Pope was
neither a Burns, nor a Byron, nor a Keats; but here, if anywhere, we
should find those qualities in which he has most affinity to the poets
of passion or of sensuous emotion, not soured by experience or purified
by reflection. The motives of the two poems were skilfully chosen.
Pope--as has already appeared to some extent--was rarely original in his
designs; he liked to have the outlines at last drawn for him, to be
filled with his own colouring. The _Eloisa to Abelard_ was founded upon
a translation from the French, published in 1714 by Hughes (author of
the _Siege of Damascus_), which is itself a manipulated translation from
the famous Latin originals. Pope, it appears, kept very closely to the
words of the English translation, and in some places has done little
more than versify the prose, though, of course, it is compressed,
rearranged, and modified. The _Unfortunate Lady_ has been the cause of a
good deal of controversy. Pope's elegy implies, vaguely enough, that she
had been cruelly treated by her guardians, and had committed suicide in
some foreign country. The verses, as commentators decided, showed such
genuine feeling, that the story narrated in them must have been
authentic, and one of his own correspondents (Caryll) begged him for an
explanation of the facts. Pope gave no answer, but left a posthumous
note to an edition of his letters calculated, perhaps intended, to
mystify future inquirers. The lady, a Mrs. Weston, to whom the note
pointed, did not die till 1724, and could therefore not have committed
suicide in 1717.
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