It is very possible that the women of Pope’s time were as bad as they could be, but if God made poets for anything it was to keep alive the traditions of the pure, the holy, and the beautiful. I grant the influence of the age, but there is a sense in which the poet is of no age, and Beauty, driven from every other home, will never be an outcast and a wanderer while there is a poet-nature left; will never fail of the tribute at least of a song. It seems to me that Pope had a sense of the nice rather than of the beautiful. His nature delighted in the blemish more than in the charm. Personally, we know more about Pope than about any of our poets. He kept no secret about himself. If he did not let the cat out of the bag, he always contrived to give her tail a pinch so that we might know she was there. In spite of the savageness of his satires, his disposition seems to have been a truly amiable one, and his character as an author was as purely fictitious as his style. I think that there was very little real malice in him. A great deal must be allowed to Pope for the age in which he lived, and not a little, I think, for the influence of Swift. In his own province he still stands unapproachably alone. If to be the greatest satirist of individual men rather than of human nature; if to be the highest expression which the life of court and the ball-room has ever found in verse; if to have added more phrases to our language than any other but Shakspeare; if to have charmed four generations makes a man a great poet, then he is one. He was the chief founder of an artificial style of writing which in his hand was living and powerful because he used it to express artificial modes of thinking and an artificial state of society. Measured by any high standard of imagination, he will be found wanting; tried by any test of wit, he is unrivaled. To what fatuities his theory of correctness led in the next generation, when practised upon by men who had not his genius, I shall endeavor to show in my next lecture. LECTURE X POETIC DICTION (_Friday Evening, February 9, 1855_) X No one who has read any early poems, of whatever nation, can have failed to notice a freshness in the language--a sort of game flavor, as it were--that gradually wastes out of it when poetry becomes domesticated, so to speak, and has grown to be a mere means of amusement both to writers and readers, instead of answering a deeper necessity in their natures. Our Northern ancestors symbolized the eternal newness of song by calling it the Present, and its delight by calling it the drink of Odin.