In the imitations of Horace he is,
of course, guided by lines already laid down for him; and he has shown
admirable skill in translating the substance as well as the words of his
author by the nearest equivalents. This peculiar mode of imitation had
been tried by other writers, but in Pope's hands it succeeded beyond all
precedent. There is so much congeniality between Horace and Pope, and
the social orders of which they were the spokesmen, that he can
represent his original without giving us any sense of constraint. Yet
even here he sometimes obscures the thread of connexion, and we feel
more or less clearly that the order of thought is not that which would
have spontaneously arisen in his own mind. So, for example, in the
imitation of Horace's first epistle of the first book, the references to
the Stoical and Epicurean morals imply a connexion of ideas to which
nothing corresponds in Pope's reproduction. Horace is describing a
genuine experience, while Pope is only putting together a string of
commonplaces. The most interesting part of these imitations are those in
which Pope takes advantage of the suggestions in Horace to be
thoroughly autobiographical. He manages to run his own experience and
feelings into the moulds provided for him by his predecessor. One of the
happiest passages is that in which he turns the serious panegyric on
Augustus into a bitter irony against the other Augustus, whose name was
George, and who, according to Lord Hervey, was so contrasted with his
prototype, that whereas personal courage was the one weak point of the
emperor, it was the one strong point of the English king.
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