time in books, who scarce allow themselves time to eat or sleep, but read and read and read on, but yet make no great advances in real knowledge, though there be no defect in their intellectual faculties to which their little progress can be imputed. The mistake here is, that it is usually supposed that, by reading, the author's knowledge is transfused into the reader's understanding; and so it is, but not by bare reading, but by reading and understanding what he writ. Whereby I mean not barely comprehending what is affirmed or denied in each proposition, though that great readers do not always think themselves concerned precisely to do, but to see and follow the train of his reasonings, observe the strength and clearness of their connection, and examine upon what they bottom. Without this a man may read the discourses of a very rational author, writ in a language and in propositions that he very well understands, and yet acquire not one jot of his knowledge; which consisting only in the perceived, certain, or probable connection of the ideas made use of in his reasonings, the reader's knowledge is no farther increased than he perceives that so much as he sees of this connection so much he knows of the truth or probability of that author's opinions.

All that he relies on without this perception he takes upon trust, upon the author's credit, without any knowledge of it at all. This makes me not at all wonder to see some men so abound in citations, and build so much upon authorities, it being the sole foundation on which they bottom most of their own tenets; so that in effect they have but a secondhand or implicit knowledge, i.e., are in the right if such an one from whom they borrowed it were in the right in that opinion which they took from him, which indeed is no knowledge at all. Writers of this or former ages may be good witnesses of matters of fact which they deliver, which we may do well to take upon their authority; but their credit can go no farther than this, it cannot at all affect the truth and falsehood of opinions, which have no other sort of trial but reason and proof, which they themselves make use of to make themselves knowing, and so must others too that will partake in their knowledge.

Indeed, it is an advantage that they have been at the pains to find out the proofs, and lay them in that order that may show the truth or probability of their conclusions; and for this we owe them great acknowledgments for saving us the pains in searching out those proofs which they have collected for us, and which possibly, after all our pains, we might not have found, nor been able to have set them in so good a light as that which they left them us in. Upon this account we are mightily beholding to judicious writers of all ages for those discoveries and dis

courses they have left behind them for our instruction, if we know how to make a right use of them; which is not to run them over in a hasty perusal, and perhaps lodge their opinions or some remarkable passages in our memories, but to enter into their reasonings, examine their proofs, and then judge of the truth or falsehood, probability or improbability of what they advance, not by any opinion we have entertained of the author, but by the evidence he produces, and the conviction he affords us, drawn from things themselves. Knowing is seeing, and, if it be so, it is madness to persuade ourselves that we do so by another man's eyes, let him use ever so many words to tell us that what he asserts is very visible. Till we ourselves see it with our own eyes, and perceive it by our own understandings, we are as much in the dark and as void of knowledge as before, let us believe any learned author as much as we will.

Euclid and Archimedes are allowed to be knowing, and to have demonstrated what they say; and yet, whoever shall read over their writings without perceiving the connection of their proofs, and seeing what they show, though he may understand all their words, yet he is not the more knowing he may believe indeed, but does not know what they say, and so is not advanced one jot in mathematical knowledge by all the reading of those approved mathematicians.

LESSON 38.

ALEXANDER POPE.-" Pope absorbed and reflected all the elements spoken of under party literature. Born in 1688, he wrote excellent verse at twelve years of age; the Pastorals appeared in 1709, and two years afterwards he took full rank as critical poet in the Essay on Criticism, 1711. The next year saw the first cast of his Rape of the Lock, the 'epos of society under Queen Anne,' and the most brilliant play of wit in English. This closed what we may call his first period.

He now became known to Swift and to Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, a statesman who was also a writer. With these and with Gay, Parnell, Prior, and Arbuthnot, Pope formed the Scriblerus Club, and soon rose into great fame by his Translation of the Iliad and Odyssey under George I., 1715-1725, for which he received 7,000 pounds.

He now, being at ease, lived at Twickenham, where he had completed his Homer. It was here, retired from the literary mob, that in bitter scorn of the many petty scribblers, he wrote in 1728 the Dunciad, altered and enlarged in 1741. It was the fiercest of his satires and it closes his second period, which took much of its savageness from the influence of Swift. The third phase of Pope's literary life was closely linked to his friend Bolingbroke. It was in conversation with him that he originated the Essay on Man, 1732-4, and the Imitations of Horace. The Moral Essays, or Epistles to men and women, were written to praise those whom he loved, and to satirize the bad poets and the social follies of the day, and all who disliked him or his party. In the last few years of his life, Bishop Warburton, the writer of the Legation of Moses and editor of Shakespeare, helped him to fit the Moral Essays into the plan of which the Essay on Man formed part. Warburton was Pope's last great friend; but almost his only old friend. By 1740 nearly all the members of his literary circle were dead, and a new race of poets and writers had grown up. In 1744 Pope died.

He is our greatest master in didactic poetry, not so much because of the worth of the thoughts as because of the masterly form in which they are put. The Essay on Man, though its philosophy is poor and not his own, is crowded with lines that have passed into daily use. The Essay on Criticism is equally full of critical precepts put with exquisite skill. The Satires and Epistles are also didactic. They set virtue and cleverness over against vice and stupidity, and they illustrate both by types of character, in the drawing of which Pope is without a rival in our literature.

His translation of Homer is made with great literary art, but for that very reason it does not make us feel the simplicity and directness of Homer. It has neither the manner of Homer nor the spirit of the Greek life, just as Pope's descriptions of nature have neither the manner nor the spirit of nature.

The heroic couplet, in which he wrote his translation and nearly all his work, he used in various subjects with a correctness that has never been surpassed, but it sometimes fails from being too smooth, and its cadences too regular.

Finally, he was a true artist, hating those who degraded his art, and, at a time when men followed it for money and place and the applause of the club and of the town, he loved it faithfully to the end for its own sake."

"In two directions, in that of condensing and pointing his meaning, and in that of drawing the utmost harmony of sound out of the couplet, Pope carried versification far beyond the point at which it was when he took it up. Because, after Pope, his trick of versification became common property, we are apt to overlook the merit of the first invention. But epigrammatic force and musical flow are not the sole elements of Pope's reputation. The matter which he worked up into his verse has a permanent value, and is indeed one of the most precious heirlooms which the eighteenth century has bequeathed us.

And here we must distinguish between Pope when he attempts general themes, and Pope when he draws that which he knew-the social life of his own day. When in the Pastorals he writes of natural beauty, in the Essay on Criticism he lays down the rules of writing, in the Essay on Man he versifies Leibnitzian optimism, he does not rise above the herd of eighteenth century writers, except in so far as his skill of language is more accomplished than theirs. It is where he comes to describe the one thing which he knew and about which he felt sympathy and antipathy-the court and town of his time, in the Moral Essays, and the Satires and Epistles, that Pope found the proper material on which to lay out his elaborate workmanship. Where he moralizes or deduces general principles, he is superficial, second-hand, and one-sided as the veriest scribbler. Wherever he recedes from what was immediately close to him, the manners, passions, prejudices, sentiments of his own day, Pope has only such merit-little enough-as wit divorced from truth can have. He is at his best only where the delicacies and subtle felicities of his diction are employed to embody some transient phase of contemporary feeling. The complex web of society, with its indefinable shades, its minute personal affinities and repulsions, is the world in which Pope lived and moved, and which he has drawn in a few vivid lines, with a keenness and intensity with which there is nothing in our literature that can compare."-Mark Pattison.

THE MINOR POETS.-"The minor poets who surrounded Pope in the first two thirds of his life did not write in his manner nor approach his genius. THOMAS PARNELL is known by his Hermit, and both he and JOHN GAY, in his six pastorals, The Shepherd's Week, 1714, touched on country life. Swift's poetical satires were coarse but always hit home, Addison celebrated the battle of Blenheim in the Campaign, and his sweet grace is found in some devotional pieces; while Prior's charming ease is best shown in the light narrative poetry which I may say began with him in the reign of William III. The Black-eyed Susan of Gay and TICKELL'S Colin and Lucy and CAREY'S Sally in our Alley and afterwards GOLDSMITH'S Edwin and Angelina mark the rise of the modern ballad; a class of poetry wholly apart from the genius of Pope.

The influence of the didactic and satirical poetry of the critical school is found in Johnson's two satires on the manners of his time, the London, 1738, and the Vanity of Human Wishes, 1749; in ROBERT BLAIR'S dull poem of The Grave, 1743; in EDWARD YOUNG's Night Thoughts, 1743, a poem on the immortality of the soul, and in his satires on The Universal Passion of Fame; in the tame work of Richard Savage, Johnson's poor friend; and in the short-lived, but vigorous, satires of Charles Churchill, who died in 1764, twenty years after Savage. The Pleasures of the Imagination, 1744, by MARK AKENSIDE, belongs also in spirit to the time of Queen Anne, and was suggested by Addison's essays in the Spectator on imagination.

THE POETRY OF NATURAL DESCRIPTION.—We have found already traces in the poets of a pleasure in rural things and the emotions they awakened. This appears chiefly among the Puritans, who, because they hated the politics of the Stuarts before the civil war and the corruption of the court after it, lived apart from the town in quietude. The best natural description we have before the time of Pope is that of two Puritans, Marvell and Milton.