He begged his own letters back from the friends to whom they were written.  He altered them, changed the dates, and published them.  Then he raised a great outcry pretending that they had been stolen from him and published without his knowledge.  Such ways led to quarrels and strife while he was alive, and since his death they have puzzled every one who has tried to write about him.  All his life through he was hardly ever without a literary quarrel of some sort, some of his poems indeed being called forth merely by these quarrels.

But though many of Pope’s poems led to quarrels, and some were written with the desire to provoke them, one of his most famous poems was, on the other hand, written to bring peace between two angry families.  This poem is called the Rape of the Lock—­rape meaning theft, and the lock not the lock of a door, but a lock of hair.

A gay young lord had stolen a lock of a beautiful young lady’s hair, and she was so angry about it that there was a coolness between the two families.  A friend then came to Pope to ask him if he could not do something to appease the angry lady.  So Pope took up his pen and wrote a mock-heroic poem making friendly fun of the whole matter.  But although Pope’s intention was kindly his success was not complete.  The families did not entirely see the joke, and Pope writes to a friend, “The celebrated lady herself is offended, and, what is stranger, not at herself, but me.”

But the poem remains one of the most delightful of airy trifles in our language.  And that it should be so airy is a triumph of Pope’s genius, for it is written in the heroic couplet, one of the most mechanical forms of English verse.

Addison called it “a delicious little thing” and the very salt of wit.

Another and later writer says of it—­“It is the most exquisite specimen of filigree work ever invented.  It is made of gauze and silver spangles. . . .  Airs, languid airs, breathe around, the atmosphere is perfumed with affectation.  A toilet is described with the solemnity of an altar raised to the goddess of vanity, and the history of a silver bodkin is given with all the pomp of heraldry.  No pains are spared, no profusion of ornament, no splendour of poetic diction to set off the meanest things. . . .  It is the perfection of the mock-heroic."*

Hazlitt.

Pope begins the poem by describing Belinda, the heroine, awaking from sleep.  He tells how her guardian sylph brings a morning dream to warn her of coming danger.  In the dream she is told that all around her unnumbered fairy spirits fly guarding her from evil—­

    “Of these am I, who thy protection claim,
    A watchful sprite, and Ariel is my name. 
    Late, as I ranged the crystal wilds of air,
    In the clear mirror of thy ruling star
    I saw, alas! some dread event impend,
    Ere to the main this morning sun descend. 
    But heaven reveals not what, or how, or where: 
    Warned by the sylph, oh pious maid, beware! 
    This to disclose is all thy guardian can: 
    Beware of all, but most beware of Man!”