Lives through all life, extends through all extent, Secure to be as bless'd as thou canst bear; All nature is but art unknown to thee: All chance direction, which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good.4. It could sum up a life, a character, a tragedy. Equally it immortalized fame and infamy, affection and glory. Whatever the subject, he could warrant it to supply appropriate music. Courage was needed to charge the heavy jingle with The Rape of the Lock; and the trust was justified. Nothing could be lighter and daintier. The setting is preposterously and delightfully monumental. An archaeologist might draw up from the poem a treatise on the toilette service of a lady of fashion in the golden days, when, near the scene of the epic, Great Anna, whom three realms obey, Did sometimes counsel take-and sometimes tea.5 If no record survived of the game of ombre, it could be reconstructed from the encounter here between the heroine and the Baron. The description of the race of Sylphs, the tutelary guardians of sovereign beauty, is as ample. There would seem even to be danger of suffocation of the plot by its sumptuous properties. Yet the nicest proportion is maintained between accessaries and principals. Belinda, the object of universal care by the powers of air and of drawing-rooms, down to obsequious Sir Plume, of amber snuff-box justly vain, With earnest eyes, and round unthinking face," reigns in the tale supreme. For conquest of hearts she hardly needs the spell of the two unequalled locks, whence the temptation to a shameless outrage, and to mortal strife, only to be healed by the snatching-up of the radiant trail of hair into the starry heavens. Her general charms would have sufficed: On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore, Look on her face, and you'll forget them all." The prettiest of fantastic trifles; and it wears its panoply of iron heroics as if of gossamer ! But a still bolder application of the measure was to the translation of the Iliad. For an indifferent scholar to have undertaken the work at all was in itself audacious; his choice of the heroic metre was almost an insult. Nothing, however, succeeds like success; and indisputably the adventure succeeded. During a century and a half Pope's version held the field; who can say that it has been superseded yet? Even the learned have been in the habit of dealing gently with its sciolism. The facile consistency of the rhythm, though regular to monotony, was accepted in exchange for the long sinuous sweep of the old Ionic. A consciousness that deep down lay the germ of a poet's genuine fellowship with the great original has acted on criticism as an opiate. There the clue will be found to the wonders he wrought in the realm of poetry at large; to the evils to which his triumphant example conduced. Partly the fashion set by Dryden, partly the decay of Elizabethan spontaneity, and the divorce of verse from music, put the heroic couplet into his hands for his instrument. He accepted it, with less choice perhaps even than his mighty predecessor. At all events, he soon learnt it would serve him well. But it was no chance, no necessary property of the metre, that, under his touch, it reflected almost every human mood. Multitudes of other writers have declared how jaundiced they were with their fellows and with existence; and have never been heeded. The world was compelled to mark every jeer and groan of his : Behold the child, by Nature's kindly law, Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage; Till tir'd he sleeps, and life's poor play is o'er.8 Disposition and circumstances inclined him to unmask and mock at weaknesses. But there was genius also in whatever phase his cross-grainedness assumed. It might be virulence, as at Duchess Sarah : From loveless youth to unrespected age, Sometimes it was less contempt than malicious amusement at the manifold forms-all crazy-which social folly may take: A salmon's belly, Helluo, was thy fate; The courtier smooth, who forty years had shin'd Just brought out this, when scarce his tongue could stir; 'If—where I'm going-I could serve you, Sir?' I give and I devise,'-old Euclio said, And sighed my lands and tenements to Ned.' Rarely, something may be infused warmer than sarcasm : In the worst inn's worst room with mat half hung, Of mimic statesmen and their merry King. No wit to flatter left of all his store. No fool to laugh at, which he valued more. 11 Is there not a spice of pity here for the wasted life—perhaps for the teller of the tale too, to whom every gift thrown away upon the profligate had been denied, and, in fancy, it seemed, would have been a joy? A first impression of Pope is of a satirist visiting the blame for his many infirmities and privations on the whole of society, and finding in his habitual metre an instrument dedicated to his vindictiveness. It is indisputable that he commonly used criticism as a hangman's noose. But in a fine, if chequered, nature like his a spring of tenderness will rise hard by one of bitterness. The thundercloud of wrath which darkens the Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady breaks to let tears shower down: What can atone, oh, ever injured shade! No friend's complaint, no kind domestic tear To midnight dances, and the public show? What though no sacred earth allow thee room, |