sentiment, but its merit consists in detached passages, descriptions,
and pictures. A fourth book to the _Dunciad_, containing many
beautiful and striking lines and a general revision of his works, closed
the poet's literary cares and toils. He died on the 30th of May, 1744,
and was buried in the church at Twickenham.

Pope was of very diminutive stature and deformed from his birth. His
physical infirmity, susceptible temperament, and incessant study
rendered his life one long disease. He was, as his friend Lord
Chesterfield said, "the most irritable of all the _genus irritabile
vatum_, offended with trifles and never forgetting or forgiving
them." His literary stratagems, disguises, assertions, denials, and (we
must add) misrepresentations would fill volumes. Yet when no disturbing
jealousy vanity, or rivalry intervened was generous and affectionate,
and he had a manly, independent spirit. As a poet he was deficient in
originality and creative power, and thus was inferior to his prototype,
Dryden, but as a literary artist, and brilliant declaimer satirist and
moralizer in verse he is still unrivaled. He is the English Horace, and
will as surely descend with honors to the latest posterity.






AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM,

WRITTEN IN THE YEAR 1709