accidents of circumstances and the mutation of affairs, are inimitable.
His power of complimenting is superior even to that of Louis XIV. He
picks out the one best quality in a man, sets it in gold, and presents
it as if he were conferring instead of describing a noble gift.

"Would you be blest, despise low joys, low gains,
_Disdain whatever Cornbury disdains_;
Be virtuous, and be happy for your pains."

Pope's language seems as if it were laboriously formed by himself for
his peculiar shape of mind, habits of thought, and style of poetry.
Compared to all English before him, Pope's English is a new although a
lesser language. He has so cut down, shorn, and trimmed the broad old
oak of Shakspeare's speech, that it seems another tree altogether.
Everything is so terse, so clear, so pointed, so elaborately easy, so
monotonously brilliant, that you must pause to remember. "These are the
very copulatives, diphthongs, and adjectives of Hooker, Milton, and
Jeremy Taylor." The change at first is pleasant, and has been generally
popular; but those who know and love our early authors, soon miss their
deep organ-tones, their gnarled strength, their intricate but intense
sweetness, their varied and voluminous music, their linked _chains_ of
lightning, and feel the difference between the fabricator of clever
lines and sparkling sentences, and the former of great passages and
works. In keeping with his style is his versification, the incessant
tinkling of a sheep-bell--sweet, small, monotonous--producing
perfectly-melodious single lines, but no grand interwoven swells and
well-proportioned masses of harmony. "Pope," says Hazlitt, "has turned
Pegasus into a rocking-horse." The noble gallop of Dryden's verse is
exchanged for a quick trot. And there is not even a point of comparison
between his sweet sing-song, and the wavy, snow-like, spirit-like motion