en words about the
poet. "Let us always take into account," he says, "that constant
tenderness and fidelity of affection which pervaded and sanctified his
life."

What pluck and dauntless courage possessed the "gallant little cripple"
of Twickenham! When all the dunces of England were aiming their
poisonous barbs at him, he said, "I had rather die at once, than live in
fear of those rascals." A vast deal that has been written about him is
untrue. No author has been more elaborately slandered on principle, or
more studiously abused through envy. Smarting dullards went about for
years, with an ever-ready microscope, hunting for flaws in his character
that might be injuriously exposed; but to-day his defamers are in bad
repute. Excellence in a fellow-mortal is to many men worse than death;
and great suffering fell upon a host of mediocre writers when Pope
uplifted his sceptre and sat supreme above them all.

Pope's latest champion is John Ruskin. Open his Lectures on Art,
recently delivered before the University of Oxford, and read passage
number seventy. Let us read it together, as we sit here in the presence
of the sensitive poet.

"I want you to think over the relation of expression to character in
two great masters of the absolute art of language, Virgil and Pope.
You are perhaps surprised at the last named; and indeed you have in
English much higher grasp and melody of language from more
passionate minds, but you have nothing else, in its range, so
perfect. I name, therefore, these two men, because they are the two
most accomplished _artists_, merely as such, whom I know, in
literature; and because I think you will be afterwards interested in
investigating how the infinite grace in the words of the one, the
severity in those of the other, and the precision in those of both,
arise wholly out of the moral elements of their minds,--out of the
deep tenderness in Virgil which enabled him to write the stories of
Nisus and Lausus, and the serene and just benevolence which placed
Pope, in his theology, two centuries in advance of his time, and
enabled him to sum the law of noble life in two lines which, so far
as I know, are the most complete, the most concise, and the most
lofty expression of moral temper existing in English words:--

'Never elated, while one man's oppressed;
Never dejected, while another's blessed.'

I wish you also to