re, and safe in the admission
of negligent indulgences, or that mankind expect from elevated genius an
uniformity of greatness, and watch its degradation with malicious
wonder; like him who, having followed with his eye an eagle into the
clouds, should lament that she ever descended to a perch.

While the volumes of his Homer were annually published, he collected his
former works, 1717, into one quarto volume, to which he prefixed a
preface, written with great sprightliness and elegance, which was
afterwards reprinted, with some passages subjoined that he at first
omitted; other marginal additions of the same kind he made in the later
editions of his poems. Waller remarks, that poets lose half their
praise, because the reader knows not what they have blotted. Pope's
voracity of fame taught him the art of obtaining the accumulated honour,
both of what he had published, and of what he had suppressed.

In this year his father died suddenly, in his seventy-fifth year, having
passed twenty-nine years in privacy. He is not known but by the
character which his son has given him. If the money with which he
retired was all gotten by himself, he had traded very successfully in,
times when sudden riches were rarely attainable.

The publication of the Iliad was at last completed in 1720. The
splendour and success of this work raised Pope many enemies, that
endeavoured to depreciate his abilities. Burnet, who was afterwards a
judge of no mean reputation, censured him in a piece called Homerides,
before it was published. Ducket, likewise, endeavoured to make him
ridiculous. Dennis was the perpetual persecutor of all his studies. But,
whoever his criticks were, their writings are lost; and the names which
are preserved are preserved in the Dunciad.

In this disastrous year, 1720, of national infatuation, when more riches
than Peru can boast were expected from the South-sea, when the contagion
of avarice tainted every mind, and even poets panted after wealth, Pope
was seized with the universal passion, and ventured some of his money.
The stock rose in its price; and for awhile he thought himself the lord
of thousands. But this dream of happiness did not last long; and he
seems to have waked soon enough to get clear with the loss only of what
he once thought himself to have won, and perhaps not wholly of that.

Next year he published some select poems of his friend Dr. Parnell, with
a very elegant dedication to the earl of Oxford; w