Alexander Pope made the heroic couplet do things no one has managed since: compress an argument, land a joke and destroy a reputation inside twenty syllables. An Essay on Criticism (1711) supplied English with more quotable lines than any poem of its century, and he was twenty-three when he wrote it. The Rape of the Lock (1712) applied the full machinery of epic to a stolen curl of hair and remains the finest mock-heroic poem in the language. The Dunciad (1728), by contrast, was a weapon — a mock-epic crowning the goddess Dulness over a London of hack writers and booksellers, most of them named, several of them ruined. His translations of the Iliad and Odyssey made him the first English writer to live entirely on his earnings, freeing him from patrons. He needed the independence: as a Catholic he was barred from university, public office and living within ten miles of London, and tuberculosis of the spine left him under five feet tall and in constant pain. He built a villa and famous grotto at Twickenham, and died there in 1744.