possible to
withhold admiration from the wit, the wickedness, the triumphant
mischief of the thing. In the _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_, the satirical
sketch of Addison--who had offended Pope by praising a rival translation
of Homer--is as brilliant as any thing of the kind in Dryden. Pope's
very malignity made his sting sharper than Dryden's. He secreted venom,
and worked out his revenges deliberately, bringing all the resources of
his art to bear upon the question of how to give the most pain most
cleverly.

Pope's masterpiece is, perhaps, the _Rape of the Lock_, a mock heroic
poem, a "dwarf _Iliad_" recounting, in five cantos, a society quarrel,
which arose from Lord Petre's cutting a lock of hair from the head of
Mrs. Arabella Fermor. Boileau, in his _Lutrin_, had treated with the
same epic dignity a dispute over the placing of the reading-desk in a
parish church. Pope was the Homer of the drawing-room, the boudoir, the
tea-urn, the ombre-party, the sedan-chair, the parrot cage, and the
lap-dogs. This poem, in its sparkle and airy grace, is the topmost
blossom of a highly artificial society, the quintessence of whatever
poetry was possible in those

Tea-cup times of hood and hoop,
And when the patch was worn,

with whose decorative features, at least, the recent Queen Anne revival
has made this generation familiar. It may be said of it, as Thackery
said of Gay's pastorals: "It is to poetry what charming little Dresden
china figures are to sculpture, graceful, minikin, fantastic, with a
certain beauty always accompanying them." The _Rape of the Lock_,
perhaps, stops short of beauty, but it attains elegance and prettiness
in a supreme degree. In imitation of the gods and goddesses in the
_Iliad_, who intermeddle for or against the human characters, Pope
introduced the Sylphs of the Rosicrucian philosophy. We may measure the
distance between imagination and fancy, if we will compare these little
filagree creatures with Shakspere's elves, whose occupation it was

To tread the ooze of the salt deep,
Or run upon the sharp wind of the north,...
Or on the beached margent of the sea
To dance their ringlets to the whispering wind.

Very different are the offices of Pope's fays:

Our humble province is to tend the fair;
Not a less pleasing, though less glorious, care;
To save the powder from too rude a gale,
Nor let the imprisoned essences exhale....
Nay oft in dreams invention we bestow
To cha