POPE. 371 



Pope in the character I have read was drawing his ideal 

 woman, for he says at the end that she shall be his muse. 

 The sentiments are those of a bourgeois and of the back 

 parlour, more tha n of the poet s and the muse s bower. A 

 man s mind is known by the company it keeps. 



Now it is very possible that the women of Pope s time 

 were as bad as they could be ; but if God made poets for 

 anything, it was to keep alive the traditions of the pure, 

 the holy, and the beautiful. I grant the influence of the 

 age, but there is a sense in which the poet is of no age, and 

 Beauty, driven from every other home, will never be an 

 outcast and a wanderer, while there is a poet s nature left, 

 will never fail of the tribute at least of a song. It seems 

 to me that Pope had a sense of the neat rather than of the 

 beautiful. His nature delighted more in detecting the 

 blemish than in enjoying the charm. 



However great his merit in expression, I think it 

 impossible that a true poet could have written such a 

 satire as the Dunciad, which is even nastier than it is 

 witty. It is filthy even in a filthy age, and Swift himself 

 could not have gone beyond some parts of it. One s mind 

 needs to be sprinkled with some disinfecting fluid after 

 reading it. I do not remember that any other poet ever 

 made poverty a crime. And it is wholly without 

 discrimination. De Foe is set in the pillory for ever ; and 

 George Wither, the author of that charming poem, &quot; Fair 

 Virtue,&quot; classed among the dunces. And was it not in this 

 age that loose Dick Steele paid his wife the finest 

 compliment ever paid to woman, when he said &quot; that 

 to know her was a liberal education 1 &quot; 



Even in the &quot; Rape of the Lock,&quot; the fancy is that of a 

 wit rather than of a poet. It might not be just to compare 

 his Sylphs with the Fairies of Shakespeare ; but contrast 

 the kind of fancy shown in the poem with that of Drayton s 

 Nymphidia, for example. I will give one stanza of it, 

 describing the palace of the Fairy : 



&quot; The walls of spiders legs were made, 

 Well mortised, and finely laid ; 



