Abelard," a poem beautiful and almost unequalled in execution, is ill
chosen in subject. He compels you indeed to weep, but you blame and
trample on your tears after they are shed. Pope in this poem, as Shelley
in the "Cenci," has tried to extract beauty from moral deformity, and to
glorify putrefaction. But who can long love to gaze at worms, however
well painted, or will be disposed to pardon the monstrous choice of a
dead or demon bride for the splendour of her wedding-garment? The
passion of the Eloisa and that of the Cenci were both indeed facts; but
many facts should be veiled statues in the Temple of Truth. To do,
however, both Pope and Shelley justice, they touch their painful and
shocking themes with extreme delicacy. "Dryden," well remarks Campbell,
"would have given but a coarse draught of Eloisa's passion." Pope's
Epistles, Satires, Imitations, &c., contain much of the most spirited
sense and elegant sarcasm in literature. The portraits of "Villars" and
"Atticus" will occur to every reader as masterpieces in power, although
we deem the latter grossly unjust to a good and great man. His Homer is
rather an adaptation than a translation--far less a "transfusion" of the
Grecian bard. Pope does not, indeed, clothe the old blind rhapsodist
with a bag-wig and sword; but he does all short of this to make him a
fine modern gentleman. Scott, we think, could have best rendered Homer
in his ballad-rhyme. Chapman is Chapman, but he is not Homer. Pope is
Pope, and Hobbes is Hobbes, and Sotheby is Sotheby, and Cowper is
Cowper, each doing his best to render Homer, but none of them is the
grand old Greek, whose lines are all simple and plain as brands, but
like brands pointed on their edges with fire.

The "Essay on Man" ought to have been called an "Epigram on Man," or,
better still, should have been propounded as a riddle, to which the word
"Man" was to supply the solution. But an antithesis, epigram, or riddle
on man of 1300 lines, is rather long. It seems so especially as there is