resented the young poet's unsparing correction of his contemptible verses, but we neither know the amount of provocation given by Pope, nor the spirit in which it was received by Wycherley: All we can say is, that there was a quarrel, the first literary quarrel of many with which Pope is to be credited. According to his own account he began his poetical career at sixteen with the composition of the "Pastorals." It is certain that one of them was in existence when he was eighteen, and according to Tonson the publisher, it was "generally approved of by the best judges in poetry," but the "Pastorals" were not published until May, 1709, when Pope was two and twenty. It is difficult for the modern student of poetry to understand the appreciation once awarded to these frigid and artificial productions. They are, as Mr. Leslie Stephen truly says, 66 mere schoolboy exercises," and "represent nothing more than so many experiments in versification," but they were not so regarded in Pope's day, and won the praise of men whose approbation was worth having. "It is no flattery at all to say," Walsh wrote to Wycherley, "that Virgil had written nothing so good at his age." The "Pastorals' are chiefly remarkable for the smoothness of versification which is Pope's metrical characteristic. In the first decade of the eighteenth century, flowing lines like these may well have been read with admiration :: "No more the mounting larks, while Daphne sings, No more the birds shall imitate her lays, Or hushed with wonder hearken from the sprays; A sweeter music than their own to hear; Fair Daphne's dead, and music is no more!' With the "Pastorals" Pope started on the road to fame, and so rapid was his progress, that in five or six years he was universally regarded as the greatest of living poets. Addison was then 66 " 1 at the height of his reputation. His "Cato 1 Johnson's "Life of Addison." faulto with the exception of Shakespeare, who has written so many lines apt for quotation and continually quoted, and that Pope should have displayed this merit in a youthful work is a noteworthy illustration of precocious genius. Two years after the publication of the "Essay' appeared "Windsor Forest," which is modelled on Sir John Denham's " Cooper's Hill," a poem still remembered for an apostrophe addressed to the most famous of rivers : : "O, could I flow like thee, and make thy stream Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull, Pope himself never composed easier lines than these, which were written in the days when Cowley, a far greater poet than Denham, was exhibiting a learned incapacity for writing simply, and instructing other poets how to entangle their verses with obscurity and conceits. The best that can be said for "Windsor Forest" is that it contains a few happily-turned lines, but it is marred by feeble pedantry, and displays Pope's inability to deal poetically with the common objects of nature. It pleased Swift, who recommended the poem to Stella; but Swift, like Pope, was emphatically a poet of the town. The " Temple of Fame," founded upon Chaucer's "House Fame," was a greater failure still, but in 1714 the publication of the "Rape of the Lock" in an enlarged form (the first edition had appeared in 1712), exhibited the genius of Pope in its brightest and liveliest mood. The origin of the " Rape of the Lock" may be stated in a word or two. Lord Petre having cut off a lock of Arabella Fermor's hair, the lady was offended, and a quarrel arose in consequence between the two families. Pope of was asked by a common friend to act the part of a peacemaker, and to this trifling cause we are indebted for the most charming heroi-comical poem in the language, or, by the general consent of critics, in any language. The wit, the fancy, and the form are alike exquisite, and one cannot but regret that the contemptuous treatment of women which degrades so much of Pope's poetry is allowed also to taint this delightful work. That Miss Fermor, the heroine, whom the poet wished to propitiate, should have objected to some of his coarse allusions is not surprising. Yet Pope affected to be surprised. "The celebrated lady herself," he wrote, "is offended, and which is stranger, not at herself, but me. Is not this enough to make a writer never be tender of another's character or fame?" Two more poems written in this early and successful period may be mentioned here, the "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady," and "Eloisa to Abelard.” For felicity of language, and for the eloquent rhetoric which may readily be mistaken for imaginative verse, these poems claim no slight distinction. It is impossible to read them without feeling the mastery over his instrument exercised by the poet. The "Elegy" was formerly regarded as a story with a strong foundation in fact. The lady according to one report was in love with Pope, and would have married him, but her guardian, thinking such a match beneath her, sent her to a convent, and "a noose and not a sword put an end to her life." Other strange reports of this poetically famous lady are related by Pope's biographers, but an examination of the Caryll correspondence by the late Mr. Dilke has proved that these tales are "fantastic fictions," and that the poem is a poetical invention. The " Eloisa," despite the objectionable passages justly condemned by Hallam, is in a higher strain, and is almost the only illustration in Pope's verse of an emotion that verges upon pathos. "The words," says Hazlitt," are burning sighs breathed from the soul of love," but in reading them the consciousness of the poet's art dries up the fount of tears. Whether the Latin Letters upon which Pope founded his epistle are authentic has been considered doubtful, but for the purposes of poetry their genuineness is unimportant. The misfortunes of the two distinguished lovers are recorded in history, and the facts of the story afford sufficient ground for the exercise of the poet's imagination. And now, before recording the event in Pope's poetical life which brought him fortune as well as fame, it will be well to mention a few personal incidents in his biography. Queen Anne, intellectually one of the dullest of women, has by the irony of fate had her name inseparably linked to the wits of her age. Addison and Swift, Prior and Gay, Steele, Arbuthnot and Pope, and other writers of smaller mark, are known as the "Queen Anne men," though most of them lived far into the Georgian period. When the queen died in 1714, Pope was twenty-six; he had won his first laurels, and was full of the consciousness of power. We are to think of him as still living with his parents at Binfield, but his name was now well known in the town, and there he was sometimes to be seen at the coffee-houses. Addison was then the literary dictator at Button's, as Dryden had been at Will's, and Steele, one of the most impulsive, reckless, and sweetest-natured of men, brought his illustrious friend and Pope together. The acquaintance began in 1712. "I |