uld overbalance the advantage. The construction of his
language is not always strictly grammatical; with those rhymes, which
prescription had conjoined, he contented himself, without regard to
Swift's remonstrances, though there was no striking consonance; nor was
he very careful to vary his terminations, or to refuse admission, at a
small distance, to the same rhymes.

To Swift's edict, for the exclusion of alexandrines and triplets, he
paid little regard; he admitted them, but, in the opinion of Fenton, too
rarely; he uses them more liberally in his translation than his poems.

He has a few double rhymes; and always, I think, unsuccessfully, except
once in the Rape of the Lock.

Expletives he very early ejected from his verses; but he now and then
admits an epithet rather commodious than important. Each of the six
first lines of the Iliad might lose two syllables with very little
diminution of the meaning; and sometimes, after all his art and labour,
one verse seems to be made for the sake of another. In his latter
productions the diction is sometimes vitiated by French idioms, with
which Bolingbroke had, perhaps, infected him.

I have been told, that the couplet by which he declared his own ear to
be most gratified, was this:

Lo, where Maeotis sleeps, and hardly flows
The freezing Tanais through a waste of snows.

But the reason of this preference I cannot discover.

It is remarked by Watts, that there is scarcely a happy combination of
words, or a phrase poetically elegant, in the English language, which
Pope has not inserted into his version of Homer. How he obtained
possession of so many beauties of speech, it were desirable to know.
That he gleaned from authors, obscure as well as eminent, what he
thought brilliant or useful, and preserved it all in a regular
collection, is not unlikely. When, in his last years, Hall's Satires
were shown him, he wished that he had seen them sooner.

New sentiments, and new images, others may produce; but to attempt any
further improvement of versification will be dangerous. Art and
diligence have now done their best, and what shall be added will be the
effort of tedious toil and needless curiosity.

After all this, it is, surely, superfluous to answer the question that
has once been asked, whether Pope was a poet? otherwise than by asking
in return, if Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found? To
circumscribe poetry by a definition, will only show the na