were neither assailants nor advocates, but | dred and thirty new letters, including lettrustees of the reputation of their author. Equally imperative was the need for the work of destruction. Part at least of the cumbrous scaffolding which concealed the original fabric was useless, and required removal.

ters from Caryll, Oxford, Orrery, Bolingbroke, Bathurst, Broome, and Fenton. The size and importance of this new collection would alone rank this edition above its predecessors. Pope's own letters are the chief support of his claim to loftiness of motive and moral integrity. He professed them to be the artless rec

Most of these wants are met in the excellent edition of Pope which is now approaching completion. It not only su-ords of his life, spontaneous expressions persedes all its predecessors, but to a of his real feelings, written only for pristudy of Pope's life and works is abso- vate friends, published piratically, without lutely indispensable. The plan of the his consent and against his wishes. As new edition was laid and much of the regards all but the Cromwell corresponmaterial collected by the late Mr. Croker. dence, Mr. Elwin proves Pope's profesHis work was carried on by the Rev. sions to be false. He himself secretly Whitwell Elwin, who brought out two procured the publication which he devolumes of the poetry and three of the nounced as surreptitious, and all his letcorrespondence. Subsequently Mr. Court-ters were carefully edited and prepared hope became editor, and under his super- for the press. Mr. Elwin goes further; vision two more volumes of poetry have he shows that many of the letters are appeared. All that is valuable in the fabrications, manufactured from correnotes of previous editors is preserved; spondence with Caryll, redirected to disthe superfluities and errors only are omit- tinguished persons of the day, to whom ted. In one respect the notes might with they were never sent, with dates and pasadvantage be still more curtailed. Pope sages altered. The extent of these frauds undoubtedly borrowed largely from other was not suspected till Dilke puplished his poets. But many of the parallel passages researches in the Athenæum. Profiting collected by Wakefield and transferred to by his suggestions, Mr. Elwin followed the present edition, are mere common- the same line of enquiry. By their miplaces which prove nothing for or against nute labor and unwearied patience the Pope's originality. Warburton's com- labyrinthine maze of deception has been mentary stands on a different footing to threaded. Pope stands convicted on the that of his successors; it had received clearest evidence, not only of complicity Pope's sanction, and is therefore printed in the piratical publications, but of the in appendices to the "Essay on Man," graver offence of falsifying his corresponthe "Essay on Criticism,” and the "Dun- dence. ciad." The new prefaces and notes contain an extraordinary amount of information, much of which appears for the first time. It is impossible to praise too highly the patient care and painstaking industry with which facts are sifted, omissions supplied, errors corrected. Equally admirable is the ingenuity, combined with wide reading, that has elucidated many passages in the life of the poet and contemporary allusions in his poetry, which were formerly regarded as hopelessly ob

scure.

Mr. Elwin's chief contribution to the work was his treatment of the questions raised by Pope's correspondence. In this edition are collected more than four hur

Mr. Elwin's judgment of Pope is biassed by unravelling these intrigues. His impartiality is not proof against his repulsion to a man whom he repeatedly proves to be treacherous. "The sketch," he writes,*" which Lord Macaulay has given of his character, when describing his conduct on the appearance of Tickell's version of the first book of the Iliad, is not too severe for the treacheries and falsehoods which were the instruments of his malevolence, cowardice, and vanity." But the "stiletto and mask" view of Pope, which Macaulay so brilliantly urged, is only partially true. It is generalized from

Vol. i., Introd. cxlii.

one,

...

Neither divine

and that the most unfavorable, side | rhetoric for passion, appeals to the judg. of his character. The portrait was drawnment rather than the feelings. Few poets for a special purpose with the art of a have so nearly become the corridor consummate advocate. It is one-sided, through which passes the breeze of nahighly colored. Few would agree with tional life. It is his misfortune that the Mr. Elwin in his unmodified acceptance era he so faithfully represented was emiof the picture. The same prejudice per- nently unpoetical. meates the whole of his work. Pope re- The first half of the eighteenth century ceives scant justice from an editor who was on the whole a tranquil, prosperous omits no opportunity of disparaging his period. Industrial progress and the exauthor. Mr. Courthope adds to the pains-haustion of previous struggles left no room taking industry of Mr. Elwin a finer lit- for enthusiasm; it was condemned as farerary taste. He is also more impartial. fetched, unpractical. Common sense, the His estimate of Pope is broader and truer quality which Pope calls wit, was en. than that of Macaulay which Mr. Elwin throned in its stead. In politics, religion, accepted: society, poetry, the tendency is equally conspicuous. Politics ceased to be colored by the chivalrous, passionate tone of Cavalier and Puritan. right nor social compact was recognized as the basis of government. Loyalty was stifled by a political convention, republi. can fire quenched by cold utilitarianism. The Tories avowed indifference to a ruler who was not the Lord's Anointed; the Whigs acknowledged their retention of office to be the aim of administration. The moral support of public opinion was neither asked by the ministers nor accorded by the people. Personalities, not principles, stimulated the factions which took the place of parties. As politics became less abstract, they grew more violent. Their concrete form made them popular. They divided society; women patched according to their politics; the opera and the theatre took sides; art and literature were pressed into the service, and suffered in the cause. From religion enthusiasm was equally banished by a theology which suspected faith, questioned revelation, demanded evidences to prove the reasonableness of Christianity. was a curious, not a thoughtful age. It is significant that many men of poetic temperament shrank from the cold glare of Protestantism into the mellow moonlight of the older faith. In society the same tendency was strongly marked. The tension of the struggle which the previous century had witnessed was withdrawn, and society sprang back with the recoil to a lighthearted gaiety, unlike our national earnestness. The nation took its ease

It will not do simply to brand him as a hypocrite, for the essence of hypocrisy consists in unreality; but, behind the falsities of Pope, there is an eagerness and intensity which gives ⚫ them a human interest, and makes us feel that, in his poetry, we are in contact with the nature of the man himself. . . . Much of the inconsistency in his conduct will be found to correspond with the union of opposite conditions in his nature: the piercing intelligence and artistic power, lodged in the sickly and deformed frame; the vivid perception of the ridiculous in others, joined to the most sensitive consciousness of his own defect; the passionate desire for fame, aggravated by a fear of being suspected by his countrymen on account of his religion; the conflicting qualities of benevolence and self-love; the predominance of intellectual instinct; the deficiency of moral principle. It might be predicted of a character so highly strong, so variously endowed, so "tremblingly alive" to opinion, and so capable of transformation, that it would exhibit itself in the most diverse aspects, according to the circumstances by which it was tested. (Vol. iii., Introd. 26.)

Pope's poetical characteristics were determined by his surroundings. He is emphatically the mirror of his times; he reflects with extraordinary fidelity the tone and topics of the town. He had not the "strong divinity of soul" which could raise him above the requirements of the age. Most of his poetry belongs to that class of literary development which deals with contemporary society or modes of thought. He adapts himself to the habits and tastes of the fashionable world, substitutes common sense for imagination,

It

For a poet, in the highest sense of the word, the times were eminently unfavorable when politics were degraded into utilitarianism, indifference, or factious violence, when religion aimed only at practical piety, when society ridiculed earnestness, when the materials of poetry were subordinate and secondary interests. Hardly less unfavorable was the broader literary movement which indirectly tended to rob poetry of spirit, to starve passion, to stunt creative genius. Correctness was the aim of this new school of which Pope was the most distinguished exponent. His claim to the title of a correct poet is often disputed. Against it are urged the ungrammatical construction of some of his sentences, the obscurity of others, the harshness or poverty of his rhymes. But in the wider sense, in which Horace practised correctness, and in which Walsh impressed it upon Pope, his title is indisputably established. No work ever left his hand

from grave pursuits. Life retained little | temporary life was not conveyed through of the adventurous. Men had wealth to any literary medium. The generation gratify and leisure to cultivate new tastes: which placed Roman heroes on the stage they acquired literary reputations as ama in perruques and buckles, or adorned the teurs or critics. The club and coffee- hand that wrote upon the wall at Belshaz house, the newspaper, the bookseller and zar's feast with ring and ruffle, did not publisher, proclaimed the rise of an idle seek the disguise of classical or mediæval class and a reading public, and heralded costume. Its active interests were reprethe time when plebeian genius no longer sented in a simple, straightforward style needed a patrician Mæcenas. Moral and in the ordinary dress of the day. The metaphysical enquiry was the chief stim- sublimity and greatness of poetry disapulus to thought, as faction was to energy. peared, but it was instinct with national A new premium was set on the acts of life. society when women became a power, and when the difference between the tie-wig and full-bottom, or the upset of a teacup was fraught with the fate of an empire. The romance of life was concentrated on the pursuit of gallantry. Pope was never more truly the mirror of his times than when he threw all the passion of which he was capable into the love epistle of Eloisa. Moral refinement fell hopelessly behind advancing civilization. As at Versailles, artificial manners and strict etiquette were combined with loose conduct. It was not till decorum was outraged that the moral law was considered; unless misconduct sinned against taste, it was hardly regarded as an offence. But at Versailles vice was draped with all the grace and painted with every allurement which civilization could supply. At St. James's she was sufficiently brazen to move without a blush for her nakedness, and society imitated the coarseness of the court. Over the social and political memoirs of the day is shed the charm of that class of French literature; there is the same incongruous juxtaposition of serious and gay, politics and scandal, combined with something of the same neatness and finish of mind that touches lightly the light things of society, and something of the same sprightly wit and sparkling epigram to temper the despotism of the Whig aristocracy. Poetry shared in the same lack of enthusiasm. It was the poetical age of reason. It was still the fashion for men of letters to appear before the public in verse, but prose was usurping the place of poetry. Artistic elegance and scholarly form replaced the varied fancy, the exuberant imagination of the older English school. Poetry subsided into an argumentative, didactic, useful character. It grew classical and courtly, embellished familiar objects and every-day events. But it ceased to be "intellectual opiumeating." It was kept in touch with all the movements of the day, scientific, political, religious, social. And this picture of con

quod non

Multa dies et multa litura coercuit, atque Perfectum dicies non castigavit ad unguem. The literature of the sixteenth century is the noblest ode to liberty. But freedom has its dangers as well as slavery. During the succeeding century the human intellect, emancipated from bondage, conquered new worlds of thought and knowledge. The conquests were more easily won than assimilated. Men poured out their new treasures and squandered the riches of their fancy in rambling, redundant, slovenly language. nothing for the forms of expression; they marred the excellence of their work by negligence; they did not know where to stop. Beauties were disfigured by meanness; absurdity joined hands with inspiration. Learning sank into pedantry, fancy into quaintness, imagination into whimsical subtlety. Pope was the last and greatest of a school which "d'un mot mis en sa place enseigna le pouvoir." He felt the value of art, the tenfold worth of a

They cared

thought when it is perfectly expressed. | favorable to the development of his poHe saw that strength of writing lay, not etic genius. He has suffered hardly less in the accumulation of epithets, but in the from his biographers than his editors. brief directness which stamps vigor on Ayre, in 1745, and Ruffhead, in 1769, pubevery syllable. His work was to sharpen lished lives of the poet which were more our native tongue, to use it not crudely mischievous than valuable. Johnson's but delicately. He labored to polish in- life of Pope is the most elaborate of his equalities, to prune redundancies, to vary lives of the poets, but he made no pretenmonotony, to impart strength to sweet- sion to accurate investigation. He drew ness, symmetry to exuberance. To him largely from Spence's anecdotes, which, and his school classical literature was the though not published till 1820, were placed final court of literary appeal; its rule over in his hands in manuscript. They had the world of letters was of divine right. been prepared for posthumous publicaThis classicism reached England from tion by their author, whom Walpole deFrance, where literature aimed at aca- scribes as "a neat fiddle-faddle bit of demic applause. It was not the study of sterling that had read good books and the past for the sake of the past; there kept good company." But at his death was no effort to realize the life of antiquity, they were bought back from Dodsley, the no sympathy with ancient lines of thought, publisher, and consigned for another but only an imitation of the form in which half-century to the library of the Duke of the thought is conveyed, a reproduction Newcastle. The collection is wearisome, not of the tone but of the style. The though full of information. Spence is classics were his model because here alone he found in combination clearness of thought, compactness of expression, perfection of literary finish. Pope did not aspire to the "sacred madness of the bard," nor was he a literary recluse, a mystic, or a mediævalist. He lived in the centre of society, participating in all its interests. His ambition was congenial to his practical age. He sought to make poetry "belle comme la prose," a treasurehouse of felicitous phrases giving currency to new ideas, fitted to express new wants or treat new subjects with the utmost precision of which language is capable. It is no slight praise to say that he succeeded. His work was of incalculable value, but the debt of gratitude to preceptors is rarely paid. It might be said with some truth that he transformed the wild, untaught muse of poetry into a court beauty, the victim of the modiste and the posture-master; checked the easy flow of her fancy by inculcating respect for politeness of phraseology; taught her that the display of natural emotion was provincial; banished her from woodland scenes to "trip down the stairs at Whitehall with gallants in her train," lords of the bedchamber for her ushers, peeresses for her waiting-women. But Pope might retort with still greater truth that discipline was necessary when the nymph had become rhapsodical, eccentric, and a slattern.

Pope's lot was cast in a prosaic age; the tendency of the literary movement by which he was most powerfully influenced was unpoetical. On the other hand, his early life was in many respects more

immeasurably inferior to Boswell. He repeats conversations, but the speakers remain initials. He never condescends to the minute details and personal touches which give colloquial individuality to Johnson and his circle. Without Boswell, Johnson would be best known as a writer of pompous rounded sentences. To Pope the want of a Boswell was an irreparable loss. Bowles and Roscoe prefixed lives of Pope to their editions, but neither are works of much merit. The second edition of Mr. Carruthers's excellent biography of Pope, which was published in 1857, unfortunately appeared before the enquiries of Dilke and Elwin were completed. Mr. Leslie Stephen's masterly sketch, which, together with some brilliant literary criticism, embodies the chief results of recent investigation, is the best summary of the poet's life. But by far the most complete and exhaustive account of Pope's career is contained in the notes and prefaces to the present edition of his works, only a portion of which was pub lished when Mr. Stephen wrote.

Pope's literary life falls," as Mr.. Courthope says, "naturally into three periods." The order adopted here is a slight departure from that of his editor. The first period, that of "retired study and imaginative composition" ends in 1715. To the second period (1715-26) belong his translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The third period (1726-44) is his era of ethical poetry, literary, moral, and political satire.

Pope was born on May 21, 1688. Both his parents were then over five-and-forty years of age. Neither of them was robust;

his father's figure was crooked, his moth- | the mouths of crooked persons,” the muser suffered from headaches. The son inherited, in an exaggerated form, the weakness of both. Pope says they were of gentle birth. But the connection which he claimed for his father with the family of Popes ennobled as the Earls of Doune is not established, nor would Lord Hervey's sneer at the obscurity of his origin have wounded so deeply had it been unfounded. His enemies discovered that Pope's father was a hatter, a farmer, a mechanic, a bankrupt. He is known to have been a London draper, residing in Broad Street, dealing in "Holland's wholesale." He retired from business with a moderate fortune. But Catholics found safe investments with difficulty. They were compelled to place their money on bond in England or in foreign securities. In the operations of the penal laws originated the traditions that the father deposited his money in a strong box and lived on the principal, and that the son was an avaricious usurer because he lent money on bond. Mr. Pope, the elder, was a sincere Catholic, carrying, it is said, into his new religion the enthusiasm of a convert. He was twice married. The maiden name of his second wife was Turner. She belonged to a Yorkshire family possessed of some landed property, and, probably, attached to the Catholic religion. Alexander Pope was her only child.

Of Pope's childhood little is known. His rapid rise to fame awakens distrust in the memories of friends. The attempt to trace his early tastes or peculiarities is useless, as vain, to use Goldsmith's pretty simile, as the chase of the morning dews in the noonday heat. It is not unreasonable to suppose him idolized by his elderly parents, petted by his nurse, Mary Beech, the nutrix fidelissima who lived with him till her death in 1725. As a child he is said to have had a round, plump, pretty, bright-complexioned face, and a voice so sweet that he was called "the little nightingale." In manhood his voice was feeble. Swift complains in the cheerless picture he draws of their meeting in 1726, that his loudest tones are low and weak." Forty years of thought and sickness worked a startling change in his appearance. Sir Joshua Reynolds describes him as "about four feet six inches high, very humpbacked and deformed. He had a large and very fine eye, a long handsome nose." The face was lined and worn, the mouth seamed with "those marks, which are always seen round

cles standing out across the cheeks like small cords, the skin drawn and contracted over the eyebrows by continual headaches. Pope can hardly be said to have received an education. It was only between the years of eight and twelve that he underwent any sort of training. Before he was eight he was attracted by the pictures to read Ogilby's Homer. He went on to Sandys's Ovid, and an unknown version of Statius. From the family priest, Banister, he picked up a little Latin and the Greek alphabet, but at Twyford School, he forgot, under the "plagosus Orbilius," whom he is said to have lampooned, the little he had previously learned. Between nine and twelve he was under a master named Deane, first in Marylebone, then at Hyde Park Corner. This Deane had been a fellow of University College, Oxford. He was one of the Catholic converts of Obadiah Walker, and at the Revolution was deprived of his fellowship. Pope in after life subscribed to a pension for his tutor, though he seems to have been an inefficient teacher. At twelve years old he returned to the "paternal cell" at Binfield, “able,” as he says himself, "to construe a little of Tully's Offices." With the exception of a few months under a priest in Windsor Forest, on the border of which Binfield was situated, this was all the schooling Pope ever had.

that

Perhaps Pope misused his opportunities. Had he wandered, a lonely, thoughtful boy, with his poetic gifts and bright fancy, among the glades of Windsor Forest, he might have grown in richness of imagination and in vigor of creative power. He had leisure for the stillness of thought, the gentleness of musing, which might have revealed to him the "religious meanings in the forms of nature were unfolded to Wordsworth. He took another course; he buried himself in his books. For the next few years he read everything that fell in his way, from Roman antiquities to controversial tracts. "Nobody," said his half-sister, Mrs. Rackett, "ever studied so hard as my brother did in his youth; he did nothing else but write and read." Seneca, Cicero, and Montaigne, he read with keen enjoyment, but philosophy was uncongenial to his vagrant habit of mind. He laid the foundations of the "Essay on Criticism" by a study of Quintilian, Rapin, and Bossu. He acquired a smattering of Latin, Greek, and French, but he always preferred the works of foreign authors in English ver,