POPE. 313 



that his personalities had all been written in the interests of 

 literature and morality, and from no selfish motive. But it is 

 hard to believe that Theobald would have been deemed worthy 

 of his disgustful pre-eminence &quot;but for the manifest superiority 

 of his edition of Shakespeare, or that Addison would have been 

 so adroitly disfigured unless through wounded self-love. It is 

 easy to conceive the resentful shame which Pope must have felt 

 when Addison so almost contemptuously disavowed all com 

 plicity in his volunteer defence of Cato in a brutal assault on 

 Dennis. Pope had done a mean thing to propitiate a man 

 whose critical judgment he dreaded ; and the great man, in 

 stead of thanking him, had resented his interference as imperti 

 nent. In the whole portrait of Atticus one cannot help feeling 

 that Pope s satire is not founded on knowledge, but rather on 

 what his own sensitive suspicion divined of the opinions of one 

 whose expressed preferences in poetry implied a condemnation 

 of the very grounds of the satirist s own popularity. We shall 

 not so easily give up the purest and most dignified figure of that 

 somewhat vulgar generation, who ranks with Sidney and 

 Spenser, as one of the few perfect gentlemen in our literary 

 annals. A man who could command the unswerving loyalty of 

 honest and impulsive Dick Steele could not have been a coward 

 or a backbiter. The only justification alleged by Pope was of 

 the flimsiest kind, namely, that Addison regretted the introduc 

 tion of the sylphs in the second edition of the Rape of the 

 Lock, saying that the poem was merum sal before. Let anyone 

 ask himself how he likes an author s emendations of any poem 

 to which his ear had adapted itself in its former shape, and he 

 will hardly think it needful to charge Addison Avith any mean 

 motive for his conservatism in this matter. One or two of 

 Pope s letters are so good as to make us regret that he did not 

 oftener don the dressing-gown and slippers in his correspon 

 dence. One in particular, to Lord Burlington, describing a 

 journey on horseback to Oxford with Lintot the bookseller, is 

 full of a lightsome humour worthy of Cowper, almost worthy of 

 Gray. 



Joseph Warton, in summing up at the end of his essay on the 

 genius and writings of Pope, says that the largest part of his 

 works is of the didactic, moral, and satiric ; and, conse 

 quently, not of the most poetic species of poetry ; whence it is 

 manifest \h&\. good sense and judgment were his characteristical 

 excellences rather than fancy and invention? It is plain that in 

 any strict definition there can be only one kind of poetry, and 



