modes of thought with which it is in comical antipathy, and while it is not degraded, they are shown in their triviality. The "clouded cane," as compared with the Homeric spear, indicates the difference of scale, the lower plane of emotions and passions. The opening of the action, too, is equally good:

"Sol through white curtains shot a timorous ray,
And oped those eyes that must eclipse the day,
Now lapdogs give themselves the rousing shake,
And sleepless lovers just at twelve awake;

Thrice rung the bell, the slipper knocked the ground,
And the pressed watch returned a silver sound.”

The mythology of the Sylphs is full of the most
fanciful wit; indeed, wit infused with fancy is
Pope's peculiar merit. The Sylph is addressing
Belinda :

“Know, then, unnumbered spirits round thee fly,
The light militia of the lower sky;

These, though unseen, are ever on the wing,
Hang o'er the box and hover round the ring.
As now your own our beings were of old,
And once enclosed in woman's beauteous mould;
Think not, when woman's transient breath is fled,
That all her vanities at once are dead;
Succeeding vanities she still regards,

And, though she plays no more, o'erlooks the cards.
For when the fair in all their pride expire,
To their first elements their souls retire;
The sprites of fiery termagants in flame
Mount up and take a salamander's name;
Soft yielding nymphs to water glide away
And sip, with nymphs, their elemental tea;
The graver prude sinks downward to a gnome,
In search of mischief still on earth to roam;
The light coquettes in sylphs aloft repair
And sport and flutter in the fields of air."

And the contrivance by which Belinda is awakened is also perfectly in keeping with all the rest of the machinery :

"He said: when Shock, who thought she slept too long,

Leaped up and waked his mistress with his tongue;

"T was then, Belinda, if report say true,

Thy eyes first opened on a billet-doux."

Throughout this poem the satiric wit of Pope peeps out in the pleasantest little smiling ways, as where, in describing the toilet-table, he says:

"Here files of pins extend their shining rows,

Puffs, powders, patches, Bibles, billet-doux."

Or when, after the fatal lock has been severed,

"Then flashed the living lightning from her eyes,
And screams of horror rend the affrighted skies,
Not louder shrieks to pitying Heaven are cast
When husbands or when lapdogs breathe their last;
Or when rich china-vessels, fallen from high,
In glittering dust and painted fragments lie!"

And so, when the conflict begins:

"Now Jove suspends his golden scales in air; Weighs the men's wits against the ladies' hair; The doubtful beam long nods from side to side; At length the wits mount up, the hairs subside." But more than the wit and fancy, I think, the perfect keeping of the poem deserves admiration. Except a touch of grossness, here and there, there is the most pleasing harmony in all the conceptions and images. The punishments which he assigns to the sylphs who neglect their duty are charmingly appropriate and ingenious : —

"Whatever spirit, careless of his charge,

His post neglects, or leaves the fair at large,

Shall feel sharp vengeance soon o'ertake his sins;
Be stopped in vials or transfixed with pins,

Or plunged in lakes of bitter washes lie,
Or wedged whole ages in a bodkin's eye;
Gums and pomatums shall his flight restrain,
While clogged he beats his silver wings in vain;
Or alum styptics with contracting power,
Shrink his thin essence like a rivelled flower;
Or as Ixion fixed the wretch shall feel
The giddy motion of the whirling wheel,
In fumes of burning chocolate shall glow,
And tremble at the sea that froths below! "

The speech of Thalestris, too, with its droll cli max, is equally good:

"Methinks already I your tears survey,
Already hear the horrid things they say,
Already see you a degraded toast,
And all your honor in a whisper lost!
How shall I then your helpless fame defend?
"T will then be infamy to seem your friend!
And shall this prize, the inestimable prize,
Exposed through crystal to the gazing eyes,
And heightened by the diamond's circling rays,
On that rapacious hand forever blaze?
Sooner shall grass in Hydepark Circus grow,
And wits take lodging in the sound of Bow,
Sooner let earth, air, sea, in chaos fall,

Men, monkeys, lapdogs, parrots, perish all! "

So also Belinda's account of the morning omens :

""T was this the morning omens seemed to tell;
Thrice from my trembling hand the patch-box fell;
The tottering china shook without a wind;

Nay, Poll sat mute, and Shock was most unkind."

The idea of the goddess of Spleen, and of her palace, where

66 The dreaded East is all the wind that blows,"

was a very happy one.

In short, the whole poem

more truly deserves the name of a creation than anything Pope ever wrote. The action is confined to a world of his own, the supernatural agency is wholly of his own contrivance, and nothing is allowed to overstep the limitations of the subject. It ranks by itself as one of the purest works of human fancy; whether that fancy be strictly poetical or not is another matter. If we compare it with the "Midsummer-night's Dream," an uncomfortable doubt is suggested. The perfection of form in the "Rape of the Lock" is to me conclusive evidence that in it the natural genius of Pope found fuller and freer expression than in any other of his poems. The others are aggregates of brilliant passages rather than harmonious wholes.

It is a droll illustration of the inconsistencies of human nature, a more profound satire than Pope himself ever wrote, that his fame should chiefly rest upon the "Essay on Man." It has been praised and admired by men of the most opposite beliefs, and men of no belief at all. Bishops and free-thinkers have met here on a common ground of sympathetic approval. And, indeed, there is no particular faith in it. It is a droll medley of inconsistent opinions. It proves only two things beyond a question, that Pope was not a great thinker; and that wherever he found a thought, no matter what, he could express it so tersely, so clearly, and with such smoothness of versification as to give it an everlasting currency. Hobbes's unwieldy Leviathan, left stranded there on the shore of the last age, and nauseous with the stench of its

selfishness, from this Pope distilled a fragrant oil with which to fill the brilliant lamps of his philosophy, lamps like those in the tombs of alchemists, that go out the moment the healthy air is let in upon them. The only positive doctrines in the poem are the selfishness of Hobbes set to music, and the Pantheism of Spinoza brought down from mysticism to commonplace. Nothing can be more absurd than many of the dogmas taught in this "Essay on Man." For example, Pope affirms explicitly that instinct is something better than rea

son:

66 See him from Nature rising slow to art,

To copy instinct then was reason's part;

Thus, then, to man the voice of nature spake ;
Go, from the creatures thy instructions take;
Learn from the beasts what food the thickets yield;
Learn from the birds the physic of the field;

The arts of building from the bee receive;

Learn of the mole to plough, the worm to weave;
Learn of the little nautilus to sail,

Spread the thin oar, or catch the driving gale."

I say nothing of the quiet way in which the general term "nature " is substituted for God, but how unutterably void of reasonableness is the theory that Nature would have left her highest product, man, destitute of that instinct with which she had endowed her other creatures! As if reason were not the most sublimated form of instinct. The accuracy on which Pope prided himself, and for which he is commended, was not accuracy of thought so much as of expression. And he cannot always even claim this merit, but only that of correct rhyme, as in one of the passages I have