ee it;" and he adds in a note,
"hence it appears this poem was writ before the author was twenty-two
years old." With the discrepancy usual with him when the dates of his
compositions were in question, he stated on the title-page of the
various reprints of the Temple of Fame, that it was "written in the year
1711," the first day of which found him nearer twenty-three than
twenty-two. He did not publish it till 1715, and between his
twenty-fifth year when he showed it to Steele, and his twenty-seventh
year when it appeared, he subjected the poem to an extensive revision.
"I have read over your Temple of Fame twice," wrote Steele, Nov. 12,
1712, "and cannot find anything amiss of weight enough to call a fault,
but see in it a thousand, thousand beauties." "Since you say," Pope
replied, "you see nothing that may be called a fault, can you not think
it so that I have confined the attendance of guardian spirits to
heaven's favourites only?" He remedied the defect by getting rid of the
guardian spirits; and with his own testimony to the changes which the
plan underwent, the learning can only be considered as displaying the
compass of his knowledge when he was upwards of twenty-six. It is
surprising that Johnson should have thought that a very small amount of
classical mythology, and an acquaintance with the broad characteristics
of a few celebrities of antiquity, was an unusual acquisition even for a
man of twenty-two. Warton has pointed out that the narrow range of
Pope's reading was more remarkable than its extent. He has not alluded
to the Greek tragedians, and had probably never looked into a single
play of AEschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides. The observation of life,
which Johnson thought as precocious as the learning, is not of the
recondite kind, and belongs exclusively to Chaucer. In whatever light we
view the Temple of Fame it must be ranked at best with the secondary
class of Pope's productions, and the indifference with which it was
regarded up to Johnson's time has continued unabated up to ours. The
eight lines on the rocks of Zembla are fine, and there is an occasional
good line in other portions of the piece, but the poem seldom rises
above a cold, and somewhat languid elegance, and like the "pale suns"
which the author describes, it "rolls away unfelt."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: The remainder of this sentence was omitted by Pope in the
later editions of his poem.]

[Footnote 2: Pope forgot that he had transfe