spring warm from his heart, that his letters are "wretched papers" and "unconsidered trifles," but these assertions rarely deceived his friends (they never deceived Swift), and we now know as a fact what Johnson and Cowper guessed at without our knowledge, that Pope's letters are manufactured, and that, in the language of Bowles, the ease is laboured, and the warmth studied. The truth is Pope was blinded by literary vanity. In his eagerness to carry out what Swift shrewdly calls his "schemes of epistolary fame," he resorted to the most pitiful arts, and the result of his pains was to disgrace himself as a man, and to lower his reputation as an author. If we could believe the letters, Pope was one of the wisest and most virtuous of mortals. Submission to the will of God, indifference as to the world's opinion, contempt for literary fame, sincerity towards friends, forgiveness of enemies, an anxiety to live well and to die well-these are the feelings expressed by the writer again and again. "I am ambitious of nothing," he writes, "but the good opinion of good men." "That man," he observes, "makes a mean figure in the eye of reason who is measuring syllables and coupling rhymes when he should be mending his own soul and securing his own immor

tality." "It is not our business," he writes again, "to be guessing what the state of souls shall be, but to be doing what may make our own state happy. We cannot be knowing but we can be virtuous." And in a letter to Martha Blount he says:

"Wit I am sure I want; at least to the degree that I see others have it. I would cut off my own head if it had nothing better than wit in it, and tear out my own heart if it had no better dispositions than to love only myself, and to laugh at all my neighbours."

There are scores of such fine sentiments, for Pope's letters, to quote Johnson's familiar words, "exhibit a perpetual and unclouded effulgence of general benevolence and particular fondness." Unfortunately we know that these sentiments are generally false, and that in the stern language of Mr.

Which may remind the reader of the noble passage in the epistle to Lord Bolingbroke:

"Long, as to him who works for debt, the day,
Long as the night to her whose Love's away,
Long as the year's dull circle seems to run,
When the brisk minor pants for twenty-one:
So slow th' unprofitable moments roll,
That lock up all the functions of my soul;
That keep me from myself; and still delay
Life's instant business to a future day;
That task which as we follow or despise,
The eldest is a fool, the youngest wise;
Which done, the poorest can no wants endure,
And which not done, the richest must be poor."

Elwin, "Pope was accustomed to say what was convenient, without much regard to what is true." When he writes, however, of his father and mother he forgets his literary artifices and displays the honest affection which he undoubtedly felt. To his parents his conduct was uniformly considerate and tender, and Dr. Johnson's saying is as true as it is beautiful, that "life has among its soothing and quiet comforts few things better to give than such a son."

The fact that Pope was a manufacturer of epistles does by no means wholly destroy the interest of his correspondence. He was the first poet of his day; the most powerful intellect of that time was his friend and correspondent for a quarter of a century; he wrote to, and received letters from, the principal wits of the town; he was the friend of Atterbury and Arbuthnot, of Bolingbroke and Gay, of Steele and Parnell; and thus Pope's letters, strained and laboured though they be, but enlivened by the answers of his correspondents, present to us in suggestive fragments a picture of the age for which we may look in vain elsewhere.

It is pleasant to turn from the correspondence of Pope to his poetry. In prose he exhibited but half his strength, in verse he towered far above his com

petitors and contemporaries. We are accustomed to call Pope the poet of artificial life, and the remark is not to be gainsayed. If there had been no cities. there would have been no Pope. He sings of the manners and morals of the town, not of natural scenery, or when he does make an attempt, as in 'Windsor Forest,' to describe the objects of nature, his heart is not in the work. That poem is full of the conventional phraseology now happily rejected by poets. Take a single and brief specimen :

"Not proud Olympus yields a nobler sight,

Though gods assembled grace his towering height,
Than what more humble mountains offer here,
Where, in their blessings, all those gods appear.
See Pan with flocks, with fruits Pomona crown'd,
Here blushing Flora paints th' enamelled ground,
Here Ceres' gifts in waving prospect stand,
And nodding tempt the joyful reaper's hand."

These lines will suffice for a sample of a poem in which, besides Ceres, Pomona, and Pan, we find allusions to Jove, Diana, Phoebus, and other personages whose connection with Windsor it is dif ficult to surmise. This was the poetical vice of the period, and a vice that outlasted it, witness the Odes of Gray; unlike Gray, however, and resembling in this respect his great predecessor Dryden, Pope is incompetent to describe the natural beauty which,

all of us may behold, or that beauty, more wondrous still, which great poets such as Spenser and Wordsworth see with the eye of faith:

"The light that never was on sea or land

The consecration and the Poet's dream."

Of the early poems of Pope the most noteworthy is the Essay on Criticism.' It is said to have been written before the poet was twenty, but if, as Mr. Elwin asserts, it exhibits his capacity at twenty-three, our wonder at the force it represents is but little diminished. A poem published one hundred and sixty years ago that contains so many lines still familiar in our mouths must have been preserved by the salt of genius. It is true that the source of many of these lines can be traced to other minds, but Addison is right in saying that the known truths in the poem are placed in so beautiful a light that they have all the graces of novelty; nor is it difficult to agree with Pope himself that "it seems not so much the perfection of sense to say things that had never been said before, as to express those best that have been said oftenest."

"In every work regard the writer's end,

Since none can compass more than they intend,"

is a piece of sound counsel, which scarcely seems to have guided Mr. Elwin in his comments on this