remember these lines of Pope, and to make
yourselves entirely masters of his system of ethics; because,
putting Shakespeare aside as rather the world's than ours, I hold
Pope to be the most perfect representative we have, since Chaucer,
of the true English mind; and I think the Dunciad is the most
absolutely chiselled and monumental work 'exacted' in our country.
You will find, as you study Pope, that he has expressed for you, in
the strictest language and within the briefest limits, every law of
art, of criticism, of economy, of policy, and, finally, of a
benevolence, humble, rational, and resigned, contented with its
allotted share of life, and trusting the problem of its salvation to
Him in whose hands lies that of the universe."

Glance up at the tender eyes of the poet, who seems to have been eagerly
listening while we have been reading Ruskin's beautiful tribute. As he
is so intent upon us, let me gratify still further the honest pride of
"the little nightingale," as they used to call him when he was a child,
and read to you from the "Causeries du Lundi" what that wise French
critic, Sainte-Beuve, has written of his favorite English poet:--

"The natural history of Pope is very simple: delicate persons, it
has been said, are unhappy, and he was doubly delicate, delicate of
mind, delicate and infirm of body; he was doubly irritable. But what
grace, what taste, what swiftness to feel, what justness and
perfection in expressing his feeling!... His first masters were
insignificant; he educated himself: at twelve years old he learned
Latin and Greek together, and almost without a master; at fifteen he
resolved to go to London, in order to learn French and Italian
there, by reading the authors. His family, retired from trade, and
Catholic, lived at this time upon an estate in the forest of
Windsor. This desire of his was considered as an odd caprice, for
his health from that time hardly permitted him to move about. He
persisted, and accomplished his project; he learned nearly
everything thus by himself, making his own choice among authors,
getting the grammar quite alone, and his pleasure was to translate
into verse the finest passages he met with among the Latin and Greek
poets. When he was about sixteen years old, he said, his taste was
formed as much as it was later.... If such a thing as literary