This is, of course, a natural result of the gaps and contradictions in the evidence, the lack especially of those minute details which are not only necessary links, but often the most suggestive features, in a record of facts or delineation of character. And if it be urged that a deeper insight would have in some measure supplied this deficiency, the answer can only be that we have no right to expect from any man the exercise of powers which he does not possess or affect to possess--powers which, in a case like this, would need to be of the finest and rarest kind. We may, however, fairly regret that Mr. Stephen has not availed himself of a resource that lay within his reach for making the accessories of his picture more brilliant and effective, with the possible incidental result of throwing a stronger light on the principal figure. Whatever else may be debated about Pope, no one would deny that he was pre-eminently the man of his time--not only its most conspicuous figure, but the very embodiment of its ideals. He suited it and it suited him. Hence the fulness and in a certain sense perfection of his work, the fact that he has given his name to an epoch as well as a school, and consequently the important place which he still retains in the history of literature. Men who were certainly not his inferiors in intellectual power lived in the same age, partook of its influence and contributed to its achievements; but they were not so thoroughly at home in it: their best qualities were stunted, rather than developed, by its soil and atmosphere. Dryden, one may safely say, would have been greater had he lived earlier, Fielding had he lived later. But one cannot imagine Pope thriving in any other air or producing equal work under different influences. The qualities most esteemed by his contemporaries he possessed in a superlative degree; his limitations were common to the society in which he moved, and neither he nor it was conscious of them as such; consequently, what would have been impediments to a different nature were to his means of free and spontaneous action. And not only does he represent the ideas of his age, but he depicted its types and manners. In this respect he is the link between the comic dramatists and the novelists, between Congreve and Fielding. The wits, the beaux, the fine ladies, the Grub Street drudges of the reign of Anne, whatever be the fidelity or other merits of the portraitures, are more familiar to us in the satires of Pope than as reflected in any other mirror. For these reasons Pope is one of the last men who can be studied to advantage from a single point of view or in a detached position. We need to understand not only his personal relations but his general affinities with the men and events of his time--of that world, at least, of which he was the centre. True, the period is better known to readers generally than almost any other. But it is not a copious accumulation of facts or a labored