vault to brag of.'

The feats of arms that have made the first Ministry of the elder Pitt for
ever glorious would have appealed to Pope's better nature, and made him
forget the scandals of the court and the follies of the town. Who knows
but they might have stirred him, for he was not wholly without the true
poet's prophetic gift, which dreams of things to come, to foretell, in
that animated and animating style of his, which has no rival save
glorious John Dryden's, the expansion of England, and how, in far-off
summers he should never see, English maidens, living under the Southern
Cross, should solace their fluttering hearts before laying themselves
down to sleep with some favourite bit from his own _Eloisa to Abelard_?
Whether, in fact, maidens in those latitudes do read _Eloisa_ before
blowing out their candles I cannot say; but Pope, I warrant, would have
thought they would. And they might do worse--and better.

Both as a poet and a man Pope had many negations.

'Of love, that sways the sun and all the stars,'

he knew absolutely nothing. Even of the lesser light,

'The eternal moon of love,
Under whose motions life's dull billows move,'

he knew but little.

His _Eloisa_, splendid as is its diction, and vigorous though be the
portrayal of the miserable creature to whom the poem relates, most
certainly lacks 'a gracious somewhat,' whilst no less certainly is it
marred by a most unfeeling coarseness. A poem about love it may be--a
love-poem it is not. Of the 'wild benefit of nature,'--

'The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills,'

Pope had small notion, though there is just a whiff of Wordsworth in an
observation he once hazarded, that a tree is a more poetical object than
a prince in his coronation robes. His taste in landscape gardening was
honoured with the approbation of Horace Walpole, and he spent 1,000
pounds upon a grotto, which incurred the ridicule of Johnson. Of that
indescribable something, that 'greatness' which causes Dryden to uplift a
lofty head from the deep pit of his corruption, neither Pope's character
nor his style bears any trace. But still, both as a poet and a man we
must give place, and even high place, to Pope. About the poetry there
can be no question. A man with his wit, and faculty of expression, and
infinite painstaking, is not to be evicted from his ancient homestead in
the affections and memories of his peopl