As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew
  From nature, I believe them true. 
  They argue no corrupted mind
  In him; the fault is in mankind.

The succession which Dryden had willed to Congreve was taken up by Alexander Pope.  He was a man quite unlike Dryden—­sickly, deformed, morbidly precocious, and spiteful; nevertheless he joined on to and continued Dryden.  He was more careful in his literary workmanship than his great forerunner, and in his Moral Essays and Satires he brought the Horatian epistle in verse, the formal satire and that species of didactic poem of which Boileau had given the first example, to an exquisite perfection of finish and verbal art.  Dryden had translated Vergil, and so Pope translated Homer.  The throne of the dunces, which Dryden had conferred upon Shadwell, Pope, in his Dunciad, passed on to two of his own literary foes, Theobald and Colley Cibber.  There is a great waste of strength in this elaborate squib, and most of the petty writers, whose names it has preserved, as has been said, like flies in amber, are now quite unknown.  But, although we have to read it with notes, to get the point of its allusions, it is easy to see what execution it must have done at the time, and it is impossible to withhold admiration from the wit, the wickedness, the triumphant mischief of the thing.  In the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, the satirical sketch of Addison—­who had offended Pope by praising a rival translation of Homer—­is as brilliant as any thing of the kind in Dryden.  Pope’s very malignity made his sting sharper than Dryden’s.  He secreted venom, and worked out his revenges deliberately, bringing all the resources of his art to bear upon the question of how to give the most pain most cleverly.

Pope’s masterpiece is, perhaps, the Rape of the Lock, a mock heroic poem, a “dwarf Iliad” recounting, in five cantos, a society quarrel, which arose from Lord Petre’s cutting a lock of hair from the head of Mrs. Arabella Fermor.  Boileau, in his Lutrin, had treated with the same epic dignity a dispute over the placing of the reading-desk in a parish church.  Pope was the Homer of the drawing-room, the boudoir, the tea-urn, the ombre-party, the sedan-chair, the parrot cage, and the lap-dogs.  This poem, in its sparkle and airy grace, is the topmost blossom of a highly artificial society, the quintessence of whatever poetry was possible in those

  Tea-cup times of hood and hoop,
  And when the patch was worn,

with whose decorative features, at least, the recent Queen Anne revival has made this generation familiar.  It may be said of it, as Thackery said of Gay’s pastorals:  “It is to poetry what charming little Dresden china figures are to sculpture, graceful, minikin, fantastic, with a certain beauty always accompanying them.”  The Rape of the Lock, perhaps, stops short of beauty, but it attains elegance and prettiness in a supreme degree.  In imitation of the gods and goddesses in the Iliad, who intermeddle for or against the human characters, Pope introduced the Sylphs of the Rosicrucian philosophy.  We may measure the distance between imagination and fancy, if we will compare these little filagree creatures with Shakspere’s elves, whose occupation it was