"The barbarous dissonance Of Bacchus and his revellers, the race Of that wild rout that tore the Thracian bard In Rhodope, where woods and rocks had ears To rapture, till the savage clamor drown'd Both harp and voice; nor could the Muse defend Her son." 14. =Rhodope.= A range of mountains in Thrace, sacred to Bacchus. =Hæmus= was another range extending from Rhodope, on the west, to the Black Sea, on the east. 15. =Music.= Compare what Pope says of music with: "Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast." --_Congreve_, _The Mourning Bride_. "O Music! sphere-descended maid, Friend of pleasure, wisdom's aid!" --_Collins_, _The Passions_. "Soft is the music that would charm forever." --_Wordsworth_, _Sonnets_. 16. Compare these lines with the four which end Dryden's "Alexander's Feast." BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. ALEXANDER POPE was born in London in 1688. He had some instruction at home, and was afterwards sent, first to a Roman Catholic seminary near Winchester, then to another in London. "This," he said, "was all the teaching I ever had, and God knows it extended a very little way. When I had done with my priests, I took to reading by myself, for which I had a very great eagerness and enthusiasm, especially for poetry: and in a few years I had dipped into a very great number of the English, Italian, Latin, and Greek poets." He was small of stature and deformed, and his ill health made him peevish, irritable, and selfish. Yet his rare intellectual abilities and the deserved success of his earlier poetry secured for him the friendship of many of the most influential men of the time. Bolingbroke declared that he never knew a man more tenderly devoted to his friends; and Warburton said, "He is as good a companion as poet, and, what is more, appears to be a good man." Pope's "Essay on Criticism" was published in 1711; the "Rape of the Lock" in 1714; his translation of Homer's "Iliad" in 1715-18, and of the "Odyssey" in 1726; the "Dunciad" in 1728; the "Essay on Man" in 1732. A revised and enlarged version of the "Dunciad" was published in 1742. The latter part of Pope's life was spent at his country-seat of Twickenham, which he enlarged and beautified from the proceeds of his translation of Homer. He died in 1744. "Pope is our greatest master in didactic poetry," says Stopford Brooke, "not so much because of the worth of the thoughts as because of the masterly form in which they are put."