idolisers of our author, chiefly on the score of his correctness.
These persons seem to be of opinion that "there is but one perfect writer,
even Pope." This is, however, a mistake: his excellence is by no means
faultlessness. If he had no great faults, he is full of little errors. His
grammatical construction is often lame and imperfect. In the Abelard and
Eloise, he says--

"There died the best of passions, Love and Fame."

This is not a legitimate ellipsis. Fame is not a passion, though love is:
but his ear was evidently confused by the meeting of the sounds "love and
fame," as if they of themselves immediately implied "love, and love of
fame." Pope's rhymes are constantly defective, being rhymes to the eye
instead of the ear; and this to a greater degree, not only than in later,
but than in preceding writers. The praise of his versification must be
confined to its uniform smoothness and harmony. In the translation of the
Iliad, which has been considered as his masterpiece in style and
execution, he continually changes the tenses in the same sentence for the
purpose of the rhyme, which shews either a want of technical resources, or
great inattention to punctilious exactness. But to have done with this.

The Epistle of Eloise to Abelard is the only exception I can think of, to
the general spirit of the foregoing remarks; and I should be disingenuous
not to acknowledge that it is an exception. The foundation is in the
letters themselves of Abelard and Eloise, which are quite as impressive,
but still in a different way. It is fine as a poem: it is finer as a piece
of high-wrought eloquence. No woman could be supposed to write a finer
love-letter in verse. Besides the richness of the historical materials,
the high _gusto_ of the original sentiments which Pope had to work upon,
there were perhaps circumstances in his own situation which made him enter
into the subject with even more than a poet's feeling. The tears shed are
drops gushing from the heart: the words are burning sighs breathed from
the soul of love. Perhaps the poem to which it bears the greatest
similarity in our language, is Dryden's Tancred and Sigismunda, taken from
Boccaccio. Pope's Eloise will bear this comparison; and after such a test,
with Boccaccio for the original author, and Dryden for the translator, it
need shrink from no other. There is something exceedingly tender and
beautiful in the sound of the concluding lines:

"If ever chance two