Perhaps there is no better proof of the lasting and deserved popularity of this Essay, than the numerous quotations from it, not only in works on rhetoric and literary criticism, but in our ordinary intercourse with men. Couplets and lines have become household words wherever the English language is spoken. How often do we hear the sciolist condemned in these words:
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or touch not the Pierian spring?
Irreverence and rash speculation are satirized thus:
Nay, fly to altars; there they'll talk you dead,
For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
We may waive a special notice of his Pastorals, which, like those of Dryden, are but clever imitations of Theocritus and anachronisms of the Alexandrian period. Of their merits, we may judge from his own words. "If they have any merit, it is to be attributed to some good old authors, whose works as I had leisure to study, so I hope I have not wanted care to imitate."
Rape of the Lock.—The poem which displays most originality of invention is the Rape of the Lock. It is, perhaps, the best and most charming specimen of the mock-heroic to be found in English; and it is specially deserving of attention, because it depicts the social life of the period in one of its principal phases. Miss Arabella Fermor, one of the reigning beauties of London society, while on a pleasure party on the Thames, had a lock of her hair surreptitiously cut off by Lord Petre. Although it was designed as a joke, the belle was very angry; and Pope, who was a friend of both persons, wrote this poem to assuage her wrath and to reconcile them. It has all the system and construction of an epic. The poet describes, with becoming delicacy, the toilet of the lady, at which she is attended by obsequious sylphs.
The party embark upon the river, and the fair lady is described in the splendor of her charms:
This nymph, to the destruction of mankind,
Nourished two locks, which graceful hung behind
In equal curls, and well conspired to deck,
With shining ringlets, the smooth, ivory neck.
Fair tresses man's imperial race ensnare.
And beauty draws us by a single hair.
Surrounding sylphs protect the beauty; and one to whom the lock has been given in charge, flutters unfortunately too near, and is clipped in two by the scissors that cut the lock. It is a rather extravagant conclusion, even in a mock-heroic poem, that when the strife was greatest to restore the lock, it flew upward:
A sudden star, it shot through liquid air,
And drew behind a radiant trail of hair,