Pope. Think how, at all events, the
labour members would applaud, not with 'a sad civility,' but with
downright cheers, a quotation they actually understood.

Pope is seen at his best in his satires and epistles, and in the mock-
heroic. To say that the _Rape of the Lock_ is the best mock-heroic poem
in the language is to say nothing; to say that it is the best in the
world is to say more than my reading warrants; but to say that it and
_Paradise Regained_ are the only two faultless poems, of any length, in
English is to say enough.

The satires are savage--perhaps satires should be; but Pope's satires are
sometimes what satires should never be--shrill. Dr. Johnson is more to
my mind as a sheer satirist than Pope, for in satire character tells more
than in any other form of verse. We want a personality behind--a strong,
gloomy, brooding personality; soured and savage if you will--nay, as
soured and savage as you like, but spiteful never.

Pope became rather by the backing of his friends than from any other
cause a party man. Party feeling ran high during the first Georges, and
embraced things now outside its ambit--the theatre, for example, and the
opera. You remember how excited politicians got over Addison's _Cato_,
which, as the work of a Whig, and appearing at a critical time, was
thought to be full of a wicked wit and a subtle innuendo future ages have
failed to discover amidst its obvious dulness. Pope, who was not then
connected with either party, wrote the prologue, and in one of the best
letters ever written to nobody tells the story of the first night.

'The numerous and violent claps of the Whig party, on the one side the
theatre, were echoed back by the Tories on the other, while the author
sweated behind the scenes with concern to find their applause
proceeded more from the hand than the head. This was the case too of
the prologue-writer, who was clapped into a stanch Whig, sore against
his will, at almost every two lines. I believe that you have heard
that, after all the applause of the opposite faction, my Lord
Bolingbroke sent for Booth, who played Cato, into the box between one
of the acts, and presented him with fifty guineas, in acknowledgment,
as he expressed it, for his defending the cause of liberty so well
against a perpetual dictator. The Whigs are unwilling to be distanced
this way, as it is said, and, therefore, design a present to the said
C