o London and for a time endeavored to
live the gay and dissolute life which was supposed to be suitable for a
literary genius; but he was utterly unfitted for it, mentally and
physically, and soon retired to Twickenham. There he gave himself up to
poetry, manufactured a little garden more artificial than his verses, and
cultivated his friendship with Martha Blount, with whom for many years he
spent a good part of each day, and who remained faithful to him to the end
of his life. At Twickenham he wrote his _Moral Epistles_ (poetical satires
modeled after Horace) and revenged himself upon all his critics in the
bitter abuse of the _Dunciad_. He died in 1744 and was buried at
Twickenham, his religion preventing him from the honor, which was certainly
his due, of a resting place in Westminster Abbey.

WORKS OF POPE. For convenience we may separate Pope's work into three
groups, corresponding to the early, middle, and later period of his life.
In the first he wrote his "Pastorals," "Windsor Forest," "Messiah," "Essay
on Criticism," "Eloise to Abelard," and the _Rape of the Lock;_ in the
second, his translations of Homer; in the third the _Dunciad_ and the
_Epistles_, the latter containing the famous "Essay on Man" and the
"Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," which is in truth his "Apologia," and in which
alone we see Pope's life from his own view point.

The "Essay on Criticism" sums up the art of poetry as taught first by
Horace, then by Boileau and the eighteenth-century classicists. Though
written in heroic couplets, we hardly consider this as a poem but rather as
a storehouse of critical maxims. "For fools rush in where angels fear to
tread"; "To err is human, to forgive divine"; "A little learning is a
dangerous thing,"--these lines, and many more like them from the same
source, have found their way into our common speech, and are used, without
thinking of the author, whenever we need an apt quotation.

The _Rape of the Lock_ is a masterpiece of its kind, and comes nearer to
being a "creation" than anything else that Pope has written. The occasion
of the famous poem was trivial enough. A fop at the court of Queen Anne,
one Lord Petre, snipped a lock of hair from the abundant curls of a pretty
maid of honor named Arabella Fermor. The young lady resented it, and the
two families were plunged into a quarrel which was the talk of London.
Pope, being appealed to, seized the occasion to construct, not a ballad, as
the Cavaliers would