elve winters.'

The fate threatened to a disobedient sprite in the later poem is that he
shall

Be stuff'd in vials, or transfixed with pins,
Or plunged in lakes of bitter washes lie,
Or wedged whole ages in a bodkin's eye.

Pope's muse--one may use the old-fashioned word in such a
connection--had left the free forest for Will's Coffee-house, and
haunted ladies' boudoirs instead of the brakes of the enchanted island.
Her wings were clogged with 'gums and pomatums,' and her 'thin essence'
had shrunk 'like a rivel'd flower.' But a delicate fancy is a delicate
fancy still, even when employed about the paraphernalia of modern life;
a truth which Byron maintained, though not in an unimpeachable form, in
his controversy with Bowles. We sometimes talk as if our ancestors were
nothing but hoops and wigs; and forget that they had a fair allowance of
human passions. And consequently we are very apt to make a false
estimate of the precise nature of that change which fairly entitles us
to call Pope's age prosaic. In showering down our epithets of
artificial, sceptical, and utilitarian, we not seldom forget what kind
of figure we are ourselves likely to make in the eyes of our own
descendants.

Whatever be the position rightly to be assigned to Pope in the British
Walhalla, his own theory has been unmistakably expressed. He boasts

That not in fancy's maze he wandered long,
But stooped to truth and moralised his song.

His theory is compressed into one of the innumerable aphorisms which
have to some degree lost their original sharpness of definition, because
they have passed, as current coinage, through so many hands.

The proper study of mankind is man.

The saying is in form nearly identical with Goethe's remark that man is
properly the only object which interests man. The two poets, indeed,
understood the doctrine in a very different way. Pope's interpretation
strikes the present generation as narrow and mechanical. He would place
such limitations upon the sphere of human interest as to exclude,
perhaps, the greatest part of what we generally mean by poetry. How
much, for example, would have to be suppressed if we sympathised with
Pope's condemnation of the works in which

Pure description holds the place of sense.

Nearly all the works of such poets as Thomson and Cowper would
disappear, Wordsworth's pages would show fearful gaps, and Keats would
be in risk of summary suppression. We may