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“This,” he said, “was all the teaching I ever had, and God knows it extended a very little way. When I had done with my priests, I took to reading by myself, for which I had a very great eagerness and enthusiasm, especially for poetry: and in a few years I had dipped into a very great number of the English, Italian, Latin, and Greek poets." He was small of stature and deformed, and his ill health made him peevish, irritable, and selfish. Yet his rare intellectual abilities and the deserved success of his earlier poetry secured for him the friendship of many of the most influential men of the time. Bolingbroke declared that he never knew a man more tenderly devoted to his friends; and Warburton said, "He is as good a companion as poet, and, what is more, appears to be a good man."

Pope's "Essay on Criticism" was published in 1711; the "Rape of the Lock" in 1714; his translation of Homer's "Iliad" in 1715-18, and of the "Odyssey" in 1726; the "Dunciad" in 1728; the "Essay on Man" in 1732. A revised and enlarged version of the “Dunciad" was published in 1742. The latter part of Pope's life was spent at his country-seat of Twickenham, which he enlarged and beautified from the proceeds of his translation of Homer. He died in 1744.

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'Pope is our greatest master in didactic poetry," says Stopford Brooke, "not so much because of the worth of the thoughts as because of the masterly form in which they are put.”

"In two directions,” says Mark Pattison, “in that of condensing and pointing his meaning, and in that of drawing the utmost harmony of sound out of the couplet, Pope carried versification far beyond the point at which it was when he took it up. The matter which he worked up into his verse has a permanent value, and is indeed one of the most precious heirlooms which the eighteenth century has bequeathed us."

Other Poems to be Read: The Rape of the Lock; The Dying Christian to his Soul; The Universal Prayer; Pastorals; Windsor Forest.

REFERENCES: Johnson's Lives of the Poets; Stephen's Hours in a Library; De Quincey's Literature of the Eighteenth Century; Lowell's My Study Windows; Pope (English Men of Letters), by Leslie Stephen.

The Seventeenth Century.

"The people of the seventeenth century were weary of liberty, weary of the unmitigated rage of the dramatists, cloyed with the roses and the spices and the kisses of the lyrists, tired of being carried over the universe and up and down the avenues of history at the freak of every irresponsible rhymester. Literature had been set open to all the breezes of heaven by the blustering and glittering Elizabethans, and in the hands of their less gifted successors it was fast declining into a mere Cave of the Winds. We know the poets

of the early Caroline period almost entirely by extracts, and their ardor, quaintness, and sudden flashes of inspiration give them a singular advantage in this form. The sustained elevation which had characterized Shakespeare and Spenser, and even in some degree several of the chief of their contemporaries, had passed away, but still the poets were most brilliant, most delectable in their purple patches.... As the last waves of the Renaissance died away, a deathly calm settled down upon the pools of thought. Man returned from the particular to the general, from romantic examples to those disquisitions on the norm which were thought to display a classical taste. The seer disappeared, and the artificer took his place. For a whole century the singer that only sang because he must, and as the linnets do, was entirely absent from English literature. He came back at the close of the eighteenth century, with Burns in Scotland, and with Blake in England.” — EDMUNd Gosse.

"At the same time, amid the classical coldness which then dried up English literature, and the social excess which then corrupted English morals . . . appeared a mighty and superb mind (Milton), prepared by logic and enthusiasm for eloquence and the epic style; the heir of a poetical age, the precursor of an austere age, holding his place between the epoch of unselfish dreaming and the epoch of practical action.” — TAINE.

Poets of the Seventeenth Century.

Ben Jonson (1573-1637). See biographical note, page 213.

William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649). Short poems; "Poems: Amorous, Funerall, Divine, Pastorall, in Sonnets, Songs, Sextains, Madrigals"; "Floures of Sion."

William Browne (1588-1643). "Britannia's Pastorals"; "The Shepherd's Pipe"; "The Inner Temple Masque."

George Wither (1588-1667). Short poems; "Collection of Emblems";
"Nature of Man"; "The Shepheard's Hunting"; "Fidelia.”
Phineas Fletcher (1582–1650). "The Locustes”; “The Purple Island.”
Giles Fletcher (1588-1623). "Christ's Victory and Triumph."
Thomas Carew (1589-1639).
Francis Quarles (1592-1644).

and Moral."

Short poems; "Cælum Britannicum."
"Divine Poems"; "Emblems, Divine

Robert Herrick (1594-1674). See biographical note, page 202.
Sir John Suckling (1608-1642). Love poems.

Richard Lovelace (1618-1658). Short poems; “Lucasta: Odes, Sonnets, Songs," etc.

Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1581-1648). Odes and short poems.

George Herbert (1592–1634). “The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations"; short poems.

George Sandys (1577-1643).
Richard Crashaw (1615-1650).
Henry Vaughan (1621-1695).
Olives."

"Christ's Passion."

"Steps to the Altar."

"Silex Scintillans"; "The Mount of

Abraham Cowley (1618-1667). “Poetical Blossomes"; "The Mistress." Edmund Waller (1605-1687). See biographical note, page 205.

Sir John Denham (1615-1668). "Cooper's Hill.”

Sir William Davenant (1605–1668). "Gondibert"; "Madagascar and

Other Poems."

John Milton (1608-1674). See biographical note, page 195.

Andrew Marvell (1621-1678). Lyric and satiric poems.

Samuel Butler (1612-1680).

Thomas Otway (1651-1685).

"Windsor Castle."

"Hudibras."

"The Poet's Complaint of his Muse";

John Dryden (1631-1700). See biographical note, page 175.

John Dryden.

ALEXANDER'S FEAST; OR, THE POWER

OF MUSIC:

AN ODE IN HONOR OF ST. CECILIA'S DAY.

'Twas at the royal feast,1 for Persia won By Philip's warlike son:

Aloft in awful state

The godlike hero sate

On his imperial throne:

His valiant peers were placed around; Their brows with roses and with myrtles bound: 2 (So should desert in arms be crowned.) The lovely Thais,3 by his side, Sate like a blooming Eastern bride In flower of youth and beauty's pride. Happy, happy, happy pair!

None but the brave,

None but the brave,

None but the brave deserves the fair.

Chorus.

Happy, happy, happy pair!

None but the brave,

None but the brave,

None but the brave deserves the fair.

Timotheus, placed on high

Amid the tuneful quire,

With flying fingers touched the lyre:
The trembling notes ascend the sky,
And heavenly joys inspire.

The song began from Jove,5
Who left his blissful seats above,
(Such is the power of mighty love.)
A dragon's fiery form belied the god:
Sublime on radiant spires he rode.
The listening crowd admire the lofty sound,
A present deity," they shout around;

A present deity, the vaulted roofs rebound:
With ravish'd ears

The monarch hears,

Assumes the god,

Affects to nod,7

And seems to shake the spheres.

Chorus.

With ravish'd ears

The monarch hears,

Assumes the god,

Affects to nod,

And seems to shake the spheres.

The praise of Bacchus then, the sweet musician sung,
Of Bacchus ever fair and ever young:

The jolly god in triumph comes;
Sound the trumpets; beat the drums;
Flush'd with a purple grace,

He shows his honest face:

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Now give the hautboys breath; he comes! he comes!

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