But living as we do at a convenient distance from Mr. Pope, we may safely wish his days had been prolonged, not necessarily to those of his mother, but to the Psalmist's span, so that he might have witnessed the dawn of a brighter day. 1744 was the nadir of the eighteenth century. With Macbeth the dying Pope might have exclaimed,-- 'Renown and grace is dead; The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees Is left in the vault to brag of.' The feats of arms that have made the first Ministry of the elder Pitt for ever glorious would have appealed to Pope's better nature, and made him forget the scandals of the court and the follies of the town. Who knows but they might have stirred him, for he was not wholly without the true poet's prophetic gift, which dreams of things to come, to foretell, in that animated and animating style of his, which has no rival save glorious John Dryden's, the expansion of England, and how, in far-off summers he should never see, English maidens, living under the Southern Cross, should solace their fluttering hearts before laying themselves down to sleep with some favourite bit from his own _Eloisa to Abelard_? Whether, in fact, maidens in those latitudes do read _Eloisa_ before blowing out their candles I cannot say; but Pope, I warrant, would have thought they would. And they might do worse--and better. Both as a poet and a man Pope had many negations. 'Of love, that sways the sun and all the stars,' he knew absolutely nothing. Even of the lesser light, 'The eternal moon of love, Under whose motions life's dull billows move,' he knew but little. His _Eloisa_, splendid as is its diction, and vigorous though be the portrayal of the miserable creature to whom the poem relates, most certainly lacks 'a gracious somewhat,' whilst no less certainly is it marred by a most unfeeling coarseness. A poem about love it may be--a love-poem it is not. Of the 'wild benefit of nature,'-- 'The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills,'