Another side of Pope's nature is revealed in this: that to some of his friends, to Swift and Bolingbroke for example, he showed gratitude, and that to his parents he was ever a dutiful son. He came perhaps as near as he could to a real rather than an artificial sentiment when he wrote of his old mother: Me let the tender office long engage, To rock the cradle of reposing age. WORKS OF POPE. Pope's first important work, _An Essay on Criticism_ (1711), is an echo of the rules which Horace had formulated in his _Ars Poetica_, more than seventeen centuries before Pope was born. The French critic Boileau made an alleged improvement of Horace in his _L'Art Poétique_, and Pope imitated both writers with his rimed _Essay_, in which he attempted to sum up the rules by which poetry should be judged. And he did it, while still under the age of twenty-five, so brilliantly that his characterization of the critic is unmatched in our literature. A few selections will serve to show the character of the work: First follow nature, and your judgment frame By her just standard, which is still the same: Unerring nature, still divinely bright, One clear, unchanged and universal light, Life, force and beauty must to all impart, At once the source and end and test of Art. Poets, like painters, thus unskilled to trace The naked nature and the living grace, With gold and jewels cover every part, And hide with ornaments their want of art. True wit is nature to advantage dressed, What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed. Expression is the dress of thought, and still Appears more decent, as more suitable. [Sidenote: RAPE OF THE LOCK] Pope's next important poem, _The Rape of the Lock_ (1712), is his most original and readable work. The occasion of the poem was that a fop stole a lock of hair from a young lady, and the theft plunged two families into a quarrel which was taken up by the fashionable set of London. Pope made a mock-heroic poem on the subject, in which he satirized the fads and fashions of Queen Anne's age. Ordinarily Pope's fancy is of small range, and proceeds jerkily, like the flight of a woodpecker, from couplet to couplet; but here he attempts to soar like the eagle. He introduces dainty aerial creatures, gnomes, sprites, sylphs, to combat for the belles and fops in their trivial concerns; and herein we see a clever burlesque of the old epic poems, in which gods or goddesses entered into the serious affairs of mortals. The craftsmanship of the poem is above praise; it is not only a neatly pointed satire on eighteenth-century fashions but is one of the most graceful works in English verse. [Sidenote: ESSAY OF MAN]