he purposes 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 better 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 wandering lovers brings
To Paraclete's white walls and silver springs," &c.

The Essay on Man is not Pope's best work. It is a theory which
Bolingbroke is supposed to have given him, and which he expanded into
verse. But "he spins the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple
of his argument." All that he says, "the very words, and to the
self-same tune," would prove just as well that whatever is, is _wrong_,
as that whatever is, is _right_. The Dunciad has splendid passages, but
in general it is dull, heavy, and mechanical. The sarcasm already quoted
on Settle, the Lord Mayor's poet, (for at that time there was a city as
well as a court poet)

"Now night descending, the proud scene is o'er,
But lives in Settle's numbers one day more"--

is the finest inversion of immortality conceivable. It is even better
than his serious apostrophe to the great heirs of glory, the triumphant
bards of antiquity!

The finest burst of severe moral invective in all Pope, is the
prophetical conclusion of the epilogue to the Satires: