in intellectual power lived in the same age, partook of its influence
and contributed to its achievements; but they were not so thoroughly at
home in it: their best qualities were stunted, rather than developed,
by its soil and atmosphere. Dryden, one may safely say, would have been
greater had he lived earlier, Fielding had he lived later. But one
cannot imagine Pope thriving in any other air or producing equal work
under different influences. The qualities most esteemed by his
contemporaries he possessed in a superlative degree; his limitations
were common to the society in which he moved, and neither he nor it was
conscious of them as such; consequently, what would have been
impediments to a different nature were to his means of free and
spontaneous action. And not only does he represent the ideas of his
age, but he depicted its types and manners. In this respect he is the
link between the comic dramatists and the novelists, between Congreve
and Fielding. The wits, the beaux, the fine ladies, the Grub Street
drudges of the reign of Anne, whatever be the fidelity or other merits
of the portraitures, are more familiar to us in the satires of Pope
than as reflected in any other mirror. For these reasons Pope is one of
the last men who can be studied to advantage from a single point of
view or in a detached position. We need to understand not only his
personal relations but his general affinities with the men and events
of his time--of that world, at least, of which he was the centre. True,
the period is better known to readers generally than almost any other.
But it is not a copious accumulation of facts or a labored
analysis--for which there would have been no space--that we miss in Mr.
Stephen's book, but such groupings and irradiating touches as might
have given us a vivid glimpse, if only a glimpse, of the whole field.
Yet in lamenting that this much is not given us we are perhaps making
the mistake before noticed, of demanding from a given source what it
could not supply. We are driven back, therefore, on the reflection how
much the slightest things in art depend on inspiration, on original
power--how immeasurable the distance is between the man of culture and
the man of genius.

Samuel Lover: A Biographical Sketch. With Selections from his Writings
and Correspondence. By Andrew James Symington. New York: Harper &
Brothers.

The memory of so genial and popular a writer as Lover ought to be kept
as green as poss