name was known and honored all over England, and this dwarf of twenty-four years, by the sheer force of his own ambition, had jumped to the foremost place in English letters.  It was soon after this that Voltaire called him “the best poet of England and, at present, of all the world,”—­which is about as near the truth as Voltaire generally gets in his numerous universal judgments.  For the next twelve years Pope was busy with poetry, especially with his translations of Homer; and his work was so successful financially that he bought a villa at Twickenham, on the Thames, and remained happily independent of wealthy patrons for a livelihood.

Led by his success, Pope returned to London and for a time endeavored to live the gay and dissolute life which was supposed to be suitable for a literary genius; but he was utterly unfitted for it, mentally and physically, and soon retired to Twickenham.  There he gave himself up to poetry, manufactured a little garden more artificial than his verses, and cultivated his friendship with Martha Blount, with whom for many years he spent a good part of each day, and who remained faithful to him to the end of his life.  At Twickenham he wrote his Moral Epistles (poetical satires modeled after Horace) and revenged himself upon all his critics in the bitter abuse of the Dunciad.  He died in 1744 and was buried at Twickenham, his religion preventing him from the honor, which was certainly his due, of a resting place in Westminster Abbey.

WORKS OF POPE.  For convenience we may separate Pope’s work into three groups, corresponding to the early, middle, and later period of his life.  In the first he wrote his “Pastorals,” “Windsor Forest,” “Messiah,” “Essay on Criticism,” “Eloise to Abelard,” and the Rape of the Lock; in the second, his translations of Homer; in the third the Dunciad and the Epistles, the latter containing the famous “Essay on Man” and the “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,” which is in truth his “Apologia,” and in which alone we see Pope’s life from his own view point.

The “Essay on Criticism” sums up the art of poetry as taught first by Horace, then by Boileau and the eighteenth-century classicists.  Though written in heroic couplets, we hardly consider this as a poem but rather as a storehouse of critical maxims.  “For fools rush in where angels fear to tread”; “To err is human, to forgive divine”; “A little learning is a dangerous thing,”—­these lines, and many more like them from the same source, have found their way into our common speech, and are used, without thinking of the author, whenever we need an apt quotation.