_Iliad_, labors to enrich the treasury of English poetry with an epic
that sheds radiance upon the ideals and manners of an heroic age. In such
attempts to exalt the grander phases of human existence, the poets were,
however, owing to their fear of enthusiasm, never quite successful. It is
significant that though most critics consider Pope's Homer no better than
a mediocre performance, none denies that his _Rape of the Lock_ is, in
its kind, perfection.

Here, as in the _vers de société_ of Matthew Prior and Ambrose Philips,
the age was illuminating with the graces of poetry something it really
understood and delighted in,--the life of leisure and fashion; and here,
accordingly, is its most original and masterly work. _The Rape of the
Lock_ is the product of a society which had the good sense and good
breeding to try to laugh away incipient quarrels, and which greeted with
airy banter the indiscreet act of an enamoured young gallant,--the kind
of act which vulgarity meets with angry lampoons or rude violence. The
poem is an idyll quite as much as a satire. The follies of fashionable
life are treated with nothing severer than light raillery; and its
actually distasteful features,--its lapses into stupidity, its vacuous
restlessness, its ennui,--are cunningly suppressed. But all that made it
seem the height of human felicity is preserved, and enhanced in charm.
"Launched on the bosom of the silver Thames," one glides to Hampton Court
amid youth and gayety and melting music; and for the nonce this realm of
"airs, flounces, and furbelows," of merry chit-chat, and of pleasurable
excitement, seems as important as it is to those exquisite creatures of
fancy that hover about the heroine, assiduous guardians of her "graceful
ease and sweetness void of pride." Of that admired world likewise are the
lovers that Matthew Prior creates, who woo neither with stormy passion
nor with mawkish whining, but in a courtly manner; lovers who deem
an epigram a finer tribute than a sigh. So the tender fondness of a