It was after he had finished the Odyssey that Pope wrote his most famous satire, called the Dunciad.  In this he insulted and held up to ridicule all stupid or dull authors, all dunces, and all those whom he considered his enemies.  It is very clever, but a poem full of malice and hatred does not make very pleasant reading.  For most of us, too, the interest it had has vanished, as many of the people at whom Pope levied his malice are forgotten, or only remembered because he made them famous by adding their names to his roll of dunces.  But in Pope’s own day the Dunciad called forth cries of anger and revenge from the victims, and involved the author in still more quarrels.

Pope wrote many more poems, the chief being the Essay on Criticism and the Essay on Man.  But his translations of Homer and the Rape of the Lock are those you will like best in the meantime.  As a whole Pope is perhaps not much read now, yet many of his lines have become household words, and when you come to read him you will be surprised to find how many familiar quotations are taken from his poems.  Perhaps no one of our poets except Shakespeare is more quoted.  And yet he seldom says anything which touches the heart.  When we enjoy his poetry we enjoy it with the brain.  It gives us pleasure rather as the glitter of a diamond than as the perfume of a rose.

In spite of his crooked, sickly little body Pope lived to be fifty-six, and one evening in May 1744 he died peacefully in his home at Twickenham, and was buried in the church there, near the monument which he had put up to the memory of his father and mother.

There is so much disagreeable and mean in Pope that we are apt to lose sight of what was good in him altogether.  We have to remind ourselves that he was a good and affectionate son, and that he was loving to the friends with whom he did not quarrel.  Yet these can hardly be counted as great merits.  Perhaps his greatest merit is that he kept his independence in an age when writers fawned upon patrons or accepted bribes from Whig or Tory.  Pope held on his own way, looking for favors neither from one side nor from the other.  And when we think of his frail little body, this sturdy independence of mind is all the more wonderful.  From Pope we date the beginning of the time when a writer could live honorable by his pen, and had not need to flatter a patron, or sell his genius to politics or party.  But Pope stood alone in this independence, and he never had to fight for it.  A happy chance, we might say, made him free.  For while his brother writers all around him were still held in the chains of patronage, Pope having more money than some did not need to bow to it, and having less greed than others did not choose to bow to it, in order to add to his wealth.  And in the following chapter we come to another man who in the next generation fought for freedom, won it, and thereby helped to free others.  This man was the famous Dr. Samuel Johnson.