POPE. 425 



muse. The sentiments are those of a bourgeois and of 

 the back parlor, more than of the poet and the muse's 

 bower. A man's mind is known by the company it 



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 in- 

 fluence 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 im- 

 possible 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 him- 

 self 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 with- 

 out discrimination. De Foe is set in the pillory forever; 

 and George Wither, the author of that charming poem, 

 " Fair Virtue," 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 

 "that to love her was a liberal education" 1 ? 



Even in the " Rape of the Lock," 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 



