316 POPE. 



verse secondary. No other poet that I remember ever wrote 

 prose which is so purely prose as his ; and yet, in any impartial 

 criticism, the * Rape of the Lock sets him even as a poet far 

 above many men more largely endowed with poetic feeling and 

 insight than he. 



A great deal must be allowed to Pope for the age in which he 

 lived, and not a little, I think, for the influence of Swift. In his 

 own province he still stands unapproachably alone. If to be 

 the greatest satirist of individual men, rather than of human 

 nature, if to be the highest expression which the life of the court 

 and the ball-room has ever found in verse, if to have added 

 more phrases to our language than any other but Shakespeare, 

 if to have charmed four generations make a man a great poet, 

 then he is one. He was the chief founder of an artificial style 

 of writing, which in his hands was living and powerful, because 

 he used it to express artificial modes of thinking and an artificial 

 state of society. Measured by any high standard of imagina 

 tion, he will be found wanting ; tried by any test of wit, he is 

 unrivalled. 



