infirmities of ordinary human nature better than Johnson. They neither angered him nor amused him; he neither storms, sneers, nor chuckles, as he records man's vanity, insincerity, jealousy, and pretence. It is with a placid pen he pricks the bubble fame, dishonours the overdrawn sentiment, burlesques the sham philosophy of life; but for generosity, friendliness, affection, he is always on the watch, whilst talent and achievement never fail to win his admiration; he being ever eager to repay, as best he could, the debt of gratitude surely due to those who have taken pains to please, and who have left behind them in a world, which rarely treated them kindly, works fitted to stir youth to emulation, or solace the disappointments of age. And over all man's manifold infirmities, he throws benignantly the mantle of his stately style. Pope's domestic virtues were not likely to miss Johnson's approbation. Of them he writes:

The filial piety of Pope was in the highest degree amiable and exemplary. His parents had the happiness of living till he and vulgarisms, and much trash as anecdotes.' - Letters, vol. viii., p. 26.

was at the summit of poetical reputation -till he was at ease in his fortune, and without a rival in his fame, and found no diminution of his respect or tenderness. Whatever was his pride, to them he was obedient; and whatever was his irritability, to them he was gentle. Life has, amongst its soothing and quiet comforts, few things better to give than such a son.'

To attempt to state in other words a paragraph like this would be indelicate, as bad as defacing a tombstone, or rewriting a collect.

Pope has had many editors, but the last edition will probably long hold the field. It is more than sixty years since the original John Murray, of Albemarle Street, determined, with the approval of his most distinguished client Lord Byron, to bring out a library edition of Pope. The task was first entrusted to Croker, the man whom Lord Macaulay hated more than he did cold boiled veal, and whose edition, had it seen the light in the great historian's lifetime, would have been, whatever its merits, well basted in the Edinburgh Review. But Croker seems to have made no real pro

gress; for though occasionally advertised amongst Mr. Murray's list of forthcoming works, the first volume did not make its. appearance until 1871, fourteen years after Croker's death. The new editor was the Rev. Whitwell Elwin, a clergyman, with many qualifications for the task, patient, sensible, not too fluent, but an intense hater of Pope. To be wroth with one you love,' sings Coleridge, 'doth work like madness in the brain;' and to edit in numerous volumes the works of a man you cordially dislike and always mistrust has something of the same effect, whilst it is certainly hard measure on the poor fellow edited. His lot if I may venture upon a homely comparison founded upon a lively reminiscence of childhood-resembles that of an unfortunate infant being dressed by an angry nurse, in whose malicious hands the simplest operations of the toilet, to say nothing of the severer processes of the tub, can easily be made the vehicles of no mean torture. Good cause can be shown for hating Pope if you are so minded, but it is something of a shame to hate him and edit him too. The Rev. Mr. Elwin unravels

the web of Pope's follies with too rough a hand for my liking; and he was, besides, far too apt to believe his poet in the wrong simply because somebody has said he was. For example, he reprints without comment De Quincey's absurd strictures on the celebrated lines

'Who but must laugh if such a man there be;

Who would not weep if Atticus were he!'

De Quincey found these lines unintelligible, and pulls them about in all directions but the right one. The ordinary reader never felt any difficulty. However, Mr. Elwin kept it up till old age overtook him, and now Mr. Courthope reigns in his stead. Mr. Courthope, it is easy to see, would have told a very different tale had he been in command from the first, for he keeps sticking in a good word for the crafty little poet whenever he decently can. And this is how it should be. Mr. Courthope's Life, which will be the concluding volume of Mr. Murray's edition, is certain to be a fascinating book.

It is Pope's behaviour about his letters that is now found peculiarly repellent. Acts of diseased egotism sometimes ex

cite an indignation which injurious crimes fail to arouse.

The whole story is too long to be told, and is by this time tolerably familiar. Here, however, is part of it. In early life Pope began writing letters, bits of pompous insincerity, as indeed the letters of clever boys generally are, to men old enough to be his grandparents, who had been struck by his precocity and anticipated his fame; and being always master of his own time, and passionately fond of composition, he kept up the habit so formed, and wrote his letters as one might fancy the celebrated Blair composing his sermons, with much solemnity, very slowly, and without emotion. A packet of these addressed to a gentleman owning the once proud name of Cromwell, and who was certainly guiltless of his country's blood,'for all that is now known of him is that he used to go hunting in a tie-wig, that is, a full-bottomed wig, tied up at the ends, had been given by that gentlemen to a lady with whom he had relations, who being, as will sometimes happen, a little pressed for money, sold them for ten gui