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It is narrated of an eminent barrister, who became a most polished judge, Mr. Knight Bruce, that once, when at the very head of his profession, he was taken in before a Master in Chancery, an office since abolished, and found himself pitted against a little snip of an attorney's clerk, scarce higher than the table, who, nothing daunted, and by the aid of authorities he cited from a bundle of books as big as himself, succeeded in worsting Knight Bruce, whom he persisted in calling over again and again 'my learned friend.' Mr. Bruce treated the imp with that courtesy which is always an opponent's due, but he never went before the Masters any more.

The Archangel has not escaped the reproach often brought against affable persons of being a bit of a bore, and though this is to speak unbecomingly, it must be owned that the reader is glad whenever Adam plucks up heart of grace and gets in a word edgeways. Mr. Bagehot has complained of Milton's angels. He says they are silly. But this is, I think, to intellectualize too much. There are some classes who are fairly exempted from all obligation to be intelligent, and these airy messengers are surely amongst that number. The retinue of a prince or of a bride justify their choice if they are well-looking and group nicely.

But these objections do not touch the main issue. Here is the story of the loss of Eden, told enchantingly, musically, and in the grand style. 'Who,' says M. Scherer, in a passage quoted by Mr. Arnold, 'can read the eleventh and twelfth books without yawning?' People, of course, are free to yawn when they please, provided they put their hands to their mouths; but in answer to this insulting question one is glad to be able to remember how Coleridge has singled out Adam's vision of future events contained in these books as especially deserving of attention. But to read them is to repel the charge.

There was no need for Mr. Arnold, of all men, to express dissatisfaction with Milton:

'Words which no ear ever to hear in heaven Expected; least of all from thee, ingrate, In place thyself so high above thy peers.'

The first thing for people to be taught is to enjoy great things greatly. The spots on the sun may be an interesting study, but anyhow the sun is not all spots. Indeed, sometimes in the early year, when he breaks forth afresh,

'And winter, slumbering in the open air, Wears on his smiling face a dream of spring,

we are apt to forget that he has any spots at all, and, as he shines, are perhaps reminded of the blind poet sitting in his darkness, in this prosaic city of ours, swinging his leg over the arm of his chair, and dictating the lines:

Coleridge added a note to his beautiful poem, 'The Nightingale,' lest he should be supposed capable of speaking with levity of a single line in Milton. The note was hardly necessary, but one loves the spirit that prompted him to make it. Sainte-Beuve remarks: 'Parler des poetes est toujours une chose bien delicate, et surtout quand on l'a ete un peu soi- meme.' But though it does not matter what the little poets do, great ones should never pass one another without a royal salute.

POPE.

The eighteenth century has been well abused by the nineteenth. So far as I can gather, it is the settled practice of every century to speak evil of her immediate predecessor, and I have small doubt that, had we gone groping about in the tenth century, we should yet have been found hinting that the ninth was darker than she had any need to be.

Pope's parents found in their only son the vocation of their later life. He might be anything he liked. Did he lisp in numbers, the boyish rhymes were duly scanned and criticised; had he a turn for painting, lessons were provided. He might be anything he chose, and everything by turns. Many of us have been lately reading chapters from the life of another only son, and though the comparison may not bear working out, still, that there were points of strong similarity between the days of the youthful poet at Binfield and those of Ruskin at Herne Hill may be suspected. Pope's education was, of course, private, for a double reason--his proscribed faith and his frail form. Mr. Leslie Stephen, with a touching faith in public schools, has the hardihood to regret that it was obviously impossible to send Pope to Westminster. One shudders at the thought. It could only have ended in an inquest. As it was, the poor little cripple was whipped at Twyford for lampooning his master. Pope was extraordinarily sensitive. Cruelty to animals he abhorred. Every kind of sport, from spinning cockchafers to coursing hares, he held in loathing, and one cannot but be thankful that the childhood of this supersensitive poet was shielded from the ruffianism of the nether world of boys as that brood then existed. Westminster had not long to wait for Cowper. Pope was taught his rudiments by stray priests and at small seminaries, where, at all events, he had his bent, and escaped the contagious error that Homer wrote in Greek in order that English boys might be beaten. Of course he did not become a scholar. Had he done so he probably would not have translated Homer, though he might have lectured on how not to do it. Indeed, the only evidence we have that Pope knew Greek at all is that he translated Homer, and was accustomed to carry about with him a small pocket edition of the bard in the original. Latin he could probably read with decent comfort, though it is noticeable that if he had occasion to refer to a Latin book, and there was a French translation, he preferred the latter version to the original. Voltaire, who knew Pope, asserts that he could not speak a word of French, and could hardly read it; but Voltaire was not a truthful man, and on one occasion told lies in an affidavit. The fact is, Pope's curiosity was too inordinate--his desire to know everything all at once too strong--to admit of the delay of learning a foreign language; and he was consequently a reader of translations, and he lived in an age of translations. He was, as a boy, a simply ferocious reader, and was early acquainted with the contents of the great poets, both of antiquity and the modern world. His studies, at once intense, prolonged, and exciting, injured his feeble health, and made him the lifelong sufferer he was. It was a noble zeal, and arose from the immense interest Pope ever took in human things.

'The filial piety of Pope was in the highest degree amiable and exemplary. His parents had the happiness of living till he was at the summit of poetical reputation--till he was at ease in his fortune, and without a rival in his fame, and found no diminution of his respect or tenderness. Whatever was his pride, to them he was obedient; and whatever was his irritability, to them he was gentle. Life has, amongst its soothing and quiet comforts, few things better to give than such a son.'

To attempt to state in other words a paragraph like this would be indelicate, as bad as defacing a tombstone, or rewriting a collect.

'Who but must laugh if such a man there be; Who would not weep if Atticus were he!'

It is Pope's behaviour about his letters that is now found peculiarly repellent. Acts of diseased egotism sometimes excite an indignation which injurious crimes fail to arouse.

The whole story is too long to be told, and is by this time tolerably familiar. Here, however, is part of it. In early life Pope began writing letters, bits of pompous insincerity, as indeed the letters of clever boys generally are, to men old enough to be his grandparents, who had been struck by his precocity and anticipated his fame, and being always master of his own time, and passionately fond of composition, he kept up the habit so formed, and wrote his letters as one might fancy the celebrated Blair composing his sermons, with much solemnity, very slowly, and without emotion. A packet of these addressed to a gentleman owning the once proud name of Cromwell, and who was certainly 'guiltless of his country's blood'--for all that is now known of him is that he used to go hunting in a tie-wig, that is, a full-bottomed wig tied up at the ends--had been given by that gentleman to a lady with whom he had relations, who being, as will sometimes happen, a little pressed for money, sold them for ten guineas to Edmund Curll, a bold pirate of a bookseller and publisher, upon whose head every kind of abuse has been heaped, not only by the authors whom he actually pillaged, but by succeeding generations of penmen who never took his wages, but none the less revile his name. He was a wily ruffian. In the year 1727 he was condemned by His Majesty's judges to stand in the pillory at Charing Cross for publishing a libel, and thither doubtless, at the appointed hour, many poor authors flocked, with their pockets full of the bad eggs that should have made their breakfasts, eager to wreak vengeance upon their employer; but a printer in the pillory has advantages over others traders, and Curll had caused handbills to be struck off and distributed amongst the crowd, stating, with his usual effrontery, that he was put in the pillory for vindicating the blessed memory of her late Majesty Queen Anne. This either touched or tickled the mob--it does not matter which--who protected Curll whilst he stood on high from further outrage, and when his penance was over bore him on their shoulders to an adjacent tavern, where he got right royally drunk. Ten years earlier those pleasant youths, the Westminster scholars, had got hold of him, tossed him in a blanket, and beat him. This was the man who bought Pope's letters to Cromwell for ten guineas, and published them. Pope, oddly enough, though very angry, does not seem on this occasion to have moved the Court of Chancery, as he subsequently did against the same publisher, for an injunction to restrain the vending of the volume. Indeed, until his suit in 1741, when he obtained an injunction against Curll, restraining the sale of a volume containing some of his letters to Swift, the right of the writer of a letter to forbid its publication had never been established, and the view that a letter was a gift to the receiver had received some countenance. But Pope had so much of the true temper of a litigant, and so loved a nice point, that he might have been expected to raise the question on the first opportunity. He, however, did not do so, and the volume had a considerable sale--a fact not likely to be lost sight of by so keen an author as Pope, to whom the thought occurred, 'Could I only recover all my letters, and get them published, I should be as famous in prose as I am in rhyme.' His communications with his friends now begin to be full of the miscreant Curll, against whose machinations and guineas no letters were proof. Have them Curll would, and publish them he would, to the sore injury of the writer's feelings. The only way to avoid this outrage upon the privacy of true friendship was for all the letters to be returned to the writer, who had arranged for them to be received by a great nobleman, against whose strong boxes Curll might rage and surge in vain. Pope's friends did not at first quite catch his drift. 'You need give yourself no trouble,' wrote Swift, though at a later date than the transaction I am now describing; 'every one of your letters shall be burnt.' But that was not what Pope wanted. The first letters he recovered were chiefly those he had written to Mr. Caryll, a Roman Catholic gentleman of character. Mr. Caryll parted with his letters with some reluctance, and even suspicion, and was at the extraordinary pains of causing them all to be transcribed; in a word, he kept copies and said nothing about it. Now it is that Pope set about as paltry a job as ever engaged the attention of a man of genius. He proceeded to manufacture a sham correspondence; he garbled and falsified to his heart's content. He took a bit of one letter and tagged it on to a bit of another letter, and out of these two foreign parts made up an imaginary letter, never really written to anybody, which he addressed to Mr. Addison, who was dead, or to whom else he chose. He did this without much regard to anything except the manufacture of something which he thought would read well, and exhibit himself in an amiable light and in a sweet, unpremeditated strain. This done, the little poet destroyed the originals, and deposited one copy, as he said he was going to do, in the library of the Earl of Oxford, whose permission so to do he sought with much solemnity, the nobleman replying with curtness that any parcel Mr. Pope chose to send to his butler should be taken care of. So far good. The next thing was to get the letters published from the copy he had retained for his own use. His vanity and love of intrigue forbade him doing so directly, and he bethought himself of his enemy, the piratical Curll, with whom, there can now be no reasonable doubt, he opened a sham correspondence under the initials 'P.T.' 'P.T.' was made to state that he had letters in his possession of Mr. Pope's, who had done him some disservice, which letters he was willing to let Curll publish. Curll was as wily as Pope, to whom he at once wrote and told him what 'P.T.' was offering him. Pope replied by an advertisement in a newspaper, denying the existence of any such letters. 'P.T.,' however, still kept it up, and a mysterious person was introduced as a go-between, wearing a clergyman's wig and lawyer's bands. Curll at last advertised as forthcoming an edition of Mr. Pope's letters to, and, as the advertisement certainly ran, from divers noblemen and gentlemen. Pope affected the utmost fury, and set the House of Lords upon the printer for threatening to publish peers' letters without their leave. Curll, however, had a tongue in his head, and easily satisfied a committee of their Lordship's House that this was a mistake, and that no noblemen's letters were included in the intended publication, the unbound sheets of which he produced. The House of Lords, somewhat mystified and disgusted, gave the matter up, and the letters came out in 1735. Pope raved, but the judicious even then opined that he protested somewhat too much. He promptly got a bookseller to pirate Curll's edition--a proceeding on his part which struck Curll as the unkindest cut of all, and flagrantly dishonest. He took proceedings against Pope's publisher, but what came of the litigation I cannot say.

The Caryll copy of the correspondence as it actually existed, after long remaining in manuscript, has been published, and we have now the real letters and the sham letters side by side. The effect is grotesquely disgusting. For example, on September 20th, 1713, Pope undoubtedly wrote to Caryll as follows:--

'I have been just taking a walk in St. James's Park, full of the reflections of the transitory nature of all human delights, and giving my thoughts a loose into the contemplation of those sensations of satisfaction which probably we may taste in the more exalted company of separate spirits, when we range the starry walks above and gaze on the world at a vast distance, as now we do on those.'

Poor stuff enough, one would have thought. On re-reading this letter Pope was so pleased with his moonshine that he transferred the whole passage to an imaginary letter, to which he gave the, of course fictitious, date of February 10th, 1715, and addressed to Mr. Blount; so that, as the correspondence now stands, you first get the Caryll letter of 1713, 'I have been just taking a solitary walk by moonshine,' and so on about the starry walks; and then you get the Blount letter of 1715, 'I have been just taking a solitary walk by moonshine;' and go on to find Pope refilled with his reflections as before. Mr. Elwin does not, you may be sure, fail to note how unlucky Pope was in his second date, February 10th, 1715; that being a famous year, when the Thames was frozen over, and as the thaw set in on the 9th, and the streets were impassable even for strong men, a tender morsel like Pope was hardly likely to be out after dark. But, of course, when Pope concocted the Blount letter in 1735, and gave it any date he chose, he could not be expected to carry in his head what sort of night it was on any particular day in February twenty-two years before. It is ever dangerous to tamper with written documents which have been out of your sole and exclusive possession even for a few minutes.

A letter Pope published as having been addressed to Addison is made up of fragments of three letters actually written to Caryll. Another imaginary letter to Addison contains the following not inapt passage from a letter to Caryll:--

'Good God! what an incongruous animal is man! how unsettled in his best part, his soul, and how changing and variable in his frame of body. What is man altogether but one mighty inconsistency?'

What, indeed! The method subsequently employed by Pope to recover his letters from Swift, and to get them published in such a way as to create the impression that Pope himself had no hand in it, cannot be here narrated. It is a story no one can take pleasure in. Of such an organized hypocrisy as this correspondence it is no man's duty to speak seriously. Here and there an amusing letter occurs, but as a whole it is neither interesting, elevating, nor amusing. When in 1741 Curll moved to dissolve the injunction Pope had obtained in connection with the Swift correspondence, his counsel argued that letters on familiar subjects and containing inquiries after the health of friends were not learned works, and consequently were not within the copyright statute of Queen Anne, which was entitled, 'An Act for the Encouragement of Learning;' but Lord Hardwicke, with his accustomed good sense, would have none of this objection, and observed :

'It is certain that no works have done more service to mankind than those which have appeared in this shape upon familiar subjects, and which, perhaps, were never intended to be published, and it is this which makes them so valuable, for I must confess, for my own part, that letters which are very elaborately written, and originally intended for the press, are generally the most insignificant, and very little worth any person's reading' .

I am encouraged by this authority to express the unorthodox opinion that Pope's letters, with scarcely half-a-dozen exceptions, and only one notable exception, are very little worth any person's reading.

When we turn from the man to the poet we have at once to change our key. A cleverer fellow than Pope never commenced author. He was in his own mundane way as determined to be a poet, and the best going, as John Milton himself. He took pains to be splendid--he polished and pruned. His first draft never reached the printer--though he sometimes said it did. This ought, I think, to endear him to us in these hasty days, when authors high and low think nothing of emptying the slops of their minds over their readers, without so much as a cry of 'Heads below!'

'But I am in good earnest of late, too much a man of business to mind metaphors and similes. I find subscribing much superior to writing, and there is a sort of little epigram I more especially delight in, after the manner of rondeaus, which begin and end all in the same words, namely--"Received" and "A. Pope." These epigrams end smartly, and each of them is tagged with two guineas. Of these, as I have learnt, you have composed several ready for me to set my name to.'

'Since, thanks to Homer, I do live and thrive.'

Pope was amongst the first of prosperous authors, and heads the clan of cunning fellows who have turned their lyrical cry into consols, and their odes into acres.

Of the merits of this great work it is not necessary to speak at length. Mr. Edmund Yates tells a pleasant story of how one day, when an old school Homer lay on his table, Shirley Brooks sauntered in, and taking the book up, laid it down again, dryly observing:

But what really is odd is that in Cowper's translation Briseis looks back too. Now, Cowper had been to a public school, and consequently knew Greek, and made it his special boast that, though dull, he was faithful. It is easy to make fun of Pope's version, but true scholars have seldom done so. Listen to Professor Conington :--

'It has been, and I hope still is, the delight of every intelligent schoolboy. They read of kings, and heroes, and mighty deeds in language which, in its calm majestic flow, unhasting, unresting, carries them on as irresistibly as Homer's own could do were they born readers of Greek, and their minds are filled with a conception of the heroic age, not indeed strictly true, but almost as near the truth as that which was entertained by Virgil himself.'

Mr. D. G. Rossetti, himself both an admirable translator and a distinguished poet, has in effect laid down the first law of rhythmical translation thus: 'Thou shalt not turn a good poem into a bad one.' Pope kept this law.

'Presumptuous man! the reason wouldst thou find, Why formed so weak, so little, and so blind? First, if thou canst, the harder reason guess, Why formed no weaker, blinder, and no less? Ask of thy mother Earth why oaks are made Taller and stronger than the weeds they shade! Or ask of yonder argent fields above Why Jove's satellites are less than Jove!'

To this latter interrogatory presumptuous science, speaking through the mouth of Voltaire, was ready with an answer. If Jupiter were less than his satellites they wouldn't go round him. Pope can make no claim to be a philosopher, and had he been one, Verse would have been a most improper vehicle to convey his speculations. No one willingly fights in handcuffs or wrestles to music. For a man with novel truths to promulgate, or grave moral laws to expound, to postpone doing so until he had hitched them into rhyme would be to insult his mission. Pope's gifts were his wit, his swift-working mind, added to all the cunning of the craft and mystery of composition. He could say things better than other men, and hence it comes that, be he a great poet or a small one, he is a great writer, an English classic. What is it that constitutes a great writer? A bold question, certainly, but whenever anyone asks himself a question in public you may be certain he has provided himself with an answer. I find mine in the writings of a distinguished neighbour of yours, himself, though living, an English classic--Cardinal Newman. He says :

'I do not claim for a great author, as such, any great depth of thought, or breadth of view, or philosophy, or sagacity, or knowledge of human nature, or experience of human life--though these additional gifts he may have, and the more he has of them the greater he is,--but I ascribe to him, as his characteristic gift, in a large sense, the faculty of expression. He is master of the two-fold , the thought and the word, distinct but inseparable from each other. . . . He always has the right word for the right idea, and never a word too much. If he is brief it is because few words suffice; if he is lavish of them, still each word has its mark, and aids, not embarrasses, the vigorous march of his elocution. He expresses what all feel, but all cannot say, and his sayings pass into proverbs amongst his people, and his phrases become household words and idioms of their daily speech, which is tessellated with the rich fragments of his language, as we see in foreign lands the marbles of Roman grandeur worked into the walls and pavements of modern palaces.' Pope satisfies this definition. He has been dead one hundred and forty-two years; yet, next to Shakespeare, who has been dead two hundred and seventy years, and who was nearer to Pope than Pope is to us, he is the most quoted of English poets, the one who has most enriched our common speech. Horace used, but has long ceased, to be the poet of Parliament; for Mr. Gladstone, who, more than any other, has kept alive in Parliament the scholarly traditions of the past, has never been very Horatian, preferring, whenever the dignity of the occasion seemed to demand Latin, the long roll of the hexameter, something out of Virgil or Lucretius. The new generation of honourable members might not unprofitably turn their attention to Pope. Think how, at all events, the labour members would applaud, not with 'a sad civility,' but with downright cheers, a quotation they actually understood.

The satires are savage--perhaps satires should be; but Pope's satires are sometimes what satires should never be--shrill. Dr. Johnson is more to my mind as a sheer satirist than Pope, for in satire character tells more than in any other form of verse. We want a personality behind--a strong, gloomy, brooding personality; soured and savage if you will--nay, as soured and savage as you like, but spiteful never.

'The numerous and violent claps of the Whig party, on the one side the theatre, were echoed back by the Tories on the other, while the author sweated behind the scenes with concern to find their applause proceeded more from the hand than the head. This was the case too of the prologue-writer, who was clapped into a stanch Whig, sore against his will, at almost every two lines. I believe that you have heard that, after all the applause of the opposite faction, my Lord Bolingbroke sent for Booth, who played Cato, into the box between one of the acts, and presented him with fifty guineas, in acknowledgment, as he expressed it, for his defending the cause of liberty so well against a perpetual dictator. The Whigs are unwilling to be distanced this way, as it is said, and, therefore, design a present to the said Cato very speedily. In the meantime they are getting ready as good a sentence as the former on their side. So, betwixt them, it is probable that Cato, as Dr. Garth expressed it, may have something to live upon after he dies.'

'While all its throats the gallery extends And all the thunder of the pit ascends, Loud as the wolves on Orca's stormy steep Howl to the roarings of the northern deep.'

'The noblest answer unto such Is kindly silence when they brawl.'

'And how did, pray, the Florid Youth offend Whose speech you took and gave it to a friend?'

Bowles said it was Lord Hervey, and that the adjective is due to his lordship's well-known practice of painting himself; but Mr. Croker, who knew everything, and was in the habit of contradicting the Duke of Wellington about the battle of Waterloo, says, 'Certainly not. The Florid Youth was young Henry Fox.'

Sometimes, indeed, in our hours of languor and dejection, when

'The heart is sick, And all the wheels of being slow,'

the question forces itself upon us, What can it matter who the Florid Youth was, and who cares how he offended? But this questioning spirit must be checked. 'The proper study of mankind is man,' and that title cannot be denied even to a florid youth. Still, as I was saying, people did not like it at the time, and the then Duke of Argyll said, in his place in the House of Lords, that if anybody so much as named him in an invective, he would first run him through the body, and then throw himself--not out of the window, as one was charitably hoping--but on a much softer place--the consideration of their Lordship's House. Some persons of quality, of less truculent aspect than McCallum More, thought to enlist the poet's services, and the Duchess of Buckingham got him to write an epitaph on her deceased son--a feeble lad--to which transaction the poet is thought to allude in the pleasing lines,

'But random praise--the task can ne'er be done, Each mother asks it for her booby son.'

Mr. Alderman Barber asked it for himself, and was willing--so at least it was reported--to pay for it at the handsome figure of 4,000 pounds for a single couplet. Pope, however, who was not mercenary, declined to gratify the alderman, who by his will left the poet a legacy of 100 pounds, possibly hoping by this benefaction, if he could not be praised in his lifetime, at all events to escape posthumous abuse. If this were his wish it was gratified, and the alderman sleeps unsung.

Pope greatly enjoyed the fear he excited. With something of exultation he sings:--

'Yes, I am proud: I must be proud to see Men, not afraid of God, afraid of me; Safe from the bar, the pulpit, and the throne, Yet touched and shamed by ridicule alone. O sacred weapon! left for Truth's defence, Sole dread of folly, vice, and insolence! To all but heaven-directed hands denied, The Muse may give thee, but the gods must guide: Reverent I touch thee, but with honest zeal, To rouse the watchmen of the public weal, To Virtue's work provoke the tardy Hall And goad the prelate slumb'ring in his stall. Ye tinsel insects! whom a court maintains, That counts your beauties only by your stains, Spin all your cobwebs o'er the eye of day, The Muse's wing shall brush you all away. All his grace preaches, all his lordship sings, All that makes saints of queens, and gods of kings,-- All, all but truth drops dead-born from the press, Like the last gazette, or the last address.'

The poet himself was very far from being invulnerable, and he writhed at every sarcasm. There was one of his contemporaries of whom he stood in mortal dread, but whose name he was too frightened even to mention. It is easy to guess who this was. It was Hogarth, who in one of his caricatures had depicted Pope as a hunchback, whitewashing Burlington House. Pope deemed this the most grievous insult of his life, but he said nothing about it; the spiteful pencil proving more than master of the poisoned pen.

Pope died in his enemies' day.

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