All this is said with a thorough recognition of its art--its amazing dexterities of verse--its playful leaps of fancy--its bright shimmer of over-nature; and yet those gossamer gnomes seem to me like an intrusion; I cannot forget that they were an afterthought of Pope himself; I cannot bring myself to think of the charming fairy-folk of Fletcher, or of Drayton's _Nymphidia_, or of the _Midsummer Night's Dream_ wallowing in pomades, {42} and straining at whalebone stays! These live through an eternal frolic in the air; those--of the _Rape of the Lock_--lie in a literary show-case, like a taxidermist's trophies. In the sobered time of life, when the iris hues have only fitful play, I think a man goes away from these earlier poems of Pope (if he reads them) with new zest, to those wonderful metric condensations of old truths, which flash and burn along the lines of his moral essays. There could be few more helpful rhetorical lessons, for boy or girl, than the effort to pack some of Pope's stinging couplets, or decades of lines, into an equal number of lines in prose; the difficulties would be great indeed and would vitalize the lesson; and the lesson, I think, would be far fuller of profitable ends, than the old "parsing" exercise, and syntactic analysis and description of sentences according to the nomenclature of Mr. Lindley Murray or of Mr. Somebody-else. {43} _Pope's Homer, and Life at Twickenham_. [Sidenote: Homer of Pope.] Notwithstanding his much writing, Pope in those early days under the beeches of Windsor forest, was not winning such financial rewards as his friends thought he deserved. The _Spectator_ did not pay much money for little poetic trifles--such as the _Messiah_; and Jacob Tonson was the screw which some publishers are. There can be no doubt that the poet, with his fine tastes, felt the restraints of a limited income; his old father, who perhaps did not carry sharp business habits into his retirement, had been compelled to leave the country house of Binfield, and had gone over to a suburban street dwelling near to Chiswick. In this emergency, (if emergency it were,) was it not the oddest thing in the world that his friends should have advised a translation of Homer?