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.

A little after this, Pope became acquainted with a far greater, better,
and truer man than himself, Joseph Addison. Warburton, and others, have
sadly misrepresented the connexion between these two famous wits, as
well as their relative intellectual positions. Addison was a more
amiable and childlike person than Pope. He had much more, too, of the
Christian. He was not so elaborately polished and furbished as the
author of "The Rape of the Lock;" but he had, naturally, a finer and
richer genius. Pope found early occasion for imagining Addison his
disguised enemy. He gave him a hint of his intention to introduce the
machinery into "The Rape of the Lock." Of this, Addison disapproved, and
said it was a delicious little thing already--_merum sal_. This, Pope,