To tread the ooze of the salt deep,
  Or run upon the sharp wind of the north,... 
  Or on the beached margent of the sea
  To dance their ringlets to the whispering wind.

Very different are the offices of Pope’s fays: 

  Our humble province is to tend the fair;
  Not a less pleasing, though less glorious, care;
  To save the powder from too rude a gale,
  Nor let the imprisoned essences exhale.... 
  Nay oft in dreams invention we bestow
  To change a flounce or add a furbelow.

Pope was not a great poet; it has been doubted whether he was a poet at all.  He does not touch the heart, or stimulate the imagination, as the true poet always does.  In the poetry of nature, and the poetry of passion, he was altogether impotent.  His Windsor Forest and his Pastorals are artificial and false, not written with “the eye upon the object.”  His epistle of Eloisa to Abelard is declamatory and academic, and leaves the reader cold.  The only one of his poems which is at all possessed with feeling is his pathetic Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady.  But he was a great literary artist.  Within the cramped and starched regularity of the heroic couplet, which the fashion of the time and his own habit of mind imposed upon him, he secured the largest variety of modulation and emphasis of which that verse was capable.  He used antithesis, periphrasis, and climax with great skill.  His example dominated English poetry for nearly a century, and even now, when a poet like Dr. Holmes, for example, would write satire or humorous verse of a dignified kind, he turns instinctively to the measure and manner of Pope.  He was not a consecutive thinker, like Dryden, and cared less about the truth of his thought than about the pointedness of its expression.  His language was closer-grained than Dryden’s.  His great art was the art of putting things.  He is more quoted than any other English poet but Shakspere.  He struck the average intelligence, the common sense of English readers, and furnished it with neat, portable formulas, so that it no longer needed to “vent its observation in mangled terms,” but could pour itself out compactly, artistically in little ready-made molds.  But this high-wrought brilliancy, this unceasing point, soon fatigue.  His poems read like a series of epigrams; and every line has a hit or an effect.

From the reign of Queen Anne date the beginnings of the periodical essay.  Newspapers had been published since the time of the civil war; at first irregularly, and then regularly.  But no literature of permanent value appeared in periodical form until Richard Steele started the Tatler, in 1709.  In this he was soon joined by his friend, Joseph Addison; and in its successor, the Spectator, the first number of which was issued March 1, 1711, Addison’s contributions outnumbered Steele’s.  The Tatler was published on three, the Spectator