routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

158 Restoration to Romanticism 1660–1789
Fair Tresses Man’s Imperial Race insnare,
And Beauty draws us with a single Hair.
Th’ Adventurous Baron the bright Locks admir’d,
He saw, he wish’d, and to the Prize aspir’d.
(The Rape of the Lock)
The Dunciad (1726, expanded in 1743) is Pope’s best-known satire.
It is again mock heroic in style, and, like Dryden’s MacFlecknoe some
fifty years before, it is an attack on the author’s literary rivals, critics,
and enemies. Pope groups them together as the general enemy
‘Dulness’, which gradually takes over the world, and reduces it to
chaos and darkness:
See now, what Dulness and her sons admire;
See! what the charms, that smite the simple heart
Not touch’d by Nature, and not reach’d by Art.
Limited though these issues may seem, Pope’s intentions in his writing
were wide-ranging. His Moral Essays from the 1730s, his An Epistle to
Doctor Arbuthnot (1735), his An Essay on Man (1733–34), and the early
Essay on Criticism (1711) explore the whole question of man’s place in
the universe, and his moral and social responsibilities in the world.
A little learning is a dangerous thing.
(Essay on Criticism)
True wit is nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.
(Essay on Criticism)
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
’Tis not enough no harshness gives offence,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense.
(Essay on Criticism)
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good;