liking of those whose opinion was of moment his road was open. Congreve gave him a gentlemanly hand of welcome; Addison and Steele praised him, and valued his few contributions to the Spectator. Against Addison presently Pope was able to reckon three several offences. He had preferred the pastorals of Philips; he disapproved of the changes in The Rape of the Lock. Finally, his disclaimer of Pope's officious and vulgar championship of Cato against the attacks of Dennis confirmed a grudge which years later found expression in the famous lines in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. Bolingbroke was a friend of whom he boasted, yet Pope did not hesitate to serve him shabbily in his turn. Arbuthnot claimed as much of his affection as any one, yet even he could not count upon the sincerity of the man who, it was said, "could hardly drink a cup of tea without a stratagem." With Swift his relations appear to have been unbroken, though at times strained. They wrote to each other regularly for years; from the savage dean Pope received much encouragement, especially in the writing of The Dunciad. Strange alliance of wasp and bloodhound, each venomous in his kind for the good of the world!

There were two women, besides his mother, towards whom Pope showed some feeling. His relations with the one are known, to the other only surmised. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was a woman exceptional in her age rather than in her own right. It was an age remarkable for the frivolity of women, especially women of rank and fashion. The acquirements which brought fame then would pass unnoticed now, would have made her hardly exceptional in the reign of Elizabeth. A certain beauty, brilliancy in conversation, charm of manner, she must have had to command even a formal and half-fancied devotion from the cold-blooded Pope. Some such devotion he professed, and for years loaded its object with praises and attentions, literary and otherwise. The lady appears to have

been cool; willing to be flattered, but not willing to flatter in turn. In the end, some more obvious expression of her equable indifference stung the poet into one of his chill rages of malice. Thereafter he lost no chance to assail in prose and verse her personal appearance, her literary pretensions, her character; and when, as too often happened, she stooped to retort in kind, he received her with rounds of elegantly-balanced Billingsgate. Towards Martha Blount his feeling seems to have been more genuine, his relation to her faintly suggesting that of Swift to Stella. She belonged to one of the little circle of Catholic families in which Pope moved till success opened all circles to him. His early acquaintance with her ripened into an intimacy guarded, but real. He did not marry her, though there is a tradition that he offered her marriage shortly before his death. His feeling for her, whatever it was not, was certainly constant. To Martha Blount he wrote his tenderest lines, to her he bequeathed most of his property.

III.

If, then, Pope was incapable of sustained thought or deep feeling, why is he still known as a great poet? Simply because he succeeded in doing one thing supremely well. He brought to the point of perfection a poetic instrument which, with all its limitations, is still unapproached in its own field. For elegance, for terseness, for antithetical force, for a sort of conventionalized grace, the Pope couplet is admirable; as the best thing of its kind, however little one may care for the kind, is always admirable. That Pope often forced it to improper uses is not the fault of the instrument. One cannot elicit harmony from a silver flute, no matter how neat its construction, how clear its tone. The service Pope did to English poetry was, on the whole, an ill one. Everybody found it possible to draw some sweetness from that little flute. The construction of heroic couplets became a mania. The eighteenth century

versifier collected them as his brother-connoisseur collected tulips; and, oddly enough as it seems to us, found as ready a market for them.

A poem of Pope's is a collection of brilliant fragments. He kept a note-book full of clever distiches set down at random. Presently so many couplets are taken and classified, others are added, a title is found, and the world applauds. If we except The Rape of the Lock and possibly the Epistle to Arbuthnot, none of his poems can be called organic in structure. The patching is neatly done, but the result is patchwork. The Essay on Man, therefore, which most of his contemporaries considered his greatest work, appears to us a mosaic of cleverly phrased platitudes and epigrams. Many of the couplets have become proverbial; the work as a whole cannot be taken seriously. "But the supposition is," says Lowell, "that in the Essay on Man Pope did not himself know what he was writing. He was only the condenser and epigrammatizer of Bolingbroke - a very fitting St. John for such a Gospel." It is to another and a less pretentious sort of work that we must turn to find the great versifier at his best.

The Rape of the Lock affords exactly the field in which Pope was fitted to excel. His artificiality, his sophistication, mar the Homer translations, at times almost to the point of burlesque. In place of the hearty surge and swing of the old pagan we are given the mincing neatness of a city-bred courtier. To illustrate the version properly we should have to picture Hector in ruffles and dress rapier, Achilles in a full-bottomed wig. It is these very qualities, on the other hand, which make the story of Belinda and her Baron a perfect thing of its kind. Here is the convenwith which how

The

tional society which Pope knew, and ever he might sneer at it he really sympathized. polished trivialities, the shallow gallantry, the hardly veiled coarseness of the London which Pope understood, are here to the life. And it is in this poem that we come closest to

the man himself. Depth of emotion, of imagination, of thought, are absent, and properly so. But here are the flashing wit, the ingenious fancy, the malicious innuendo, the epigrammatic thrust, which are Pope. The author of such a poem may be pitied, censured, disliked. but hardly despised or forgotten.