style, and harmony of the verse. The Temple of Fame suffered from a cause which deteriorated much of Pope's early poetry,--the notion that the noblest exercise of mind was to magnify the ancients, and reproduce their ideas. The epic poem he commenced at thirteen was naturally a school-boy's "slavish imitation" of Greek and Latin authors.[6] A magnificent modern literature, marked by the strongest lines of native vigour and masculine independence, might have been expected, as he grew acquainted with it, to expand his taste. This effect did not ensue. Led astray by the false conventional canons of hacknied criticism, he clung to his early prejudices, and, regardless of the splendid names which gave the lie to his theory, he could say, at the age of thirty, in the preface to his works, "All that is left us is to recommend our productions by the imitation of the ancients." He told Spence that he should certainly have tried his hand upon a second epic if he had not translated the Iliad, and this epic, in its main characteristics, would not have differed much from his translation. "I should have sat down to it," he said, "with this advantage, that I had been nursed up in Homer and Virgil."[7] He once intended to take the Corinthian Timoleon for his hero; and scene, manners, personages, machinery, and sentiments would all have been as Greek as they could be made by an imitator who had not entered deeply into the spirit of classic writers and times. The everlasting interest attached to the Iliad,--to a poem original and national, reflecting the institutions, customs, feelings, and beliefs of its era,--would, he thought, be extended to a modern duplicate, in which every one of these qualities would have been reversed. "The less we copy the ancients," said Dr. Young, "we shall resemble them the more." The undue exaltation of antiquity is complete in the Temple of Fame. No English king, warrior, statesman, or patriot; no Christian martyr or evangeliser; no poet or philosopher was deemed worthy to be ranked with the men of old. The fictitious phantoms of heathen mythology, the heroes of decayed empires, and the authors whose works are in dead languages, are the sole immortals of Pope. Within the limits of his narrow world several of his names appear to have been selected at random, and others are applauded upon mistaken principles. He extols the virtue of Brutus, whose chief glory was to have plotted the death of his preserver, patron, and friend. Nations do not need, and virtue disowns the patriotism which manifests itself in ingratitude, treachery, and murder. Pope's admiration of tyrannicides even led him to celebrate Timoleon for killing his brother, notwithstanding that Timoleon had forfeited his claim to the panegyric by bitterly repenting his crime. To consecrate political assassinations is to put the lives of rulers at the mercy of any individual who conceives their policy to be mischievous. In short,