but there was still a
strong element of opposition and sedition in the Jacobite party, which had
by no means abandoned the hope of restoring the former rule. They were
kept in check, indeed, during the reign of William and Mary, but they
became bolder upon the accession of Queen Anne. They hoped to find their
efforts facilitated by the fact that she was childless; and they even
asserted that upon her death-bed she had favored the succession of the
pretender, whom they called James III.

In 1715, the year after the accession of George I., the electoral prince
of Hanover,--whose grandmother was the daughter of James I.,--they broke
out into open rebellion. The pretender landed in Scotland, and made an
abortive attempt to recover the throne. The nation was kept in a state of
excitement and turmoil until the disaster of Culloden, and the final
defeat of Charles Edward, the young pretender, in 1745, one year after the
death of Pope.

These historical facts had a direct influence upon English society: the
country was divided into factions; and political conflicts sharpened the
wits and gave vigor to the conduct of men in all ranks. Pope was an
interpreter of his age, in politics, in general culture, and in social
manners and morals. Thus he was a politician among the statesmen
Bolingbroke, Buckingham, Oxford, Sunderland, Halifax, Harley, and
Marlborough. His _Essay on Criticism_ presents to us the artificial taste
and technical rules which were established as a standard in literature.
His _Essay on Man_, his _Moral Epistles_, and his _Universal Prayer_ are
an index to the semi-Christian, semi-Grecian ethics of an age too selfish
to be orthodox, and too progressive to be intolerant. His _Rape of the
Lock_ is a striking picture of social life, sketched by the hand of a
gentle satire. His translations of Homer, and their great success, are
significant of a more extended taste for scholarship; not attended,
however, with many incentives to originality of production. The nobles
were still the patrons of literature, and they fancied old things which
were grand, in new and gaudy English dresses. The age was also marked by
rapid and uniform progress in the English language. The sonorous, but
cumbrous English of Milton had been greatly improved by Dryden; and we
have seen, also, that the terse and somewhat crude diction of Dryden's
earlier works had been polished and rendered more harmonious in his later
poems.

This harmony of lan