strong and refined enough to enjoy the severe fidelity of a prose
translation. But Pope has brought the story of Achilles' wrath, and
Helen's pathetic beauty, and Hector's fall, and Priam's agony home to
the hearts of millions for whom they would otherwise have no life. We
have no intention of writing a critical dissertation on the poetry of
Pope. One fact may, however, be remarked and recorded concerning it.
After Shakespeare, and possibly Milton, no English poet is so much
quoted from as Pope. Lines and phrases of his have passed into the
common vernacular of our daily life. We talk Pope, many of us, as the
too-often cited _bourgeois gentilhomme_ of Moliere talked prose,
without knowing it. There is hardly a line of "The Rape of the Lock"
or "The Dunciad" that has not thus passed into the habitual
conversation of our lives. This of itself would not prove that Pope
was a great poet, but it is a striking testimony to his extraordinary
popularity, and his style is not that which of itself would seem
calculated to insure popularity. The very smoothness and perfection of
his verse make it seem to many ears nothing better than a melodious
monotony. Pope had not imagination enough to be a great poet of the
highest order--the order of creative power. He had marvellous fancy,
which sometimes, as in "The Rape of the Lock" and in passages of the
fierce "Dunciad," rose to something like imagination. Every good
Christian ought no doubt to lament that a man of such noble gifts
should have had also such a terrible gift of hate. But even a very
good Christian could hardly help admitting that it must have been all
for the best, seeing that only for that passion of hatred we should
never have had "The Dunciad."

{199}

CHAPTER XXXIV.

"THE FORTY-FIVE."

[Sidenote: 1720--Birth of "Prince Charlie"]

Thirty years had come and gone since England had been alarmed,
irritated, or encouraged, according to the temper of its political
inhabitants, by a Jacobite rising. The personality of James Stuart,
the Old Pretender, was little more than a memory among those clansmen
who had rallied round the royal standard at Braemar. In those thirty
years James Stuart had lived his melancholy, lonely, evil life of
exile, the hanger-on of foreign courts, the half grotesque, half
pitiable, sham monarch of a sham court, that was always ready to be
moved from place to place, with all its cheaply regal accessaries, like
the company and