ortunate
Lady_ and the _Eloisa to Abelard_. Both poems, and especially the last,
have received the warmest praises from Pope's critics, and even from
critics who were most opposed to his school. They are, in fact, his
chief performances of the sentimental kind. Written in his youth, and
yet when his powers of versification had reached their fullest maturity,
they represent an element generally absent from his poetry. Pope was at
the period in which, if ever, a poet should sing of love, and in which
we expect the richest glow and fervour of youthful imagination. Pope was
neither a Burns, nor a Byron, nor a Keats; but here, if anywhere, we
should find those qualities in which he has most affinity to the poets
of passion or of sensuous emotion, not soured by experience or purified
by reflection. The motives of the two poems were skilfully chosen.
Pope--as has already appeared to some extent--was rarely original in his
designs; he liked to have the outlines at last drawn for him, to be
filled with his own colouring. The _Eloisa to Abelard_ was founded upon
a translation from the French, published in 1714 by Hughes (author of
the _Siege of Damascus_), which is itself a manipulated translation from
the famous Latin originals. Pope, it appears, kept very closely to the
words of the English translation, and in some places has done little
more than versify the prose, though, of course, it is compressed,
rearranged, and modified. The _Unfortunate Lady_ has been the cause of a
good deal of controversy. Pope's elegy implies, vaguely enough, that she
had been cruelly treated by her guardians, and had committed suicide in
some foreign country. The verses, as commentators decided, showed such
genuine feeling, that the story narrated in them must have been
authentic, and one of his own correspondents (Caryll) begged him for an
explanation of the facts. Pope gave no answer, but left a posthumous
note to an edition of his letters calculated, perhaps intended, to
mystify future inquirers. The lady, a Mrs. Weston, to whom the note
pointed, did not die till 1724, and could therefore not have committed
suicide in 1717. The mystification was childish enough, though if Pope
had committed no worse crime of the kind, one would not consider him to
be a very grievous offender. The inquiries of Mr. Dilke, who cleared up
this puzzle, show that there were in fact two ladies, Mrs. Weston and a
Mrs. Cope, known to Pope about this time, both of whom suffe