Nor public flame nor private dares to shine, Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; In 1723, Bolingbroke having returned from exile, made his home at Dawley, which was within an easy drive of Twickenham, and thither Pope went frequently to enjoy the eloquent talk of his guide, philosopher, and friend. On one of these occasions, his coach was upset into the river, and if a footman had not managed to break the closed window and pull him out, he would have been drowned. So severely was Pope cut, that he was in danger of losing the use of his right hand. Voltaire, who was then at Dawley, condoled with him in the affected style of the man and of the period, saying that the water was not Hippocrene's, or it would have respected him, and adding, "Is it possible that those fingers which have written the Rape of the Lock' and the 'Criticism,' which have dressed Homer so becomingly in an English coat, should have been so barbarously treated?" Voltaire, it is said, was on one occasion the poet's guest at Twickenham, and talked in so coarse a strain as to drive his mother from the room. 66 The Essay on Man" was published anonymously in three Epistles in 1733, and to these a fourth Epistle was added in 1734. It cannot be accounted a great poem. Pope, although he was the favourite poet of Kant, is no philosopher, and he is eminently deficient as a moralist. In attempting to justify the ways of God to men, in this famous Essay he failed, partly from ignorance and partly from a deficiency of feeling. Where he failed in argument he might have risen on the wings of devotion, but profound religious feeling was as alien to his nature as philosophy. He lacked depth, and was deficient, as Mr. Mark Pattison has pointed out, "in a true human and natural sympathy." 999 "The Essay on Man,' says this admirable critic, "was composed at a time when the reading public in this country were occupied with an intense and eager curiosity by speculation on the first principles of Natural Religion. Everywhere, in the pulpit, in the coffee-houses, in every pamphlet, argument on the origin of evil, on the goodness of God and the constitution of the world, was rife. Into the prevailing topic of polite conversation Bolingbroke, who returned from exile in 1723, was drawn by the bent of his native genius. Pope followed the example and impulse of his friend's more powerful mind. Thus much there was of special suggestion. But the arguments or topics of the poem are to be traced to books in much vogue.at the time; to Shaftesbury's Characteristics,' King On the Origin of Evil,' and particularly to Leibnitz, Essais de Théodicée.' . . . In selecting his subject Pope was thus determined against the bent of his own genius by the direction in which the curiosity of his reading public happened to be exerted. Herein lay, to begin with, a source of weakness. To write on a thesis set by circumstances is to begin by wanting inspiration, which proceeds from the fullness of the heart; but when the thesis prescribed is also one which lies beyond the scope of the mental habits of the writer, the difficulties to be overcome are great indeed." How far Pope was indebted to Bolingbroke for the plan of his Essay is of little consequence. No one now reads the poem for its philosophy, if the poet's fatalistic platitudes merit that appel lation, but for the sententious beauty of many a passage or couplet which lives in literature. It is in the "Essay on Man" that the reader will find the two lines characterized by Mr Ruskin as "the most complete, the most concise, and the most lofty expression of moral temper existing in English words "Never elated while one man's oppressed, and the final lines afford an admirable specimen of Pope's easy flow of verse and felicity of expression: : "Come, then, my Friend! my Genius! come along, And while the Muse now stoops or now ascends, To man's low passions or their glorious ends, To fall with dignity, with temper rise; Oh! while along the stream of Time thy name Say, shall my little bark attendant sail, Pursue the triumph and partake the gale? When statesmen, heroes, kings, in dust repose, Whose sons shall blush their fathers were thy foes, And all our knowledge is ourselves to know." The "Moral Essays," which, according to Warburton, were intended to form a part of the 66 Essay on Man," have no perceptible connection with that poem, and whatever Pope's plan might have been it was not carried out. They were printed at different periods between 1731 and 1735, and were arranged by Pope in their present order in 1743. It is significant that in an age by no means distinguished by morality it was deemed necessary that every poem should point a moral. The noblest wisdom is seen by the light of the imagination, and a great poet is no doubt also a great teacher; but the chief end of poetry is to yield delight, and the power of the poet rests upon the faculty of song, and not upon his didactic precepts. If the versemen of the eighteenth century had understood this truth, our literature might have been spared many a treatise in rhyme written by sound moralists and bad poets. Pope did not understand it, and in spite of an occasional grossness that sometimes borders on obscenity, he invariably poses as a moralist. His moral sayings and his reasoning may be false or feeble, often they are both, but the reader does not open Pope to weigh his opinions, but to enjoy his wit and fancy and his consummate art of expression, and with these delightful gifts the "Moral Essays" abound. None of Pope's poems are more worthy of his fame than the "Imitations of Horace," written in the form of Epistles (1733-38). For happy ease of versification, for keenness of satire, and for variety of illustration, these pieces are unrivalled, and were it not for many grossly abusive passages in which satire degenerates into lampoon, they might be praised without reserve as the finest expression of his satirical genius. The Prologue to the Satires addressed to his friend Dr. Arbuthnot, although often indecently unjust, abounds with familiar lines and passages. In that poem Pope's friends Granville and Garth, Congreve and Swift, Atterbury and Bolingbroke, Gay and Arbuthnot himself are all felicitously mentioned; and there, too, we have the wonder.. d ful portrait of Addison and many cruel lines on Lord Hervey, Burnet, Bentley, Dennis, Theobald and Cibber, and on Ambrose Philips, who 66 "Just writes to make his barrenness appear, And strains from hard-bound brains eight lines a year." Occasionally in the "Imitations," as in the Essay on Man," Pope rises into a strain that is at once beautiful and pathetic. Lines like the following show the poet in his happiest mood ; "Long as to him who works for debt, the day, At an age when most men are in their prime, Pope discovered that "life after the first warm heats are over is all down hill." His bodily condition may account very much for his irritability of temper, and for the trickeries and intrigues that were his meat and drink. He could look at nothing in a clear straightforward way, and could not, it is said, make tea without a stratagem. His miserable body was a constant torment to him, and he was never able to accept his infirmities in a patient manly spirit. In later life he was too feeble to dress or undress without help, and required the support of stays. By night as well as by day he claimed attention, and could not, as Swift said, ride a mile or walk two. Such was the brutality of the age, that the poet's deformity supplied "the dunces with miserable jests," and to Pope every such jest was torture. Truly but |