POPE’S DEATH AND CHARACTER.—­On the 30th of May, 1744, Pope passed away, after a long illness, during which he said he was “dying of a hundred good symptoms.”  Indeed, so frail and weak had he always been, that it was a wonder he lived so long.  His weakness of body seems to have acted upon his strong mind, which must account for much that is satirical and splenetic in his writings.  Very short, thin, and ill-shaped, his person wanted the compactness necessary to stand alone, until it was encased in stays.  He needed a high chair at table, such as children use; but he was an epicure, and a fastidious one; and despite his infirmities, his bright, intellectual eye and his courtly manners caused him to be noted quite as much as his defects.

THE ARTIFICIAL SCHOOL.—­Pope has been set forth as the head of the Artificial School.  This is, perhaps, rather a convenient than an exact designation.  He had little of original genius, but was an apt imitator and reproducer—­what in painting would be an excellent copyist.  His greatest praise, however, is that he reduced to system what had gone before him; his poems present in themselves an art of poetry, with technical canons and illustrations, which were long after servilely obeyed, and the influence of which is still felt to-day.

And this artificial school was in the main due to the artificial character of the age.  Nature seemed to have lost her charms; pastorals were little more than private theatricals, enacted with straw hats and shepherd’s crook in drawing-rooms or on close-clipped lawns.  Culture was confined to court and town, and poets found little inducement to consult the heart or to woo nature, but wrote what would please the town or court.  This taste gave character to the technical standards, to which Pope, more than any other writer, gave system and coherence.  Most of the literati were men of the town; many were fine gentlemen with a political bias; and thus it is that the school of poets of which Pope is the unchallenged head, has been known as the Artificial School.

In the passage of time, and with the increase of literature, the real merits of Pope were for some time neglected, or misrepresented.  The world is beginning to discern and recognize these again.  Learned, industrious, self-reliant, controversial, and, above all, harmonious, instead of giving vent to the highest fancies in simple language, he has treated the common-place—­that which is of universal interest—­in melodious and splendid diction.  But, above all, he stands as the representative of his age:  a wit among the comic dramatists who were going out and the essayists who were coming in; a man of the world with Lady Mary and the gay parties on the Thames; a polemic, who dealt keen thrusts and who liked to see them rankle, and who yet writhed in agony when the riposte came; a Roman Catholic in faith and a latitudinarian in speech;—­such was Pope as a type of that world in which he lived.