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Shakespearian commentator Theobald was dethroned from his eminence, in order to give place to Colley Cibber as the King of Dulness. Pope made a conspicuous blunder in this selection. Cibber had many faults, but dulness was not one of them. He was no poet, and any amount of satire levelled at such a verse-maker for wearing the laurel wreath would have been legitimate enough, but all readers of Cibber's 66 Apology" will admit what his contemporaries knew, that he was one of the liveliest of men and of no mean ability. Moreover, he had far too good an opinion of himself to care much for Pope's stings. In "A Letter from Mr. Cibber to Mr. Pope," he says, "I wrote more to be fed than to be famous; and since my writings still give me a dinner, do you rhyme me out of my stomach if you can," and he suggests by the following story that the poet's malice would recoil upon himself: "An honest lusty grenadier, while a little creeping creature of an ensign for some trifling fault was impatiently laying on him with his cane, quietly folded his arms across, and shaking his head, only replied to his valiant officer, Have a care, dear captain! don't strike so hard. Upon my soul you will hurt yourself!'" It is evident that to attack a man so fortified against assault was to waste powder. Pope made a still worse error in placing Bentley, a great scholar and a man of genius, among his motley crowd of dullards. The "Dunciad" is illustrated and burdened by prefaces, commentaries, and criticisms, written under feigned names by Warburton and other friends, and also by the poet himself. Obscure hints and personal allusions abound, and so weighted is the satire in its numerous editions

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with prose comments, that the notes occupy a larger space than the text. "It may fairly be doubted," says Professor Ward, "whether the mystification in which every step connected with the publication of the various editions of the "Dunciad" was intentionally involved by Pope has not answered an end beyond that proposed to himself by the poet, and provided a tangle of literary difficulties which no learned ingenuity will ever suffice entirely to unravel." There is much in the "Dunciad" that belonged to the time, and has died with it. The peddling animosities that gave a point to many of the couplets have no interest for the modern reader, but the poem is not dependent on them for its vitality, and its publication lifted Pope to the position which he holds to this day-unless Dryden be his rival-as the greatest of English satirists.

It has been sometimes asked whether Pope was a poet. Let the magnificent lines describing the victory of Dulness, with which he concludes the "Dunciad," be the answer:

"She comes! she comes! the sable throne behold
Of Night primeval and of Chaos old!
Before her Fancy's gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying rainbows die away;
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
The meteor drops and in a flash expires.
As one by one at dread Medea's strain

The sickening stars fade off the ethereal plain;
As Argus' eyes by Hermes' wand oppressed
Closed one by one to everlasting rest;
Thus at her felt approach and secret might,
Art after Art goes out and all is Night;
See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled,
Mountains of Casuistry heaped o'er her head!
Philosophy, that leaned on Heaven before,
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more;
Physic of Metaphysic begs defence,
And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense!
See Mystery to Mathematics fly!

In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave and die;
Religion, blushing, veils her sacred fires,
And, unawares, Morality expires;

Nor public flame nor private dares to shine,
Nor human spark is left nor glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored;
Light dies before thy uncreating word;

Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And universal darkness buries all."

In 1723, Bolingbroke having returned from exile, made his home at Dawley, which was within an easy drive of Twickenham, and thither Pope went frequently to enjoy the eloquent talk of his guide, philosopher, and friend. On one of these occasions, his coach was upset into the river, and if a footman had not managed to break the closed window and pull him out, he would have been drowned. So severely was Pope cut, that he was in danger of losing the use of his right hand. Voltaire, who was then at Dawley, condoled with him in the affected style of the man and of the period, saying that the water was not Hippocrene's, or it would have respected him, and adding, "Is it possible that those fingers which have written the ' Rape of the Lock' and the 'Criticism,' which have dressed Homer so becomingly in an English coat, should have been so barbarously treated?" Voltaire, it is said, was on one occasion the poet's guest at Twickenham, and talked in so coarse a strain as to drive his mother from the room.

TheEssay on Man" was published anonymously in three Epistles in 1733, and to these a fourth Epistle was added in 1734. It cannot be accounted a great poem. Pope, although he was the favourite poet of Kant, is no philosopher, and he is eminently deficient as a moralist. In attempting to justify the ways of God to men, in this famous Essay he failed, partly from ignorance and partly from a deficiency of feeling. Where he failed in argument he might have risen on the wings of devotion, but profound religious

feeling was as alien to his nature as philosophy. He lacked depth, and was deficient, as Mr. Mark Pattison has pointed out, "in a true human and natural sympathy."

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"The Essay on Man,' says this admirable critic, "was composed at a time when the reading public in this country were occupied with an intense and eager curiosity by speculation on the first principles of Natural Religion. Everywhere, in the pulpit, in the coffee-houses, in every pamphlet, argument on the origin of evil, on the goodness of God and the constitution of the world, was rife. Into the prevailing topic of polite conversation Bolingbroke, who returned from exile in 1723, was drawn by the bent of his native genius. Pope followed the example and impulse of his friend's more powerful mind. Thus much there was of special suggestion. But the arguments or topics of the poem are to be traced to books in much vogue at the time; to Shaftesbury's Characteristics,' King On the Origin of Evil,' and particularly to Leibnitz, ‘Essais de Théodicée.' . . . In selecting his subject Pope was thus determined against the bent of his own genius by the direction in which the curiosity of his reading public happened to be exerted. Herein lay, to begin with, a source of weakness. To write on a thesis set by circumstances is to begin by wanting inspiration, which proceeds from the fullness of the heart; but when the thesis prescribed is also one which lies beyond the scope of the mental habits of the writer, the difficulties to be overcome are great indeed."

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How far Pope was indebted to Bolingbroke for the plan of his Essay is of little consequence. No one now reads the poem for its philosophy, if the poet's fatalistic platitudes merit that appel

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lation, but for the sententious beauty of many a passage or couplet which lives in literature. It is in the Essay on Man" that the reader will find the two lines characterized by Mr Ruskin as "the most complete, the most concise, and the most lofty expression of moral temper existing in English words

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"Never elated while one man's oppressed,
Never dejected while another's blessed; '

and the final lines afford an admirable specimen of Pope's easy flow of verse and felicity of expression:

"Come, then, my Friend! my Genius! come along,
Oh, master of the poet and the song!

And while the Muse now stoops or now ascends,

To man's low passions or their glorious ends,
Teach me, like thee, in various nature wise,
To fall with dignity, with temper rise;
Formed by thy converse, happily to steer
From grave to gay, from lively to severe;
Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease,
Intent to reason, or polite to please.

Oh! while along the stream of Time thy name
Expanded flies and gathers all its fame,

Say, shall my little bark attendant sail,

Pursue the triumph and partake the gale?

When statesmen, heroes, kings, in dust repose,

Whose sons shall blush their fathers were thy foes,
Shall then this verse to future age pretend
Thou wert my guide, philosopher, and friend?
That urged by thee I turned the tuneful art
From sounds to things, from fancy to the heart;
For wit's false mirror held up nature's light,
Showed erring pride, whatever is, is right;
That reason, passion, answer one great aim;
That true self-love and social are the same;
That virtue only makes our bliss below,

And all our knowledge is ourselves to know."

The "Moral Essays," which, according to Warburton, were intended to form a part of the

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Essay on Man," have no perceptible connection with that poem, and whatever Pope's plan might have been it was not carried out. They were printed at different periods between 1731 and 1735, and were arranged by Pope in their present

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