ed at a
century which whitewashed its churches and thought even monthly
communions affected. The ardent Liberal could not but despise a century
which did without the franchise, and, despite the most splendid
materials, had no Financial Reform Almanack. The sentimental Tory found
little to please him in the House of Hanover and Whig domination. The
lovers of poetry, with Shelley in their ears and Wordsworth at their
hearts, made merry with the trim muses of Queen Anne, with their sham
pastorals, their dilapidated classicism, and still more with their town-
bred descriptions of the country, with its purling brooks and nodding
groves, and, hanging over all, the moon--not Shelley's 'orbed maiden,'
but 'the refulgent lamp of night.' And so, on all hands, the poor
century was weighed in a hundred different balances and found wanting. It
lacked inspiration, unction, and generally all those things for which it
was thought certain the twentieth century would commend us. But we do
not talk like that now. The waters of the sullen Lethe, rolling doom,
are sounding too loudly in our own ears. We would die at peace with all
centuries. Mr. Frederic Harrison writes a formal _Defence of the
Eighteenth Century_, Mr. Matthew Arnold reprints half a dozen of Dr.
Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_. Mr. Leslie Stephen composes a history of
thought during this objurgated period, and also edits, in sumptuously
inconvenient volumes, the works of its two great novelists, Richardson
and Fielding; and, finally, there now trembles on the very verge of
completion a splendid and long-laboured edition of the poems and letters
of the great poet of the eighteenth century, the abstract and brief
chronicle of his time, a man who had some of its virtues and most of its
vices, one whom it is easy to hate, but still easier to quote--Alexander
Pope.

Twenty years ago the chances were that a lecturer on Pope began by asking
the, perhaps not impertinent, question, 'Was he a poet?' And the method
had its merits, for the question once asked, it was easy for the
lecturer, like an incendiary who has just fired a haystack, to steal away
amidst the cracklings of a familiar controversy. It was not unfitting
that so quarrelsome a man as Pope should have been the occasion of so
much quarrelsomeness in others. For long the battle waged as fiercely
over Pope's poetry as erst it did in his own _Homer_ over the body of the
slain Patroclus. Stout men took part in it