To readers who have lost the taste for poetry of this class one poem may seem about as good as the other; but Pope's superiority is plain enough to a reader who will condescend to distinguish.

His verses are an excellent specimen of his declamatory style--polished, epigrammatic, and well expressed; and, though keeping far below the regions of true poetry, preserving just that level which would commend them to the literary statesmen and the politicians at Will's and Button's.

Perhaps some advocate of Free Trade might try upon a modern audience the lines in which Pope expresses his aspiration in a footnote that London may one day become a "FREE PORT." There is at least not one antiquated or obscure phrase in the whole.
Here are half-a-dozen lines:-- The time shall come, when, free as seas and wind, Unbounded Thames shall flow for all mankind, Whole nations enter with each swelling tide, And seas but join the regions they divide; Earth's distant ends our glory shall behold, And the new world launch forth to seek the old.
In the next few years Pope found other themes for the display of his declamatory powers.

Of the _Temple of Fame_ (1715), a frigid imitation of Chaucer, I need only say that it is one of Pope's least successful performances; but I must notice more fully two rhetorical poems which appeared in 1717.

These were the _Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady_ and the _Eloisa to Abelard_.