en it is insufficient, is content to
suspend judgment without resorting to conjecture; or that his views
both on points of conduct and literary questions, if not marked by any
striking originality, show clear and vigorous thinking and are stated
in a way that provokes no impatience or captious dissent. The interest
of the narrative is well sustained, and the general impression left by
it that of a report made by an expert on documents that needed to be
thoroughly sifted in order that the issues which had been raised might
be succinctly set forth and fully apprehended. Further than this Mr.
Stephen does not pretend to go. His report is preliminary, not final.
No matter previously left uncertain is here determined. Instead of an
added knowledge, we are only made more sensible of our former
ignorance. Pope's figure, far from coming more distinctly into view,
seems to have receded and grown more vague. Certain traits have perhaps
been made more noticeable than before, but those essential elements of
character which would define, explain, reconcile, and enable us to
conceive the combination as a unit, have eluded observation.

This is, of course, a natural result of the gaps and contradictions in
the evidence, the lack especially of those minute details which are not
only necessary links, but often the most suggestive features, in a
record of facts or delineation of character. And if it be urged that a
deeper insight would have in some measure supplied this deficiency, the
answer can only be that we have no right to expect from any man the
exercise of powers which he does not possess or affect to
possess--powers which, in a case like this, would need to be of the
finest and rarest kind. We may, however, fairly regret that Mr. Stephen
has not availed himself of a resource that lay within his reach for
making the accessories of his picture more brilliant and effective,
with the possible incidental result of throwing a stronger light on the
principal figure. Whatever else may be debated about Pope, no one would
deny that he was pre-eminently the man of his time--not only its most
conspicuous figure, but the very embodiment of its ideals. He suited it
and it suited him. Hence the fulness and in a certain sense perfection
of his work, the fact that he has given his name to an epoch as well as
a school, and consequently the important place which he still retains
in the history of literature. Men who were certainly not his inferiors