POPE. 309 



Like Cato give his little Senate laws, 

 And sit attentive to his own applause, 

 While wits and templars every sentence raise, 

 And wonder with a foolish face of praise ; 

 Who but must laugh if such a man there be ? 

 Who would not weep if Atticus were he ? 



With the exception of the somewhat technical image in the 

 second verse of Fame blowing the fire of genius, which too much 

 puts us in mind of the frontispieces of the day, surely nothing 

 better of its kind was ever written. How applicable it was to 

 Addison I shall consider in another place. As an accurate 

 intellectual observer and describer of personal weaknesses, Pope 

 stands by himself in English verse. 



In his epistle on the characters of women, no one who has 

 ever known a noble woman, nay, I should almost say no one 

 who ever had a mother or sister, will find much to please him. 

 The climax of his praise rather degrades than elevates. 



O, blest in temper, whose unclouded ray 

 Can make to-morrow cheerful as to-day, 

 She who can love a sister s charms, or hear 

 Sighs for a daughter with unwounded ear, 

 She who ne er answers till a husband cools, 



^ Or, if she rules him, never shows she rules, 



Charms by accepting-, by submitting sways, 

 Yet has her humour most when she obeys ; 

 Lets fops or fortune fly which way they will, 

 Disdains all loss of tickets or codille, 

 Spleen, vapors, or small-pox, above them all 

 And mistress of herself, though china fall. 



The last line is very witty and pointed but consider what an 

 ideal of womanly nobleness he must have had, who praises his 

 heroine for not being jealous of her daughter. Addison, in 

 commending Pope s * Essay on Criticism/ says, speaking of us 

 who live in the latter ages of the world : We have little else 

 to do left us but to represent the common sense of mankind, in 

 more strong, more beautiful, or more uncommon lights. I think 

 he has here touched exactly the point of Pope s merit, and, in 

 doing so, tacitly excludes him from the position of poet, in the 

 highest sense. Take two of Jeremy Taylor s prose sentences 

 about the Countess of Carbery, the lady in Milton s Comus : 

 1 The religion of this excellent lady was of another constitution : 

 it took root downward in humility, and brought forth fruit 

 upward in the substantial graces of a Christian, in charity and 

 justice, in chastity and modesty, in fair friendships and sweetness 

 of society. . . . And though she had the greatest judgment, and 

 the greatest experience of things and persons I ever yet knew in 

 a person of her youth and sex and circumstances, yet, as if she 



