ong visit to Pope at Twickenham. These
two influences may be traced in most of Pope's remaining works. In
1726, "Gulliver's Travels" saw the light, and in 1727 were issued
those joint volumes of "Miscellanies" which contained the "Treatise on
the Bathos," a prose satire, to be supplanted in brief space by the
terrible "Dunciad." In this last, Pope entered upon a campaign against
the smaller fry of the pen with a vigor, a deadly earnestness, and a
determination to wound, unparalleled in the history of letters. One of
the most gifted of his critics, the late Rector of Lincoln College,
speaks of the "Dunciad" roundly as "an amalgam of dirt, ribaldry, and
petty spite," and M. Taine brought against it the more fatal charge of
tediousness. But even if one admits the indiscriminate nature of that
onslaught which confuses Bentley with such creatures of a day as Ralph
and Oldmixon, it is impossible not to admire the surpassing skill of
the measure; and it is probable that, in spite of the "higher
criticism," the "Dunciad," swarming as it does with contemporary
allusions, will continue to hold its own with the antiquary and the
literary historian, though it has ceased to be regarded as one of the
desirable masterpieces of its class.

If Swift, who encouraged Pope in his war against Dulness, must be held
to be indirectly responsible for the attack upon its strongholds, it
was Bolingbroke who suggested the once popular epistles which Pope
dedicated to him under the title of the "Essay on Man," a work which
has this in common with the earlier "Essay on Criticism," that it is a
versification of a given theme. But Pope understood the precepts of
Rapin and Bossu better than the precepts of Leibnitz and St. John, and
the "Essay on Man," bristling as it does with axiomatic felicities and
"jewels five words long," has long been discredited as a philosophical
treatise. It is to another hint from the sage of Dawley that we owe
its author's most individual work. A chance remark of Bolingbroke set
him upon the imitations of Horace that grew into the "Satires and
Epistles." In these and the cognate "Moral Essays," which belong to
his ripest period of production, Pope's unmatched mastery over
heroics, perfected by the long probation of his Homeric translations,
and his equally unrivalled powers of satire, let loose and emboldened
by the brutalities of the "Dunciad," found their fitting field. Aimed
at the old eternal vices and frailties of huma