calls an idol of the Cave, because it had a superficial resemblance to fine art when truly defined, that is to say, "an assemblage of contrary qualities mixed in such proportion that no one part is felt to counteract another." But whereas fine art implies a union of contrary principles actually existing in Nature, false wit aims solely at the combination of dissimilar ideas of the mind without any reference to the actual truth of things. Pope fully understood that this practice was a violation of the law of Fine Art, and that it was the business of the poet to find a foundation for his conceptions in the Universal: hence his definition of True Wit:

True wit is Nature to advantage dressed,

What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed.

constant aim implied in

His idea of correctness,

The couplet sets forth the his standard of correctness. therefore, may be defined as an imitation of Nature, in which an attempt is made to combine the Catholic spirit of the Middle Ages with the civic and philosophic ideas of the Renaissance, in the forms consecrated by the usage of classic poetry.

In many respects Pope was exceedingly well equipped both by nature and training for the accomplishment of this task. Born of Roman Catholic parents, he had also had a Roman Catholic education; but this strong initial tendency towards mediævalism was counteracted by his early introduction to the best society of London, which was of course emphatically Protestant. His temperament and perceptions

naturally caused him to aim at a balance between the two religions, and he describes himself as

Papist or Protestant, or both between,

Like good Erasmus in an honest mean.

His age and the society about him impelled his genius in the same direction. The year of his birth, 1688, marked the opening in England of the new constitutional era. Proscribed from taking part in politics, in which, from his association with Swift and Bolingbroke, he was nevertheless deeply interested, he formed for himself a philosophic idea of the English, constitution as a whole. While he was familiar with the nature of the controversy between the Roman and Anglican Churches, he had also read Bacon, and Locke, and Newton, to say nothing of the various Deistical writers who put forward their ideas so voluminously in the early part of the eighteenth century. Hence, in his conception of Nature, his imagination may be observed undergoing a development from Catholicism to what may be called a state of Catholic Deism. Listen, for example, to the impassioned lines in which he makes Heloïse address Abelard, and say if they do not breathe the very spirit of S. Benedict or S. Buonaventura :

Of all affliction taught a lover yet

'Tis sure the hardest science to forget.
How shall I love the sin yet keep the sense?
How love the offender yet detest the offence?
How the dear object from the crime remove?
Or how distinguish penitence from love?
Unequal task! a passion to resign

For hearts so touched, so pierced, so lost as mine.
Ere such a soul regain its peaceful state,

How often must it love, how often hate!
How often hope, despair, resent, regret,
Conceal, disdain-do all things but forget!
But let heaven seize it, all at once 'tis fired,
Not touched but rapt, not wakened but inspired!
Oh come, oh teach me nature to subdue,
Renounce my love, my life, myself—and you.
Fill my fond heart with God alone, for He
Alone can rival, can succeed to thee.

Or this, which has in it something of the spirit of
Crashaw, though without his conceit :

Vital spark of heavenly flame,
Quit, O quit, this mortal frame,
Trembling, hoping, lingering, flying,
O the pain, the bliss of dying!

Cease, fond Nature, cease thy strife!
And let me languish into life.

Hark they whisper: Angels say,

Sister spirit, come away.

What is this absorbs me quite,
Heals my senses, steals my sight,

Drowns my spirit, draws my breath?
Tell me, my soul, can this be Death?

The world recedes; it disappears!

Heaven opens on my eyes! my ears

With sounds seraphic ring:

Lend, lend your wings! I mount! I fly!

O Grave, where is thy victory?

O Death! where is thy sting?

Compare this glowing enthusiasm with the Deistic rationalism of the address to the Creator in the Universal Prayer:

Father of all! in every age,

In every clime adored

By saint, by savage, and by sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord.

Thou first great Cause, least understood,
Who all my sense confined,

To know but this, that Thou art good
And that myself am blind!

What a contrast! And yet both the youthful and the mature conceptions have one thing in common, the idea of Nature, of the Universal, apprehended by feeling and instinct in the one case, arrived at by an effort of Reason in the other. The latter perception expresses itself in the note of triumph animating the vigorous concluding lines of the Essay on Man, in which the poet defines his idea of Poetry, and, addressing Bolingbroke, declares :

That urged by thee I turned the tuneful art
From sounds to things, from fancy to the heart;
For wit's false mirror held up nature's light;
Showed erring pride whatever is is right;
That reason, passion, answer one great aim;
That true self-love and social are the same;
That virtue only makes our lives below,

And all our knowledge is ourselves to know.

You may say, How limited an idea of Nature, of the Universal, is this, compared with Dante's idea of the Universe as presented in The Divine Comedy! and you will say it justly. Still, it is fair to remember, in the first place, that this restriction of knowledge to self-knowledge is only the completion of a tendency of thought which reveals itself in Paradise

Lost, where, as I pointed out in my last lecture, the Archangel Raphael exhorts Adam :

Be lowly wise,

Think only what concerns thee and thy being,
Dream not of other worlds.

And, in the second place, the just standard of comparison is not so much Pope's idea of Nature measured by Dante's, as Pope's contrasted with the False Wit of the poets of the seventeenth century, Phineas and Giles Fletcher, Donne, Crashaw, Quarles, and Cowley. Compared with any of thesefor they had all of them given over the attempt to conceive Nature poetically as a whole-the view of Nature presented in the Essay on Man appears simple, harmonious, majestic. Moreover, it is the idea of Pope's age; it reflects the universal tendency of thought working in England and France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the movement, that is to say, of experimental and inductive philosophy, started by Bacon and carried on from him through Hobbes to Locke, and from Locke to Bolingbroke and Hume. That is the meaning of Pope's boast that he

Turned the tuneful art

From sounds to things, from fancy to the heart.

And that, too, explains why, by an inevitable inward movement, Pope's genius changed from romantic themes of pure fancy, like his Pastorals, to the moral, satiric, and didactic vein characteristic of his work in his later years.