“There died the best of passions, Love and Fame.”

This is not a legitimate ellipsis.  Fame is not a passion, though love is:  but his ear was evidently confused by the meeting of the sounds “love and fame,” as if they of themselves immediately implied “love, and love of fame.”  Pope’s rhymes are constantly defective, being rhymes to the eye instead of the ear; and this to a greater degree, not only than in later, but than in preceding writers.  The praise of his versification must be confined to its uniform smoothness and harmony.  In the translation of the Iliad, which has been considered as his masterpiece in style and execution, he continually changes the tenses in the same sentence for the purposes of the rhyme, which shews either a want of technical resources, or great inattention to punctilious exactness.  But to have done with this.

The epistle of Eloise to Abelard is the only exception I can think of, to the general spirit of the foregoing remarks; and I should be disingenuous not to acknowledge that it is an exception.  The foundation is in the letters themselves of Abelard and Eloise, which are quite as impressive, but still in a different way.  It is fine as a poem:  it is finer as a piece of high-wrought eloquence.  No woman could be supposed to write a better love-letter in verse.  Besides the richness of the historical materials, the high gusto of the original sentiments which Pope had to work upon, there were perhaps circumstances in his own situation which made him enter into the subject with even more than a poet’s feeling.  The tears shed are drops gushing from the heart:  the words are burning sighs breathed from the soul of love.  Perhaps the poem to which it bears the greatest similarity in our language, is Dryden’s Tancred and Sigismunda, taken from Boccaccio.  Pope’s Eloise will bear this comparison; and after such a test, with Boccaccio for the original author, and Dryden for the translator, it need shrink from no other.  There is something exceedingly tender and beautiful in the sound of the concluding lines: 

      “If ever chance two wandering lovers brings
      To Paraclete’s white walls and silver springs,” &c.

The Essay on Man is not Pope’s best work.  It is a theory which Bolingbroke is supposed to have given him, and which he expanded into verse.  But “he spins the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.”  All that he says, “the very words, and to the self-same tune,” would prove just as well that whatever is, is wrong, as that whatever is, is right.  The Dunciad has splendid passages, but in general it is dull, heavy, and mechanical.  The sarcasm already quoted on Settle, the Lord Mayor’s poet, (for at that time there was a city as well as a court poet)

      “Now night descending, the proud scene is o’er,
      But lives in Settle’s numbers one day more”—­

is the finest inversion of immortality conceivable.  It is even better than his serious apostrophe to the great heirs of glory, the triumphant bards of antiquity!