homer. All this, I think, must be admitted; by some the poems of Sir Walter Scott, and old ballads like Chevy Chase, have been thought to convey a better notion of this Homeric twang than can be gathered from all the polished couplets of Pope. Cowper (an honoured name) tried a more literal version in blank verse, which certainly may be said to represent more closely at least the simplicity of the original. Let us, however, come to the practical test-as Lord Byron has asked concerning these two translations, "Who can ever read Cowper, and who will ever lay down Pope, except for the original? As a child I first read Pope's Homer with a rapture which no subsequent work could ever afford, and children are not the worst judges of

their own language." It is no mean praise that it is the channel which has conveyed the knowledge of Homer to the general English public,-not to our scholars, of course. Though it is far less to the purpose how I felt about this as a child, than how Lord Byron felt, I too remember the days (I fear, indeed, that the anecdote will savour of egotism, but I must not mind the imputation of egotism, if it illustrates my author,) when I used to learn Pope's Iliad by heart behind a screen, while I was supposed to be engaged on lessons of more direct usefulness; and I fancy that I was under the strange hallucination at the time that I had got by heart the four first books. I do not mention this as a profitable example, but in order to show the degree in which this translation was calculated to gain the mastery over the youthful mind.

All the poems of Pope, to which I have already referred, belong to that period of life which, in all ordinary cases, would be called youth. I believe that they must have been nearly altogether completed before he was thirty. Those which I may further have to quote from (in doing which I shall hardly think it necessary to observe so much separate order between the different poems as heretofore), were the fruits of his matured years and settled powers. They henceforth fall under one class of composition, that which treats of men, their manners, and their morals; they are comprised under the titles of satires and moral essays. He himself speaks of the bent which his genius now adopted,

"That not in fancy's maze he wander'd long,

But stoop'd to truth, and moraliz'd his song."

Upon which I again feel happy to find myself in full acquiescence with Lord Byron, who says, "He should have written, rose to truth. In my mind the highest of all poetry is ethical poetry, as the highest of all earthly subjects must be moral truth."

Lord Bolingbroke and Bishop Atterbury, certainly no mean judges of intellectual merit, declared that the strength of Pope's genius lay eminently and peculiarly in satire. What shall I, then, single out as an illustration of his satiric vein ? The character of Lord Hervey, under the name of Sporus, is cited by Lord Byron as a specimen of his rich fancy, (generally, but most erroneously, assumed to be the quality in which Pope was chiefly deficient,) and with this specimen of fancy Lord Byron defied all his own cotemporaries to compete. That it does manifest injustice at least to the