Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 7.djvu/130

 90 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS mire the surpassing skill of the measure ; and it is probable that, in spite of the "higher criticism," the " Dunciad," swarming as it does with contemporary allu- sions, will continue to hold its own with the antiquary and the literary historian, though it has ceased to be regarded as one of the desirable masterpieces of its class. If Swift, who encouraged Pope in his war against Dulness, must be held to be indirectly responsible for the attack upon its strongholds, it was Bolingbroke who suggested the once popular epistles which Pope dedicated to him under the title of the " Essay on Man," a work which has this in common with the earlier " Essay on Criticism," that it is a versification of a given theme. But Pope under- stood the precepts of Rapin and Bossu better than the precepts of Leibnitz and St. John, and the *' Essay on Man," bristling as it does with axiomatic felicities and " jewels five words long," has long been discredited as a philosophical trea- tise. It is to another hint from the sage of Dawley that we owe its author's most individual work. A chance remark of Bolingbroke set him upon the imi- tations of Horace that grew into the " Satires and Epistles." In these and the cognate " Moral Essays," which belong to his ripest period of production, Pope's unmatched mastery over heroics, perfected by the long probation of his Homeric translations, and his equally unrivalled powers of satire, let loose and emboldened by the brutalities of the " Dunciad," found their fitting field. Aimed at the old eternal vices and frailties of humanity, they assail them with a pungency, a force, a wit, and a directness which, in English verse, have no parallel. Indeed it may be doubted whether the portraits of Bufo and Sporus, of Atossa and Atticus, have been excelled in any language whatsoever. The first of the Dialogues known as the "Epilogue to the Satires" was published in 1738, on the same morning as Johnson's "London," thus (in Bos- well's view) providing England simultaneously with its Horace and its Juvenal. The second part followed in the same year. Besides these there is little which is material to be added to the record of Pope's work but the revised " Dunciad," in which, to gratify an increased antipathy, he displaced its old hero, Theobald, in favor of Colley Cibber, who, whatever his faults, was certainly not a typical dunce. Toward the close of his life those infirmities at which Wycherley had hinted in his youth grew upon him, and he became almost entirely dependent upon nurses. He had not, to use De Quincey's words, drawn that supreme prize in life, " a fine intellect with a healthy stomach," and his whole story testifies to that fact As years went on his little figure, in its rusty black, was seen more rarely in the Twickenham lanes, and if he took the air upon the Thames, it was in a sedan- chair that was lifted into a boat. When he visited his friends his sleeplessness and his multiplied needs tired out the servants ; while in the day-time he would nod in company, even though the Prince of Wales was talking of poetry. He was a martyr to sick headaches, and in the intervals of relief from them would be tormented by all sorts of morbid cravings for the very dietary which must in- evitably secure their recurrence. This continued battle of the brain with the ig- nobler organs goes far to explain, if it may not excuse, much of the less admira-