THREE:BURIAL OF SIR JOHN MOORE. (See p. 570.)At this juncture Sir Henry Pottinger succeeded Captain Elliot, with orders to bring the war to a satisfactory conclusion. His measures were prompt; Amoy fell on the 26th of August, Chusan, which had been abandoned, was recaptured in September, and the Chinese experienced further reverses in 1842. At length the Chinese saw that resistance was vain, and that they must come to terms, as the "barbarians" could not be exterminated. Full powers had been given to three Commissioners to negotiate a treaty of peace, which, after various conferences, was concluded on the 26th of August, 1842. It embraced the following stipulations:The payment by the Chinese of an indemnity of 4,375,000 in addition to the ransom of 1,250,000 already surrendered; the opening of the new ports of Canton, Amoy, Fou-chow-fou, Ning-po, and Shang-hai to British merchants, with permission to consular officers to reside there; the cession of the island of Hong Kong to the British in perpetuity; correspondence to be conducted on terms of perfect equality between the officers of both Governments; and the islands of Chusan and Ku-lang-su to be held by the British until the money payments were made, and arrangements for opening the ports were completed.
THREE:
THREE:These treaties were regarded by Lord Lake, Sir John Malcolmwho had to negotiate themand many men of eminence in Indian affairs, as based[515] on a policy which could not last; that there could be no quiet in Hindostan so long as the restless Mahrattas and Pindarrees were not broken up, nor till the Indus was made the boundary of our Indian empire towards the north-west. We shall see that a few more years justified their foresight. These treaties, however, having, for the present, restored peace to the north, Lord Lake, after giving a grand review of the army on the banks of the Hyphasis, to impress the Sikhs with a sense of our military superiority, commenced his march back to Delhi, and in February, 1807, quitted his command in India, few commanders having rendered more brilliant services in that part of our empire, or left behind them more sincere esteem and admiration.At the head of the poets of this period stands Alexander Pope, who became the founder of a school which has had followers down to our own time. Pope was the poet of society, of art, and polish. His life was spent in London and in the country, chiefly between Binfield, in Windsor Forest, and Twickenham; and his poetry partakes very much of the qualities of that sceneryrich, cultivated, and beautiful, but having no claims to the wild or the sublime. He is opposed to poets like Milton and Shakespeare as pastures and town gardens are opposed to seas, forests, and mountains. In style he is polished to the highest degree, piquant, and musical; but, instead of being profound and creative, he is sensible, satiric, and didactic. He failed in "the vision and the faculty divine," but he possessed fancy, a moderate amount of passion, and a clear and penetrating intellect. He loved nature, but it was such only as he knewthe home-scenes of Berkshire and the southern counties, the trained and polished beauties in his gardens, the winding walks and grottoes at Twickenham. Mountains he had never seen, and there are none in his poetry. He was born in the year of the Revolution, and died in 1744, aged fifty-six; and, considering that he suffered from a feeble constitution and defective health, he was a remarkably industrious man. His pastorals appeared in Tonson's "Miscellany" when he was only twenty-one years old. Before this he had translated the first book of the "Thebais," and Ovid's "Epistle from Sappho to Phaon;" paraphrased Chaucer's "January and May," and the prologue to "The Wife of Bath's Tale." In two years after his "Pastorals" appeared his "Essay on Criticism" (1711). "The Messiah" and "The Rape of the Lock" were published in 1712the year in which the "Spectator" died. "The Rape of the Lock" celebrated the mighty event of the clipping of a lock of hair from the head of Miss Belle Fermor by Lord Petre.[151] This act, adorned with a great machinery of sylphs and gnomes, a specimen of elegant trifling, enchanted the age, which would have less appreciated grander things, and placed Pope on the pinnacle of fame. In 1713 he published "Windsor Forest," a subject for a pleasant but not a great poem, yet characteristic of Pope's genius, which delighted in the level and ornate rather than the splendid and the wild. In 1715 appeared the first four books of his translation of Homer's "Iliad," which was not completed till 1720. This still continues the most popular translation of the great heroic poet of Greece; for although it is rather a paraphrase of this colossal yet simple poem, and therefore not estimated highly by Greek scholars who can go to the original, it has that beauty and harmony of style which render it to the English reader an ever-fascinating work. In 1717 appeared his "Epistle from Eloisa to Abelard," a poem displaying more passion than any other of Pope's writings, but too sensuous, and the subject itself far from well chosen. Next succeeded his "Odyssey" of Homer, in conjunction with Fenton and Broome, and in 1728 the first three books of "The Dunciad," in which he took a sweeping vengeance on the critics and poetasters of the time, who had assailed him fiercely on all sides, with John Dennis at their head. The vigour with which Pope wielded the satiric lash excited the wonder of the public, which had seen no such trenchant production hitherto in the language, and filled the whole host of flayed and scalded dunces with howls of wrath and agony. Pope was not sparing of foul language in his branding of others, and they were still more obscene and scurrilous in their retorts. It is questionable whether they or Pope felt the most torture; for, so far from silencing them, they continued to kick, sting, and pelt him with dirt so long as he lived. So late as 1742 he published a fourth book of the satire, to give yet one more murderous blow to the blackguard crew. Besides this satire, he modernised an edition of Donne's Satires, and produced his "Essay on Man," his "Epistle on Taste," his "Moral Essays," and other poems, down to 1740. His "Essay on Man," "Moral Essays," etc., display shrewd sense, and a keen perception of the characteristics of human nature and of the world; yet they do not let us into any before unknown depths of life or morals, but, on the contrary, are, in many particulars, unsound. In fact, these productions belong by no means to poetry, of which they exhibit no quality, and might just as well have been given in prose. On the whole, Pope is a poet whose character is that of cleverness, strong intellect, carefully-elaborative art, much malice, and little warmth or breadth of genuine imagination. He reflects the times in which he lived, which were corrupt, critical, but not original, and he had no conception of the heavens of poetry and soul into which Milton and Shakespeare soared before him, and Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Tennyson in our time have wandered at large.
