her words a paragraph like this would be
indelicate, as bad as defacing a tombstone, or rewriting a collect.

Pope has had many editors, but the last edition will probably long hold
the field. It is more than sixty years since the original John Murray,
of Albemarle Street, determined, with the approval of his most
distinguished client Lord Byron, to bring out a library edition of Pope.
The task was first entrusted to Croker, the man whom Lord Macaulay hated
more than he did cold boiled veal, and whose edition, had it seen the
light in the great historian's lifetime, would have been, whatever its
merits, well basted in the _Edinburgh Review_. But Croker seems to have
made no real progress; for though occasionally advertised amongst Mr.
Murray's list of forthcoming works, the first volume did not make its
appearance until 1871, fourteen years after Croker's death. The new
editor was the Rev. Whitwell Elwin, a clergyman, with many qualifications
for the task,--patient, sensible, not too fluent, but an intense hater of
Pope. 'To be wroth with one you love,' sings Coleridge, 'doth work like
madness in the brain;' and to edit in numerous volumes the works of a man
you cordially dislike and always mistrust has something of the same
effect, whilst it is certainly hard measure on the poor fellow edited.
His lot--if I may venture upon a homely comparison founded upon a lively
reminiscence of childhood--resembles that of an unfortunate infant being
dressed by an angry nurse, in whose malicious hands the simplest
operations of the toilet, to say nothing of the severer processes of the
tub, can easily be made the vehicles of no mean torture. Good cause can
be shown for hating Pope if you are so minded, but it is something of a
shame to hate him and edit him too. The Rev. Mr. Elwin unravels the web
of Pope's follies with too rough a hand for my liking; and he was,
besides, far too apt to believe his poet in the wrong simply because
somebody has said he was. For example, he reprints without comment De
Quincey's absurd strictures on the celebrated lines--

'Who but must laugh if such a man there be;
Who would not weep if Atticus were he!'

De Quincey found these lines unintelligible, and pulls them about in all
directions but the right one. The ordinary reader never felt any
difficulty. However, Mr. Elwin kept it up till old age overtook him, and
now Mr. Courthope reigns in his stead. Mr. Courthope, it is easy to see,