alth which nature had put in his keeping. He
resigned himself to die, and was dying, when a strong interposition, among
other sanatary measures, transferred him from the back of Pegasus to that
of an earth-born horse.

Pope had a gentleness of spirit, which showed itself in his filial offices
to his father and mother--to her the most, ill the prolonged wearing out
of a beloved life. It appears in kindly relations to his friends, in
charities, in the scheme of his life--contentedness in a bounded, quiet
existence, a seclusion among books, and trees, and flowers. His life
flowed on peaceably and gently, like the noble river upon which his modest
dwelling looked. Ill health, as we said, often dedicates a student. The
constitutional feebleness from which he suffered, might doubly favour his
mind; as often the more delicate frame harbours the greater spirit; and as
inaptitude for active and rough sports, throws the solitary boy upon the
companionship of books, and upon the energies, avocations, and pleasures
of his own intelligence and fancy. The little poem of his boyhood, and the
first of his manhood, prophesy his tenor of life, and his literary career.

A commanding power, a predominant star in English literature--you might
say that the last century belonged to him. Dryden reigned over his
contemporaries. Pope, succeeding, took dominion over his own time and the
following. The pupil of Dryden, and gratefully proud to proclaim the
greatness of his master, and to own all obligations, he moulded himself
nevertheless upon a type in his own mind. In the school of Dryden he is an
original master. Dryden is, properly speaking, without imitators. His
manner proceeds from his own genius, and baffles transcribers. But Pope
completed an art which could be learned, and he left a world full of
copyists.

A remarkable feature is the early acknowledgment of Pope by his
contemporaries. At sixteen he is a poet for the world by his PASTORALS,
and at that age he has a literary adviser in Walsh and a literary patron
in Trumbull. He does not seem to court. He is courted. He is the intimate
friend, we do not know how soon, of scholars and polite writers, of men
and women high in birth, in education, in station. Scarce twenty, by his
"ESSAY ON CRITICISM" he assumes a chair in the school of the Muses. At
five-and-twenty, he is an acknowledged dictator of polite letters. So
early, rapid, untroubled an ascension to fame, it would require some
re