Both poems, and especially the last, have received the warmest praises from Pope's critics, and even from critics who were most opposed to his school.

They are, in fact, his chief performances of the sentimental kind.

Written in his youth, and yet when his powers of versification had reached their fullest maturity, they represent an element generally absent from his poetry.

Pope was at the period in which, if ever, a poet should sing of love, and in which we expect the richest glow and fervour of youthful imagination.

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.