youthful production of Pope. He has no words of generous praise to bestow upon the Essay, but takes the view of it held by De Quincey, whom he terms a subtler and sounder critic than Hazlitt. The comparison need not be challenged, but it may be remarked in passing that the subtlety of De Quincey is sometimes more conspicuous than his soundness, and that fine as his critical judgment often is, it is frequently, like Hazlitt's, warped by prejudice. "He thought acutely by fits," says Mr. Leslie Stephen; and we may add that between the fits a cloud obscured his vision and disturbed his mind.

The contradictions of criticism were never displayed more strikingly, than in the judgments passed upon the poem that professes to deal with the art. The work, according to Dr. Johnson, placed Pope among the first critics and the first poets, an opinion which Mr. Elwin, with justice, regards as "preposterous." Probably his own view of it is as much open to question. According to this view it would seem as though a more miserable attempt at poetry were never made by a Grub Street poet.

"Almost anybody," says Mr. Elwin, " may convert ordinary prose into defective verse, and much of the verse in the Essay on Criticism' is of a low order. The phraseology is frequently mean and slovenly, the construction inverted and ungrammatical,

the ellipses harsh, the expletives feeble, the metre inharmonious, the rhymes imperfect. Striving to be poetical, Pope fell below bald and slipshod prose. Where the plain portions of the poem are not positively bad, they are seldom of any peculiar excellence. Mediocrity relieved by occasional well-wrought passages forms the staple of the work."

If we accept this verdict we must place the Essay on a level with the poetical productions of Roscommon or of Halifax; but Mr. Elwin's denunciation of its faults is not confined to the strongly expressed opinion we have quoted. He gives a long list of imperfect rhymes, he points out contradictions, and takes pains to prove what a great poet of our century asserted long ago, that Pope's claims to correctness are unfounded. We agree with Mr. Elwin, who in this respect is in harmony with the highest criticism of the age, that the superb mastery over language exhibited by some of our greatest poets is beyond the range of Pope. In purity and strength of diction he ranks below Dryden, whose blunders, like Shelley's, seem to have been the result of indifference or haste. Pope, on the contrary, was the most painstaking of poets, and in a limited sense one of the most correct. This is the virtue which, combined with the modernness of his style, has received high praise from Dr. Abbott, himself a master of English.

"Pope's English," he writes, "is not only correct, it is also as Dryden's is, modern. There is no substantial difference between it and the English of the present day except that Pope is more exact than most modern authors in the use of words. . . It is Pope's modernness as well as correctness, that makes him so valuable a model for the student of modern English. I know few better or more valuable lessons in the choice of English words than after reading a passage of Pope to shut the book and to have the verses repeated, with blanks here and there for the student to fill up. By comparing one's failures with the original, one learns to appreciate the unerring exactitude with which Pope elaborated every couplet till it reached absolute perfection. Pope is one of the few poets whose lines cannot be misquoted with impunity. Many of his couplets would be seriously impaired by the change of an epithet, the transformation of a word, nay, even the alteration of a vowel or consonant. Byron was probably not far wrong in calling Pope a poet of a thousand years. Pope's ideal of a poet was not a noble one, but such as it was he rose to its full height. . . . He has expressed the common-places of criticism and of morality in such language as is recognised to be not only the best, but now, the only possible way of expressing them."

This is true, but it is true also that Pope carried his literary proclivities to an almost fastidious length, that he cared sometimes more for words than thoughts, more for shape than substance.

"His interest lay," says Mr. Pattison, alluding to the Essay on Man,' "in the elaboration rather than in the matter treated," and what is true of that poem

*A Concordance to the Works of Alexander Pope.' By Edwin Abbott. With an Introduction by Edwin A. Abbott, D.D. Chapman and Hall.

is true also, though in a lesser degree, of a large portion of his verse. Language is the life of poetry, by that the poet is justified and by that condemned, but in poetry more than in any other form of composition, it is imperative that beautiful or lofty thoughts should be linked to rare words.*

Of all poets, save Shakespeare, Pope is the most often quoted, because he has expressed in the most pointed form the common observation of mankind. His lines fix themselves on the memory, and men who care little for poetry and nothing for Pope are

Leigh Hunt complains somewhere that Pope's versification is a veritable see-saw, and there is some reasonableness in his remark. Take a single instance of this here-we-go-up and here-we-go-down style:

"See the same man, in vigour, in the gout,
Alone, in company, in place, or out;
Early at business and at hazard late;
Mad at a fox-chase, wise at a debate;
Drunk at a borough, civil at a ball;

Friendly at Hackney, faithless at Whitehall."

Such lines remind us of a couplet in the poet's satire of Lord Hervey, which it is possible may have suggested Hunt's comparison:

"His wit all see-saw, between that and this,

Now high, now low, now master up, now miss.”

Pope is seen at his worst in lines like these, and it would be unjust to estimate him by them. In general his versification, though it does not fill and satisfy the ear like the divine music of poets like Milton and Shelley, is extremely happy, and in its degree approaches to, if it does not actually attain, perfection.

accustomed to use his verses, not knowing that they are his, in the daily concerns of life. His line in poetry is strictly limited. His wing never carried him into the highest regions of the art. He had no dramatic power; the epic was out of his reach, and for the lyric, in which supreme excellence is the most rarely attainable, he had no capacity whatever. He could not sing,-a grievous and irreparable want, since poetry in its loveliest utterance is song. He is one of the few great English poets, three or four at most, who never produced a sonnet, and it may be worth observing that he has written none of the verses which children love,* nor any lines which grown-up people care to croon over in moments of weakness or sorrow. After some misdirected efforts Pope understood where his strength lay, and from that moment there was no failure. In ethical and satirical verse he has but one rival amongst English poets.

The

And he has another claim to immortality. Rape of the Lock,' a poem which stands alone in our literature, is the happiest specimen we possess of ludicrous poetry. Moreover, it is as original as it is

Pope has no place in Mr. Palgrave's 'Children's Treasury of English Song;' but it must not be forgotten that his 'Homer' has afforded infinite delight to many a boy and girl between the ages, say, of twelve and sixteen.