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accept the general verdict without much acquaintance with his works at first hand. The universal sway and triumph of Dulness are thus commemorated:

"She comes! she comes! the sable throne behold

Of Night primeval and of Chaos old!
Before her Fancy's gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying rainbows die away.
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
The meteor drops and in a flash expires.
As one by one, at dread Medea's strain,
The sickening stars fade off th' ethereal plain;
As Argus' eyes, by Hermes' wand opprest,
Close one by one to everlasting rest;
Thus, at her fell approach and secret might,
Art after Art goes out, and all is night.
See skulking Truth to her own cavern fled,
Mountains of casuistry heaped o'er her head!
Philosophy that leaned on Heaven before,
Shrinks to her second cause and is no more.
Physic of Metaphysic begs defence,
And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense!
See Mystery to Mathematics fly!

In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave and die.
Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,
And unawares Morality expires.

Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine;
Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored;
Light dies before thy uncreating word;
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall,
And universal Darkness buries all."*

The sound of these noble lines, which are likened by Mr. Thackeray to a silver trumpet "ringing defiance to falsehood and tyranny, deceit, dulness, and superstition," must have been in

Pope is, we think, seen at his best and puts forth his greatest strength in the Satires and Epistles of Horace. They show how thoroughly in one direction he appreciated the genius of the great Roman poet, and how admirably he was able to use it without being overmastered by it. Truly does Mr. Pattison say that these Imitations' are among the most original of his writings, and they are assuredly the most interesting. If the verse that will bear to be read the oftenest may be accounted the best (a rule

Mr. Austin's ear when he penned the last page and finest portion of his poem 'The Golden Age.' His lines read as if the spirit of Pope had inspired the poetical ardour of his disciple. The poet has been lamenting our greed of money and political pusillanimity, and hints at the possibility of Britain, oppressed with the weight of her gold, falling into the hands of barbarians. Pity that the first couplet is marred by a false rhyme.

"Perish the thought! O, rather let me see
Conspiring myriads bristling on the sea,
Our tranquil coasts bewildered by alarms,
And Britain, singly, face a world in arms!

What if a treacherous Heaven befriend our foes?

Let us go down in glory, as we rose!

And if that doom-the best that could betide-
Be to our Fame by envious Fate denied,
Then come, primeval clouds and seasons frore,
And wrap in gloom our luckless land once more!
Come, every wind of Heaven that rudely blows,
Plunge back our Isle in never-ending snows!
Rage, Eurus, rage! fierce Boreas descend!
With glacial mists lost Albion befriend!
E'en of its name be every trace destroyed,

And Dark sit brooding o'er the formless Void!"

not without exceptions, and dependent in no small measure upon the capacity of the reader), then does Pope merit the highest praise for these masterly productions. Here we have the satirist's finest wit, his most graceful versification, many of his most familiar sayings, some of his sharpest stings. Nowhere in his works does he display such power, such skill in praising a friend and in annihilating a foe. He stabs a reputation or confers one with a word. To be praised by Pope as Arbuthnot, Bolingbroke, Gay, and Bethel are praised in these satires, is to secure a literary immortality; to be laughed at by him is to be laughed at by the world for evermore. The earnestness of the poet is conspicuous throughout, and, we must add, his spite. He does not play with his weapon or merely menace his enemy; but thrusts at him with all his strength. His sincerity is not that of a great moralist, but of a great hater; he shoots with poisoned arrows, and the slightest wound he inflicts is mortal. "He knowingly threw away fame to indulge his piques," says Mr. Pattison; and yet so dear to him was the art he sneers at as an idle trade, that one cannot help suspecting he would have flung a friend aside to save a couplet. In the Prologue Pope declares that he "thought a lie in verse or prose the same," and so in one sense

he did, for he was equally indifferent to both. Yet there is generally truth enough in his satires to give them point. His character of Addison, for instance, false in the main, is not without sufficient veracity in the details to give it currency; and if Dennis, Theobald, Gildon, and others, got more than they deserved, they were fair game for Pope, and could scarcely complain with reason because he hitched them into his rhymes. In these epistles, as in the 'Dunciad,' Pope is sometimes absolutely unjust. To class Burnet with such men as Oldmixon and Cooke was to disgrace himself more than the bishop; to sneer at "slashing Bentley" was to betray his own ignorance. Satire, to carry weight, must have at least some foundation in truth, and not even Pope's consummate art can damage the reputation of a sincere evangelist like Whitefield, or of a man of genius like Defoe. Defects such as these must be deplored; but they are well-nigh forgotten in the blaze of genius that illuminates these satires, and there is tenderness as well as brilliancy, which may be deemed all the more precious because exhibited so rarely. Beautiful are Pope's references to the life and death of his father, to his mother's reposing age, to the medical skill of Arbuthnot, to life's "instant business," to the friends whom he loved

and honoured. Effusions such as these serve to soften down the severity and personality of the satire; they draw us towards the writer, and create that sympathy which is an infinitely higher tribute to the poet than the cold award of admiration. Moreover, the knowledge of the period to be gained from these poems can scarcely be over-estimated. To study them thoroughly is to study the age of which Pope was the first literary representative. He stands, in Mr. Pattison's judgment, as a landmark in the literary and social history of England, and he observes in his admirable introduction to the Satires and Epistles:

"There has accumulated round Pope's poems a mass of biographical anecdote such as surrounds the writings of no other English author. The student of our literature will find that his enjoyment of the wit of the Satires and Epistles is increased exactly in proportion as he extends his knowledge of the period."

There is also another purpose to be served, one of no slight importance in our time, by a careful study of Pope. That poetry is an art will be universally accepted as a truism; but much of our recent verse that has attained a large share of popularity is composed by men who are not artists. They say what they feel without considering what is fitting to be said; they lack the sense of proportion, of con

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