ought the Horatian epistle in verse, the formal satire and that
species of didactic poem of which Boileau had given the first example,
to an exquisite perfection of finish and verbal art. Dryden had
translated Vergil, and so Pope translated Homer. The throne of the
dunces, which Dryden had conferred upon Shadwell, Pope, in his
_Dunciad_, passed on to two of his own literary foes, Theobald and
Colley Cibber. There is a great waste of strength in this elaborate
squib, and most of the petty writers, whose names it has preserved, as
has been said, like flies in amber, are now quite unknown. But,
although we have to read it with notes, to get the point of its
allusions, it is easy to {184} see what execution it must have done at
the time, and it is impossible to withhold admiration from the wit, the
wickedness, the triumphant mischief of the thing. The sketch of
Addison--who had offended Pope by praising a rival translation of
Homer--as "Atticus," is as brilliant as any thing of the kind in
Dryden. Pope's very malignity made his sting sharper than Dryden's.
He secreted venom, and worked out his revenges deliberately, bringing
all the resources of his art to bear upon the question of how to give
the most pain most cleverly.

Pope's masterpiece is, perhaps, the _Rape of the Lock_, a mock heroic
poem, a "dwarf Iliad," recounting, in five cantos, a society quarrel,
which arose from Lord Petre's cutting a lock of hair from the head of
Mrs. Arabella Fermor. Boileau, in his _Lutrin_, had treated, with the
same epic dignity, a dispute over the placing of the reading desk in a
parish church. Pope was the Homer of the drawing-room, the boudoir,
the tea-urn, the omber-party, the sedan-chair, the parrot cage, and the
lap-dogs. This poem, in its sparkle and airy grace, is the topmost
blossom of a highly artificial society, the quintessence of whatever
poetry was possible in those

"Teacup times of hood and hoop,
And when the patch was worn,"

with whose decorative features, at least, the recent Queen Anne revival
has made this generation familiar. It may be said of it, as Thackeray
said of {185} Gay's pastorals: "It is to poetry what charming little
Dresden china figures are to sculpture, graceful, minikin, fantastic,
with a certain beauty always accompanying them." The _Rape of the
Lock_, perhaps, stops short of beauty, but it attains elegance and
prettiness in a supreme degree. In imitation of the gods and goddesses