wrought plates of steel and considered their ancient place on the instruments of battle, it occurred to me that their craftsmanship was not unlike that which had gone into the making of this detached masterpiece of words. And it seemed to me that the rectitude and patience of the work in each case was one of the causes of their perpetual charm. I have a prejudice in favour of genius, an invincible feeling that true art is in some way based on truth. And so, whether this portrait of Addison was written, as Warburton declares, in 1815, because the Earl of Warwick, Addison's stepson, had warned Pope of Addison's jealousy and of his instigation of Gildon to publish a scurrilous pamphlet against his supposed friend, or because Pope believed Addison to be responsible for Tickell's rival translation of the Iliad, whatever may have been the devious ways of Pope in explaining and spreading abroad the satire I am convinced that the portrait was not entirely without similitude. In some way the jealousies of Addison's trade had set free the deceitful spirit of egotism that hides beneath the fairest character. It must be remembered also that in the year when the satire was written, and when the circle of Pope was suffering in so many ways from the death of Queen Anne, Addison, as Chief Secretary to Ireland, was enjoying the fruits of his service to the Whigs. He was, I believe, the only man of great parts in pure literature who profited by

the new régime. That, indeed, may be to his credit politically; it will help to explain, nevertheless, why Pope placed him, not among the dunces, for that would have been to stultify the writer, but among those who in the desperate battle of the mind followed the false standard the one lost leader, when so many lesser and more ignoble men were faithful. I think Pope had loved, and did always admire, Addison. There is the true pathos of wit and wit may have its tears cry of grief from a very great bitterness and regret in the last line,

Who would not weep, if Atticus were he!

a

If the emotion here be not genuine, we may as well shut our bosoms to every appeal of books.

But there is in this satire something besides sorrow for the perversion, or at least the failure, of a noble friend; it must be read in connection with Pope's own feeling of weariness, if not of degradation. By the side of this scorn of the dull and the base, runs the contrasted note of friendship, which was always the finest trait of his character. Nowhere else does he express the union that bound together this body of defeated wits with so fine a charm as in the lines to the genial, much-beloved physician:

Friend to my life, which did not you prolong,
The world had wanted many an idle song.

In comparison with that peaceful bond, of what profit was the long-protracted and in the end losing enmity which inspired his satire? What evil genius projected him into this hateful air of conflict?

Why did I write? What sin to me unknown
Dipp'd me in ink, my parents' or my own?

To understand the Epistle we must read it as Pope's apologia pro vita sua, at once an excuse for the warfare in which his days had passed and an acknowledgement of their waste and bitter fruit. With a kind of childlike and, I think, utterly sincere regret he compares the quiet tenor of his father's life with the discordant ambitions of literature, and counts as the one indisputable blessing to himself the homely respect for that life which he had preserved against all the inroads of the world's malice:

O friend! May each domestic bliss be thine!
Be no unpleasing melancholy mine:
Me, let the tender office long engage,

To rock the cradle of reposing age,

With lenient arts extend a mother's breath,
Make languor smile, and smooth the bed of death,
Explore the thought, explain the asking eye,

And keep awhile one parent from the sky!
On cares like these if length of days attend,
May Heaven, to bless those days, preserve my friend,
Preserve him social, cheerful, and serene,

And just as rich as when he served a queen.

Not Goldsmith himself painted a sweeter picture of resignation and piety; and, whatever else may have been true of Pope, these lines also speak the truth of him.

It may seem that the beauty of these contrasted notes in Pope's greatest poem is lost to the world to-day, because one of them at least, the warfare of the wits, was a temporary thing, now long forgotten and of interest only to the special student. To a certain degree and in the matter of form, this is no doubt the case. Yet the warfare substantially is not ended, and shall not end while the differences of human nature remain unreconciled Men in this living age, always a few, are still fighting for the rights of the mind against a dull and delusive materialism, for the freedom of the imagination against a prosaic tyranny, for a pure and patient ambition against the quick successes of vanity and pliant cleverness, for the reality of human nature against a fatuous self-complacency. To these the triumphant satire of Pope is a perpetual encouragement, while his pathetic apology expresses for them the relief needed when success appears far away, or, even if near, not worth the cost in the humiliating wager of soul against soul. Nor is the theme of the Epistle without its more universal aspect. For after all life itself, not for the wit only, but for each man in his place, is a contest, and poetry, from the time when Homer portrayed his

heroes battling with sword and fire on the banks of the Simois, and longing for the peace of hearth and kindred and friends across the seas, has been the expression, varying in form and instruments, of that inevitable fate. The presentation of this truth may in Pope be narrowed to a particular manner and time, it may assume ignoble images and speak too often in reprehensible language, nevertheless he who does not respond to the deep emotion and humanity underlying the Satires has travelled but a short way into the realm of letters; he has even, I dare assert, felt but a little of the great realities of man's life.