g was not that of a satirist but of
the brightest and most genial of verse writers. When after some fanciful
preludes his genius found full utterance in 1712, it was in the "Rape of
the Lock"; and the "Rape of the Lock" was a poetic counterpart of the
work of the Essayists. If we miss in it the personal and intimate charm
of Addison, or the freshness and pathos of Steele, it passes far beyond
the work of both in the brilliancy of its wit, in the lightness and
buoyancy of its tone, in its atmosphere of fancy, its glancing colour,
its exquisite verse, its irresistible gaiety. The poem remains Pope's
masterpiece; it is impossible to read it without feeling that his
mastery lay in social and fanciful verse, and that he missed his poetic
path when he laid down the humourist for the philosopher and the critic.
But the state of letters presented an irresistible temptation to
criticism. All Pope's nobler feelings of loyalty to his art revolted
from the degradation of letters which he saw about him: and after an
interval of hack-work in a translation of Homer he revealed his terrible
power of sarcasm in his poem of the "Dunciad." The poem is disfigured by
mere outbursts of personal spleen, and in its later form by attacks on
men whose last fault was dulness. But in the main the "Dunciad" was a
noble vindication of literature from the herd of dullards and dunces
that had usurped its name, a protest against the claims of the
journalist or pamphleteer, of the compiler of facts and dates, or the
grubber among archives, to the rank of men of letters.

[Sidenote: Revival of Letters.]

That there was work and useful work for such men to do, Pope would not
have denied. It was when their pretensions threatened the very existence
of literature as an art, when the sense that the writer's work was the
work of an artist, and like an artist's work must show largeness of
design, and grace of form, and fitness of phrase, was either denied or
forgotten, it was when every rimer was claiming to be a poet, every
fault-finder a critic, every chronicler an historian, that Pope struck
at the herd of book-makers and swept them from the path of letters. Such
a protest is as true now, and perhaps as much needed now, as it was true
and needed then. But it had hardly been uttered when the chaos settled
itself, and the intellectual impulse which had as yet been felt mainly
in the demand for literature showed itself in its supply. Even before
the "Dunciad"