“When they have really seen life—­when they have felt it—­when they have travelled beyond the far distant boundaries of the wilds of Middlesex—­when they have overpassed the Alps of Highgate, and traced to its sources the Nile of the New River—­then, and not till then, can it properly be permitted to them to despise Pope; who had, if not in Wales, been near it, when he described so beautifully the ‘artificial’ works of the Benefactor of Nature and mankind, the ’Man of Ross,’ whose picture, still suspended in the parlour of the inn, I have so often contemplated with reverence for his memory, and admiration of the poet, without whom even his own still existing good works could hardly have preserved his honest renown.

“If they had said nothing of Pope, they might have remained ’alone with their glory’ for aught I should have said or thought about them or their nonsense.  But if they interfere with the little ‘Nightingale’ of Twickenham, they may find others who will bear it—­I won’t.  Neither time, nor distance, nor grief, nor age, can ever diminish my veneration for him, who is the great moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of all stages of existence.  The delight of my boyhood, the study of my manhood, perhaps (if allowed to me to attain it) he may be the consolation of my age.  His poetry is the Book of Life.  Without canting, and yet without neglecting, religion, he has assembled all that a good and great man can gather together of moral wisdom clothed in consummate beauty.  Sir William Temple observes, ’That of all the members of mankind that live within the compass of a thousand years, for one man that is born capable of making a great poet there may be a thousand born capable of making as great generals and ministers of state as any in story.’  Here is a statesman’s opinion of poetry:  it is honourable to him and to the art.  Such a ‘poet of a thousand years’ was Pope.  A thousand years will roll away before such another can be hoped for in our literature.  But it can want them—­he himself is a literature.

“One word upon his so brutally abused translation of Homer.  ’Dr. Clarke, whose critical exactness is well known, has not been able to point out above three or four mistakes in the sense through the whole Iliad.  The real faults of the translation are of a different kind.’  So says Warton, himself a scholar.  It appears by this, then, that he avoided the chief fault of a translator.  As to its other faults, they consist in his having made a beautiful English poem of a sublime Greek one.  It will always hold.  Cowper and all the rest of the blank pretenders may do their best and their worst; they will never wrench Pope from the hands of a single reader of sense and feeling.