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where he published his collected works. He was deformed and afflicted, and attained only to the age of fifty-six. But he gathered around him the greatest celebrities of his time, and stood first amongst them for his criticism and poetry.
Pope says of himself: "I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came :" yet in almost all his works he is either the imitator or translator of the productions of others, and he is the last man to whom we should apply the dictum of the old Latin poet, " poeta nascitur, non Jit." Some of his principal works are the following : His " Pastorals," published in 1709 ; the " Essay on Criticism," highly praised by Dr. Johnson, 1711 ; the " Rape of the Lock," a mock-heroic poem on the stealing of a lock of a lady s hair by Lord Petre ; the " Temple of Fame," 1715 ; " Windsor Forest," the " Dunciad" (his severe satire on some of the literary men of his day), in 1728 ; the " Essay on Man," in 1733 ; and " Characters of Men and Moral Essays," in 1734. Without producing striking characters or skilful plots in his poems, Pope succeeded in writing lines that will never be lost, and his words are quoted by many who never read his works.
Pope s fame rests in part on his poetical translation of the Iliad (1720), and Odyssey (1725) of Homer. This work is valued for its poetic taste and skill rather than as a translation. It often departs fromt he original, and is written in a style having its acknowledged excellencies, but felt to be unsuitable for the reproduction, in another language, of the force and grand simplicity of the original. Pope s style has been commended by some and condemned by others, and probably part of the disfavour it has met with has arisen from the tame and tedious imitations of those who had not genius enough to equal its excellencies. Of it Thomas Campbell says " Pope has a gracefully peculiar manner, though it is not calculated to be an universal one. . . . His pauses have little variety, and his phrases are too much weighed in the balance of antithesis. But let us look to the spirit that points his anti thesis, and the rapid precision of his thoughts, and we shall for-
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