There are those whose sole knowledge of Heloise is derived from the reading of Pope’s well-known poem, which is taken to be a metrical exposition of her first letter. With such an impression, and a few broad outlines of the life of the lovers, one is well prepared to accept the assertion of a parallel with the _Portuguese Letters_ and other of the _lettres amoureuses_ which were so dear to the eighteenth century. Probably few who compare Pope with the original, or indeed read him without comparison, will agree with Hallam that he has put ‘the sentiments of a coarse and abandoned woman into her mouth.’ Johnson found ‘no crudeness of sense, no asperity of language’ in Pope’s poem. Yet no one who has carefully read the original will fail to perceive that Pope has given a greatly distorted version of it. French versifiers found it ‘un amusement littéraire et galant,’ as has been said of Bussy-Rabutin’s version, to isolate the element of passion in the finer soul of Heloise, and thus present her as a twelfth-century Marianne Alcoforado. Pope has yielded somewhat to the same spirit. He does indeed introduce the intellectual judgment and the complex ethical feeling of Heloise in his poem, but he alters the proportions of the psychic elements in her letter, and prepares the way for a false estimate. Pope’s _Heloise_ is framed in the eighteenth century as naturally as the real _Heloise_ is in the twelfth. Still, it must be remembered that Pope did not write from the original Latin letters. He evidently used some of the so-called ‘translations,’ but really paraphrases, of his time.[21] [21] Mr. Leslie Stephen has kindly drawn my attention to Elwin’s theory (Pope’s Works) that he followed the translation of J. Hughes, author of the _Siege of Damascus_. Hughes’s ‘translation’ was little more faithful than the current French versions; it is largely a work of imagination. Careful comparison does seem to show that Pope used this version, but he seems also to have used some of the very misleading French paraphrases. Elwin himself thinks Pope did not look at the original Latin.