in print, those whom he did not love, nor to have praised those whom he did not esteem. Certainly, his independence secured him from the servile drudgery of offering praise and congratulations for sale. He was a fond and faithful friend to the chosen few. I never in my life,' said Bolingbroke, 'knew a man that had so tender a heart for his particular friends, or a more general friendship for mankind.' It may be remembered, against many faults, that, while resentful and irritable to others, he was uniformly gentle and reverential to his venerable parents:

To rock the cradle of reposing age;

With lenient arts extend a mother's breath,

Make languor smile and soothe the bed of death;
Explore the thought, explain the asking eye,
And keep at least one parent from the sky.'

His generous sentiments would seem to have been the colors of his better and present moments. He had the feeling and the admiration of moral excellence, and has described it admirably; but the wingless brute was stronger than the winged seraph, and was constantly dragging him down.

Influence.-To Pope the English language will always be indebted. He, more than any other before or since, discovered its power of melody, enriched it with poetical elegances, with happy combinations of words, and developed its capacities for terse and brilliant expression. In the form of his verse,-the rhymed decasyllabic line, which he made for a time supreme,— his influence is no longer felt; but in the taste he created for correct diction and polished versification, his influence will never

cease.

By his satires, he was a public benefactor. The poet may influence the mind by virtue directly, by warnings and exhortations; or indirectly, by scourging vice and exposing folly. The latter is the method of the satirist, who is the Judge Lynch of civilized society. The case-hardened, with whom serious admonition is vain, he exposes to the public gaze for the public sport, not to effect any improvement in them, but, by showing their example to be intrinsically contemptible, to prevent the communication of their disease to others. Thus Pope was serviceable to his generation by satirizing its false taste, false virtue, false happiness, false life; and, in the character of satirist, may claim a moral purpose:

'Hear this and tremble, you who escape the laws;
Yes, while I live, no rich or noble knave
Shall walk the world in credit to his grave.'1

We must acknowledge his service to us in reflecting, with curious completeness, the thoughts of his day. He resembles a plastic material, which has taken, with singular sharpness and fidelity, the main peculiarities of the time. A semi-Deist, without well knowing what Deism meant, he exhibits in the Essay on Man the religious creed of the age,-a creed which, by refining the Deity into an abstraction, leaves religion soulless,-a bare skeleton of logic. In his translation of Homer's Iliad, he exemplifies in its utmost excellence the theory of artificial poetry. His various satires are significant of the social structure.

In spiritual interests, his influence will ever be one of mixed good and evil. The reason is simple, he had not spiritual healthfulness. No man can inspire and sustain his fellow-beings with high and happy emotions, who has not religious realization, and a just sense of the dignity of human nature. characteristic view of human life:

'Behold the child, by nature's kindly law,
Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw:
Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight,
A little louder, but as empty quite;
Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper age,
And beads and prayer-books are the toys of age;
Pleased with this bauble still, as that before,

Till tired he sleeps, and life's poor play is o'er.'

Here is his

The 'rattle,' the 'straw,' the 'beads,' and the 'prayer-books' are equally baubles, and end alike in weariness and death. This is deliberate and final,-the sum of life's poor play'! The greatest men have indeed had a sense of the pettiness of our lives; no great soul could ever be without it; but mark the difference: life is a brief dream, vanishing into the vast abyss of ever-present mystery,-be humble; it is a shifting scene, but Heaven is behind the veil of phenomena,-be of good cheer amid your frailties; you are gifted with an immortal spirit, but you stand in the shadow of the great darkness,-be lowly wise. We would have it considered well, that he who would give enduring and efficient utterance to those echoing sentiments which search the heart, and in virtue of which poetry fulfils its

1 Pope's Imitations of Horace.

truest mission of soothing and elevating the soul; he who would gain the orbit of the high, the holy, and the real, see them in their eternal beauty, feel them in their universal interest, and exert the measure of their power on the minds of his readers,— must have first a profound reverence for the divine, and a profound sympathy for the human,-its hopes and its sorrows, its infirmities and its aspirations.

What we would commend to the student's careful remembrance, as of practical moment, is Pope's admirable unity of method. He searched the pages of Dryden for the best fabric of verse, and, having found it, used it habitually. He read, first to know, then to judge,- always with reference to a fixed object. As he read, he possessed himself of the beauties of speech, gleaned what he thought to be brilliant or useful, and preserved it all in a regular collection. His intelligence was perpetually on the wing. Not content with well-done, he endeavored to do better. In his highest flights, he wished to go higher. Having written, he revised often, retouched every part with an unsparing hand and an attentive eye. Here is a specimen indicative of his continual corrections and critical erasures:

The wrath of Peleus' son, the direful spring

Of all the Grecian woes, O Goddess, sing;

That wrath which hurl'd to Pluto's gloomy reign

The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain,'1

"The stern Pelides' rage, O Goddess, sing,

wrath

Of all the woes of Greece the fatal spring,

Grecian

That strewed with warriors dead the Phrygian plain,

heroes

And peopled the dark hell with heroes slain."2

fill'd the shady hell with chiefs untimely

Milton, Addison, Tasso, Balzac, Pascal, felt similar anxieties. The first was solicitous after correct punctuation, the second after the minutiae of the press. The manuscripts of the third, still preserved, are illegible from the vast number of corrections. Balzac, dissatisfied with his first thoughts, would expend a week on a single page, and Pascal frequently occupied twenty days on one

Iliad, as printed.

*Corresponding lines of the original manuscript, the words in italics being erased, and those under them adopted instead. Between this copy and the printed page, was, of course, an intermediate manuscript.

of his Provincial Letters. They realized that posterity will respect only those who

File off the mortal part

Of glowing thought with Attic art.'

'A little thing gives perfection,' said an ancient philosopher, 'but perfection is not a little thing.'

CRITICAL PERIOD: SECOND PHASE.

CHAPTER III.

FEATURES.

What do we look for in studying the history of a past age? Is it to learn the political transactions and characters of the leading public men? Is it to make ourselves acquainted with the life and being of the time? . . . I take up a volume of Dr. Smollet, or a volume of the 'Spectator,' and say the fiction carries a greater amount of truth in solution, than the volume which purports to be all true. Out of the fictitious book I get the expression of the life of the time; of the manners; of the movement, the dress, the pleasures, the ridicules of society; the old times live again, and I travel in the old country of England. Can the heaviest historian do more for me?--Thackeray.

Politics. A period of Whig supremacy.

Pressed by the

people and abandoned by the crown, the Tories were unable to take any share in the government. Strong in numbers and in property, they had scarcely a single man of distinguished talents. in business or debate. The preponderance of intellect was Whig.

Internally with the exception of one or two ineffectual attempts to disturb the tranquillity-a time of political torpor. Faction had sunk into repose.

Two ministers give lustre to the administrative policy, Robert Walpole and William Pitt. The first loved peace, and made his country prosperous; the second loved war, and made her glorious.

Society. For literary merit, a dark night between two sunny days. The age of princely patronage had passed; that of general intelligence had not arrived. A poet was a wild ass wedded to his desolate freedom; a ragged, squalid fellow who lodged in a garret up four flights of stairs, dined in a cellar on musty pudding among footmen out of place, wore dirty linen and a greasy coat, stood at restaurant windows snuffing the scent of what he could not afford to taste; slept, like Savage, amid the ashes of a glass-house in December, died in a hospital, and was buried, not in Westminster Abbey, but in a parish vault. Such was the fate of many a writer who, had he lived thirty years earlier, might have sat in Parliament; and, had he written in our day, would