died on May 30, 1744, at his house in Twickenham, where "Thames'
translucent wave shines a broad mirror," to use his own famous words.
He died quietly; death was indeed a relief to him from pain which he
had borne with a patience hardly to be expected from one of so fitful a
temper. Pope's life had been all a struggle against ill-health and
premature decrepitude. He was deformed; he was dwarfish; he was
miserably weak from his very boyhood; a rude breath of air made him
shrink and wither; the very breezes of summer had peril in them for his
singularly delicate constitution and ever-quivering nerves. He was but
fifty-six years old when death set him free. Life had been for him a
splendid success indeed, but the success had been qualified by much
bitterness and pain. He was sensitive to the quick; he formed strong
friendships, fierce and passionate enmities; and the friendships
themselves turned only too often into enmities. Unsparing with the
satire of his pen, he made enemies everywhere. He professed to be
indifferent to the world's praise or censure, but he was nevertheless
morbidly anxious to know what people said of him. He was as egotistic
as Rousseau or Byron; but he had none of Byron's manly public spirit,
and none of Rousseau's exalted love of humanity. Pope's place in
English poetry may be taken now as settled. He stands high and stands
firmly in the second class: that is, in the class just below
Shakespeare and Milton and a very few others. He has been
extravagantly censured and extravagantly praised. Byron at one time
maintained that he was the greatest English poet, and many vehement
arguments have been used to prove that he was not a poet at all. One
English critic believed he had settled the question forever when he
described Pope as "a musical rocking-horse." Again and again the world
has been told that Pope has disappeared from the sky of literature, but
the world looks up, and behold, there is the star shining just as
before. Many scholars and many poets have scoffed at his translations
of {198} Homer, but generations of English school-boys have learned to
love the "Iliad" because of the way in which Pope has told them the
story; and as to the telling of a story, the judgment of a school-boy
sometimes counts for more than the judgment of a sage. Pope's "Iliad"
and "Odyssey" are certainly not for those who can read the great
originals in their own tongue, or even for those who have a taste