This was
the "Essay on Criticism," a work which he had first written in prose,
and which discovers a ripeness of judgment, a clearness of thought, a
condensation of style, and a command over the information he possesses,
worthy of any age in life, and almost of any mind in time. It serves,
indeed, to shew what Pope's true forte was. That lay not so much in
poetry, as in the knowledge of its principles and laws,--not so much in
creation, as in criticism. He was no Homer or Shakspeare; but he might
have been nearly as acute a judge of poetry as Aristotle, and nearly as
eloquent an expounder of the rules of art and the glories of genius as
Longinus.
In the same year, Pope printed "The Rape of the Lock," in a volume of
Miscellanies. Lord Petre had, much in the way described by the poet,
stolen a lock of Miss Belle Fermor's hair,--a feat which led to an
estrangement between the families. Pope set himself to reconcile them by
this beautiful poem,--a poem which has embalmed at once the quarrel and
the reconciliation to all future time. In its first version, the
machinery was awanting, the "lock" was a desert, the "rape" a natural
event,--the small infantry of sylphs and gnomes were slumbering
uncreated in the poet's mind; but in the next edition he contrived to
introduce them in a manner so easy and so exquisite, as to remind you of
the variations which occur in dreams, where one wonder seems softly to
slide into the bosom of another, and where beautiful and fantastic
fancies grow suddenly out of realities, like the bud from the bough, or
the fairy-seeming wing of the summer-cloud from the stern azure of the
heavens.
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