It shows the influence of a man of genius both over contemporaries and posterity, that the reputation of Theobald has never recovered from the effects of this blow. He was undoubtedly a very

ordinary poet, and as a critic the best that can be said of him is that he was as poor as the average members of that fraternity. But as an editor there had been none before to compare with him, and there have been very few since, amid the countless number who have attacked the text of the great dramatist. His edition of Shakespeare, which came out in 1733, effectually put Pope's in the shade then, and has been ever since the storehouse upon which later commentators have drawn for their readings, even while engaged in depreciating the man to whom they owe the corrections they have adopted. For Theobald was on the whole one of the acutest as well as one of the most painstaking of textual critics. Yet in consequence of Pope's attack he was held up at the time as one of the dullest of mortals, and is often termed so now by men who are duller than he ever conceived of any one's being. One of the last acts of Pope's life was to dethrone him from the position to which he had been raised. The proceeding was eminently characteristic of the poet. His publication of the fourth book of the 'Dunciad' in 1742 led to a pamphlet, in the shape of a letter addressed to him, by Colley Cibber. So stung was he by the laureate's attack that he recast the whole 'Dunciad' in 1743, with the fourth book added; and in place of Theobald put his later antagonist, whose qualities and attainments were almost exactly the reverse of those of his original hero.

The publication of the Dunciad' marks the turning-point in Pope's literary career. Henceforth his writings were of a philosophical cast, like the 'Essay on Man,' which came out in four parts from 1732 to 1734; or semi-philosophical and semi-satirical, as in the 'Moral Essays'; or mainly satirical, as in the 'Imitations of Horace.' These imitations were wonderful exhibitions of ingenuity and skill. Pope took particular satires and epistles of the Latin poet, and cleverly applied to contemporary characters and to modern times and conditions the sentiments expressed by his model. In the composition of them his peculiar powers shone out at their best. One or two of these pieces are in a measure autobiographical. An offshoot of the 'Imitations' - the 'Prologue to the Satires,' printed below is especially marked by this characteristic, and on the whole is the most striking of all. It labors at present, as indeed all satirical work must eventually labor, under the general ignorance that has come to prevail about facts and persons once widely known; and the sting that once caused keen pain to the victim and keener delight to contemporaries, is now not appreciated by the mass of even educated readers. Still the point and venom are there; and so long as fuller

knowledge is accessible, change of time or circumstance can never destroy the pungency and force of the lines, however much they may impair belief in the justice of the attack. The picture, for instance, of Addison under the name of Atticus, found in this prologue, may be as grossly unfair as his partisans maintain; but while letters live, that cruel characterization will never be dissociated from his memory, and will always suggest doubt even when it does not carry conviction.

The greatness of Addison has made this portrait familiar, and its references easily understood. There are in Pope's works plenty of similar passages, almost if not quite as powerful in their way; but the subtle irony of personalities, that once made them widely read and keenly enjoyed, now falls unheeded, save by the few who have taken the pains to become fully acquainted with the minor characters and events of the time. The satirist, in truth, must always sacrifice to some extent the future to the present. If Pope himself appreciated the fact, he must have felt that for the coming loss he was receiving some compensation in the actual terror he inspired. About the extent of that there can be no question. He was dreaded as no author before or since has been dreaded, and he exulted in the consciousness of the power he wielded. "Yes, I am proud," he said in the 'Epilogue to the Satires,'—

I must be proud, to see

Men not afraid of God, afraid of me:

Safe from the bar, the pulpit, and the throne,
Yet touched and shamed by ridicule alone.»

It was an obvious answer to all this,-and Pope did not fail to have his attention called to it, that a somewhat similar statement could be made about a mad dog. Nor at the time could the possession of this power conduce to a really enviable reputation, outside of the comparatively limited circle with which he was closely connected, and which naturally shared in his sentiments and prejudices. During his life it is plain that suspicions were entertained, even by many most disposed to admire him, that he was not as attractive in his character as he was in his writings. In spite of the respect paid to its sting, a hornet is not a creature to which any popular sympathy clings. This feeling about him has increased since the devious course he often pursued has been in these later times completely exposed.

The character of Pope is indeed the most peculiar and puzzling of that of any author of our literature. His impatience under attack was excessive; and when his hostility was once aroused, the virulence of his dislike or hatred seemed thenceforth never to experience abatement. Occasionally too he expressed himself with a ferocity

that bore a close resemblance to malignity.

The violence of his

language, indeed, not unfrequently impaired the effectiveness of his invective. It certainly sometimes exceeded the bounds of decency and sense. The terms in which he came to speak of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, to whom he had once professed something more than friendship, were simply unpardonable, no matter what the real or fancied injury he may have suffered. There is something to be said in palliation of his course, in fact something in the case of certain persons which approaches justification. The age was a coarse one; and literary combatants used towards each other the coarsest language. Pope himself had early been subjected to contumely out of all proportion to the provocation he had given. By Dennis in his remarks upon the 'Essay on Criticism' he had been styled a "humpbacked toad.» Comments upon his personal deformities — and such were not infrequent-he took deeply to heart; and these he not only never forgave, he took care to repay in kind the abuse of which he had been made the object. But on every side he was thinskinned. It was his abnormal sensitiveness to criticism that led to the long war he carried on with the petty writers of the time, whom he classed together under the general name of dunces. The contest was only saved from being wholly ignoble by the marvelous ability he brought to the work of waging it. But outside of any pretexts furnished by the action of his opponents, he loved personalities for their own sake. "Touch me," he wrote, "and no minister so sore.» He adds:

"Whoe'er offends, at some unlucky time
Slides into verse, and hitches in a rhyme;

Sacred to ridicule his whole life long,

And the sad burthen of some merry song."

The most singular thing about his character was, that while in his controversies he was at times moved by some of the meanest passions that can stir the heart, he sincerely regarded himself as actuated by the purest and loftiest motives. It was, to use his own words, the strong antipathy of good to bad, that led him to attack those who had incurred his dislike, either on social, or political, or literary grounds. It is needless to add that in his opinion those who had incurred his dislike were invariably contemptible and vile. In this matter he may or may not have imposed upon others; but there is little reason to doubt that he imposed upon himself. No one was ever more under the influence of that pleasing self-flattery which tempts a man to give to his ill-nature the name of virtuous indignation. According to his own account he was engaged in a holy war against vice, in whatever station of life it presented itself. Nor is

this all. He himself was, if anything, more fond of the reputation of being a good than a great man; and in order to secure the name of it, stood constantly ready to sacrifice the thing. His life was largely made up of a series of strategic devices to persuade the public that he was by nature incapable of the very acts he was engaged in perpetrating. If these things contributed to the benefit of his reputation with his contemporaries, they have damaged him irretrievably with posterity, now that his devious tracks have been fully explored.

This characteristic was most fully exemplified in his epistolary correspondence,—both in its matter and the means he took to secure its publication. His letters are not really letters; they are rather little essays, short and somewhat tedious moral discourses. In fact, Pope, when he wrote prose, wrote with his left hand. The difference between it and his verse is everywhere plainly marked, but nowhere more so than in the correspondence, which was brought out under his own supervision. Never were letters more artificial. They are particularly distinguished for the lofty moral sentiments they contain. The impression they give of him is of a man animated by the most exalted feelings that belong to humanity. Yet we know now that they were never written as they were published. The correspondence he carried on in his youth with Wycherley was so altered that the parts the two writers played were completely reversed; and until a recent period all biographers and literary historians have been deceived by the mutilations of the originals then made. It was even worse in the subsequent publication of his correspondence. He had recalled the letters he wrote; and when time had made it safe, he brought them out with dates changed, with contents dismembered, and addressed to eminent persons then dead who had never had the pleasure of receiving them while living. The elaborate scheme he planned and carried out so as to appear in the light of being forced for his own protection to publish this correspondence, reads like the plot of a cheap and particularly villainous melodrama. For us the effect of all these elaborate devices has been rendered absolutely nugatory by the accidental discovery, in the middle of this century, of transcripts of the original letters made before they were returned. It is the barest act of justice to Pope to state that there was much in his surroundings to explain these peculiarities in his proceedings, though it is impossible to condone them. His family professed a persecuted religion; and in the anti-Catholic reaction that followed the expulsion of James II., their situation must often have been disagreeable. The boy was necessarily brought up in that atmosphere of evasion and intrigue by which the weak strive to protect themselves from the strong, seeking to secure by trickery what could not be wrested from law. It was not a school to encourage the development

of openness and manliness. Indirection to those thus nurtured tends to become a second nature. Besides this, there were bodily defects which probably exerted an influence of their own upon the poet's nature. His life was, as he himself said, a long disease; and his personal appearance was such that his enemies delighted to call him a monster. Deformity of the body sometimes reacts upon the character; and Pope seems to have been one to whom this principle in a measure applies. On the other hand, there is a good deal to be said in his favor. In many respects he was an example to even good men. Never was there a more pious and devoted son. He constantly interested himself in behalf of the unfortunate who had gained his sympathy or had engaged his respect. Furthermore, he early secured the esteem of a number of persons whose friendship was always an honor and was sometimes fame; and there must have been much in his character to inspire respect and affection, or he could not have earned a regard which was never given lightly, and would have been withdrawn had there not existed qualities to retain it.

From Pope the man it is much more satisfactory to turn to Pope the writer. The first thing that here arrests the attention is the estimate in which he was held by his own generation. No poet of any previous period in English literature ever attained like success, perhaps no poet of any period. The critical attitude of the nineteenth century is so different from the attitude of the eighteenth, that so far from the former being able to sympathize with the sentiments of the latter, it is hardly able to understand them. The view taken of Pope by his contemporaries and immediate successors is something ordinarily incomprehensible to the modern man. In their eyes

he was not merely a great poet; there was no greater English poet. Some were disposed to reckon him the greatest. He was our English Homer, not merely because he translated him, but because he stood in the same lofty relation to English poetry that Homer did to Greek. While there were some who denied, and a few who scoffed at, this enrollment, theirs was not the prevailing opinion. That was expressed by Dr. Johnson in his comment on the delay which took place in the publication of the second volume of Joseph Warton's 'Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope.' The first had appeared in 1756. In this, Warton had maintained that Pope did not stand at the head of his profession; that he was indeed superior to all other men in the kind of poetry in which he excelled, but that that in which he excelled was not poetry of the highest kind. Heresy of this sort was not palatable; at any rate, for some reason the second volume was not published until 1782. When Boswell in 1763 asked Johnson why Warton did not bring out the continuation, the latter gave as the probable reason that the delay was due to the writer's