ring by vast and permanent benefits.

A fourth element in Windsor Forest is not noticed by Bowles. Pope
considered that the "reflections upon life and political institutions"
were the distinguishing excellence of Cooper's Hill. He emulated in this
respect his master's merits, surpassed him in polish of style, and fell
below him in strength of thought. Hunting the hare suggests to Pope this
poor and false conclusion:

Beasts urged by us their fellow beasts pursue,
And learn of man each other to undo.

How much more weighty is the sentiment expressed by Denham, when the
stag endeavours to take refuge in the herd:

The herd, unkindly wise,
Or chases him from thence, or from him flies;
Like a declining statesman, left forlorn
To his friends' pity, and pursuers' scorn,
With shame remembers, while himself was one
Of the same herd, himself the same had done.

The terse satire upon Henry VIII. is a still better specimen of Denham's
moralisings. As he surveys the prospect round Cooper's Hill he is
reminded of the dissolution of the monasteries, by the sight of the
place where once stood a chapel which had shared the fate of its parent
abbey. This rouses his indignation, and he thus proceeds:

Tell me, my Muse, what monstrous dire offence,
What crime could any Christian king incense
To such a rage? Was't luxury or lust?
Was _he_ so temperate, so chaste, so just?
Were these their crimes?--they were his own much more;
But wealth is crime enough to him that's poor,
Who having spent the treasures of his crown,
Condemns their luxury to feed his own.
Thus he the church at once protects and spoils:
But princes' swords are sharper than their styles.

The last couplet is a contrast between the destroying energy of Henry
VIII., and the impotence of his book against Luther.

Windsor Forest has rather more variety in its versification than is
usual with Pope. The poem opens with one of those breaks in the metre
which were incessant in the older rhymsters, and which were gradually
abjured by their successors.

Thy forest, Windsor! and thy green retreats,
At once the monarch's and the muse's seats,
Invite my lays.

This use of the full stop commonly required that the sense should be
carried on without a pause from the preceding line, whereas the theory
spread that the close of the sense should coincide with the close of the
r