which previously defaced the poet's memory. It is proved beyond cavil that Pope resorted to unworthy artifice in order to make it appear that the publication of the letters was due to his friends' pressure, and not to his own vanity. It seems, too, that he 'cooked' the letters to improve his own figure in the eyes of posterity, and cooked them at the expense of some of his friends. He lied and equivocated freely. The spectacle thus exposed is melancholy enough. Defence of Pope's intrigues is impossible; and all that can be said is, that crimes of this kind, strange as it may sound, are not incompatible with many amiable qualities. Even Mr. Elwin, in a moment of forgetfulness, gives Pope credit for a 'certain tenderness of heart.' Pope was not a saint, nor a consistent character: he was a victim of physical and mental diseases; he was a man whose keen sensibility had been perverted and turned acid; full of petty weaknesses, which are sometimes almost childish, and not seldom contemptible. And yet he had the making of a fine character-or so we may still believe till Mr. Elwin blows to the winds his last shreds of reputation in the forthcoming biography. Till then let us try to hope the best. The time has passed for anger, and we may as well recognise the truth that man is full of strange inconsistencies, and that those who at times are base enough have at times also the most warm and generous senti

ments.

At present, however, I wish merely to consider Mr. Elwin's literary judgment. To read Pope with any satisfaction in his edition, it is necessary to make a stern compact with oneself to keep the notes and the text distinct. One must read the verses continuously, and then, if it is desirable, go through the commentary by itself. Otherwise, one feels something like

a boy at a pantomime with a school. master by his side. The boy laughs at the clown, and the schoolmaster immediately nudges him and explains at length that it is very wrong to sit down upon babies, or brand the rear of policemen with red-hot pokers. The boy admires the fairies and the coloured lights, and his preceptor points out that all is not gold that glitters, that the taste of the decorations is far from classical, and demonstrates that sound theologians do not believe in fairies.

As,

After studying Mr. Elwin I am inclined to exclaim 'Oh for an hour of Pope!' The assailant of Bentley could have struck a shrewd blow or two at Bentley's successor. however, Pope's reappearance in his own defence is out of the question, I will venture first to suggest some of the topics which he would probably have urged. It is utterly impossible to follow Mr. Elwin's voluminous comments at full length, and I will confine myself to the Essay on Criticism and the Essay on Man, which form part of the second volume.

Pope published the Essay on Criticism at the age of twenty-three. He says himself that it was written in his twentieth year. Mr. Elwin labours to prove, from some conflicting statements of Pope himself, that it was written in his twentysecond year, and concludes that at any rate it represents the capacity of Pope at the age of twenty-three,' as he went on polishing his pieces until their publication. Various critics have admired the amount of thought displayed by so young a writer. Mr. Elwin disputes their judgment, and declares that we shall be more struck by the want of good sense in the principal critical canons.' He holds that they are 'below his years,' and 'the narrow, erroneous dogmas of a youth fresh from his schoolboy studies.' The Essay contains many

contradictions and glaringly erroneous positions, "The phraseology is frequently mean and slovenly, the construction inverted and ungrammatical, the ellipses harsh, the metre inharmonious, the rhymes imperfect.' Its language falls below bald and slipshod prose.' In metrical qualities it is the worst of Pope's poems; he makes ten couplets rhyme to 'sense,' and twelve to wit.' Let us examine the terrible indictment, and see whether we can find any set-off against it. Whenever Pope actually com. posed the poem he was not far from that age at which our youthful geniuses are contending for prizes at the universities. Amongst twentytwo successful candidates at Cambridge in the first thirty years of the prize I find the following with other distinguished names: W. Whewell, T. B. Macaulay, W. M. Praed, E. L. Bulwer, A. Tennyson, G. S. Venables-a list which I may incidentally remark shows very clearly that if prize poems deserve their bad reputation, they at least often bring out promising young men. The poems themselves have sunk into utter oblivion, and probably few of the authors would care to have their juvenile performances revived. It would not have been surprising if Pope's early poem on a subject which is specially difficult for a young man should have sunk into equally profound slumbers, and have been, as Mr. Elwin says, decidedly below his years. Yet I suppose that there is not one of my readers who is not familiar with each of the following phrases, though some of them may have forgotten or never known their

For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.-(1.625.)

And if Mr. Elwin should dispute the truth or originality of the sentiments expressed, I may answer him still from the same poem in equally well-known words:

True wit is nature to advantage dressedWhat oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.-(1. 297.)

This does not prove that Pope was a great thinker or a great poet at the age of twenty-three; but it proves that at the age of twentythree Pope had the rare art of composing proverbs in verse, which have become part of the intellectual furniture of all decently educated men. How many other poets are there in the language of whom the same can be said? A man who at that early age has written five phrases in a poem of less than 750 lines which stick in the memory of his countrymen a century and a half later possesses a rare precocity of talent of a certain order. The fact too causes some presumption that where the bull's-eye has been hit so often, there will be a good many shots near the centre.

Let us, however, look at this a little closer. Mr. Elwin singles out for contemptuous notice in the Preface, the first line of the following passage, which Warton had been led to praise 'by his relish for platitudes:

:

speare, there is rarely one who is qualified to be a critic, or who 'is born to judge. The critical faculty, indeed, is so rare that there are probably at the present moment more poets than critics of esta blished reputation, though the number of moderately good performers is in both cases surprisingly large. We have indeed recently lost one French critic whose claims were universally admitted, and to whom neither Warton nor Mr. Elwin can be pronounced equal. I speak, of course, of M. Sainte-Beuve. happens to have treated of this very poem, and to have selected for particular admiration the very passage which Mr. Elwin condemns. Of

He

the poem in general he says that it is well worth those of Horace or Boileau. Coming to details, he remarks, Que de judicieuses et de fines remarques, éternellement vraies, je recueille en le lisant, et comme elles sont exprimées dans une forme brève, concise, élégante, et une fois pour toutes!' He singles out several other passages as containing 'delicate truths expressed in elegant verse,' and amongst them is another which excites Mr. Elwin's wrath. 'Parlant d'Homère et de son rapport avec Virgile,' says M. Sainte-Beuve, Pope établit la vraie ligne et la vraie voie pour les talents classiques, et qui restent dans l'ordre de la tradition;' and adds, after translating the passage, 'Certes la poésie des seconds âges, des âges polis et adoucis, n'a jamais été mieux exprimée par un exemple. All that Mr. Elwin discovers from the same passage is that Pope did not appreciate the vast metamorphosis which the world had undergone since the close of the Greek and Roman eras,' or, in other words, that Pope at twentythree shared the prejudices of the classical school of the eighteenth century. Mr. Elwin is clearly right as far as he goes, and SainteBuve may be wrong; still if I

knew that any undergraduate was now writing a poem which would be read with admiration by a distinguished French critic of the year 2020, I should think that he was really giving some proofs of precocious talent. M. Sainte-Beuve quotes another passage which I will commend to Mr. Elwin's consideration, and I need not point out to him that it contains two rhymes to 'wit,' one of which is a bad one:

A perfect judge will read each work of wit

With the same spirit that its author writ: Survey the whole, nor seek slight faults to find

Where nature moves and rapture warms

the mind;

Nor lose for that malignant, dull delight The generous pleasure to be warmed with wit.

I now pass to the Essay on Man, where Mr. Elwin has been specially exuberant. He has prefixed some remarks which I roughly calculate to be between three and four times as long as Pope's poem, the main part of which is an elaborate attack upon Pope's metaphysics and theology. Not content with this, he has appended denunciatory notes to a number of passages in the poem. His general system is to interpret an epigram as if it were an act of parliament; to prove with superabundant force that a paradox is not a truism, and that a truism is not an original remark. He thinks it a heinous sin for a poet to accept the current philosophy of his age, and strains every rash phrase to its farthest extreme, and then saddles his author with the consequences, which he supposes to be a logical result.

I might, in the first place, say summarily that all the argument directed against Pope's theology or metaphysics is utterly irrelevant. A man may found grand poetry upon erroneous systems. Lucretius defended very startling doctrines; Shelley was not an orthodox Chris tian; Milton was tainted with

X

Arianism; but what should we say to a commentator who spent many pages in proving such statements-who brought Paley to confute Shelley, or quoted. Bull and Waterland to correct Milton's rash útterances? Simply, I imagine, that he did not know his business. Mr. Elwin, perhaps, thinks that he is exposing Pope's character. He says that Pope kept to Catholicism, not from conscientious motives, but because he didn't wish to hurt his mother's feelings-not precisely an unconscientious motive. As Pope himself put it, his conversion would do no good to himself, and would do no good to anybody else. The truth seems to be plain enough. Pope's religion was that of most educated Roman Catholics in his own day and ours, and moreover -if Mr. Elwin will forgive the saying that of a good many respectable members of the Church of England. He believed, Mr. Elwin says, in God and a future world; he thought religion exceedingly valuable in a social point of view; but he believed little or nothing of the dogmatic theology of his own Church; and thought that a wise man would be content to keep his doubts to himself, and preserve a decent regard to ecclesiastical ceremonies, without troubling himself overmuch about creeds and controversies. Also, he was very anxious not to hurt his mother's feelings. Does this imply any great moral obliquity? If so, how many of the laity in our own day are tolerably honest men?

But, Mr. Elwin adds, Pope was grossly inconsistent, and did not understand his own theories. Granted, by all means; and who, I will ask, ever doubted it? Is it necessary to spend many pages in demonstrating that Newton was not a great divine; that Hume was not profoundly acquainted with original sources of English history; that Dr. Johnson was weak in etymology; and that

the famous Pope was but a shallow metaphysician? The only remark we can make is that which Lord Brougham is said to have once audibly uttered under a sermon proving that the sun shone at noonday- Go on, sir, the court is with you.' Well, says Mr. Elwin, poetry ought not to be employed in setting forth a puzzled system of shallow metaphysics. Granted, again! It was a pity that Pope tried to put argument into verse, especially as he didn't understand the argument; and the consequence has been that the Essay on Man is full of bad verses as well as bad arguments. If so, Mr. Elwin will ask, what do you claim for the poem ? To which my reply must be, all that any good judges have ever claimed for it, namely, that it is full of passages of singular force and beauty, which Mr. Elwin has attacked with, as I think, bad logic and worse taste. Even in attacking Pope's weakest points, he seems to me to succeed in generally putting himself in the wrong.

To reason in verse is proverbially difficult, and especially is it difficult to pack syllogisms into the rigid framework of Pope's antithetical couplets. Mr. Elwin has no trouble in pointing out that the grammar often suffers, and that there are very harsh ellipses and inversions. He would have done well to remember that arguments which have been subjected to such a process are necessarily more or less maimed and distorted; and that it is the very height of unfairness to insist upon particular expressions, and to draw inferences from a misplaced particle or preposition. It is still more unfair to reason, as he constantly does, from suppressed couplets, which, for anything he knows, may have been suppressed for the very fault which he discovers in them. His whole method, in short, indicates a hostile animus towards Pope, and a desire to pick