I come now to what in itself would be enough to have immortalized him as a poet, the “Rape of the Lock,” in which, indeed, he appears more purely as a poet than in any other of his productions. Elsewhere he has shown more force, more wit, more reach of thought, but nowhere such a truly artistic combination of elegance and fancy. His genius has here found its true direction, and the very same artificiality which in his Pastorals was unpleasing heightens the effect and adds to the general keeping. As truly as Shakspeare is the poet of man as God made him, dealing with great passions and innate motives, so truly is Pope the poet of society, the delineator of manners, the exposer of those motives which may be called acquired, whose spring is in institutions and habits of purely worldly origin. The whole poem more truly deserves the name of a creation than anything Pope ever wrote. The action is confined to a world of his own, the supernatural agency is wholly of his own contrivance, and nothing is allowed to overstep the limitations of the subject. It ranks by itself as one of the purest works of human fancy. Whether that fancy be truly poetical or not is another matter. The perfection of form in the “Rape of the Lock” is to me conclusive evidence that in it the natural genius of Pope found fuller and freer expression than in any other of his poems. The others are aggregates of brilliant passages rather than harmonious wholes. Mr. Lowell gave a detailed analysis of the poem, with extracts of some length. The “Essay on Man” has been praised and admired by men of the most opposite beliefs, and men of no belief at all. Bishops and free-thinkers have met here on a common ground of sympathetic approval. And, indeed, there is no particular faith in it. It is a droll medley of inconsistent opinions. It proves only two things beyond a question: that Pope was not a great thinker; and that wherever he found a thought, no matter what, he would express it so tersely, so clearly, and with such smoothness of versification, as to give it an everlasting currency. Hobbes’s unwieldy “Leviathan,” left stranded on the shore of the last age and nauseous with the stench of its selfishness--from this Pope distilled a fragrant oil with which to fill the brilliant lamps of his philosophy, lamps like those in the tombs of alchemists, that go out the moment the healthy air is let in upon them. The only positive doctrine in the poem is the selfishness of Hobbes set to music, and the pantheism of Spinoza brought down from mysticism to commonplace. Nothing can be more absurd than many of the dogmas taught in the “Essay on Man.”