pt to upset him was regarded as a daring
revolution. What was Pope? Poet or not, for his title to the name has
been disputed, he had one power or weakness in which he has scarcely
been rivalled. No writer, that is, reflects so clearly and completely
the spirit of his own day. His want of originality means the extreme and
even morbid sensibility which enabled him to give the fullest utterance
to the ideas of his class, and of the nation, so far as the nation was
really represented by the class. But the literary class was going
through a process of differentiation, as the alliance of authors and
statesmen broke up. Pope represents mainly the aristocratic movement. He
had become independent--a fact of which he was a little too proud--and
moved on the most familiar terms with the great men of the age. The Tory
leaders were, of course, his special friends; but in later days he
became a friend of Frederick, Prince of Wales, and of the politicians
who broke off from Walpole; while even with Walpole he was on terms of
civility. His poems give a long catalogue of the great men of whose
intimacy he was so proud. Besides Bolingbroke, his 'guide, philosopher,
and friend,' he counts up nearly all the great men of his time. Somers
and Halifax, and Granville and Congreve, Oxford and Atterbury, who had
encouraged his first efforts; Pulteney, Chesterfield, Argyll, Wyndham,
Cobham, Bathurst, Peterborough, Queensberry, who had become friends in
later years, receive the delicate compliments which imply his excusable
pride in their alliance. Pope, therefore, may be considered from one
point of view as the authorised interpreter of the upper circle, which
then took itself to embody the highest cultivation of the nation. We may
appreciate Pope's poetry by comparing it with an independent
manifestation of their morality. The most explicit summary of the
general tone of the class-morality may, I think, be gathered from
Chesterfield's _Letters_. Though written at a later period, they sum up
the lesson he has imbibed from his experience at this time. Chesterfield
was no mere fribble or rake. He was a singularly shrewd, impartial
observer of life, who had studied men at first hand as well as from
books. His letters deal with the problem: What are the conditions of
success in public life? He treats it in the method of Machiavelli; that
is to say, he inquires what actually succeeds, not what ought to
succeed. An answer to that question given by a man