no real or new light cast in it on man's nature or destiny. (We refer
our readers to the notes of Dr Croly's edition for a running commentary
of confutation to the "Essay on Man" distinguished by solid and
unanswerable acuteness of argument.) But such an eloquent and ingenious
puzzle as it is! It might have issued from the work-basket of Titania
herself. It is another evidence of Pope's greatness in trifles. How he
would have shone in fabricating the staves of the ark, or the fringes of
the tabernacle!

The "Dunciad" is in many respects the ablest, the most elaborate, and
the most characteristic of Pope's poems. In embalming insignificance and
impaling folly he seems to have found, at last, his most congenial work.
With what apparently sovereign contempt, masterly ease, artistic calm,
and judicial gravity, does he set about it! And once his museum of
dunces is completed, with what dignity--the little tyrant that he
was!--does he march through it, and with what complacency does he point
to his slain and dried Dunces, and say, "Behold the work of my hands!"
It never seems to have occurred to him that his poem was destined to be
an everlasting memorial, not only of his enemies, but of the annoyance
he had met from them--at once of his strength in crushing, and his
weakness in feeling, their attacks, and in showing their mummies for
money.

That Pope deserves, on the whole, the name of "poet," we are willing, as
aforesaid, to concede. But he was the most artificial of true poets. He
had in him a real though limited vein, but did not trust sufficiently to
it, and at once weakened and strengthened it by his peculiar kind of
cultivation. He weakened it as a faculty, but strengthened it as an art;
he lessened its inward force, but increased the elegance and facility of
its outward expression. What he might have attained, had he left his