POPE. 377 



often than he makes the second line of the couplet a mere 

 train-bearer to the first. His more ambitious works may be 

 denned as careless thinking carefully versified. Lessing was 

 one of the first to see this, and accordingly he tells us that 

 &quot;his greatj I will not say greatest, merit lay in what we call 

 the mechanic of poetry.&quot;* Lessing, with his usual insight, 

 parenthetically qualifies his statement ; for where Pope, as 

 in the &quot; Rape of the Loci,&quot; found a subject exactly level 

 with his genius, he was able to make what, taken for all in 

 all, is the most perfect poem in the language. 



It will hardly be questioned that the man who writes 

 what is still piquant and rememberable, a century and a 

 quarter after his death, was a man of genius. But there are 

 two modes of uttering such things as cleave to the memory 

 of mankind. They may be said or sung. I do not think 

 that Pope s verse anywhere sings, but it should seem that 

 the abiding presence of fancy in his best work forbids his 

 exclusion from the rank of poet. The atmosphere in which 

 he habitually dwelt was an essentially prosaic one, the 

 language habitual to him was that of conversation and 

 society, so that he lacked the help of that fresher dialect 

 which seems like inspiration in the elder poets. His range 

 of associations was of that narrow kind which is always 

 vulgar, whether it be found in the village or the court. 

 Certainly he has not the force and majesty of Dry den in 

 his better moods, but he has a grace, a finesse, an art of 

 being pungent, a sensitiveness to impressions, that would 

 incline us to rank him with Voltaire (whom in many ways 

 he so much resembles), as an author with whom the gift of 

 writing was primary, and that of 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 

 &quot; Rape of the Lock &quot; sets him even as a poet far above many 

 men more largely endowed with poetic feeling and insight 

 than he. 



* Briefe die neueste Litteratur betreffend, 1759, ii. Brief. See also 

 his more elaborate criticism on the &quot;Essay on Man&quot; (Pope ein 

 Metaphysiker), 1755. 



