Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Crime of Alexander Pope APART from the affectionate admiration of his genius which every one feels who came early in life under the spell of Pope, there is no practical doubt that he was, to borrow the deathbed words of Scott, " a good man, a kind man." He may have played hocus-pocus with his own correspondence—he may have written about Lady Mary in a manner almost unpardonable even when all allowance is made—he did, as a matter of fact, do both these things—but, in spite of all, we leave it to any candid reader of " Spence's Anecdotes " to judge what manner of man he was. In that book, which, in point of sheer downright literary entertainment, we put immediately second to "Boswell," we get Pope as we do nowhere else, very much in his habit as he lived and across the walnuts and the wine. If we quote the following scrap of dialogue it is not so much because it is more illustrative than others of the nature of the man, but because some stray reader who does not know it may be interested to hear Pope's views upon vivisection. " Yes, Dr. Hales is a very good man, only I am sorryhe has his hands so much imbrued in blood." " What, he cuts up rats ? " " Ay, and dogs too ! [With what emphasis and concern he spoke it!] He commits most of these barbarities with the thought of being of use to man, but how do we know that we have a right to kill creatures we are so little above as dogs, for our curiosity or even for some use to us ? " Nevertheless this poet of genius and sensibility must undoubtedly be accused of crime in that he caused his followers to lay violent hands upon a " noble and a national metre." His followers walking in that way of " smoothness " which Pope enjoined upon them, so trivialized and debased the couplet that they left it for dead—and dead it seemed to be for m...