nge a flounce or add a furbelow.

Pope was not a great poet; it has been doubted whether he was a poet at
all. He does not touch the heart, or stimulate the imagination, as the
true poet always does. In the poetry of nature, and the poetry of
passion, he was altogether impotent. His _Windsor Forest_ and his
_Pastorals_ are artificial and false, not written with "the eye upon the
object." His epistle of _Eloisa to Abelard_ is declamatory and academic,
and leaves the reader cold. The only one of his poems which is at all
possessed with feeling is his pathetic _Elegy to the Memory of an
Unfortunate Lady_. But he was a great literary artist. Within the
cramped and starched regularity of the heroic couplet, which the fashion
of the time and his own habit of mind imposed upon him, he secured the
largest variety of modulation and emphasis of which that verse was
capable. He used antithesis, periphrasis, and climax with great skill.
His example dominated English poetry for nearly a century, and even now,
when a poet like Dr. Holmes, for example, would write satire or humorous
verse of a dignified kind, he turns instinctively to the measure and
manner of Pope. He was not a consecutive thinker, like Dryden, and cared
less about the truth of his thought than about the pointedness of its
expression. His language was closer-grained than Dryden's. His great art
was the art of putting things. He is more quoted than any other English
poet but Shakspere. He struck the average intelligence, the common sense
of English readers, and furnished it with neat, portable formulas, so
that it no longer needed to "vent its observation in mangled terms," but
could pour itself out compactly, artistically in little ready-made
molds. But this high-wrought brilliancy, this unceasing point, soon
fatigue. His poems read like a series of epigrams; and every line has a
hit or an effect.

From the reign of Queen Anne date the beginnings of the periodical
essay. Newspapers had been published since the time of the civil war; at
first irregularly, and then regularly. But no literature of permanent
value appeared in periodical form until Richard Steele started the
_Tatler_, in 1709. In this he was soon joined by his friend, Joseph
Addison; and in its successor, the _Spectator_, the first number of
which was issued March 1, 1711, Addison's contributions outnumbered
Steele's. The _Tatler_ was published on three, the _Spectator_ on six,
days of the week. The _Tat