excellence. His general reading, too. was uncomn ly
extensive and various, ami at twenty-five he was on< ol i lie best-informed men of his generation. When only eighteen years old he produced his Messiah, a sacred eclogue in imitation of Virgil's Potlio. Pollio was a Roman senator in the time of Augustus, and ci lebrated
not only as a general, hut as a patron of letter- and the
line an-. Virgil addressed to him his fourth t clogue at
a lime ( 11. ( '. In i when Augustus and Antony had rati- fied a league of peace, and thus, as it was thought, es-
POPE
413
POPER
tablished the tranquillity of the empire, as in the times of the "golden age." In this eclogue Virgil is most eloquent" in the praise of peace, and in some of his figures and expressions is thought to have imitated the prophecies of Isaiah, which he had possibly read in the Greek Septuagint. But, however this may be as regards Virgil, Roscoe well remarks of this produc- tion of Pope, that "the idea of uniting the sacred prophecies and grand imagery of Isaiah with the mys- terious visions and pomp of numbers displayed in the Pollio, thereby combining both sacred and heathen mythology in predicting the coming of the Messiah, is one of the happiest subjects for producing emotions of sublimity that ever occurred to the mind of a poet." Pope's next remarkable work was his Essay on Criti- cism (written in 1700). which displays such extent of comprehension, such nicety of distinction, such ac- quaintance with mankind, and such knowledge both of ancient and modern learning, as are not often attained by the maturest age and longest, experience. About 1713 he set about a translation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, which he published from 1715 to 1720, and secured by it a world-wide renown. It was received witli admiration, and well deserved the praises of his contemporaries. But the work which gives him special interest in our line of study is his Essay on Man (1733), a philosophical didactic poem in vindication of the ways of Providence, in which the poet proposes to prove that, of all possible systems, Infinite Wisdom has formed the best; that in such a system coherence, union, subordination, are necessary; that it is not strange that we should not be able to discover perfection and order in every instance ; because, in an infinity of things mu- tually relative, a mind which sees not infinitely can see nothing fully. Thus we see Pope setting forth, after Bolingbroke, a theory of optimism (q. v.), the con- sequences of which he probably did not fully under- stand. The Essay aspires to be, like Leibnitz's cele- brated work, a theodicy, and is really a poetical ver- sion of the religious creed of Pope's age- — of that deism which took various shapes with Clarke, Tindal, and Shaftesbury, and which Bolingbroke seems to have more or less put into shape to be celebrated in poetry by his friends. The poem is didactic, and not only didactive, but ratiocinative. The emotion is always checked by the sense that the Deity whose ways are indicated is after all but a barren abstraction, in no particular relation to our race or its history. He never touches the circle of human interests. Considered as a whole, this production, though Pope's most ambitious, remains radically unsatisfactory; yet there are, it must be granted, many brief passages marked by Pope's spe- cial felicity of touch; many in which the moral senti- ment is true and tender; many in which he forgets for a moment the danger of open heterodoxy, and utters with genuine force some of the deeper sentiments that haunt us in this mysterious universe. Of his other works, none interest us here. One of the most admira- ble of Pope's religious poems is "The Universal Prayer," beginning with
" Father of all ! in every age, In every clinic adored."
Pope's celebrated lyric, " Vital spark of heavenly flame," like some other productions of his pen, is an imitation. The original source of this hymn is supposed to be a poem composed by the emperor Adrian, who, dying A.D. 138, thus gave expression to his mingled doubts and fears. His poem begins: Animulum vagula blan- dula, Hospes comesque corporis ("Sweet spirit, ready- to depart, guest and companion of the body"). It is afterwards found freely rendered in a piece by a poet of some note in his "day— Thomas Flatman, of Lon- don, a barrister, poet, and painter. Flatman's poem is called "A Thought of Death ;" and as he died in the year Pope was born, 1688, and the poems are very sim- ilar, there can be little doubt that Pope has imitated
his predecessor. From Pope's correspondence we learn that on Nov. 7, 1712, he sent a letter to Mr. Steele for insertion in the Spectator on the subject of Adrian's last words; to which Steele responded by asking him to make of them an ode, in two or three stanzas of music. Pope replied immediately, saying that he had done as required, and sent the piece. To show how close is the parallel between the poets, we print a stanza of each :
FI.ATiMAN.
" Full of sorrow, full of anguish, Fainting, graspiiiL', trembling, crying, Panting, groaning, sin inking dv'ing- Methiiiks I hem- some penile spirit say, ' Be not fearful, come away V "