Hence the fulness and in a certain sense perfection of his work, the fact that he has given his name to an epoch as well as a school, and consequently the important place which he still retains in the history of literature.  Men who were certainly not his inferiors in intellectual power lived in the same age, partook of its influence and contributed to its achievements; but they were not so thoroughly at home in it:  their best qualities were stunted, rather than developed, by its soil and atmosphere.  Dryden, one may safely say, would have been greater had he lived earlier, Fielding had he lived later.  But one cannot imagine Pope thriving in any other air or producing equal work under different influences.  The qualities most esteemed by his contemporaries he possessed in a superlative degree; his limitations were common to the society in which he moved, and neither he nor it was conscious of them as such; consequently, what would have been impediments to a different nature were to his means of free and spontaneous action.  And not only does he represent the ideas of his age, but he depicted its types and manners.  In this respect he is the link between the comic dramatists and the novelists, between Congreve and Fielding.  The wits, the beaux, the fine ladies, the Grub Street drudges of the reign of Anne, whatever be the fidelity or other merits of the portraitures, are more familiar to us in the satires of Pope than as reflected in any other mirror.  For these reasons Pope is one of the last men who can be studied to advantage from a single point of view or in a detached position.  We need to understand not only his personal relations but his general affinities with the men and events of his time—­of that world, at least, of which he was the centre.  True, the period is better known to readers generally than almost any other.  But it is not a copious accumulation of facts or a labored analysis—­for which there would have been no space—­that we miss in Mr. Stephen’s book, but such groupings and irradiating touches as might have given us a vivid glimpse, if only a glimpse, of the whole field.  Yet in lamenting that this much is not given us we are perhaps making the mistake before noticed, of demanding from a given source what it could not supply.  We are driven back, therefore, on the reflection how much the slightest things in art depend on inspiration, on original power—­how immeasurable the distance is between the man of culture and the man of genius.

Samuel Lover:  A Biographical Sketch.  With Selections from his Writings and Correspondence.  By Andrew James Symington.  New York:  Harper & Brothers.