against cruelty to animals. He "dares not" attack hunting,
he says--and, indeed, such an attack requires some courage even at the
present day--but he evidently has no sympathy with huntsmen, and has to
borrow his description from Statius, which was hardly the way to get the
true local colour. _Windsor Forest_, however, like _Cooper's Hill_,
speedily diverges into historical and political reflections. The
barbarity of the old forest laws, the poets Denham and Cowley and
Surrey, who had sung on the banks of the Thames, and the heroes who
made Windsor illustrious, suggest obvious thoughts, put into verses
often brilliant, though sometimes affected, varied by a compliment to
Trumbull and an excessive eulogy of Granville, to whom the poem is
inscribed. The whole is skilfully adapted to the time by a brilliant
eulogy upon the peace which was concluded just as the poem was
published. The Whig poet Tickell, soon to be Pope's rival, was
celebrating the same "lofty theme" on his "artless reed," and
introducing a pretty little compliment to Pope. To readers who have lost
the taste for poetry of this class one poem may seem about as good as
the other; but Pope's superiority is plain enough to a reader who will
condescend to distinguish. His verses are an excellent specimen of his
declamatory style--polished, epigrammatic, and well expressed; and,
though keeping far below the regions of true poetry, preserving just
that level which would commend them to the literary statesmen and the
politicians at Will's and Button's. Perhaps some advocate of Free Trade
might try upon a modern audience the lines in which Pope expresses his
aspiration in a footnote that London may one day become a "FREE PORT."
There is at least not one antiquated or obscure phrase in the whole.
Here are half-a-dozen lines:--

The time shall come, when, free as seas and wind,
Unbounded Thames shall flow for all mankind,
Whole nations enter with each swelling tide,
And seas but join the regions they divide;
Earth's distant ends our glory shall behold,
And the new world launch forth to seek the old.

In the next few years Pope found other themes for the display of his
declamatory powers. Of the _Temple of Fame_ (1715), a frigid imitation
of Chaucer, I need only say that it is one of Pope's least successful
performances; but I must notice more fully two rhetorical poems which
appeared in 1717. These were the _Elegy to the Memory of an Unf