More Popeana: Items from an Unpublished Correspondence

A Lexander Pope as known to his contemporaries is a study in extremes. One group knew him as the satirist, diabolically clever and Papistical, responsible for the Moral Essays and the Dunciad. But another group less frequently commemorated idolized him as the romantic author of the Pastorals , of Windsor Forest , of Eloisa to Abelard and The Dying Christian to his Soul ; he satisfied their love of beauty both in external nature and in the soul of man. With something of surprise we see through the eyes of these admirers the figure of the romantic poet usually obscured by that of the satirist of later years. The gradual stages by which the admirers of the younger Pope become the stern judges of his middle age are evidences of changes in the poet himself and not in those romantically-minded readers who turned reluctantly from him to Thomson and Shenstone and Young.