Pope

“ Pope perfected the music and elegance of the English verse. Drawn out of chaos by old Chaucer; softened by Spenser; twisted into pliancy by Surrey; subtilized by Cowley; smoothed by Waller; strongly and beautifully modelled by Dryden;—it still wanted the finishing touch, and this, Pope gave. But he was more than an accomplished linguist. A skilful satirist, a touching eulogist, a philosophic tutor, and in fine, in spite of bodily infirmities, a good and amiable man,20 his life was like the passage of a health-infusing river through the sands of the earth. ”

“ You have driven your soul headlong into the abyss, because you would not humble yourself and bend your stubborn neck. When a pope is able by his teaching and admonition to bring the emperor of his time before God, guiltless and cleansed from all sin, he gains great glory from Him on the holy day of resurrection, when all our secrets and all our works are brought to light to our confusion in the presence of his angels. ”

“ The filial piety of Pope was in the highest degree amiable and exemplary; his parents had the happiness of living till he 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 diminutions 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, among its soothing and quiet comforts, few things better to give than such a son. ”

“ Here reigns a pope, self-nominated, self-consecrated,—ay, and much stranger too,—self-believing!—a pope whom, if you cannot obey him, I would advise you to disobey as silently as possible; a pope hitherto afraid of no Luther; a pope who manages his own inquisition, who punishes unbelievers as no most skilful inquisitor of Spain ever dreamt of doing;—one who can excommunicate thoroughly, fearfully, radically; put you beyond the pale of men's charity; make you odious to your dearest friends, and turn you into a monster to be pointed at by the finger! ”

“ To imagine Pope at his best, we must place ourselves in Twickenham on some fine day, when the long disease has relaxed its grasp for a moment; when he has taken a turn through his garden, and comforted his poor frame with potted lampreys and a glass or two from his frugal pint. Suppose two or three friends to be sitting with him, the stately Bolingbroke or the mercurial Bathurst, with one of the patriotic hopes of mankind, Marchmont or Lyttelton, to stimulate his ardour, and the amiable Spence, or Mrs. Patty Blount to listen reverentially to his morality. ”

“ The shadow of the great Pope is upon those time-worn steps where he stood and blessed his brethren, with moisture in his eyes and joy in his heart, sending them forth upon the difficult and dangerous way which he had himself desired to tread, but from which their spirits shrank. We have all a sacred right to come back here, to share the blessing of the saint, to remember the constant affection he bore us, his dedication of himself had it been permitted, his never-ending thought of his angel boys which has come to such wonderful issues. ”

“ But outside of all this depression and subordination, among tribes of half-barbaric blood, among dreamy enthusiasts contemplating what seemed to them the simple and natural scheme of an earthly judge infallible in wisdom and divinely inspired; among bewildered and trampled ecclesiastics, looking forth into the night, and seeing, far above all the storms and darkness that surrounded them in their own distracted land, a star by which they might steer their course, undimmed and unalterable—the Pope of Rome was the highest and holiest of created men. ”

“ A voice there is, that whispers in my ear, ('Tis Reason's voice, which sometimes one can hear) "Friend Pope, be prudent, let your muse take breath, And never gallop Pegasus to death; Lest stiff and stately, void of fire or force, You limp, like Blackmore, on a lord mayor's horse." Farewell then verse, and love, and every toy, The rhymes and rattles of the man or boy; What right, what true, what fit we justly call, Let this be all my care--for this is all. To lay this harvest up, and hoard with haste What every day will want, and most, the last. ”

“ And as you are musing on these things, and centuries seem to pass before you like the figures of a dream, the room gradually fills, the cardinals come in and take their places, each clad in the simple majesty of the purple, and last of all comes the Pope himself, the steel sabres of his guard ringing on the marble floor with a clang that breaks the harmonious silence most discordantly. ”

“ Pope, I charge none to his Poetical Capacity, but chiefly to his Ruling Passion, which is so much his Master, that we must allow, his inimitable Verse is generally warmest, where his too fond Indulgence of that Passion inspires it. How much brighter still might that Genius shine, could it be equally inspired by Good-nature! ”

“ A Pope arose, by his tendencies, his progressive instincts and his love of popularity, an exception to the Popes of later times: to whom Providence, as if to teach mankind the absolute powerlessness of the institution, opened, in the love and in the illusions of the people, the path to a new life. ”

“ The Pope himself bore the holy sacrament, kneeling and surrounded by the greater half of the whole Christian episcopate. It was remarked that he was as calm and collected in the midst of such a great and imposing multitude as if he had been in his private oratory. The vast assemblage was also rapt in silent contemplation. Not a sound was heard save the murmur of the fountains. An eye-witness has observed that if one closed his eyes he could imagine himself in a desert. ”

“ All that is the Vatican, and inside is the Pope. He is seventy years old, frail, an invalid. Death is at his pillow, but what does that matter? He is strong. How many believe in him, stretch out their hands to him, bow down before him, pray in his name, die in his name! We triumphantly count our array of atheists and sceptics. Who can count the believers? ”

“ Certain qualities of the highest poet Pope no doubt lacked, lofty imagination, intense passion, wide human sympathy. But within the narrow field which he marked out for his own he approaches perfection as nearly as any English poet, and Pope's merit consists not merely in the smoothness of his verse or the polish of separate epigrams, as is so often stated, but quite as much in the vigor of his conceptions and the unity and careful proportion of each poem as a whole. ”

“ We will be pope next."
"O wife, wife!" said he. "How can you be pope? There is but one pope at a time in Christendom."
"Husband," said she, "I will be pope this very day."
"But," replied the husband, "the fish cannot make you pope."
"What nonsense!" said she. "If he can make an emperor, he can make a pope; go and try him."
So the fisherman went; but when he came to the shore the wind was raging, the sea was tossed up and down like boiling water, and the ships were in the greatest distress and danced upon the waves most fearfully. ”

“ Pope has caught and fixed forever the atmosphere of this age. It is not the mere outward form and circumstance, the manners and customs, the patching, powdering, ogling, gambling, of the day that he has reproduced, though his account of these would alone suffice to secure the poem immortality as a contribution to the history of society. The essential spirit of the age breathes from every line. No great English poem is at once so brilliant and so empty, so artistic, and yet so devoid of the ideals on which all high art rests. ”

“ In poetry Pope takes a first place in the second order of poets. The deficiencies which forbid his entrance into the first rank are obvious. He cannot sing, he has no ear for the subtlest melodies of verse, he is not a creative poet, and has few of the spirit-stirring thoughts which the noblest poets scatter through their pages with apparent unconsciousness. There are no depths in Pope and there are no heights; he has neither eye for the beauties of Nature, nor ear for her harmonies, and a primrose was no more to him than it was to Peter Bell. ”

“ A DIALOGUE. POPE. Since my old friend is grown so great, As to be Minister of State, I'm told, but 'tis not true, I hope, That Craggs will be ashamed of Pope. CRAGGS. Alas! if I am such a creature, To grow the worse for growing greater; Why, faith, in spite of all my brags, 'Tis Pope must be ashamed of Craggs.
ODE TO QUINBUS FLESTRIN, THE MAN MOUNTAIN,87 BY TITTY TIT, POET-LAUREATE TO HIS MAJESTY OF LILLIPUT. TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH. In amaze Lost I gaze! Can our eyes Reach thy size! May my lays Swell with praise, Worthy thee! Worthy me! Muse, inspire All thy fire! ”

“ What, in fact, did Pope learn by his study of man, such as it was? What does he tell us about the character of human beings and their position in the universe which is either original or marked by the freshness of independent thought? Perhaps the most characteristic vein of reflection is that which is embodied in the 'Dunciad.' There, at least, we have Pope speaking energetically and sincerely. He really detests, abjures, and abominates as impious and heretical, without a trace of mental reservation, the worship of the great goddess Dulness. ”

“ Pope had but a faint perception of latent and subtle beauties, and he usually kept to those general appearances which are obvious to all the world. His trees cast a shade, his streams murmur, his heath is purple, his harvests are yellow, and his skies blue. Living in the midst of English peasants he shows less familiarity with rural character than with rural scenes. Neither in his verse, nor his letters, is there anything to indicate that he had mixed, like Thomson, Cowper, and Wordsworth, with the cottagers around him, or had divined the noble qualities which are masked by a rustic exterior. ”

“ He is the soul of man at its finest—having passed through the smoky fires of life and emerging clear and high. Greatest of all the spirits exhibited, however, is that of the more than octogenarian Pope, at whose brooding, pondering, solitary vigil, by the end of a hard grey winter day in the great bleak waiting Vatican—“in the plain closet where he does such work”—we assist as intimately as at every other step of the case, and on whose grand meditation we heavily hang. ”

“ The Pope, or Supreme Pontiff, is the vicar of our Lord on earth, his representative—the representative not only of him who is our invisible High-Priest, but of him who is King of kings and Lord of lords, therefore of both the priestly and the kingly power. ”

“ The boys and girls whom charity maintains, Implore your help in these pathetic strains: How could devotion touch the country pews, Unless the gods bestowed a proper Muse? Verse cheers their leisure, verse assists their work, Verse prays for peace, or sings down Pope and Turk. The silenced preacher yields to potent strain, And feels that grace his prayer besought in vain; The blessing thrills through all the lab'ring throng, And Heaven is won by violence of song. ”

“ And so, too often, did their poet.
Pope's special faculties are easily seen, and may be briefly enumerated. Destitute of the highest imagination, and perhaps of constructive power— (he has produced many brilliant parts, and many little, but no large wholes) —he is otherwise prodigally endowed. He has a keen, strong, clear intellect, which, if it seldom reaches sublimity, never fails to eliminate sense. He has wit of a polished and vigorous kind—less easy, indeed, than Addison's, the very curl of whose lip was crucifixion to his foe. ”

“ Pope is now in my library with me, and writes to the world, to the present and to future ages, while I begin this letter which he is to finish to you. What good he will do to mankind I know not; this comfort he may be sure of, he cannot do less than you have done before him. ”

“ Thus, the power of the Papal chair is far greater than the power of the throne, and Kings owe obedience and submission to Popes. According as the Pope is through God, and in the place of God, so is every thing placed under him; all matters, both temporal and spiritual, belong to his judgment-seat; he shall teach, exhort, punish, improve, condemn, and decide. The church is the divine judgment-seat, and renders account to God of the sins of mankind. She teaches the right way; she is the finger of God. The Pope is the governor under Christ, and over all. ”

“ I confess and believe, that the Pope is Christ’s vicar, and has full power to forgive the sins of all mankind, according to his own will and pleasure, either to save, to let them perish, or to excommunicate them, if he thinks fit. ”

“ Pope's affectation is perhaps the most transparent and the most gratuitous. His career had been pre-eminently successful; his talents had found their natural outlet; and he had only to be what he apparently persuaded himself that he was, to be happy in spite of illness. He is constantly flourishing his admirable moral sense in our faces, dilating upon his simplicity, modesty, fidelity to his friends, indifference to the charms of fame, till we are almost convinced that he has imposed upon himself. ”

“ Poets do not always express their own thoughts: Pope, with all this labour in the praise of music, was ignorant of its principles and insensible of its effects.
One of his greatest, though of his earliest works, is the “Essay on Criticism,” which, if he had written nothing else, would have placed him among the first critics and the first poets, as it exhibits every mode of excellence that can embellish or dignify didactic composition, selection of matter, novelty of arrangement, justness of precept, splendour of illustration, and propriety of digression. ”