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“Who would not laugh, if such a man there be,
Who but must weep if Atticus were he?”

Why must we laugh? Because we find a grotesque assembly of noble and ignoble qualities. Very well; but why then must we weep? Because this assemblage is found actually existing in an eminent man of genius. Well, that is a good reason for weeping; we weep for the degradation of human nature. But then revolves the question, why must we laugh? Because, if the belonging to a man of genius were a sufficient reason for weeping, so much we know from the very first. The very first line says, “Peace to all such. But were there one whose fires true genius kindles and fair fame inspires.” Thus falls to the ground the whole antithesis of this famous character. We are to change our mood from laughter to tears upon a sudden discovery that the character belonged to a man of genius; and this we had already known from the beginning. Match us this prodigious oversight in Shakspeare. Again, take the Essay on Criticism. It is a collection of independent maxims, tied together into a fasciculus by the printer, but having no natural order or logical dependency; generally so vague as to mean nothing. Like the general rules of justice, etc., in ethics, to which every man assents; but when the question comes about any practical case, is it just? The opinions fly asunder far as the poles. And, what is remarkable, many of the rules are violated by no man so often as by Pope, and by Pope nowhere so often as in this very poem. As a single instance, he proscribes monosyllabic lines; and in no English poem of any pretensions are there so many lines of that class as in this. We have counted above a score, and the last line of all is monosyllabic.

Not, therefore, for superior correctness, but for qualities the very same as belong to his most distinguished brethren, is Pope to be considered a great poet; for impassioned thinking, powerful description, pathetic reflection, brilliant narration. His characteristic difference is simply that he carried these powers into a different field, and moved chiefly amongst the social paths of men, and viewed their characters as operating through their manners. And our obligations to him arise chiefly on this ground, that having already, in the persons of earlier poets, carried off the palm in all the grander trials of intellectual strength, for the majesty of the epopee and the impassioned vehemence of the tragic drama, to Pope we owe it that we can now claim an equal preeminence in the sportive and aerial graces of the mock heroic and satiric muse; that in the Dunciad we possess a peculiar form of satire, in which (according to a plan unattempted by any other nation) we see alternately her festive smile and her gloomiest scowl; that the grave good sense of the nation has here found its brightest mirror; and, finally, that through Pope the cycle of our poetry is perfected and made orbicular, that from that day we might claim the laurel equally, whether for dignity or grace.

NOTES.

NOTE 1.

Dr. Johnson, however, and Joseph Warton, for reasons not stated, have placed his birth on the 22d. To this statement, as opposed to that which comes from the personal friends of Pope, little attention is due. Ruffhead and Spence, upon such questions, must always be of higher authority than Johnson and Warton, and a fortiori than Bowles. But it ought not to be concealed, though hitherto unnoticed by any person, that some doubt after all remains whether any of the biographers is right. An anonymous writer, contemporary with Pope, and evidently familiar with his personal history, declares that he was born on the 8th of June; and he connects it with an event that, having a public and a partisan interest, (the birth of that Prince of Wales, who was known twenty-seven years afterwards as the Pretender,) would serve to check his own recollections, and give them a collateral voucher. It is true he wrote for an ill-natured purpose; but no purpose whatever could have been promoted by falsifying this particular date. What is still more noticeable, however, Pope himself puts a most emphatic negative upon all these statements. In a pathetic letter to a friend, when his attention could not have been wandering, for he is expressly insisting upon a sentiment which will find an echo in many a human heart, viz., that a birthday, though from habit usually celebrated as a festal day, too often is secretly a memorial of disappointment, and an anniversary of sorrowful meaning, he speaks of the very day on which he is then writing as his own birthday; and indeed what else could give any propriety to the passage? Now the date of this letter is January 1, 1733. Surely Pope knew his own birthday better than those who have adopted a random rumor without investigation.