Page:The venture; an annual of art and literature.djvu/57

 often also indicates dangerous temper. Pope had much of the dwarfs traditional malice and long-minded resentment. His life was a long triumph, unaffected by political changes (for he stood outside of parties); but it was marred by the temper which made him see hostility where none existed, and poisoned every scratch of criticism; so that the most famous things in his work are bound up with the memory of literary feuds. Yet he inspired deep friendship. No letters in the world show a warmer feeling of one man for another than those which Swift wrote to him and about him.

Pope was best known in his own day by his translation of Homer—the most profitable book, financially, to its author that had ever been published in England. His most pretentious work, the Essay on Man, abounds in much-quoted distichs and is singularly barren of real thought. Those poems of Pope which the average reader to-day is likely to enjoy are first, the Essay on Criticism; secondly, the Rape of the Lock; and thirdly, the Moral Essays. To these may be added some superb passages in The Dunciad

The Essay on Criticism will always please by sheer cleverness, and nothing could exceed it as a formal expiration of that age's æsthetic tenets. But its arrangement into headings and subheadings like the model prize essay is too obvious, and even its cleverness is the precocious talent of immaturity.

Pope was never young. Yet something of the glow of youth is to be found in his exquisite Rape of the Lock