The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, Volume 2

'Nay,' quoth the king, 'dear madam, be not wroth; 700 I yield it up; but since I gave my oath, That this much-injured knight again should see; It must be done--I am a king,' sai...

I should still have been silent, if either I had seen any inclination in my friend to be serious with such accusers, or if they had only meddled with his writings; since whoever...

Mist's Weekly Journal, June 8. A long Letter, signed W. A. Writ by some or other of the Club of Theobald, Dennis, Moore, Concanen, Cooke, who for some time held constant weekly...

Say, lovely youth, that dost my heart command, Can Phaon's eyes forget his Sappho's hand? Must then her name the wretched writer prove, To thy remembrance lost, as to thy love?...

'A heathen author, of the first degree, (Who, though not faith, had sense as well as we), Bids us be certain our concerns to trust 180 To those of generous principles and just....

'Yet Chloe, sure, was form'd without a spot'-- Nature in her then err'd not, but forgot. 'With every pleasing, every prudent part, Say, what can Chloe[17] want?'--She wants a he...

Then how two wives their lords' destruction prove, Through hatred one, and one through too much love; That for her husband mix'd a poisonous draught, And this for lust an amorou...

But from all that hath been said, the discerning reader will collect, that it little availed our author to have any candour, since, when he declared he did not write for others,...

[300] 'Stood dauntless Curll:' we come now to a character of much respect, that of Mr Edmund Curll. As a plain repetition of great actions is the best praise of them, we shall o...

'Of all th' enamell'd race, whose silvery wing Waves to the tepid zephyrs of the spring, Or swims along the fluid atmosphere, Once brightest shined this child of heat and air. I...

'When I consider myself as a British freeholder, I am in a particular manner pleased with the labours of those who have improved our language with the translations of old Greek...

Too safe in inborn heaviness to stray, And lick up every blockhead in the way. Thy dragons, magistrates and peers shall taste, And from each show rise duller than the last; Till...

[372] 'Though long my party:' Settle, like most party-writers, was very uncertain in his political principles. He was employed to hold the pen in the character of a popish succe...

So fares the sailor on the stormy main, 520 When clouds conceal Bootes' golden wain, When not a star its friendly lustre keeps, Nor trembling Cynthia glimmers on the deeps; He d...

--i.e. Britain is the only place on the globe which feels not tyranny even to its very entrails. Alluding to the condemnation of criminals to the mines, one of the inflictions o...

'Why did I trust thee with that giddy youth? Who from a page can ever learn the truth? Versed in Court tricks, that money-loving boy To some lord's daughter sold the living toy;...

First he relates, how sinking to the chin, Smit with his mien, the mud-nymphs suck'd him in: How young Lutetia, softer than the down, Nigrina black, and Merdamante brown, Vied f...

That his philosophy was empirical, is proved by his "Essay on Man," which, notwithstanding all its brilliant rhetoric, is the shallow version of a shallow system of naturalism....

The goddess then o'er his anointed head, With mystic words, the sacred opium shed. And, lo! her bird (a monster of a fowl, Something betwixt a Heidegger[282] and owl,) 290 Perch...

Fraternal rage, the guilty Thebes' alarms, Th' alternate reign destroy'd by impious arms, Demand our song; a sacred fury fires My ravish'd breast, and all the Muse inspires. O g...

The good Scriblerus indeed--nay, the world itself--might be imposed on, in the late spurious editions, by I can't tell what sham hero or phantom; but it was not so easy to impos...

The second book takes up again the first and second epistles of the first book, and treats of man in his intellectual capacity at large, as has been explained above. Of this, on...

[23] 'The patriot's cloak:' this is a true story, which happened in the reign of William III. to an unsuspected old patriot, who coming out at the back-door from having been clo...

[240] 'Laborious, heavy, busy, bold,' &c. I wonder the learned Scriblerus has omitted to advertise the reader, at the opening of this poem, that Dulness here is not to be taken...

Few poets during their lifetime have been at once so much admired and so much abused as Pope. Some writers, destined to oblivion in after-ages, have been loaded with laurels in...

_P_. Where London's column,[44] pointing at the skies Like a tall bully, lifts the head, and lies; 340 There dwelt a citizen of sober fame, A plain good man, and Balaam was his...