or a lady of title, whether she was beautiful or deformed, whether she was in love with Pope or the Duke of Buckingham or the Duc de Berry, whether Pope was in love with her, or even knew her, or whether she killed herself with a sword or by hanging herself.  One can find plenty of “rest and refreshment” among the conjectures of the commentators, but in the verse itself one can find little but a good example of the technique of the rhymed couplet.  But Mr. Saintsbury evidently loves the heroic couplet for itself alone.  The only long example of Pope’s verse which he quotes is merely ding-dong, and might have been written by any capable imitator of the poet later in the century.  Surely, if his contention is true that Pope’s reputation as a poet is now lower than it ought to be, he ought to have quoted something from the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot or The Rape of the Lock, or even The Essay on Man.  The two first are almost flawless masterpieces.  Here Pope suddenly becomes a star.  Here he gilds his age and his passions with wit and fancy; he ceases to be a mere rhymed moralist, a mechanician of metre.  Mr. Saintsbury, I regret to see, contends that the first version of The Rape of the Lock is the best.  One can hardly forgive this throwing overboard of the toilet and the fairies which Pope added in the later edition.  We may admit that the gnomes are a less happy invention than the sylphs, and that their introduction lets the poem down from its level of magic illusion.  But in the second telling the poem is an infinitely richer and more peopled thing.  Had we only known the first version, we should, no doubt, have felt with Addison that it was madness to tamper with such exquisite perfection.  But Pope, who foolishly attributed Addison’s advice to envy, proved that Addison was wrong.  His revision of The Rape of the Lock is one of the few magnificently successful examples in literature of painting the lily.

One differs from Mr. Saintsbury, however, less in liking a different garden from his than in liking a different seat in the same garden.  One who is familiar as he is with all the literature he discusses in the present volume is bound to indulge all manner of preferences, whims and even eccentricities.  An instance of Mr. Saintsbury’s whims is his complaint that the eighteenth-century essays are almost always reprinted only in selections and without the advertisements that appeared with them on their first publication.  He is impatient of J. R. Green’s dismissal of the periodical essayist as a “mass of rubbish,” and he demands his eighteenth-century essayists in full, advertisements and all.  “Here,” he insists, “these things fringe and vignette the text in the most appropriate manner, and so set off the quaint variety and the other-worldly character as nothing else could do.”  Is not the author’s contention, however, as to the great loss the Addisonian essay suffers when isolated from its context a severe