My Study Windows

Pope

IN 1675 Edward Phillips, the elder of Milton’s nephews, published his Theatrum Poetarum. In his Preface and elsewhere there can be little doubt that he reflected the æsthetic principles and literary judgments of his now illustrious uncle, who had died in obscurity the year before.34 The great poet who gave to English blank verse the grandeur and compass of organ-music, and who in his minor poems kept alive the traditions of Fletcher and Shakespeare, died with no foretaste, and yet we may believe as confident as ever, of that “immortality of fame” which he tells his friend Diodati he was “meditating with the help of Heaven” in his youth. He who may have seen Shakespeare, who doubtless had seen Fletcher, and who perhaps personally knew Jonson,35 lived to see that false school of writers whom he qualified as “good rhymists, but no poets,” at once the idols and the victims of the taste they had corrupted. As he saw, not without scorn, how they found universal hearing, while he slowly won his audience fit though few, did he ever think of the hero of his own epic at the ear of Eve? It is not impossible; but however that may be, he sowed in his nephew’s book the dragon’s teeth of that long war which, after the lapse of a century and a half, was to end in the expulsion of the usurping dynasty and the restoration of the ancient and legitimate race whose claim rested on the grace of God. In the following passage surely the voice is Milton’s, though the hand be that of Phillips: “Wit, ingenuity, and learning in verse, even elegancy itself, though that comes nearest, are one thing; true native poetry is another, in which there is a certain air and spirit, which, perhaps, the most learned and judicious in other arts do not perfectly apprehend; much less is it attainable by any art or study.” The man who speaks of elegancy as coming nearest, certainly shared, if he was not repeating, the opinions of him who thirty years before had said that “decorum” (meaning a higher or organic unity) was “the grand masterpiece to observe” in poetry.36

It is upon this text of Phillips (as Chalmers has remarked) that Joseph Warton bases his classification of poets in the dedication to Young of the first volume of his essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, published in 1756. That was the earliest public and official declaration of war against the reigning mode, though private hostilities and reprisals had been going on for some time. Addison’s panegyric of Milton in the Spectator was a criticism, not the less damaging because indirect, of the superficial poetry then in vogue. His praise of the old ballads condemned by innuendo the artificial elaboration of the drawing-room pastoral by contrasting it with the simple sincerity of nature. Himself incapable of being natural except in prose, he had an instinct for the genuine virtues of poetry as sure as that of Gray. Thomson’s “Winter” (1726) was a direct protest against the literature of Good Society, going as it did to prove that the noblest society was that of one’s own mind heightened by the contemplation of outward nature. What Thomson’s poetical creed was may be surely inferred from his having modelled his two principal poems on Milton and Spenser, ignoring rhyme altogether in the “Seasons,” and in the “Castle of Indolence” rejecting the stiff mould of the couplet. In 1744 came Akenside’s “Pleasures of Imagination,” whose very title, like a guide-post, points away from the level highway of commonplace to mountain-paths and less domestic prospects. The poem was stiff and unwilling, but in its loins lay the seed of nobler births, and without it the “Lines written at Tintern Abbey” might never have been. Three years later Collins printed his little volume of Odes, advocating in theory and exemplifying in practice the natural supremacy of the imagination (though he called it by its older name of fancy) as a test to distinguish poetry from verse-making. The whole Romantic School, in its germ, no doubt, but yet unmistakably foreshadowed, lies already in the “Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands.” He was the first to bring back into poetry something of the antique fervor, and found again the long-lost secret of being classically elegant without being pedantically cold. A skilled lover of music,37 he rose from the general sing-song of his generation to a harmony that had been silent since Milton, and in him, to use his own words,

      “The force of energy is found,
And the sense rises on the wings of sound.”

But beside his own direct services in the reformation of our poetry, we owe him a still greater debt as the inspirer of Gray, whose “Progress of Poesy,” in reach, variety, and loftiness of poise, overflies all other English lyrics like an eagle. In spite of the dulness of contemporary ears, preoccupied with the continuous hum of the popular hurdy-gurdy, it was the prevailing blast of Gray’s trumpet that more than anything else called men back to the legitimate standard.38 Another poet, Dyer, whose “Fleece” was published in 1753, both in the choice of his subject and his treatment of it gives further proof of the tendency among the younger generation to revert to simpler and purer models. Plainly enough, Thomson had been his chief model, though there are also traces of a careful study of Milton.

Pope had died in 1744, at the height of his renown, the acknowledged monarch of letters, as supreme as Voltaire when the excitement and exposure of his coronation-ceremonies at Paris hastened his end a generation later. His fame, like Voltaire’s, was European, and the style which he had carried to perfection was paramount throughout the cultivated world. The new edition of the “Dunciad,” with the Fourth Book added, published the year before his death, though the substitution of Cibber for Theobald made the poem incoherent, had yet increased his reputation and confirmed the sway of the school whose recognized head he was, by the poignancy of its satire, the lucidity of its wit, and the resounding, if somewhat uniform march, of its numbers. He had been translated into other languages living and dead. Voltaire had long before pronounced him “the best poet of England, and at present of all the world.”39 It was the apotheosis of clearness, point, and technical skill, of the ease that comes of practice, not of the fulness of original power. And yet, as we have seen, while he was in the very plenitude of his power, there was already a widespread discontent, a feeling that what “comes nearest,” as Phillips calls it, may yet be infinitely far from giving those profounder and incalculable satisfactions of which the soul is capable in poetry. A movement was gathering strength which prompted

    “The age to quit their clogs
By the known rules of virtuous liberty.”

Nor was it wholly confined to England. Symptoms of a similar reaction began to show themselves on the Continent, notably in the translation of Milton (1732) and the publication of the Nibelungen Lied (1757) by Bodmer, and the imitations of Thomson in France. Was it possible, then, that there was anything better than good sense, elegant diction, and the highest polish of style? Could there be an intellectual appetite which antithesis failed to satisfy? If the horse would only have faith enough in his green spectacles, surely the straw would acquire, not only the flavor, but the nutritious properties of fresh grass. The horse was foolish enough to starve, but the public is wiser. It is surprising how patiently it will go on, for generation after generation, transmuting dry stubble into verdure in this fashion.

The school which Boileau founded was critical and not creative. It was limited, not only in its essence, but by the capabilities of the French language and by the natural bent of the French mind, which finds a predominant satisfaction in phrases if elegantly turned, and can make a despotism, political or æsthetic, palatable with the pepper of epigram. The style of Louis XIV. did what his armies failed to do. It overran and subjugated Europe. It struck the literature of imagination with palsy, and it is droll enough to see Voltaire, after he had got some knowledge of Shakespeare, continually endeavoring to reassure himself about the poetry of the grand siècle, and all the time asking himself, “Why, in the name of all the gods at once, is this not the real thing?” He seems to have felt that there was a dreadful mistake somewhere, when poetry must be called upon to prove itself inspired, above all when it must demonstrate that it is interesting, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. Difficulty, according to Voltaire, is the tenth Muse, but how if there were difficulty in reading as well as writing? it was something, at any rate, which an increasing number of persons were perverse enough to feel in attempting the productions of a pseudo-classicism, the classicism of red heels and periwigs. Even poor old Dennis himself had arrived at a kind of muddled notion that artifice was not precisely art, that there were depths in human nature which the most perfectly manufactured line of five feet could not sound, and passionate elations that could not be tuned to the lullaby seesaw of the couplet. The satisfactions of a conventional taste were very well in their own way, but were they, after all, the highest of which men were capable who had obscurely divined the Greeks, and who had seen Hamlet, Lear, and Othello upon the stage? Was not poetry, then, something which delivered us from the dungeon of actual life, instead of basely reconciling us with it?

A century earlier the school of the cultists had established a dominion, ephemeral, as it soon appeared, but absolute while it lasted. Du Bartas, who may, perhaps, as fairly as any, lay claim to its paternity,40 had been called divine, and similar honors had been paid in turn to Gongora, Lilly, and Marini, who were in the strictest sense contemporaneous. The infection of mere fashion will hardly account satisfactorily for a vogue so sudden and so widely extended. It may well be suspected that there was some latent cause, something at work more potent than the fascinating mannerism of any single author in the rapid and almost simultaneous diffusion of this purely cutaneous eruption. It is not improbable that, in the revival of letters, men whose native tongues had not yet attained the precision and grace only to be acquired by long literary usage, should have learned from a study of the Latin poets to value the form above the substance, and to seek in mere words a conjuring property which belongs to them only when they catch life and meaning from profound thought or powerful emotion. Yet this very devotion to expression at the expense of everything else, though its excesses were fatal to the innovators who preached and practised it, may not have been without good results in refining language and fitting it for the higher uses to which it was destined. The cultists went down before the implacable good sense of French criticism, but the defect of this criticism was that it ignored imagination altogether, and sent Nature about her business as an impertinent baggage whose household loom competed unlawfully with the machine-made fabrics, so exquisitely uniform in pattern, of the royal manufactories. There is more than a fanciful analogy between the style which Pope brought into vogue and that which for a time bewitched all ears in the latter half of the sixteenth century. As the master had made it an axiom to avoid what was mean or low, so the disciples endeavored to escape from what was common. This they contrived by the ready expedient of the periphrasis. They called everything something else. A boot with them was

“The shining leather that encased the limb”;

coffee became

“The fragrant juice of Mocha’s berry brown”;

and they were as liberal of epithets as a royal christening of proper names. Two in every verse, one to balance the other, was the smallest allowance. Here are four successive verses from “The Vanity of Human Wishes”:—

“The encumbered oar scarce leaves the dreaded coast
 Through purple billows and a floating host.
 The bold Bavarian in a luckless hour
 Tries the dread summits of Cæsarian power.”

This fashion perished also by its own excess, but the criticism which laid at the door of the master all the faults of his pupils was unjust. It was defective, moreover, in overlooking how much of what we call natural is an artificial product, above all in forgetting that Pope had one of the prime qualities of a great poet in exactly answering the intellectual needs of the age in which he lived, and in reflecting its lineaments. He did in some not inadequate sense hold the mirror up to nature. His poetry is not a mountain-tarn, like that of Wordsworth; it is not in sympathy with the higher moods of the mind; yet it continues entertaining, in spite of all changes of mode. It was a mirror in a drawing-room, but it gave back a faithful image of society, powdered and rouged, to be sure, and intent on trifles, yet still as human in its own way as the heroes of Homer in theirs.

For the popularity of Pope, as for that of Marini and his sect, circumstances had prepared the way. English literature for half a century after the Restoration showed the marks both of a moral reaction and of an artistic vassalage to France. From the compulsory saintship and cropped hair of the Puritans men rushed or sneaked, as their temperaments dictated, to the opposite cant of sensuality and a wilderness of periwig. Charles II. had brought back with him from exile French manners, French morals, and above all French taste. Misfortune makes a shallow mind sceptical. It had made the king so; and this, at a time when court patronage was the main sinew of authorship, was fatal to the higher qualities of literature. That Charles should have preferred the stately decorums of the French school, and should have mistaken its polished mannerism for style, was natural enough. But there was something also in the texture of the average British mind which prepared it for this subjugation from the other side of the Channel. No observer of men can have failed to notice the clumsy respect which the understanding pays to elegance of manner and savoir-faire, nor what an awkward sense of inferiority it feels in the presence of an accomplished worldliness. The code of society is stronger with most persons than that of Sinai, and many a man who would not scruple to thrust his fingers in his neighbor’s pocket would forego green peas rather than use his knife as a shovel. The submission with which the greater number surrender their natural likings for the acquired taste of what for the moment is called the World is a highly curious phenomenon, and, however destructive of originality, is the main safeguard of society and nurse of civility. Any one who has witnessed the torments of an honest citizen in a foreign gallery before some hideous martyrdom which he feels it his duty to admire, though it be hateful to him as nightmare, may well doubt whether the gridiron of the saint were hotter than that of the sinner. It is only a great mind or a strong character that knows how to respect its own provincialism and can dare to be in fashion with itself. The bewildered clown with his “Am I Giles? or am I not?” was but a type of the average man who finds himself uniformed, drilled, and keeping step, whether he will or no, with the company into which destiny or chance has drafted him, and which is marching him inexorably away from everything that made him comfortable.

The insularity of England, while it fostered pride and reserve, entailed also that sensitiveness to ridicule which haunts pride like an evil genius. “The English,” says Barclay, writing half a century before the Restoration, “have for the most part grave minds and withdrawn, as it were, into themselves for counsel; they wonderfully admire themselves and the manners, genius, and spirit of their own nation. In salutation or in writing they endure not (unless haply imbued with foreign manners) to descend to those words of imaginary servitude which the refinement (blandities) of ages hath invented.”41 Yet their fondness of foreign fashions had long been the butt of native satirists. Every one remembers Portia’s merry picture of the English lord: “How oddly he is suited! I think he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behavior everywhere.” But while she laughs at his bungling efforts to make himself a cosmopolite in externals, she hints at the persistency of his inward Anglicism: “He hath neither Latin, French, nor Italian.” In matters of taste the Anglo-Saxon mind seems always to have felt a painful distrust of itself, which it betrays either in an affectation of burly contempt or in a pretence of admiration equally insincere. The young lords who were to make the future court of Charles II. no doubt found in Paris an elegance beside which the homely bluntness of native manners seemed rustic and underbred. They frequented a theatre where propriety was absolute upon the stage, though license had its full swing behind the scenes. They brought home with them to England debauched morals and that urbane discipline of manners which is so agreeable a substitute for discipline of mind. The word “genteel” came back with them, an outward symptom of the inward change. In the last generation, the men whose great aim was success in the Other World had wrought a political revolution; now, those whose ideal was prosperity in This World were to have their turn and to accomplish with their lighter weapons as great a change. Before the end of the seventeenth century John Bull was pretty well persuaded, in a bewildered kind of way, that he had been vulgar, and especially that his efforts in literature showed marks of native vigor, indeed, but of a vigor clownish and uncouth. He began to be ashamed of the provincialism which had given strength, if also something of limitation, to his character.

Waller, who spent a whole summer in polishing the life out of ten lines to be written in the Tasso of the Duchess of York, expresses the prevailing belief as regarded poetry in the prologue to his “improvement” of the “Maid’s Tragedy” of Beaumont and Fletcher. He made the play reasonable, as it was called, and there is a pleasant satire in the fact that it was refused a license because there was an immoral king in it. On the throne, to be sure,—but on the stage! Forbid it, decency!

“Above our neighbors’ our conceptions are,
 But faultless writing is the effect of care;
 Our lines reformed, and not composed in haste,
 Polished like marble, would like marble last.
.....
 Were we but less indulgent to our fau’ts,
 And patience had to cultivate our thoughts,
 Our Muse would flourish, and a nobler rage
 Would honor this than did the Grecian stage.”

It is a curious comment on these verses in favor of careful writing, that Waller should have failed even to express his own meaning either clearly or with propriety. He talks of “cultivating our thoughts,” when he means “pruning our style”; he confounds the Muse with the laurel, or at any rate makes her a plant, and then goes on with perfect equanimity to tell us that a nobler “rage” (that is, madness) than that of Greece would follow the horticultural devices he recommends. It never seems to have occurred to Waller that it is the substance of what you polish, and not the polish itself, that insures duration. Dryden, in his rough-and-ready way, has hinted at this in his verses to Congreve on the “Double Dealer.” He begins by stating the received theory about the improvement of English literature under the new régime, but the thin ice of sophistry over which Waller had glided smoothly gives way under his greater weight, and he finds himself in deep water ere he is aware.

“Well, then, the promised hour has come at last,
 The present age in wit obscures the past;
 Strong were our sires, and as they fought they writ,
 Conquering with force of arm42 and dint of wit.
 Theirs was the giant race before the Flood;
 And thus when Charles returned our Empire stood;
 Like Janus he the stubborn soil manured,
 With rules of husbandry the rankness cured,
 Tamed us to manners when the stage was rude,
 And boisterous English wit with art endued;
 Our age was cultivated thus at length,
 But what we gained in skill we lost in strength;
 Our builders were with want of genius curst,
 The second temple was not like the first.”

There would seem to be a manifest reminiscence of Waller’s verse in the half-scornful emphasis which Dryden lays on “cultivated.” Perhaps he was at first led to give greater weight to correctness and to the restraint of arbitrary rules from a consciousness that he had a tendency to hyperbole and extravagance. But he afterwards became convinced that the heightening of discourse by passion was a very different thing from the exaggeration which heaps phrase on phrase, and that genius, like beauty, can always plead its privilege. Dryden, by his powerful example, by the charm of his verse which combines vigor and fluency in a measure perhaps never reached by any other of our poets, and above all because it is never long before the sunshine of his cheerful good sense breaks through the clouds of rhetoric, and gilds the clipped hedges over which his thought clambers like an unpruned vine,—Dryden, one of the most truly English of English authors, did more than all others combined to bring about the triumphs of French standards in taste and French principles in criticism. But he was always like a deserter who cannot feel happy in the victories of the alien arms, and who would go back if he could to the camp where he naturally belonged. Between 1660 and 1700 more French words, I believe, were directly transplanted into our language than in the century and a half since. What was of more consequence, French ideas came with them, shaping the form, and through that modifying the spirit, of our literature.

Voltaire, though he came later, was steeped in the theories of art which had been inherited as traditions of classicism from the preceding generation. He had lived in England, and, I have no doubt, gives us a very good notion of the tone which was prevalent there in his time, an English version of the criticism imported from France. He tells us that Mr. Addison was the first Englishman who had written a reasonable tragedy. And in spite of the growling of poor old Dennis, whose sandy pedantry was not without an oasis of refreshing sound judgment here and there, this was the opinion of most persons at that day, except, it may be suspected, the judicious and modest Mr. Addison himself. Voltaire says of the English tragedians,—and it will be noticed that he is only putting, in another way, the opinion of Dryden,—“Their productions, almost all barbarous, without polish, order, or probability, have astonishing gleams in the midst of their night;... it seems sometimes that nature is not made in England as it is elsewhere.” Eh bien, the inference is that we must try and make it so! The world must be uniform in order to be comfortable, and what fashion so becoming as the one we have invented in Paris? It is not a little amusing that when Voltaire played master of ceremonies to introduce the bizarre Shakespeare among his countrymen, that other kind of nature made a profounder impression on them than quite pleased him. So he turned about presently and called his whilome protége a buffoon.

The condition of the English mind at the close of the seventeenth century was such as to make it particularly sensitive to the magnetism which streamed to it from Paris. The loyalty of everybody both in politics and religion had been put out of joint. A generation of materialists, by the natural rebound which inevitably follows over-tension, was to balance the ultra-spiritualism of the Puritans. As always when a political revolution has been wrought by moral agencies, the plunder had fallen mainly to the share of the greedy, selfish, and unscrupulous, whose disgusting cant had given a taint of hypocrisy to piety itself. Religion, from a burning conviction of the soul, had grown to be with both parties a political badge, as little typical of the inward man as the scallop of a pilgrim. Sincerity is impossible, unless it pervade the whole being, and the pretence of it saps the very foundation of character. There seems to have been an universal scepticism, and in its worst form, that is, with an outward conformity in the interest of decorum and order. There was an unbelief that did not believe even in itself.

The difference between the leading minds of the former age and that which was supplanting it went to the very roots of the soul. Milton was willing to peril the success of his crowning work by making the poetry of it a stalking-horse for his theological convictions. What was that Fame

      “Which the clear spirit doth raise
To scorn delights and live laborious days,”

to the crown of a good preacher who sets

        “The hearts of men on fire
To scorn the sordid world and unto heaven aspire”?

Dean Swift, who aspired to the mitre, could write a book whose moral, if it had any, was that one religion was as good as another, since all were political devices, and accepted a cure of souls when it was more than doubtful whether he believed that his fellow-creatures had any souls to be saved, or, if they had, whether they were worth saving. The answer which Pulci’s Margutte makes to Morgante, when asked if he believed in Christ or Mahomet, would have expressed well enough the creed of the majority of that generation:—

          “To tell thee truly,
My faith in black’s no greater than in azure,
  But I believe in capons, roast-meat, bouilli,
And in good wine my faith’s beyond all measure.”43

It was a carnival of intellect without faith, when men could be Protestant or Catholic, both at once, or by turns, or neither, as suited their interest, when they could swear one allegiance and keep on safe terms with the other, when prime ministers and commanders-in-chief could be intelligencers of the Pretender, nay, when even Algernon Sidney himself could be a pensioner of France. What morality there was, was the morality of appearances, of the side that is turned toward men and not toward God. The very shamelessness of Congreve is refreshing in that age of sham.

It was impossible that anything truly great, that is, great on the moral and emotional as well as the intellectual side, should be produced by such a generation. But something intellectually great could be and was. The French mind, always stronger in perceptive and analytic than in imaginative qualities, loving precision, grace, and finesse, prone to attribute an almost magical power to the scientific regulation whether of politics or religion, had brought wit and fancy and the elegant arts of society to as great perfection as was possible by the a priori method. Its ideal in literature was to conjure passion within the magic circle of courtliness, or to combine the appearance of careless ease and gayety of thought with intellectual exactness of statement. The eternal watchfulness of a wit that never slept had made it distrustful of the natural emotions and the unconventional expression of them, and its first question about a sentiment was, Will it be safe? about a phrase, Will it pass with the Academy? The effect of its example on English literature would appear chiefly in neatness and facility of turn, in point and epigrammatic compactness of phrase, and these in conveying conventional sentiments and emotions, in appealing to good society rather than to human nature. Its influence would be greatest where its success had been most marked, in what was called moral poetry, whose chosen province was manners, and in which satire, with its avenging scourge, took the place of that profounder art whose office it was to purify, not the manners, but the source of them in the soul, by pity and terror. The mistake of the whole school of French criticism, it seems to me, lay in its tendency to confound what was common with what was vulgar, in a too exclusive deference to authority at the expense of all free movement of the mind.

There are certain defects of taste which correct themselves by their own extravagance. Language, I suspect, is more apt to be reformed by the charm of some master of it, like Milton, than by any amount of precept. The influence of second-rate writers for evil is at best ephemeral, for true style, the joint result of culture and natural aptitude, is always in fashion, as fine manners always are, in whatever clothes. Perhaps some reform was needed when Quarles, who had no mean gift of poesy, could write,

“My passion has no April in her eyes:
 I cannot spend in mists; I cannot mizzle;
 My fluent brains are too severe to drizzle
 Slight drops.”44

Good taste is an excellent thing when it confines itself to its own rightful province of the proprieties, but when it attempts to correct those profound instincts out of whose judgments the higher principles of æsthetics have been formulated, its success is a disaster. During the era when the French theory of poetry was supreme, we notice a decline from imagination to fancy, from passion to wit, from metaphor, which fuses image and thought in one, to simile, which sets one beside the other, from the supreme code of the natural sympathies to the parochial by-laws of etiquette. The imagination instinctively Platonizes, and it is the essence of poetry that it should be unconventional, that the soul of it should subordinate the outward parts; while the artificial method proceeds from a principle the reverse of this, making the spirit lackey the form.

Waller preaches up this new doctrine in the epilogue to the “Maid’s Tragedy”:—

“Nor is’t less strange such mighty wits as those
 Should use a style in tragedy like prose;
 Well-sounding verse, where princes tread the stage,
 Should speak their virtue and describe their rage.”

That it should be beneath the dignity of princes to speak in anything but rhyme can only be paralleled by Mr. Puff’s law that a heroine can go decorously mad only in white satin. Waller, I suppose, though with so loose a thinker one cannot be positive, uses “describe” in its Latin sense of limitation. Fancy Othello or Lear confined to this go-cart! Phillips touches the true point when he says, “And the truth is, the use of measure alone, without any rime at all, would give more scope and liberty both to style and fancy than can possibly be observed in rime.”45 But let us test Waller’s method by an example or two. His monarch made reasonable, thus discourses:—

“Courage our greatest failings does supply,
 And makes all good, or handsomely we die.
 Life is a thing of common use; by heaven
 As well to insects as to monarchs given;
 But for the crown, ’t is a more sacred thing;
 I’ll dying lose it, or I’ll live a king.
 Come, Diphilus, we must together walk
 And of a matter of importance talk.”
          [Exeunt.

Blank verse, where the sentiment is trivial as here, merely removes prose to a proper ideal distance, where it is in keeping with more impassioned parts, but commonplace set to this rocking-horse jog irritates the nerves. There is nothing here to remind us of the older tragic style but the exeunt at the close. Its pithy conciseness and the relief which it brings us from his majesty’s prosing give it an almost poetical savor. Aspatia’s reflections upon suicide (or “suppressing our breath,” as she calls it), in the same play, will make few readers regret that Shakespeare was left to his own unassisted barbarism when he wrote Hamlet’s soliloquy on the same topic:—

“‘T was in compassion of our woe
   That nature first made poisons grow,
 For hopeless wretches such as I
 Kindly providing means to die:
 As mothers do their children keep,
 So Nature feeds and makes us sleep.
 The indisposed she does invite
 To go to bed before ’tis night.”

Correctness in this case is but a synonyme of monotony, and words are chosen for the number of their syllables, for their rubbishy value to fill-in, instead of being forced upon the poet by the meaning which occupies the mind. Language becomes useful for its diluting properties, rather than as the medium by means of which the thought or fancy precipitate themselves in crystals upon a connecting thread of purpose. Let us read a few verses from Beaumont and Fletcher, that we may feel fully the difference between the rude and the reformed styles. This also shall be a speech of Aspatia’s. Antiphila, one of her maidens, is working the story of Theseus and Ariadne in tapestry, for the older masters loved a picturesque background and knew the value of fanciful accessaries. Aspatia thinks the face of Ariadne not sad enough:—

          “Do it by me,
Do it again by me, the lost Aspatia,
And you shall find all true but the wild island.
Suppose I stand upon the seabeach now,
Mine arms thus, and my hair blown with the wind,
Wild as that desert; and let all about me
Be teachers of my story. Do my face
(If ever thou hadst feeling of a sorrow)
Thus, thus, Antiphila; strive to make me look
Like sorrow’s monument; and the trees about me
Let them be dry and leafless; let the rocks
Groan with continual surges; and behind me
Make all a desolation.”

What instinctive felicity of versification! what sobbing breaks and passionate repetitions are here!

We see what the direction of the new tendency was, but it would be an inadequate or a dishonest criticism that should hold Pope responsible for the narrow compass of the instrument which was his legacy from his immediate predecessors, any more than for the wearisome thrumming-over of his tune by those who came after him and who had caught his technical skill without his genius. The question properly stated is, How much was it possible to make of the material supplied by the age in which he lived? and how much did he make of it? Thus far, among the great English poets who preceded him, we have seen actual life represented by Chaucer, imaginative life by Spenser, ideal life by Shakespeare, the interior life by Milton. But as everything aspires to a rhythmical utterance of itself, so conventional life, itself a new phenomenon, was waiting for its poet. It found or made a most fitting one in Pope. He stands for exactness of intellectual expression, for perfect propriety of phrase (I speak of him at his best), and is a striking instance how much success and permanence of reputation depend on conscientious finish as well as on native endowment. Butler asks,—

“Then why should those who pick and choose
 The best of all the best compose,
 And join it by Mosaic art,
 In graceful order, part to part,
 To make the whole in beauty suit,
 Not merit as complete repute
 As those who, with less art and pain,
 Can do it with their native brain?”

Butler knew very well that precisely what stamps a man as an artist is this power of finding out what is “the best of all the best.”

I confess that I come to the treatment of Pope with diffidence. I was brought up in the old superstition that he was the greatest poet that ever lived; and when I came to find that I had instincts of my own, and my mind was brought in contact with the apostles of a more esoteric doctrine of poetry, I felt that ardent desire for smashing the idols I had been brought up to worship, without any regard to their artistic beauty, which characterizes youthful zeal. What was it to me that Pope was called a master of style? I felt, as Addison says in his Freeholder when answering an argument in favor of the Pretender because he could speak English and George I. could not, “that I did not wish to be tyrannized over in the best English that ever was spoken.” The young demand thoughts that find an echo in their real and not their acquired nature, and care very little about the dress they are put in. It is later that we learn to like the conventional, as we do olives. There was a time when I could not read Pope, but disliked him on principle as old Roger Ascham seems to have felt about Italy when he says, “I was once in Italy myself, but I thank God my abode there was only nine days.”

But Pope fills a very important place in the history of English poetry, and must be studied by every one who would come to a clear knowledge of it. I have since read over every line that Pope ever wrote, and every letter written by or to him, and that more than once. If I have not come to the conclusion that he is the greatest of poets, I believe that I am at least in a condition to allow him every merit that is fairly his. I have said that Pope as a literary man represents precision and grace of expression; but as a poet he represents something more,—nothing less, namely, than one of those eternal controversies of taste which will last as long as the imagination and understanding divide men between them. It is not a matter to be settled by any amount of argument or demonstration. There are born Popists or Wordsworthians, Lockists or Kantists, and there is nothing more to be said of the matter.

Wordsworth was not in a condition to do Pope justice. A man brought up in sublime mountain solitudes, and whose nature was a solitude more vast than they, walking an earth which quivered with the throe of the French Revolution, the child of an era of profound mental and moral movement, it could not be expected that he should be in sympathy with the poet of artificial life. Moreover, he was the apostle of imagination, and came at a time when the school which Pope founded had degenerated into a mob of mannerists who wrote with ease, and who with their congenial critics united at once to decry poetry which brought in the dangerous innovation of having a soul in it.

But however it may be with poets, it is very certain that a reader is happiest whose mind is broad enough to enjoy the natural school for its nature, and the artificial for its artificiality, provided they be only good of their kind. At any rate, we must allow that the man who can produce one perfect work is either a great genius or a very lucky one; and so far as we who read are concerned, it is of secondary importance which. And Pope has done this in the “Rape of the Lock.” For wit, fancy, invention, and keeping, it has never been surpassed. I do not say there is in it poetry of the highest order, or that Pope is a poet whom any one would choose as the companion of his best hours. There is no inspiration in it, no trumpet-call, but for pure entertainment it is unmatched. There are two kinds of genius. The first and highest may be said to speak out of the eternal to the present, and must compel its age to understand it; the second understands its age, and tells it what it wishes to be told. Let us find strength and inspiration in the one, amusement and instruction in the other, and be honestly thankful for both.

The very earliest of Pope’s productions give indications of that sense and discretion, as well as wit, which afterward so eminently distinguished him. The facility of expression is remarkable, and we find also that perfect balance of metre, which he afterward carried so far as to be wearisome. His pastorals were written in his sixteenth year, and their publication immediately brought him into notice. The following four verses from his first pastoral are quite characteristic in their antithetic balance:—

“You that, too wise for pride, too good for power,
 Enjoy the glory to be great no more,
 And carrying with you all the world can boast,
 To all the world illustriously are lost!”

The sentiment is affected, and reminds one of that future period of Pope’s Correspondence with his Friends, when Swift, his heart corroding with disappointed ambition at Dublin, Bolingbroke raising delusive turnips at his farm, and Pope pretending not to feel the lampoons which imbittered his life, played together the solemn farce of affecting indifference to the world by which it would have agonized them to be forgotten, and wrote letters addressed to each other, but really intended for that posterity whose opinion they assumed to despise.

In these pastorals there is an entire want of nature. For example in that on the death of Mrs. Tempest:—

“Her fate is whispered by the gentle breeze
 And told in sighs to all the trembling trees;
 The trembling trees, in every plain and wood,
 Her fate remurmur to the silver flood:
 The silver flood, so lately calm, appears
 Swelled with new passion, and o’erflows with tears;
 The winds and trees and floods her death deplore
 Daphne, our grief! our glory now no more!”

All this is as perfectly professional as the mourning of an undertaker. Still worse, Pope materializes and makes too palpably objective that sympathy which our grief forces upon outward nature. Milton, before making the echoes mourn for Lycidas, puts our feelings in tune, as it were, and hints at his own imagination as the source of this emotion in inanimate things,—

“But, O the heavy change now thou art gone!”

In “Windsor Forest” we find the same thing again:—

“Here his first lays majestic Denham sung,
 There the last numbers flowed from Cowley’s tongue;
 O early lost, what tears the river shed
 When the sad pomp along his banks was led!
 His drooping swans on every note expire,
 And on his willows hung each muse’s lyre!”

In the same poem he indulges the absurd conceit that,

“Beasts urged by us, their fellow-beasts pursue,
 And learn of man each other to undo”;

and in the succeeding verses gives some striking instances of that artificial diction, so inappropriate to poems descriptive of natural objects and ordinary life, which brought verse-making to such a depth of absurdity in the course of the century.

“With slaughtering guns, the unwearied fowler roves
 Where frosts have whitened all the naked groves;
 Where doves in flocks the leafless trees o’ershade,
 And lonely woodcocks haunt the watery glade;
 He lifts the tube and levels with his eye,
 Straight a short thunder breaks the frozen sky:
 Oft as in airy rings they skim the heath,
 The clamorous lapwings feel the leaden death;
 Oft as the mounting larks their notes prepare,
 They fall and leave their little lives in air.”

Now one would imagine that the tube of the fowler was a telescope instead of a gun. And think of the larks preparing their notes like a country choir! Yet even here there are admirable lines,—

“Oft as in airy rings they skim the heath,”
.....
“They fall and leave their little lives in air,”

for example.

In Pope’s next poem, the “Essay on Criticism,” the wit and poet become apparent. It is full of clear thoughts, compactly expressed. In this poem, written when Pope was only twenty-one, occur some of those lines which have become proverbial; such as

“A little learning is a dangerous thing”;

“For fools rush in where angels fear to tread”;

“True wit is Nature to advantage dressed,
 What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.”

“For each ill author is as bad a friend.”

In all of these we notice that terseness in which (regard being had to his especial range of thought) Pope has never been equalled. One cannot help being struck also with the singular discretion which the poem gives evidence of. I do not know where to look for another author in whom it appeared so early, and, considering the vivacity of his mind and the constantly besetting temptation of his wit, it is still more wonderful. In his boyish correspondence with poor old Wycherley, one would suppose him to be the man and Wycherley the youth. Pope’s understanding was no less vigorous (when not the dupe of his nerves) than his fancy was lightsome and sprightly.

I come now to what in itself would be enough to have immortalized him as a poet, the “Rape of the Lock,” in which, indeed, he appears more purely as poet than in any other of his productions. Elsewhere he has shown more force, more wit, more reach of thought, but nowhere such a truly artistic combination of elegance and fancy. His genius has here found its true direction, and the very same artificiality, which in his pastorals was unpleasing, heightens the effect, and adds to the general keeping. As truly as Shakespeare is the poet of man, as God made him, dealing with great passions and innate motives, so truly is Pope the poet of society, the delineator of manners, the exposer of those motives which may be called acquired, whose spring is in institutions and habits of purely worldly origin.

The “Rape of the Lock” was written in Pope’s twenty-fourth year, and the machinery of the Sylphs was added at the suggestion of Dr. Garth,—a circumstance for which we can feel a more unmixed gratitude to him than for writing the “Dispensary.” The idea was taken from that entertaining book “The Count de Gabalis,” in which Fouquè afterward found the hint for his “Undine”; but the little sprites as they appear in the poem are purely the creation of Pope’s fancy.

The theory of the poem is excellent. The heroic is out of the question in fine society. It is perfectly true that almost every door we pass in the street closes upon its private tragedy, but the moment a great passion enters a man he passes at once out of the artificial into the human. So long as he continues artificial, the sublime is a conscious absurdity to him. The mock-heroic then is the only way in which the petty actions and sufferings of the fine world can be epically treated, and the contrast continually suggested with subjects of larger scope and more dignified treatment, makes no small part of the pleasure and sharpens the point of the wit. The invocation is admirable:—

“Say, what strange motive, Goddess, could compel,
 A well-bred lord to assault a gentle belle?
 O say what stranger cause, yet unexplored,
 Could make a gentle belle reject a lord?”

The keynote of the poem is here struck, and we are able to put ourselves in tune with it. It is not a parody of the heroic style, but only a setting it in satirical juxtaposition with cares and events and modes of thought with which it is in comical antipathy, and while it is not degraded, they are shown in their triviality. The “clouded cane,” as compared with the Homeric spear, indicates the difference of scale, the lower plane of emotions and passions. The opening of the action, too, is equally good:—

“Sol through white curtains shot a timorous ray,
 And oped those eyes that must eclipse the day,
 Now lapdogs give themselves the rousing shake,
 And sleepless lovers just at twelve awake;
 Thrice rung the bell, the slipper knocked the ground,
 And the pressed watch returned a silver sound.”

The mythology of the Sylphs is full of the most fanciful wit; indeed, wit infused with fancy is Pope’s peculiar merit. The Sylph is addressing Belinda:—

“Know, then, unnumbered spirits round thee fly,
 The light militia of the lower sky;
 These, though unseen, are ever on the wing,
 Hang o’er the box and hover round the ring.
 As now your own our beings were of old,
 And once enclosed in woman’s beauteous mould;
 Think not, when woman’s transient breath is fled,
 That all her vanities at once are dead;
 Succeeding vanities she still regards,
 And, though she plays no more, o’erlooks the cards.
 For when the fair in all their pride expire,
 To their first elements their souls retire;
 The sprites of fiery termagants in flame
 Mount up and take a salamander’s name;
 Soft yielding nymphs to water glide away
 And sip, with nymphs, their elemental tea;
 The graver prude sinks downward to a gnome,
 In search of mischief still on earth to roam;
 The light coquettes in sylphs aloft repair
 And sport and flutter in the fields of air.”

And the contrivance by which Belinda is awakened is also perfectly in keeping with all the rest of the machinery:—

“He said: when Shock, who thought she slept too long,
 Leaped up and waked his mistress with his tongue;
 ’Twas then, Belinda, if report say true,
 Thy eyes first opened on a billet-doux.”

Throughout this poem the satiric wit of Pope peeps out in the pleasantest little smiling ways, as where, in describing the toilet-table, he says:—

“Here files of pins extend their shining rows,
 Puffs, powders, patches, Bibles, billet-doux.”

Or when, after the fatal lock has been severed,

“Then flashed the living lightning from her eyes,
 And screams of horror rend the affrighted skies,
 Not louder shrieks to pitying Heaven are cast
 When husbands or when lapdogs breathe their last
 Or when rich china-vessels, fallen from high,
 In glittering dust and painted fragments lie!”

And so, when the conflict begins:—

“Now Jove suspends his golden scales in air;
 Weighs the men’s wits against the ladies’ hair;
 The doubtful beam long nods from side to side;
 At length the wits mount up, the hairs subside.”

But more than the wit and fancy, I think, the perfect keeping of the poem deserves admiration. Except a touch of grossness, here and there, there is the most pleasing harmony in all the conceptions and images. The punishments which he assigns to the sylphs who neglect their duty are charmingly appropriate and ingenious:—

“Whatever spirit, careless of his charge,
 His post neglects, or leaves the fair at large,
 Shall feel sharp vengeance soon o’ertake his sins;
 Be stopped in vials or transfixed with pins,
 Or plunged in lakes of bitter washes lie,
 Or wedged whole ages in a bodkin’s eye;
 Gums and pomatums shall his flight restrain,
 While clogged he beats his silver wings in vain;
 Or alum styptics with contracting power,
 Shrink his thin essence like a rivelled flower;
 Or as Ixion fixed the wretch shall feel
 The giddy motion of the whirling wheel,
 In fumes of burning chocolate, shall glow,
 And tremble at the sea that froths below!”

The speech of Thalestris, too, with its droll climax, is equally good:—

“Methinks already I your tears survey,
 Already hear the horrid things they say,
 Already see you a degraded toast,
 And all your honor in a whisper lost!
 How shall I then your helpless fame defend?
 ’Twill then be infamy to seem your friend!
 And shall this prize, the inestimable prize,
 Exposed through crystal to the gazing eyes,
 And heightened by the diamond’s circling rays,
 On that rapacious hand forever blaze?
 Sooner shall grass in Hydepark Circus grow,
 And wits take lodging in the sound of Bow,
 Sooner let earth, air, sea, in chaos fall,
 Men, monkeys, lapdogs, parrots, perish all!”

So also Belinda’s account of the morning omens:—

“’Twas this the morning omens seemed to tell;
 Thrice from my trembling hand the patch-box fell;
 The tottering china shook without a wind;
 Nay, Poll sat mute, and Shock was most unkind.”

The idea of the goddess of Spleen, and of her palace, where

“The dreaded East is all the wind that blows,”

was a very happy one. In short, the whole poem more truly deserves the name of a creation than anything Pope ever wrote. The action is confined to a world of his own, the supernatural agency is wholly of his own contrivance, and nothing is allowed to overstep the limitations of the subject. It ranks by itself as one of the purest works of human fancy; whether that fancy be strictly poetical or not is another matter. If we compare it with the “Midsummer-night’s Dream,” an uncomfortable doubt is suggested. The perfection of form in the “Rape of the Lock” is to me conclusive evidence that in it the natural genius of Pope found fuller and freer expression than in any other of his poems. The others are aggregates of brilliant passages rather than harmonious wholes.

It is a droll illustration of the inconsistencies of human nature, a more profound satire than Pope himself ever wrote, that his fame should chiefly rest upon the “Essay on Man.” It has been praised and admired by men of the most opposite beliefs, and men of no belief at all. Bishops and free-thinkers have met here on a common ground of sympathetic approval. And, indeed, there is no particular faith in it. It is a droll medley of inconsistent opinions. It proves only two things beyond a question,—that Pope was not a great thinker; and that wherever he found a thought, no matter what, he could express it so tersely, so clearly, and with such smoothness of versification as to give it an everlasting currency. Hobbes’s unwieldy Leviathan, left stranded there on the shore of the last age, and nauseous with the stench of its selfishness,—from this Pope distilled a fragrant oil with which to fill the brilliant lamps of his philosophy,—lamps like those in the tombs of alchemists, that go out the moment the healthy air is let in upon them. The only positive doctrines in the poem are the selfishness of Hobbes set to music, and the Pantheism of Spinoza brought down from mysticism to commonplace. Nothing can be more absurd than many of the dogmas taught in this “Essay on Man.” For example, Pope affirms explicitly that instinct is something better than reason:—

“See him from Nature rising slow to art,
 To copy instinct then was reason’s part;
 Thus, then, to man the voice of nature spake;—
 Go, from the creatures thy instructions take;
 Learn from the beasts what food the thickets yield;
 Learn from the birds the physic of the field;
 The arts of building from the bee receive;
 Learn of the mole to plough, the worm to weave;
 Learn of the little nautilus to sail,
 Spread the thin oar, or catch the driving gale.”

I say nothing of the quiet way in which the general term “nature” is substituted for God, but how unutterably void of reasonableness is the theory that Nature would have left her highest product, man, destitute of that instinct with which she had endowed her other creatures! As if reason were not the most sublimated form of instinct. The accuracy on which Pope prided himself, and for which he is commended, was not accuracy of thought so much as of expression. And he cannot always even claim this merit, but only that of correct rhyme, as in one of the passages I have already quoted from the “Rape of the Lock” he talks of casting shrieks to heaven,—a performance of some difficulty, except when cast is needed to rhyme with last.

But the supposition is that in the “Essay on Man” Pope did not himself know what he was writing. He was only the condenser and epigrammatizer of Bolingbroke,—a very fitting St. John for such a gospel. Or, if he did know, we can account for the contradictions by supposing that he threw in some of the commonplace moralities to conceal his real drift. Johnson asserts that Bolingbroke in private laughed at Pope’s having been made the mouthpiece of opinions which he did not hold. But this is hardly probable when we consider the relations between them. It is giving Pope altogether too little credit for intelligence to suppose that he did not understand the principles of his intimate friend. The caution with which he at first concealed the authorship would argue that he had doubts as to the reception of the poem. When it was attacked on the score of infidelity, he gladly accepted Warburton’s championship, and assumed whatever pious interpretation he contrived to thrust upon it. The beginning of the poem is familiar to everybody:—

“Awake, my St. John, leave all meaner things
 To low ambition and the pride of kings;
 Let us (since life can little more supply
 Than just to look about us and to die)
 Expatiate free o’er all this scene of man,
 A mighty maze,—but not without a plan”;

To expatiate o’er a mighty maze is rather loose writing but the last verse, as it stood in the original editions, was,

“A mighty maze of walks without a plan”;

and perhaps this came nearer Pope’s real opinion than the verse he substituted for it. Warburton is careful not to mention this variation in his notes. The poem is everywhere as remarkable for its confusion of logic as it often is for ease of verse and grace of expression. An instance of both occurs in a passage frequently quoted:—

“Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate;
 All but the page prescribed, their present state;
 From brutes what men, from men what spirits know,
 Or who would suffer being here below?
 The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
 Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?
 Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food,
 And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.
 O, blindness to the future kindly given
 That each may fill the circle meant by heaven!
 Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
 A hero perish or a sparrow fall,
 Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,
 And now a bubble burst, and now a world!”

Now, if “heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate,” why should not the lamb “skip and play,” if he had the reason of man? Why, because he would then be able to read the book of fate. But if man himself cannot, why, then, could the lamb with the reason of man? For, if the lamb had the reason of man, the book of fate would still be hidden, so far as himself was concerned. If the inferences we can draw from appearances are equivalent to a knowledge of destiny, the knowing enough to take an umbrella in cloudy weather might be called so. There is a manifest confusion between what we know about ourselves and about other people; the whole point of the passage being that we are always mercifully blinded to our own future, however much reason we may possess. There is also inaccuracy as well as inelegance in saying,

          “Heaven,
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish or a sparrow fall.”

To the last verse Warburton, desirous of reconciling his author with Scripture, appends a note referring to Matthew x. 29: “Are not two sparrows sold for one farthing? and one of them shall not fall to the ground without your Father.” It would not have been safe to have referred to the thirty-first verse: “Fear ye not, therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.”

To my feeling, one of the most beautiful passages in the whole poem is that familiar one:—

“Lo, the poor Indian whose untutored mind
 Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind,
 His soul proud science never taught to stray
 Far as the solar walk or milky way:
 Yet simple Nature to his hope has given
 Behind the cloud-topt hill a humbler heaven;
 Some safer world in depth of woods embraced,
 Some happier island in the watery waste,
 Where slaves once more their native land behold,
 No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold.
 To be contents his natural desire,
 He asks no angel’s wing, no seraph’s fire,
 But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
 His faithful dog shall bear him company.”

But this comes in as a corollary to what went just before:—

“Hope springs eternal in the human breast,
 Man never is but always to be blest;
 The soul, uneasy, and confined from home,
 Rests and expatiates in a life to come.”

Then follows immediately the passage about the poor Indian, who, after all, it seems, is contented with merely being, and whose soul, therefore, is an exception to the general rule. And what have the “solar walk” (as he calls it) and “milky way” to do with the affair? Does our hope of heaven depend on our knowledge of astronomy? Or does he mean that science and faith are necessarily hostile? And, after being told that it is the “untutored mind” of the savage which “sees God in clouds and hears him in the wind,” we are rather surprised to find that the lesson the poet intends to teach is that

“All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
 Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.
 That, changed through all, and yet in all the same,
 Great in the earth, as in the ethereal frame,
 Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
 Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees.”

So that we are no better off than the untutored Indian, after the poet has tutored us. Dr. Warburton makes a rather lame attempt to ward off the charge of Spinozism from this last passage. He would have found it harder to show that the acknowledgment of any divine revelation would not overturn the greater part of its teachings. If Pope intended by his poem all that the bishop takes for granted in his commentary, we must deny him what is usually claimed as his first merit,—clearness. If he did not, we grant him clearness as a writer at the expense of sincerity as a man. Perhaps a more charitable solution of the difficulty would be, that Pope’s precision of thought was no match for the fluency of his verse.

Lord Byron goes so far as to say, in speaking of Pope, that he who executes the best, no matter what his department, will rank the highest. I think there are enough indications in these letters of Byron’s, however, that they were written rather more against Wordsworth than for Pope. The rule he lays down would make Voltaire a greater poet, in some respects, than Shakespeare. Byron cites Petrarch as an example; yet if Petrarch had put nothing more into his sonnets than execution, there are plenty of Italian sonneteers who would be his match. But, in point of fact, the department chooses the man and not the man the department, and it has a great deal to do with our estimate of him. Is the department of Milton no higher than that of Butler? Byron took especial care not to write in the style he commended. But I think Pope has received quite as much credit in respect even of execution as he deserves. Surely execution is not confined to versification alone. What can be worse than this?

“At length Erasmus, that great, injured name,
 (The glory of the priesthood and the shame,)
 Stemmed the wild torrent of a barbarous age,
 And drove those holy vandals off the stage.”

It would have been hard for Pope to have found a prettier piece of confusion in any of the small authors he laughed at than this image of a great, injured name stemming a torrent and driving vandals off the stage. And in the following verses the image is helplessly confused:—

“Kind self-conceit to some her glass applies,
 Which no one looks in with another’s eyes,
 But, as the flatterer or dependant paint,
 Beholds himself a patriot, chief, or saint.”

The use of the word “applies” is perfectly un-English; and it seems that people who look in this remarkable glass see their pictures and not their reflections. Often, also, when Pope attempts the sublime, his epithets become curiously unpoetical, as where he says, in the Dunciad,

“As, one by one, at dread Medea’s strain,
 The sickening stars fade off the ethereal plain.”

And not seldom he is satisfied with the music of the verse without much regard to fitness of imagery; in the “Essay on Man,” for example:—

“Passions, like elements, though born to fight,
 Yet, mixed and softened, in his work unite;
 These ’tis enough to temper and employ;
 But what composes man can man destroy?
 Suffice that Reason keep to Nature’s road,
 Subject, compound them, follow her and God.
 Love, Hope, and Joy, fair Pleasure’s smiling train,
 Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of Pain,
 These, mixed with Art, and to due bounds confined,
 Make and maintain the balance of the mind.”

Here reason is represented as an apothecary compounding pills of “pleasure’s smiling train” and the “family of pain.” And in the Moral Essays,

“Know God and Nature only are the same;
 In man the judgment shoots at flying game,
 A bird of passage, gone as soon as found,
 Now in the moon, perhaps, now under ground.”

The “judgment shooting at flying game” is an odd image enough; but I think a bird of passage, now in the moon and now under ground, could be found nowhere—out of Goldsmith’s Natural History, perhaps. An epigrammatic expression will also tempt him into saying something without basis in truth, as where he ranks together “Macedonia’s madman and the Swede,” and says that neither of them “looked forward farther than his nose,” a slang phrase which may apply well enough to Charles XII., but certainly not to the pupil of Aristotle, who showed himself capable of a large political forethought. So, too, the rhyme, if correct, is a sufficient apology for want of propriety in phrase, as where he makes “Socrates bleed.”

But it is in his Moral Essays and parts of his Satires that Pope deserves the praise which he himself desired:—

          “Happily to steer
From grave to gay, from lively to severe,
Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease,
Intent to reason, or polite to please.”

Here Pope must be allowed to have established a style of his own, in which he is without a rival. One can open upon wit and epigram at any page.

“Behold, if Fortune or a mistress frowns,
 Some plunge in business, other shave their crowns;
 To ease the soul of one oppressive weight,
 This quits an empire, that embroils a state;
 The same adust complexion has impelled,
 Charles to the convent, Philip to the field.”

Indeed, I think one gets a little tired of the invariable this set off by the inevitable that, and wishes antithesis would let him have a little quiet now and then. In the first couplet, too, the conditional “frown” would have been more elegant. But taken as detached passages, how admirably the different characters are drawn, so admirably that half the verses have become proverbial. This of Addison will bear reading again:—

“Peace to all such: but were there one whose fires
 True genius kindles and fair fame inspires;
 Blest with each talent and each art to please,
 And born to write, converse, and live with ease;
 Should such a man, too fond to rule alone,
 Bear like the Turk no brother near the throne,
 View him with scornful yet with jealous eyes,
 And hate for arts that caused himself to rise,
 Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
 And, without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;
 Willing to wound and yet afraid to strike,
 Just hint a fault and hesitate dislike,
 Alike reserved to blame or to commend,
 A timorous foe and a suspicious friend;
 Dreading e’en fools, by flatterers besieged,
 And so obliging that he ne’er obliged;
 Like Cato give his little Senate laws,
 And sit attentive to his own applause,
 While wits and templars every sentence raise,
 And wonder with a foolish face of praise;—
 Who but must laugh if such a man there be?
 Who would not weep if Atticus were he?”

With the exception of the somewhat technical image in the second verse of Fame blowing the fire of genius, which too much puts us in mind of the frontispieces of the day, surely nothing better of its kind was ever written. How applicable it was to Addison I shall consider in another place. As an accurate intellectual observer and describer of personal weaknesses, Pope stands by himself in English verse.

In his epistle on the characters of women, no one who has ever known a noble woman, nay, I should almost say no one who ever had a mother or sister, will find much to please him. The climax of his praise rather degrades than elevates.

“O, blest in temper, whose unclouded ray
 Can make to-morrow cheerful as to-day,
 She who can love a sister’s charms, or hear
 Sighs for a daughter with unwounded ear,
 She who ne’er answers till a husband cools,
 Or, if she rules him, never shows she rules,
 Charms by accepting, by submitting sways,
 Yet has her humor most when she obeys;
 Lets fops or fortune fly which way they will,
 Disdains all loss of tickets or codille,
 Spleen, vapors, or smallpox, above them all
 And mistress of herself, though china fall.”

The last line is very witty and pointed,—but consider what an ideal of womanly nobleness he must have had, who praises his heroine for not being jealous of her daughter. Addison, in commending Pope’s “Essay on Criticism,” says, speaking of us “who live in the latter ages of the world”: “We have little else to do left us but to represent the common sense of mankind, in more strong, more beautiful, or more uncommon lights.” I think he has here touched exactly the point of Pope’s merit, and, in doing so, tacitly excludes him from the position of poet, in the highest sense. Take two of Jeremy Taylor’s prose sentences about the Countess of Carbery, the lady in Milton’s “Comus”: “The religion of this excellent lady was of another constitution: it took root downward in humility, and brought forth fruit upward in the substantial graces of a Christian, in charity and justice, in chastity and modesty, in fair friendships and sweetness of society.... And though she had the greatest judgment, and the greatest experience of things and persons I ever yet knew in a person of her youth and sex and circumstances, yet, as if she knew nothing of it, she had the meanest opinion of herself, and like a fair taper, when she shined to all the room, yet round about her station she had cast a shadow and a cloud, and she shined to everybody but herself.” This is poetry, though not in verse. The plays of the elder dramatists are not without examples of weak and vile women, but they are not without noble ones either. Take these verses of Chapman, for example:—

“Let no man value at a little price
 A virtuous woman’s counsel: her winged spirit
 Is feathered oftentimes with noble words
 And, like her beauty, ravishing and pure;
 The weaker body, still the stronger soul.
 O, what a treasure is a virtuous wife,
 Discreet and loving. Not one gift on earth
 Makes a man’s life so nighly bound to heaven.
 She gives him double forces to endure
 And to enjoy, being one with him,
 Feeling his joys and griefs with equal sense:
 If he fetch sighs, she draws her breath as short;
 If he lament, she melts herself in tears;
 If he be glad, she triumphs; if he stir,
 She moves his way, in all things his sweet ape,
 Himself divinely varied without change.
 All store without her leaves a man but poor,
 And with her poverty is exceeding store.”

Pope in the character I have read was drawing his ideal woman, for he says at the end that she shall be his muse. The sentiments are those of a bourgeois and of the back parlor, more than of the poet and the muse’s bower. A man’s mind is known by the company it keeps.

Now it is very possible that the women of Pope’s time were as bad as they could be; but if God made poets for anything, it was to keep alive the traditions of the pure, the holy, and the beautiful. I grant the influence of the age, but there is a sense in which the poet is of no age, and Beauty, driven from every other home, will never be an outcast and a wanderer, while there is a poet’s nature left, will never fail of the tribute at least of a song. It seems to me that Pope had a sense of the neat rather than of the beautiful. His nature delighted more in detecting the blemish than in enjoying the charm.

However great his merit in expression, I think it impossible that a true poet could have written such a satire as the Dunciad, which is even nastier than it is witty. It is filthy even in a filthy age, and Swift himself could not have gone beyond some parts of it. One’s mind needs to be sprinkled with some disinfecting fluid after reading it. I do not remember that any other poet ever made poverty a crime. And it is wholly without discrimination. De Foe is set in the pillory forever; and George Wither, the author of that charming poem, “Fair Virtue,” classed among the dunces. And was it not in this age that loose Dick Steele paid his wife the finest compliment ever paid to woman, when he said “that to love her was a liberal education”?

Even in the “Rape of the Lock,” the fancy is that of a wit rather than of a poet. It might not be just to compare his Sylphs with the Fairies of Shakespeare; but contrast the kind of fancy shown in the poem with that of Drayton’s Nymphidia, for example. I will give one stanza of it, describing the palace of the Fairy:—

“The walls of spider’s legs were made,
 Well mortised, and finely laid;
 (He was the master of his trade
 It curiously that builded:)
 The windows of the eyes of cats,
 And, for the roof, instead of slats
 ’Tis covered with the skins of bats,
 With moonshine that are gilded.”

In the last line the eye and fancy of a poet are recognized.

Personally we know more about Pope than about any of our poets. He kept no secrets about himself. If he did not let the cat out of the bag, he always contrived to give her tail a wrench so that we might know she was there. In spite of the savageness of his satires, his natural disposition seems to have been an amiable one, and his character as an author was as purely factitious as his style. Dr. Johnson appears to have suspected his sincerity; but artifice more than insincerity lay at the basis of his character. I think that there was very little real malice in him, and that his “evil was wrought from want of thought.” When Dennis was old and poor, he wrote a prologue for a play to be acted for his benefit. Except Addison, he numbered among his friends the most illustrious men of his time.

The correspondence of Pope is, on the whole, less interesting than that of any other eminent English poet, except that of Southey, and their letters have the same fault of being labored compositions. Southey’s are, on the whole, the more agreeable of the two, for they inspire one (as Pope’s certainly do not) with a sincere respect for the character of the writer. Pope’s are altogether too full of the proclamation of his own virtues to be pleasant reading. It is plain that they were mostly addressed to the public, perhaps even to posterity. But letters, however carefully drilled to be circumspect, are sure to blab, and those of Pope leave in the reader’s mind an unpleasant feeling of circumspection,—of an attempt to look as an eminent literary character should rather than as the man really was. They have the unnatural constraint of a man in full dress sitting for his portrait and endeavoring to look his best. We never catch him, if he can help it, at unawares. Among all Pope’s correspondents, Swift shows in the most dignified and, one is tempted to say, the most amiable light. It is creditable to the Dean that the letters which Pope addressed to him are by far the most simple and straightforward of any that he wrote. No sham could encounter those terrible eyes in Dublin without wincing. I think, on the whole, that a revision of judgment would substitute “discomforting consciousness of the public” for “insincerity” in judging Pope’s character by his letters. He could not shake off the habits of the author, and never, or almost never, in prose, acquired that knack of seeming carelessness that makes Walpole’s elaborate compositions such agreeable reading. Pope would seem to have kept a commonplace-book of phrases proper to this or that occasion; and he transfers a compliment, a fine moral sentiment, nay, even sometimes a burst of passionate ardor, from one correspondent to another, with the most cold-blooded impartiality. Were it not for this curious economy of his, no one could read his letters to Lady Wortley Montague without a conviction that they were written by a lover. Indeed, I think nothing short of the spretæ injuria formæ will account for (though it will not excuse) the savage vindictiveness he felt and showed towards her. It may be suspected also that the bitterness of caste added gall to his resentment. His enemy wore that impenetrable armor of superior rank which rendered her indifference to his shafts the more provoking that it was unaffected. Even for us his satire loses its sting when we reflect that it is not in human nature for a woman to have had two such utterly irreconcilable characters as those of Lady Mary before and after her quarrel with the poet. In any view of Pope’s conduct in this affair, there is an ill savor in his attempting to degrade a woman whom he had once made sacred with his love. Spenser touches the right chord when he says of the Rosalind who had rejected him,

“Not, then, to her, that scornéd thing so base,
 But to myself the blame, that lookt so high;
 Yet so much grace let her vouchsafe to grant
 To simple swain, sith her I may not love,
 Yet that I may her honor paravant
 And praise her worth, though far my wit above;
 Such grace shall be some guerdon of the grief
 And long affliction which I have endured.”

In his correspondence with Aaron Hill, Pope, pushed to the wall, appears positively mean. He vainly endeavors to show that his personalities had all been written in the interests of literature and morality, and from no selfish motive. But it is hard to believe that Theobald would have been deemed worthy of his disgustful pre-eminence but for the manifest superiority of his edition of Shakespeare, or that Addison would have been so adroitly disfigured unless through wounded self-love. It is easy to conceive the resentful shame which Pope must have felt when Addison so almost contemptuously disavowed all complicity in his volunteer defence of Cato in a brutal assault on Dennis. Pope had done a mean thing to propitiate a man whose critical judgment he dreaded; and the great man, instead of thanking him, had resented his interference as impertinent. In the whole portrait of Atticus one cannot help feeling that Pope’s satire is not founded on knowledge, but rather on what his own sensitive suspicion divined of the opinions of one whose expressed preferences in poetry implied a condemnation of the very grounds of the satirist’s own popularity. We shall not so easily give up the purest and most dignified figure of that somewhat vulgar generation, who ranks with Sidney and Spenser, as one of the few perfect gentlemen in our literary annals. A man who could command the unswerving loyalty of honest and impulsive Dick Steele could not have been a coward or a backbiter. The only justification alleged by Pope was of the flimsiest kind, namely, that Addison regretted the introduction of the sylphs in the second edition of the “Rape of the Lock,” saying that the poem was merum sal before. Let any one ask himself how he likes an author’s emendations of any poem to which his ear had adapted itself in its former shape, and he will hardly think it needful to charge Addison with any mean motive for his conservatism in this matter. One or two of Pope’s letters are so good as to make us regret that he did not oftener don the dressing-gown and slippers in his correspondence. One in particular, to Lord Burlington, describing a journey on horseback to Oxford with Lintot the bookseller, is full of a lightsome humor worthy of Cowper, almost worthy of Gray.

Joseph Warton, in summing up at the end of his essay on the genius and writings of Pope, says that the largest part of his works “is of the didactic, moral, and satiric; and, consequently, not of the most poetic species of poetry; whence it is manifest that good sense and judgment were his characteristical excellences rather than fancy and invention.” It is plain that in any strict definition there can be only one kind of poetry, and that what Warton really meant to say was that Pope was not a poet at all. This, I think, is shown by what Johnson says in his “Life of Pope,” though he does not name Warton. The dispute on this point went on with occasional lulls for more than a half-century after Warton’s death. It was renewed with peculiar acrimony when the Rev. W. L. Bowles diffused and confused Warton’s critical opinions in his own peculiarly helpless way in editing a new edition of Pope in 1806. Bowles entirely mistook the functions of an editor, and maladroitly entangled his judgment of the poetry with his estimate of the author’s character.46 Thirteen years later, Campbell, in his “Specimens,” controverted Mr. Bowles’s estimate of Pope’s character and position, both as man and poet. Mr. Bowles replied in a letter to Campbell on what he called “the invariable principles of poetry.” This letter was in turn somewhat sharply criticised by Gilchrist in the Quarterly Review. Mr. Bowles made an angry and unmannerly retort, among other things charging Gilchrist with the crime of being a tradesman’s son, whereupon the affair became what they call on the frontier a free fight, in which Gilchrist, Roscoe, the elder Disraeli, and Byron took part with equal relish, though with various fortune. The last shot, in what had grown into a thirty years’ war, between the partisans of what was called the Old School of poetry and those of the New, was fired by Bowles in 1826. Bowles, in losing his temper, lost also what little logic he had. and though, in a vague way, æsthetically right, contrived always to be argumentatively wrong. Anger made worse confusion in a brain never very clear, and he had neither the scholarship nor the critical faculty for a vigorous exposition of his own thesis. Never was wilder hitting than his, and he laid himself open to dreadful punishment, especially from Byron, whose two letters are masterpieces of polemic prose. Bowles most happily exemplified in his own pamphlets what was really the turning-point of the whole controversy (though all the combatants more or less lost sight of it or never saw it), namely, that without clearness and terseness there could be no good writing, whether in prose or verse; in other words that, while precision of phrase presupposes lucidity of thought, yet good writing is an art as well as a gift. Byron alone saw clearly that here was the true knot of the question, though, as his object was mainly mischief, he was not careful to loosen it. The sincerity of Byron’s admiration of Pope has been, it seems to me, too hastily doubted. What he admired in him was that patience in careful finish which he felt to be wanting in himself and in most of his contemporaries. Pope’s assailants went so far as to make a defect of what, rightly considered, was a distinguished merit, though the amount of it was exaggerated. The weak point in the case was that his nicety concerned itself wholly about the phrase, leaving the thought to be as faulty as it would, and that it seldom extended beyond the couplet, often not beyond a single verse. His serious poetry, therefore, at its best, is a succession of loosely strung epigrams, and no poet more often than he makes the second line of the couplet a mere trainbearer to the first. His more ambitious works may be defined as careless thinking carefully versified. Lessing was one of the first to see this, and accordingly he tells us that “his great, I will not say greatest, merit lay in what we call the mechanic of poetry.”47 Lessing, with his usual insight, parenthetically qualifies his statement; for where Pope, as in the “Rape of the Lock,” found a subject exactly level with his genius, he was able to make what, taken for all in all, is the most perfect poem in the language.

It will hardly be questioned that the man who writes what is still piquant and rememberable, a century and a quarter after his death, was a man of genius. But there are two modes of uttering such things as cleave to the memory of mankind. They may be said or sung. I do not think that Pope’s verse anywhere sings, but it should seem that the abiding presence of fancy in his best work forbids his exclusion from the rank of poet. The atmosphere in which he habitually dwelt was an essentially prosaic one, the language habitual to him was that of conversation and society, so that he lacked the help of that fresher dialect which seems like inspiration in the elder poets. His range of associations was of that narrow kind which is always vulgar, whether it be found in the village or the court. Certainly he has not the force and majesty of Dryden in his better moods, but he has a grace, a finesse, an art of being pungent, a sensitiveness to impressions, that would incline us to rank him with Voltaire (whom in many ways he so much resembles), as an author with whom the gift of writing was primary, and that of verse secondary. No other poet that I remember ever wrote prose which is so purely prose as his; and yet, in any impartial criticism, the “Rape of the Lock” sets him even as a poet far above many men more largely endowed with poetic feeling and insight than he.

A great deal must be allowed to Pope for the age in which he lived, and not a little, I think, for the influence of Swift. In his own province he still stands unapproachably alone. If to be the greatest satirist of individual men, rather than of human nature, if to be the highest expression which the life of the court and the ball-room has ever found in verse, if to have added more phrases to our language than any other but Shakespeare, if to have charmed four generations make a man a great poet,—then he is one. He was the chief founder of an artificial style of writing, which in his hands was living and powerful, because he used it to express artificial modes of thinking and an artificial state of society. Measured by any high standard of imagination, he will be found wanting; tried by any test of wit, he is unrivalled.

The End

“Pur remembrer des ancessours
 Les faits et les dits et les mours,
 Deit l’en les livres et les gestes
 Et les estoires lire a festes.”

—Roman du Rou.

t Chaucer wrote for the private reading of the closet.

should certainly read,

“None fairer in the world might be.”

was due to Gray’s

“Orient hues unborrowed of the sun.”

I believe it has not been noticed that among the verses in Gray’s “Sonnet on the Death of West,” which Wordsworth condemns as of no value, the second—

“And reddening Phœbus lifts his golden fires”—

is one of Gray’s happy reminiscences from a poet in some respects greater than either of them:—

Jamque rubrum tremulis jubar ignibus erigere alte
Cum cœptat natura.
          Lucret., iv. 404, 405.

Gray’s taste was a sensitive divining-rod of the sources whether of pleasing or profound emotion in poetry. Though he prized pomp, he did not undervalue simplicity of subject or treatment, if only the witch Imagination had cast her spell there. Wordsworth loved solitude in his appreciations as well as in his daily life, and was the readier to find merit in obscurity, because it gave him the pleasure of being a first discoverer all by himself. Thus he addresses a sonnet to John Dyer. But Gray was one of “the pure and powerful minds” who had discovered Dyer during his lifetime, when the discovery of poets is more difficult. In 1753 he writes to Walpole: “Mr. Dyer has more poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number, but rough and injudicious.” Dyer has one fine verse,—

“On the dark level of adversity.”

Notes

3 One of Mr. Lincoln’s neatest strokes of humor was his treatment of this gentleman when a laudable curiosity induced him to be presented to the President of the Broken Bubble. Mr. Lincoln persisted in calling him Mr. Partington. Surely the refinement of good-breeding could go no further. Giving the young man his real name (already notorious in the newspapers) would have made his visit an insult. Had Henri IV. done this, it would have been famous.

4 The Life of Josiah Quincy by his son.

5 Apropos of his Frederick the Great.

6 Mr. Emerson, in the Biographical Sketch prefixed to the “Excursions.”

8 Tyrwhitt doubted the authenticity of “The Flower and the Leaf” and “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale.” To these Mr. Bradshaw (and there can be no higher authority) would add “The Court of Love,” the “Dream,” the “Praise of Woman,” the “Romaunt of the Rose,” and several of the shorter poems. To these doubtful productions there is strong ground, both moral and æsthetic, for adding the “Parson’s Tale.”

9 Fauriel, Histoire de la Gaule Meridionale, Vol. I. passim.

10 Allegat ergo pro se lingua Oil quod propter sui faciliorem et delectabiliorem vulgaritatem, quicquid redactum sive inventum est ad vulgare prosaicum, suum est; videlicet biblia cum Trojanorum, Romanorumque gestibus compilata et Arturi regis ambages pulcherrimæ et quamplures aliæ historiæ ac doctrinæ. That Dante by prosaicum did not mean prose, but a more inartificial verse, numeros lege solutos, is clear. Cf. Wolf, Ueber die Lais, pp. 92 seq. and notes. It has not, I think, been remarked that Dante borrows his faciliorem el delectabiliorem from the plus diletable et comune of his master Brunetto Latini.

11 “My ears no sweeter music know
 Than hauberk’s clank with saddlebow,
 The noise, the cries, the tumult blown
 From trumpet and from clarion.”

12 Compare Floripar in Fierabras with Nausikäa, for example.

13 If internal evidence may be trusted, the Lai de l’Espine is not hers.

14 Sir Eger and Sir Grine in the Percy Folio. The passage quoted is from Ellis.

15 I think he tried one now and then, like “eyen columbine.”

16 Commonly printed hath.

17 Froissart’s description of the book of traités amoureux et de moralité, which he had had engrossed for presentation to Richard II. in 1394, is enough to bring tears to the eyes of a modern author. “Et lui plut très grandement; et plaire bien lui devoit car il é’tait enluminé, écrit et historié et couvert de vermeil velours à dis cloux d’argent dorés d’or, et roses d’or au milieu, et à deux grands fremaulx dorés et richement ouvrés au milieu de rosiers d’or.” How lovingly he lingers over it, hooking it together with et after et! But two centuries earlier, while the jongleurs were still in full song, poems were also read aloud.

18 One of the very worst, be it said in passing.

19 Whence came, pray, the Elizabethan commandëment, chapëlain, surëly, and a score of others? Whence the Scottish bonny, and so many English words of Romance derivation ending in y?

20 Poésies de Marie de France, Tome I. p. 168.

21 Le Roman de la Rose, Tome II. p. 890.

22 Rutebeuf, Tome I. pp. 203 seqq. 304 seqq.

23 From the “Craft of Lovers,” attributed by Ritson to Lydgate, but too bad even for him.

24 Here the received texts give “So pray I to God.” Cf. “But Reason said him.” T. & C.

25 Corrected from Kissner, p. 18.

26 Compare this with the Mumbo-Jumbo Revenge in Collins’s Ode.

27 London: John Russell Smith. 1856-64.

28 Literary Remains, Vol. I. pp. 259, 260.

29 Chapman himself was evidently pleased with this, for he cites it as a sample of his version.

30 Early Popular Poetry. Edited by W. Carew Hazlitt.

31 The careless Ritson would have printed this twynkling.

32 For example:—
“And in the arber was a tre
 A fairer in the world might none be,”

33 The to is, we need not say, an addition of Mr. Hazlitt’s. What faith can we put in the text of a man who so often copies even his quotations inaccurately?

34 This was Thomas Warton’s opinion.

35 Milton, a London boy, was in his eighth, seventeenth, and twenty-ninth years, respectively, when Shakespeare (1616), Fletcher (1625), and B. Jonson (1637) died.

36 In his Tractate on Education.

37 Milton, Collins, and Gray, our three great masters of harmony were all musicians.

38 Wordsworth, who recognized forerunners in Thomson, Collins, Dyer, and Burns, and who chimes in with the popular superstition about Chatterton, is always somewhat niggardly in his appreciation of Gray. Yet he owed him not a little. Without Gray’s tune in his ears, his own noblest Ode would have missed the varied modulation which is one of its main charms. Where he forgets Gray, his verse sinks to something like the measure of a jig. Perhaps the suggestion of one of his own finest lines,
(“The light that never was on land or sea,”)

39 MS. letter of Voltaire, cited by Warburton in his edition of Pope, Vol. IV. p. 38, note. The date is 15th October, 1726. I do not find it in Voltaire’s Correspondence.

40 Its taste for verbal affectations is to be found in the Roman de la Rose, and (yet more absurdly forced) in Gauthier de Coinsy; but in Du Bartas the research of effect not seldom subjugates the thought as well as the phrase.

41 Barclaii Satyricon, p. 382. Barclay had lived in France.

42 Usually printed arms, but Dryden certainly wrote arm, to correspond with dint, which he used in its old meaning of a downright blow.

43 Morgante, xviii. 115.

44 Elegie on Doctor Wilson. But if Quarles had been led astray by the vices of Donne’s manner, he had good company in Herbert and Vaughan. In common with them, too, he had that luck of simpleness which is even more delightful than wit. In the same poem he says,—
“Go, glorious soul, and lay thy temples down
 In Abram’s bosom, in the sacred down
 Of soft eternity.”

45 Preface to the Theatrum.

46 Bowles’s Sonnets, wellnigh forgotten now, did more than his controversial writings for the cause he advocated. Their influence upon the coming generation was great (greater than we can well account for) and beneficial. Coleridge tells us that he made forty copies of them while at Christ’s Hospital. Wordsworth’s prefaces first made imagination the true test of poetry, in its more modern sense. But they drew little notice till later.

47 Briefe die neueste Litteratur betreffend, 1759, II. Brief. See also his more elaborate criticism of the “Essay on Man” (Pope ein Metaphysiker), 1755.