have done, nor an epigram, as French poets love to do,
but a long poem in which all the mannerisms of society are pictured in
minutest detail and satirized with the most delicate wit. The first
edition, consisting of two cantos, was published in 1712; and it is amazing
now to read of the trivial character of London court life at the time when
English soldiers were battling for a great continent in the French and
Indian wars. Its instant success caused Pope to lengthen the poem by three
more cantos; and in order to make a more perfect burlesque of an epic poem,
he introduces gnomes, sprites, sylphs, and salamanders,[188] instead of the
gods of the great epics, with which his readers were familiar. The poem is
modeled after two foreign satires: Boileau's _Le Lutrin_ (reading desk), a
satire on the French clergy, who raised a huge quarrel over the location of
a lectern; and _La Secchia Rapita_ (stolen bucket), a famous Italian satire
on the petty causes of the endless Italian wars. Pope, however, went far
ahead of his masters in style and in delicacy of handling a mock-heroic
theme, and during his lifetime the _Rape of the Lock_ was considered as the
greatest poem of its kind in all literature. The poem is still well worth
reading; for as an expression of the artificial life of the age--of its
cards, parties, toilettes, lapdogs, tea-drinking, snuff-taking, and idle
vanities--it is as perfect in its way as _Tamburlaine_, which reflects the
boundless ambition of the Elizabethans.

The fame of Pope's _Iliad_, which was financially the most successful of
his books, was due to the fact that he interpreted Homer in the elegant,
artificial language of his own age. Not only do his words follow literary
fashions but even the Homeric characters lose their strength and become
fashionable men of the court. So the criticism of the scholar Bentley was
most appropriate when he said, "It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must
not call it Homer." Pope translated the entire _Iliad_ and half of the
_Odyssey_; and the latter work was finished by two Cambridge scholars,
Elijah Fenton and William Broome, who imitated the mechanical couplets so
perfectly that it is difficult to distinguish their work from that of the
greatest poet of the age. A single selection is given to show how, in the
nobler passages, even Pope may faintly suggest the elemental grandeur of
Homer:

The troops exulting sat in order round,
And beaming fires illumine