rests. Bowles has strongly and plausibly urged that it was not of the
purest or most creditable order. Others have contended that it did not
go further than the manners of the age sanctioned; and they say, "a much
greater license in conversation and in epistolary correspondence was
permitted between the sexes than in our decorous age!" We are not
careful to try and settle such a delicate question--only we are inclined
to suspect, that when common decency quits the _words_ of male and
female parties in their mutual communications, it is a very ample
charity that can suppose it to adhere to their _actions_. And nowhere do
we find grosser language than in some of Pope's prose epistles to the
Blounts.

His "Pastorals," after having been handed about in MS., and shewn to
such reputed judges as Lord Halifax, Lord Somers, Garth, Congreve, &c.,
were at last, in 1709, printed in the sixth volume of Tonson's
"Miscellanies." Like all well-finished commonplaces, they were received
with instant and universal applause. It is humiliating to contrast the
reception of these empty echoes of inspiration, these agreeable
_centos_, with that of such genuine, although faulty poems, as Keat's
"Endymion," Shelley's "Queen Mab," and Wordsworth's "Lyrical Ballads."
Two years later, (in 1711), a far better and more characteristic
production from his pen was ushered anonymously into the world. 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