POPE. QQ7 



I was once in Italy myself, but I thank God my abode there 

 was only nine days. 



But Pope fills a very important place in the history of English 

 poetry, and must be studied by everyone who would come to a 

 clear knowledge of it. I have since read over every line that 

 Pope ever wrote, and every letter written by or to him, and that 

 more than once. If I have not come to the conclusion that he 

 is the greatest of poets, I believe that I am at least in a condition 

 to allow him every merit that is fairly his. I have said that 

 Pope as a literary man represents precision and grace of ex 

 pression ; but as a poet he represents something more, nothing 

 less, namely, than one of those eternal controversies of taste 

 which will last as long as the imagination and understanding 

 divide men between them. It is not a matter to be settled by 

 any amount of argument or demonstration. There are born 

 Popists or Wordsworthians, Lockists or Kantists, and there is 

 nothing more to be said of the matter. 



Wordsworth was not in a condition to do Pope justice. A 

 man brought up in sublime mountain solitudes, and whose 

 nature was a solitude more vast than they, walking an earth 

 which quivered with the throe of the French Revolution, the 

 child of an era of profound mental and moral movement, it 

 could not be expected that he should be in sympathy with the 

 poet of artificial life. Moreover, he was the apostle of imagi 

 nation, and came at a time when the school which Pope founded 

 had degenerated into a mob of mannerists who wrote with ease, 

 and who with their congenial critics united at once to decry 

 poetry which brought in the dangerous innovation of having a 

 soul in it. 



But however it may be with poets, it is very certain that a 

 reader is happiest whose mind is broad enough to enjoy the 

 natural school for its nature, and the artificial for its artificiality, 

 provided they be only good of their kind. At any rate, we must 

 allow that the man who can produce one perfect work is either 

 a great genius or a very lucky one ; and so far as we who read 

 are concerned, it is of secondary importance which. And Pope 

 has done this in the Rape of the Lock. For wit, fancy, inven 

 tion, and keeping, it has never been surpassed. I do not say 

 there is in it poetry of the highest order, or that Pope is a poet 

 whom anyone would choose as the companion of his best hours. 4 

 There is no inspiration in it, no trumpet-call, but for pure enter- \ 

 tainment it is unmatched. There are two kinds of genius. The 

 first and highest may be said to speak out of the eternal to the 



