PART III. VER. 560, &C.

Rules for the conduct of manners in a critic--1. Candour, ver. 563--Modesty, ver. 566--Good breeding, ver. 572--Sincerity and freedom of advice, ver. 578--2. When one's counsel is to be restrained, ver. 584--Character of an incorrigible poet, ver. 600--And of an impertinent critic, ver. 610--Character of a good critic, ver. 629--The history of criticism, and characters of the best critics, Aristotle, ver. 645--Horace, ver. 653--Dionysius, ver. 665--Petronius, ver. 667--Quintilian, ver. 670--Longinus, ver. 675--Of the decay of criticism, and its revival. Erasmus, ver. 693--Vida, ver. 705--Boileau, ver. 714--Lord Roscommon, &c. ver. 725--Conclusion.

AN

ESSAY ON CRITICISM.

'Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill Appear in writing or in judging ill; But, of the two, less dang'rous is th' offence To tire our patience, than mislead our sense. Some few in that, but numbers err in this, 5 Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss; A fool might once himself alone expose, Now one in verse makes many more in prose.[54] 'Tis with our judgments as our watches, none Go just alike, yet each believes his own. 10 In poets as true genius is but rare, True taste as seldom is the critic's share;[55] Both must alike from heav'n derive their light, These born to judge, as well as those to write. Let such teach others who themselves excel, 15 And censure freely, who have written well.[56] Authors are partial to their wit, 'tis true, But are not critics to their judgment too? Yet, if we look more closely, we shall find Most have the seeds of judgment in their mind:[57] 20 Nature affords at least a glimm'ring light, The lines, though touched but faintly, are drawn right; But as the slightest sketch, if justly traced, } Is by ill-colouring but the more disgraced,[58] } So by false learning is good sense defaced:[59] } 25 Some are bewildered in the maze of schools,[60] And some made coxcombs nature meant but fools.[61] In search of wit, these lose their common sense, And then turn critics in their own defence:[62] Each burns alike, who can, or cannot write, 30 Or with a rival's, or an eunuch's spite.[63] All fools have still an itching to deride, And fain would be upon the laughing side.[64] If Mævius scribble in Apollo's spite,[65] There are who judge still worse than he can write. 35 Some have at first for wits, then poets passed, Turned critics next, and proved plain fools at last. Some neither can for wits nor critics pass, As heavy mules are neither horse nor ass.[66] Those half-learned witlings, num'rous in our isle, 40 As half-formed insects on the banks of Nile;[67] Unfinished things, one knows not what to call,[68] Their generation's so equivocal:[69] To tell 'em would a hundred tongues require, Or one vain wit's, that might a hundred tire.[70] 45 But you who seek to give and merit fame, And justly bear a critic's noble name, Be sure yourself and your own reach to know, How far your genius, taste, and learning go;[71] Launch not beyond your depth, but be discreet, 50 And mark that point where sense and dulness meet. Nature to all things fixed the limits fit, And wisely curbed proud man's pretending wit. As on the land while here the ocean gains, In other parts it leaves wide sandy plains; 55 Thus in the soul while memory prevails, The solid pow'r of understanding fails;[72] Where beams of warm imagination play,[73] The memory's soft figures melt away.[74] One science only will one genius fit; 60 So vast is art, so narrow human wit:[75] Not only bounded to peculiar arts, But oft in those confined to single parts. Like kings we lose the conquests gained before, By vain ambition still to make them more 65 Each might his sev'ral province well command, Would all but stoop to what they understand. First follow nature, and your judgment frame By her just standard,[76] which is still the same: Unerring nature, still divinely bright, 70 One clear, unchanged, and universal light,[77] Life, force, and beauty, must to all impart,[78] At once the source, and end, and test of art. Art from that fund each just supply provides; Works without show, and without pomp presides:[79] 75 In some fair body thus th' informing soul With spirits feeds, with vigour fills the whole,[80] Each motion guides, and ev'ry nerve sustains; Itself unseen, but in th' effects remains.[81] Some, to whom heav'n in wit has been profuse, 80 Want as much more, to turn it to its use;[82] For wit and judgment often are at strife,[83] Though meant each other's aid, like man and wife. 'Tis more to guide, than spur the muse's steed; Restrain his fury, than provoke his speed; 85 The winged courser, like a gen'rous horse,[84] Shows most true mettle when you check his course. Those rules of old discovered, not devised, Are nature still, but nature methodised;[85] Nature, like liberty,[86] is but restrained 90 By the same laws which first herself ordained. Hear how learn'd Greece her useful rules indites, When to repress, and when indulge our flights: High on Parnassus' top her sons she showed, And pointed out those arduous paths they trod; 95 Held from afar, aloft, th' immortal prize,[87] And urged the rest by equal steps to rise. Just precepts thus from great examples giv'n,[88] She drew from them what they derived from heav'n,[89] The gen'rous critic fanned the poet's fire, 100 And taught the world with reason to admire. Then criticism the muse's handmaid proved, To dress her charms, and make her more beloved: But following wits from that intention strayed, Who could not win the mistress, wooed the maid;[90] 105 Against the poets their own arms they turned, Sure to hate most the men from whom they learned.[91] So modern 'pothecaries, taught the art By doctors' bills[92] to play the doctor's part, Bold in the practice of mistaken rules, 110 Prescribe, apply, and call their masters fools. Some on the leaves of ancient authors prey, Nor time nor moths e'er spoiled[93] so much as they; Some dryly plain, without invention's aid, Write dull receipts how poems may be made; 115 These leave the sense, their learning to display, And those explain the meaning quite away. You then whose judgment the right course would steer, Know well each ancient's proper character; His fable, subject, scope in ev'ry page; 120 Religion, country, genius of his age:[94] Without all these at once before your eyes, Cavil you may,[95] but never criticise.[96] Be Homer's works your study and delight, Read them by day, and meditate by night;[97] 125 Thence form your judgment, thence your maxims bring, And trace the muses upward to their spring.[98] Still with itself compared, his text peruse;[99] And let your comment be the Mantuan muse. When first young Maro in his boundless mind 130 A work t' outlast[100] immortal Rome designed,[101] Perhaps he seemed above the critic's law, And but from nature's fountain scorned to draw: But when t' examine ev'ry part he came, Nature and Homer were, he found, the same. 135 Convinced, amazed, he checks the bold design: } And rules as strict his laboured work confine,[102] } As if the Stagyrite[103] o'erlooked each line.[104] } Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem; To copy nature is to copy them.[105] 140 Some beauties yet no precepts can declare, For there's a happiness as well as care. Music resembles poetry; in each } Are nameless graces which no methods teach,[106] } And which a master hand alone can reach. } 145 If, where the rules not far enough extend,[107] (Since rules were made but to promote their end,) Some lucky licence answer to the full Th' intent proposed, that licence is a rule. Thus Pegasus, a nearer way to take, 150 May boldly deviate from the common track. Great wits sometimes may gloriously offend,[108] And rise to faults true critics dare not mend;[109] From vulgar bounds with brave disorder part, And snatch a grace beyond the reach of art,[110] 155 Which, without passing through the judgment, gains The heart, and all its end at once attains. In prospects, thus, some objects please our eyes, } Which out of nature's common order rise,[111] } The shapeless rock, or hanging precipice.[112] } 160 But though the ancients thus their[113] rules invade, (As kings dispense with laws themselves have made,[114]) Moderns, beware! or if you must offend Against the precept, ne'er transgress its end; Let it be seldom, and compelled by need; 165 And have, at least, their precedent to plead. The critic else proceeds without remorse, Seizes your fame, and puts his laws in force. I know there are, to whose presumptuous thoughts Those freer beauties, ev'n in them, seem faults.[115] 170 Some figures monstrous and mis-shaped[116] appear, Considered singly, or beheld too near, Which, but proportioned to their light, or place, Due distance reconciles to form and grace.[117] A prudent chief not always must display[118] 175 His pow'rs in equal rank, and fair array, But with th' occasion and the place comply, Conceal his force, nay, seem sometimes to fly. Those oft are stratagems which errors seem,[119] Nor is it Homer nods but we that dream.[120] 180 Still green with bays each ancient altar stands, Above the reach of sacrilegious hands;[121] Secure from flames, from envy's fiercer rage, Destructive war, and all-involving age.[122] See, from each clime, the learn'd their incense bring; 185 Hear, in all tongues consenting Pæans ring! In praise so just let ev'ry voice be joined, And fill the gen'ral chorus of mankind.[123] Hail, bards triumphant! born in happier days;[124] Immortal heirs of universal praise! 190 Whose honours with increase of ages grow, As streams roll down, enlarging as they flow; Nations unborn your mighty names shall sound, And worlds applaud, that must not yet be found![125] O may some spark of your celestial fire, 195 The last, the meanest of your sons inspire, (That on weak wings, from far, pursues your flights; Glows while he reads, but trembles as he writes,) To teach vain wits a science little known, T' admire superior sense, and doubt their own! 200

II.

Of all the causes which conspire to blind Man's erring judgment, and misguide the mind, What the weak head with strongest bias rules, Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools. Whatever nature has in worth denied,[126] 205 She gives in large recruits of needful pride; For as in bodies, thus in souls, we find What wants in blood and spirits, swelled with wind:[127] Pride, where wit fails, steps in to our defence, And fills up all the mighty void of sense. 210 If once right reason drives that cloud away, Truth breaks upon us with resistless day. Trust not yourself; but your defects to know, Make use of ev'ry friend and ev'ry foe. A little learning is a dang'rous thing; 215 Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:[128] There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again. Fired at first sight with what the muse imparts,[129] In fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts,[130] 220 While from the bounded level of our mind, Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind;[131] But more advanced, behold with strange surprise, New distant scenes of endless science rise! So pleased at first the tow'ring Alps we try,[132] 225 Mount o'er the vales, and seem to tread the sky, Th' eternal snows appear already past, And the first clouds and mountains seem the last: But those attained, we tremble to survey The growing labours of the lengthened way, 230 Th' increasing prospect tires our wand'ring eyes, Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise![133] A perfect judge will read each work of wit[134] With the same spirit that its author writ:[135] Survey the whole, nor seek slight faults to find 235 Where nature moves, and rapture warms the mind; Nor lose for that malignant dull delight, The gen'rous pleasure to be charmed with wit. But in such lays as neither ebb nor flow,[136] Correctly cold,[137] and regularly low, 240 That, shunning faults, one quiet tenour keep, We cannot blame indeed, but we may sleep. In wit, as nature, what affects our hearts Is not th' exactness of peculiar parts; 'Tis not a lip, or eye, we beauty call, 245 But the joint force and full result of all.[138] Thus when we view some well-proportioned dome, (The world's just wonder, and ev'n thine, O Rome![139]) No single parts unequally surprise, All comes united to th' admiring eyes; 250 No monstrous height, or breadth, or length, appear;[140] The whole at once is bold, and regular. Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see, Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be.[141] In ev'ry work regard the writer's end, 255 Since none can compass more than they intend; And if the means be just, the conduct true, Applause, in spite of trivial faults, is due.[142] As men of breeding, sometimes men of wit, T' avoid great errors, must the less commit: 260 Neglect the rules each verbal critic lays,[143] For not to know some trifles is a praise.[144] Most critics, fond of some subservient art, Still make the whole depend upon a part: They talk of principles, but notions prize, 265 And all to one loved folly sacrifice. Once on a time, La Mancha's knight, they say,[145] A certain bard encount'ring on the way, Discoursed in terms as just, with looks as sage, As e'er could Dennis, of the Grecian stage;[146] 270 Concluding all were desp'rate sots and fools, Who durst depart from Aristotle's rules. Our author, happy in a judge so nice, Produced his play, and begged the knight's advice; Made him observe the subject, and the plot, 275 The manners, passions, unities, what not, All which, exact to rule, were brought about, Were but a combat in the lists left out. "What! leave the combat out!" exclaims the knight; Yes, or we must renounce the Stagyrite. 280 "Not so, by heav'n!" he answers in a rage, "Knights, squires, and steeds, must enter on the stage." So vast a throng the stage can ne'er contain. "Then build a new, or act it in a plain."[147] Thus critics of less judgment than caprice, 285 Curious not knowing,[148] not exact but nice, Form short ideas; and offend in arts, As most in manners, by a love to parts.[149] Some to conceit alone their taste confine, And glitt'ring thoughts struck out at ev'ry line; 290 Pleased with a work where nothing's just or fit; One glaring chaos and wild heap of wit. Poets, like painters, thus unskilled to trace The naked nature, and the living grace, With gold and jewels cover ev'ry part, 295 And hide with ornaments their want of art.[150] True wit is nature[151] to advantage dressed; What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed;[152] Something, whose truth convinced at sight we find, That gives us back the image of our mind. 300 As shades more sweetly recommend the light,[153] So modest plainness sets off sprightly wit;[154] For works may have more wit than does 'em good,[155] As bodies perish through excess of blood. Others for language all their care express, 305 And value books, as women men, for dress: Their praise is still,--the style is excellent; The sense, they humbly take upon content.[156] Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found: 310 False eloquence, like the prismatic glass, Its gaudy colours spreads on ev'ry place; The face of nature we no more survey, All glares alike, without distinction gay; But true expression, like th' unchanging sun, } 315 Clears and improves whate'er it shines upon, } It gilds all objects, but it alters none.[157] } Expression is the dress of thought, and still Appears more decent,[158] as more suitable:[159] A vile conceit in pompous words expressed 320 Is like a clown in regal purple dressed: For diff'rent styles with diff'rent subjects sort, As sev'ral garbs with country, town, and court. Some by old words to fame have made pretence,[160] Ancients in phrase, mere moderns in their sense; 325 Such laboured nothings, in so strange a style, Amaze th' unlearn'd, and make the learned smile. Unlucky, as Fungoso in the play,[161] } These sparks with awkward vanity display } What the fine gentleman wore yesterday; } 330 And but so mimic ancient wits at best, As apes our grandsires, in their doublets drest. In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold; Alike fantastic, if too new, or old: Be not the first by whom the new are tried,[162] 335 Nor yet the last to lay the old aside. But most by numbers judge a poet's song, And smooth or rough, with them, is right or wrong:[163] In the bright muse, though thousand charms conspire, Her voice is all these tuneful fools admire; 340 Who haunt Parnassus but to please their ear, } Not mend their minds; as some to church repair, } Not for the doctrine, but the music there.[164] } These equal syllables alone require, Tho' oft the ear the open vowels tire;[165] 345 While expletives their feeble aid do join;[166] And ten low words[167] oft creep in one dull line:[168] While they ring round the same unvaried chimes, With sure returns of still expected rhymes;[169] Where'er you find "the cooling western breeze," 350 In the next line, it "whispers through the trees:" If crystal streams "with pleasing murmurs creep," The reader's threatened, not in vain, with "sleep:"[170] Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, 355 A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.[171] Leave such to tune their own dull rhymes,[172] and know What's roundly smooth, or languishingly slow; And praise[173] the easy vigour of a line, 360 Where Denham's strength, and Waller's sweetness join.[174] True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,[175] As those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence, The sound must seem an echo to the sense.[176] 365 Soft is the strain when zephyr gently blows,[177] And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows; But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,[178] The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar: When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,[179] 370 The line too labours, and the words move slow:[180] Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain, Flies o'er th' unbending corn,[181] and skims along the main.[182] Hear how Timotheus' varied lays surprise,[183] And bid alternate passions fall and rise![184] 375 While at each change, the son of Libyan Jove Now burns with glory, and then melts with love; Now his fierce eyes with sparkling fury glow, Now sighs steal out, and tears begin to flow:[185] Persians and Greeks like turns of nature found, 380 And the world's victor stood subdued by sound! The pow'r of music all our hearts allow, And what Timotheus was, is Dryden now.[186] Avoid extremes; and shun the fault of such, Who still are pleased too little or too much. 385 At ev'ry trifle scorn to take offence, That always shows great pride, or little sense: Those heads, as stomachs, are not sure the best, Which nauseate all, and nothing can digest. Yet let not each gay turn thy rapture move; 390 For fools admire, but men of sense approve:[187] As things seem large which we through mists descry, Dulness is ever apt to magnify. Some foreign writers,[188] some our own despise; The ancients only, or the moderns prize. 395 Thus wit, like faith, by each man is applied To one small sect, and all are damned beside.[189] Meanly they seek the blessing to confine, And force that sun but on a part to shine, Which not alone the southern wit sublimes, 400 But ripens spirits in cold northern climes; Which, from the first has shone on ages past, Enlights[190] the present, and shall warm the last; Though each may feel increases and decays,[191] And see now clearer and now darker days: 405 Regard not then if wit be old or new, But blame the false, and value still the true. Some ne'er advance a judgment of their own,[192] But catch the spreading notion of the town: They reason and conclude by precedent, 410 And own stale nonsense which they ne'er invent. Some judge of authors' names, not works, and then Nor praise nor blame the writings, but the men. Of all this servile herd, the worst is he That in proud dulness joins with quality,[193] 415 A constant critic at the great man's board, To fetch and carry nonsense for my lord. What woeful stuff this madrigal would be, In some starved hackney sonneteer, or me![194] But let a lord once own the happy lines, 420 How the wit brightens! how the style refines! Before his sacred name flies ev'ry fault, And each exalted stanza teems with thought! The vulgar thus through imitation err; As oft the learn'd by being singular; 425 So much they scorn the crowd, that if the throng By chance go right, they purposely go wrong: So schismatics the plain believers quit,[196] And are but damned for having too much wit. Some praise at morning what they blame at night; 430 But always think the last opinion right. A muse by these is like a mistress used, This hour she's idolised, the next abused; While their weak heads, like towns unfortified, 'Twixt sense and nonsense daily change their side.[197] 435 Ask them the cause; they're wiser still they say; And still to-morrow's wiser than to-day. We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow; Our wiser sons, no doubt, will think us so. Once school divines this zealous isle o'erspread; 440 Who knew most Sentences,[198] was deepest read; Faith, gospel, all, seemed made to be disputed, And none had sense enough to be confuted: Scotists and Thomists,[199] now, in peace remain, Amidst their kindred cobwebs[200] in Duck-lane.[201] 445 If faith itself has diff'rent dresses worn, What wonder modes in wit should take their turn?[202] Oft, leaving what is natural and fit, The current folly proves the ready wit; And authors think their reputation safe, 450 Which lives as long as fools are pleased to laugh. Some valuing those of their own side or mind, Still make themselves the measure of mankind: Fondly we think we honour merit then, When we but praise ourselves in other men. 455 Parties in wit attend on those of state, And public faction doubles private hate.[203] Pride, malice, folly, against Dryden rose, In various shapes of parsons, critics, beaus;[204] But sense survived when merry jests were past; 460 For rising merit will buoy up at last. Might he return, and bless once more our eyes,[205] New Blackmores and new Milbournes must arise:[206] Nay, should great Homer lift his awful head, Zoilus[207] again would start up from the dead. 465 Envy will merit, as its shade, pursue; But like a shadow, proves the substance true: For envied wit, like Sol eclipsed, makes known Th' opposing body's grossness, not its own. When first that sun too pow'rful beams displays, 470 It draws up vapours which obscure its rays; But ev'n those clouds at last adorn its way, Reflect new glories, and augment the day.[208] Be thou the first true merit to befriend; His praise is lost, who stays till all commend. 475 Short is the date, alas! of modern rhymes, And 'tis but just to let them live betimes. No longer now that golden age appears, When patriarch wits survived a thousand years: Now length of fame (our second life) is lost, 480 And bare threescore is all ev'n that can boast;[209] Our sons their fathers' failing language see, And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be. So when the faithful pencil has designed Some bright idea of the master's mind, 485 Where a new world leaps out at his command, And ready nature waits upon his hand; When the ripe colours soften and unite, And sweetly melt into just shade and light; When mellowing years their full perfection give, 490 And each bold figure just begins to live, The treach'rous colours the fair art betray,[210] And all the bright creation fades away! Unhappy wit, like most mistaken things,[211] Atones not for that envy which it brings. 495 In youth alone its empty praise we boast,[212] But soon the short-lived vanity is lost: Like some fair flow'r the early spring supplies,[213] That gaily blooms, but ev'n in blooming dies. What is this wit, which must our cares employ?[214] 500 The owner's wife,[215] that other men enjoy; Then most our trouble still when most admired, And still the more we give, the more required;[216] Whose fame with pains we guard, but lose with ease,[217] Sure some to vex, but never all to please; 505 'Tis what the vicious fear, the virtuous shun, By fools 'tis hated, and by knaves undone! If wit so much from ign'rance undergo, Ah let not learning too commence its foe![218] Of old, those met rewards who could excel, 510 And such were praised who but endeavour'd well:[219] Though, triumphs were to gen'rals only due, Crowns were reserved to grace the soldiers too. Now, they who reach Parnassus' lofty crown,[220] Employ their pains to spurn some others down; 515 And while self-love each jealous writer rules, Contending wits become the sport of fools:[221] But still the worst with most regret commend, For each ill author is as bad a friend.[222] To what base ends, and by what abject ways, 520 Are mortals urged through sacred lust of praise![223] Ah ne'er so dire a thirst of glory boast,[224] Nor in the critic let the man be lost. Good-nature and good sense must ever join; To err is human, to forgive, divine. 525 But if in noble minds some dregs remain Not yet purged off, of spleen and sour disdain; Discharge that rage on more provoking crimes, Nor fear a dearth in these flagitious times. No pardon vile obscenity should find,[225] 530 Though wit and art conspire to move your mind;[226] But dulness with obscenity must prove As shameful sure as impotence in love. In the fat age of pleasure, wealth, and ease, Sprung the rank weed,[227] and thrived with large increase: 535 When love was all an easy monarch's care; Seldom at council, never in a war: Jilts ruled the state, and statesmen farces writ: Nay, wits had pensions,[228] and young lords had wit;[229] The fair sat panting at a courtier's play, 540 And not a mask[230] went unimproved away: The modest fan was lifted up no more,[231] And virgins smiled at what they blushed before. The following licence of a foreign reign Did all the dregs of bold Socinus drain;[232] 545 Then unbelieving priests reformed the nation,[233] And taught more pleasant methods of salvation;[234] Where heaven's free subjects might their rights dispute, Lest God himself should seem too absolute: Pulpits their sacred satire learned to spare, 550 And vice admired to find a flatt'rer there![235] Encouraged thus, wit's Titans braved the skies, And the press groaned with licensed blasphemies. These monsters, critics! with your darts engage, Here point your thunder, and exhaust your rage! 555 Yet shun their fault, who, scandalously nice, Will needs mistake an author into vice; All seems infected that th' infected spy, As all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.[236]

III.

Learn then what morals critics ought to show, 560 For 'tis but half a judge's task, to know. 'Tis not enough, taste, judgment, learning, join; In all you speak, let truth and candour shine, That not alone what to your sense is due All may allow, but seek your friendship too. 565 Be silent always when you doubt your sense; And speak, though sure, with seeming diffidence:[237] Some positive, persisting fops we know, Who, if once wrong, will needs be always so; But you with pleasure own your errors past, 570 And make each day a critique on the last. 'Tis not enough your counsel still be true; Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do; Men must be taught as if you taught them not, And things unknown proposed as things forgot. 575 Without good-breeding truth is disapproved; That only makes superior sense beloved. Be niggards of advice on no pretence: For the worst avarice is that of sense. With mean complaisance ne'er betray your trust, 580 Nor be so civil as to prove unjust.[238] Fear not the anger of the wise to raise; Those best can bear reproof, who merit praise. 'Twere well might critics still this freedom take, But Appius reddens[239] at each word you speak, 585 And stares, tremendous, with a threat'ning eye, Like some fierce tyrant in old tapestry.[240] Fear most to tax an Honourable fool, Whose right it is, uncensured, to be dull; Such, without wit, are poets when they please, 590 As without learning they can take degrees.[241] Leave dang'rous truths to unsuccessful satires, And flattery to fulsome dedicators, Whom, when they praise, the world believes no more, Than when they promise to give scribbling o'er. 595 'Tis best sometimes your censure to restrain, And charitably let the dull be vain:[242] Your silence there is better than your spite, For who can rail so long as they can write?[243] Still humming on, their drowsy course they keep, 600 And lashed so long, like tops, are lashed asleep.[244] False steps but help them to renew the race, As, after stumbling, jades will mend their pace. What crowds of these, impenitently bold, In sounds and jingling syllables grown old, 605 Still run on poets in a raging vein, Ev'n to the dregs and squeezing of the brain, Strain out the last dull droppings[245] of their sense, And rhyme with all the rage of impotence. Such shameless bards we have; and yet, 'tis true, 610 There are as mad, abandoned critics too. The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head,[246] With his own tongue still edifies his ears, And always list'ning to himself appears. 615 All books he reads, and all he reads assails, From Dryden's Fables down to Durfey's Tales. With him most authors steal their works, or buy; Garth did not write his own Dispensary.[247] Name a new play, and he's the poet's friend, 620 Nay, showed his faults--but when would poets mend? No place so sacred from such fops is barred,[248] Nor is Paul's church[249] more safe than Paul's churchyard:[250] Nay, fly to altars; there they'll talk you dead; For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.[251] 625 Distrustful sense with modest caution speaks, } It still looks home, and short excursions makes;[252] } But rattling nonsense in full volleys breaks, } And never shocked, and never turned aside, Bursts out, resistless, with a thund'ring tide. 630 But where's the man, who counsel can bestow, Still pleased to teach, and yet not proud to know? Unbiassed, or by favour, or by spite; Not dully prepossessed, nor blindly right; Though learn'd, well-bred; and though well-bred, sincere; Modestly bold, and humanly[253] severe; 636 Who to a friend his faults can freely show, And gladly praise the merit of a foe? Blest with a taste exact, yet unconfined; A knowledge both of books and human kind; 640 Gen'rous converse; a soul exempt from pride; And love to praise,[254] with reason on his side? Such once were critics; such the happy few, Athens and Rome in better ages knew.[255] The mighty Stagyrite first left the shore, 645 Spread all his sails, and durst the deeps explore;[256] He steered securely, and discovered far,[257] Led by the light of the Mæonian star.[258] Poets, a race long unconfined, and free, Still fond and proud of savage liberty, 650 Received his laws;[259] and stood convinced 'twas fit, Who conquered nature, should preside o'er wit.[260] Horace still charms with graceful negligence,[261] And without method talks us into sense; Will, like a friend, familiarly convey 655 The truest notions in the easiest way. He, who supreme in judgment, as in wit, Might boldly censure, as he boldly writ, Yet judged with coolness,[262] though he sung with fire; His precepts teach but what his works inspire. 660 Our critics take a contrary extreme, They judge with fury, but they write with phlegm:[263] Nor suffers Horace more in wrong translations By wits, than critics in as wrong quotations.[264] See Dionysius[265] Homer's thoughts refine, 665 And call new beauties forth from ev'ry line! Fancy and art in gay Petronius please, The scholar's learning, with the courtier's ease.[266] In grave Quintilian's[267] copious work, we find The justest rules, and clearest method joined: 670 Thus useful arms in magazines we place, All ranged in order, and disposed with grace, But less to please the eye, than arm the hand, Still fit for use, and ready at command.[268] Thee, bold Longinus! all the Nine inspire,[269] 675 And bless their critic with a poet's fire. An ardent judge, who, zealous in his trust, With warmth gives sentence, yet is always just: Whose own example strengthens all his laws; And is himself that great sublime he draws.[270] 680 Thus long succeeding critics justly reigned, Licence repressed, and useful laws ordained. Learning and Rome alike in empire grew; And arts still followed where her eagles flew; From the same foes, at last, both felt[271] their doom, 685 And the same age saw learning fall and Rome.[272] With tyranny, then superstition joined, As that the body, this enslaved the mind;[273] Much was believed, but little understood,[274] And to be dull was construed to be good;[275] 690 A second deluge learning thus o'er-run, And the monks finished what the Goths begun.[276] At length Erasmus, that great injured name, (The glory of the priesthood and the shame!)[277] Stemmed the wild torrent of a barb'rous age,[278] 695 And drove those holy Vandals off the stage. But see! each muse, in Leo's golden days, Starts from her trance, and trims her withered bays, Rome's ancient genius, o'er its ruins spread,[279] Shakes off the dust, and rears his rev'rend head. 700 Then sculpture and her sister-arts revive; Stones leaped to form, and rocks began to live;[280] With sweeter notes each rising temple rung;[281] A Raphael painted, and a Vida sung.[282] Immortal Vida: on whose honoured brow 705 The poet's bays and critic's ivy grow:[283] Cremona now shall ever boast thy name, As next in place to Mantua, next in fame![284] But soon by impious arms from Latium chased, Their ancient bounds the banished Muses passed.[285] 710 Thence arts o'er all the northern world advance, But critic-learning flourished most in France; The rules a nation, born to serve,[286] obeys; And Boileau still in right of Horace sways.[287] But we, brave Britons, foreign laws despised, 715 And kept unconquered, and uncivilized; Fierce for the liberties of wit, and bold, We still defied the Romans, as of old.[288] Yet some there were, among the sounder few Of those who less presumed, and better knew, 720 Who durst assert the juster ancient cause, And here restored wit's fundamental laws. Such was the Muse, whose rules and practice tell "Nature's chief master-piece is writing well."[289] Such was Roscommon, not more learn'd than good,[290] 725 With manners gen'rous as his noble blood; To him the wit of Greece and Rome was known, And ev'ry author's merit, but his own.[291] Such late was Walsh,[292] the muse's judge and friend, Who justly knew to blame or to commend: 730 To failings mild, but zealous for desert; The clearest head, and the sincerest heart. This humble praise, lamented shade! receive, This praise at least a grateful muse may give: The muse, whose early voice you taught to sing, 735 Prescribed her heights, and pruned her tender wing, (Her guide now lost) no more attempts to rise, But in low numbers short excursions tries;[293] Content, if hence th' unlearn'd their wants may view, The learn'd reflect on what before they knew: 740 Careless of censure, nor too fond of fame; Still pleased to praise, yet not afraid to blame;[294] Averse alike to flatter, or offend; Not free from faults, nor yet too vain to mend.[295]

APPENDIX.

Dr. Warburton, endeavouring to demonstrate, what Addison could not discover, nor what Pope himself, according to the testimony of his intimate friend, Richardson, ever thought of or intended, that this Essay was written with a methodical and systematical regularity, has accompanied the whole with a long and laboured commentary, in which he has tortured many passages to support this groundless opinion. Warburton had certainly wit, genius, and much miscellaneous learning; but was perpetually dazzled and misled, by the eager desire of seeing everything in a new light unobserved before, into perverse interpretations and forced comments. It is painful to see such abilities wasted on such unsubstantial objects. Accordingly his notes on Shakspeare have been totally demolished by Edwards and Malone; and Gibbon has torn up by the roots his fanciful and visionary interpretation of the sixth book of Virgil. And but few readers, I believe, will be found that will cordially subscribe to an opinion lately delivered,[296] that his notes on Pope's Works are the very best ever given on any classic whatever. For, to instance no other, surely the attempt to reconcile the doctrines of the Essay on Man to the doctrines of revelation, is the rashest adventure in which ever critic yet engaged. This is, in truth, to divine, rather than to explain an author's meaning.--WARTON.

If this Commentary were only a perverse and forced interpretation, as Warton insinuates, it is scarcely likely that Pope would have approved of it so highly, as not only to speak of it in the warmest terms of admiration, but to allow it to accompany his own edition of the poem. To assert that Pope was not the best judge of his own meaning, is an insult not only to his understanding, but to common sense; and to discard the commentary of Warburton, as Warton has done in his edition, in order to replace it by a series of notes, intended to impress the reader with his own opinions, is a kind of infringement on those rights, which had already been decided on by the only person who was entitled to judge on the subject. For these reasons I have thought it advisable, in this edition, to restore the commentary of Warburton entire, which has only been partially done by Mr. Bowles; conceiving that it is as injurious, if not more so, to the commentator, whose object it is to demonstrate the order and consistency of the poem, to deprive him of a portion of his remarks, as it is to deprive him of them altogether.--ROSCOE.

Warburton's commentary proceeded upon two assumptions, which are not complimentary to Pope. The first was that a poem which had contracted no obscurity from age, and which consisted of a series of simple precepts, was written in a manner so confused that it would not be intelligible to ordinary readers, unless the whole was retold in cumbrous prose. The second assumption was that Pope was so deficient in power of expression that his ideas were constantly at variance with his words. One of the sarcastic canons of criticism which Edwards deduced from Warburton's Shakspeare was that an editor "may interpret his author so as to make him mean directly contrary to what he says," and certain it is that if Warburton's explanations are correct, Pope's language was often sadly inaccurate. Roscoe, in effect, adopts the last solution, for he urges that Pope, who was the best judge of his own meaning, acknowledged his meaning to be that which Warburton ascribed to him. There is another, and more probable alternative. Though Pope undeniably knew his own meaning best, his vanity may have been gratified by the subtle views which were imputed to him, and he may have had the weakness, in consequence, to adopt interpretations which never crossed his mind when he composed his poem. Since, however, he desired that his works should be read by the light of Warburton's paraphrase, an editor is not warranted in overruling the decision of the author, and on this account the commentary and notes of Warburton are printed in their integrity, though in themselves they are tedious, verbose, and barren.

THE COMMENTARY AND NOTES OF

W. WARBURTON

ON THE

ESSAY ON CRITICISM.

COMMENTARY.

_An Essay._] The poem is in one book, but divided into three principal parts or members. The first, to ver. 201, gives rules for the study of the art of criticism: the second, from thence to ver. 560, exposes the causes of wrong judgment: and the third, from thence to the end, marks out the morals of the critic.

In order to a right conception of this poem, it will be necessary to observe, that though it be entitled simply An Essay on Criticism, yet several of the precepts relate equally to the good writing as well as to the true judging of a poem. This is so far from violating the unity of the subject, that it preserves and completes it: or from disordering the regularity of the form, that it adds beauty to it, as will appear by the following considerations: 1. It was impossible to give a full and exact idea of the art of poetical criticism, without considering at the same time the art of poetry; so far as poetry is an art. These therefore being closely connected in nature, the author has, with much judgment, interwoven the precepts of each reciprocally through his whole poem. 2. As the rules of the ancient critics were taken from poets who copied nature, this is another reason why every poet should be a critic: therefore as the subject is poetical criticism, it is frequently addressed to the critical poet. And 3dly, the art of criticism is as properly, and much more usefully exercised in writing than in judging.

But readers have been misled by the modesty of the title, which only promises an art of criticism, to expect little, where they will find a great deal,--a treatise, and that no incomplete one, of the art both of criticism and poetry. This, and the not attending to the considerations offered above, was what, perhaps misled a very candid writer, after having given the Essay on Criticism all the praises on the side of genius and poetry which his true taste could not refuse it, to say, that "the observations follow one another like those in Horace's Art of Poetry, without that methodical regularity which would have been requisite in a prose writer." Spect. No. 235. I do not see how method can hurt any one grace of poetry: or what prerogative there is in verse to dispense with regularity. The remark is false in every part of it. Mr. Pope's Essay on Criticism, the reader will soon see, is a regular piece, and a very learned critic has lately shown that Horace had the same attention to method in his Art of Poetry. See Mr. Hurd's Comment on the Epistle to the Pisos.[297]

Ver. 1. _'Tis hard to say, &c._] The poem opens, from ver. 1 to 9, with showing the use and seasonableness of the subject. Its use, from the greater mischief in wrong criticism than in ill poetry--this only tiring, that misleading the reader. Its seasonableness, from the growing number of bad critics, which now vastly exceeds that of bad poets.

Ver. 9. _'Tis with our judgments, &c._] The author having shown us the expediency of his subject, the art of criticism, inquires next, from ver. 8 to 15, into the proper qualities of a true critic, and observes first, that judgment alone is not sufficient to constitute this character, because judgment, like the artificial measures of time, goes different, and yet each man relies upon his own. The reasoning is conclusive, and the similitude extremely just. For judgment, when it is alone, is generally regulated, or at least much influenced, by custom, fashion, and habit; and never certain and constant but when founded upon and accompanied by taste, which is in the critic, what in the poet we call genius. Both are derived from heaven, and like the sun, the natural measure of time, always constant and equable.

Judgment alone, it is allowed, will not make a poet; where is the wonder then, that it will not make a critic in poetry? For on examination we shall find, that genius and taste are but one and the same faculty, differently exerting itself under different names, in the two professions of poetry and criticism. The art of poetry consists in selecting, out of all those images which present themselves to the fancy, such of them as are truly beautiful; and the art of criticism in discerning, and fully relishing what it finds so selected. The main difference is, that in the poet, this faculty is eminently joined to a bright imagination, and extensive comprehension, which provide stores for the selection, and can form that selection, by proportioned parts, into a regular whole: in the critic, it is joined to a solid judgment and accurate discernment, which can penetrate into the causes of an excellence, and display that excellence in all its variety of lights. Longinus had taste in an eminent degree; therefore, this quality, which all true critics have in common, our author makes his distinguishing character:

Thee, bold Longinus! all the Nine inspire, And bless their critic with a poet's fire.

_i. e._ with taste, or genius.

Ver. 15. _Let such teach others, &c._] But it is not enough that the critic hath these natural endowments of judgment and taste, to entitle him to exercise his art; he should, as our author shows us, from ver. 14 to 19, in order to give a further test of his qualification, have put them successfully into use. And this on two accounts: 1. Because the office of a critic is an exercise of authority. 2. Because he being naturally as partial to his judgment as the poet is to his wit, his partiality would have nothing to correct it, as that of the person judged hath by the very terms. Therefore some test is necessary; and the best and most unexceptionable, is his having written well himself--an approved remedy against critical partiality, and the surest means of so maturing the judgment as to reap with glory what Longinus calls "the last and most perfect fruits of much study and experience." Η γαρ των λογων κρισις πολλης εστι πειρας τελευταιον επιγεννημα.

Ver. 19. _Yet, if we look, &c._] But the author having been thus free with the fundamental quality of criticism, judgment, so as to charge it with inconstancy and partiality, and to be often warped by custom and affection, that he may not be misunderstood, he next explains, from ver. 18 to 36, the nature of judgment, and the accidents occasioning those miscarriages before objected to it. He owns, that the seeds of judgment are indeed sown in the minds of most men, but by ill culture, as it springs up, it generally runs wild, either on the one hand, by false learning, which pedants call philology, and by false reasoning, which philosophers call school-learning, or, on the other, by false wit, which is not regulated by sense, and by false politeness, which is solely regulated by the fashion. Both these sorts, who have their judgment thus doubly depraved, the poet observes, are naturally turned to censure and abuse, only with this difference, that the learned dunce always affects to be on the reasoning, and the unlearned fool on the laughing side. And thus, at the same time, our author proves the truth of his introductory observation, that the number of bad critics is vastly superior to that of bad poets.

Ver. 36. _Some have at first for wits, &c._] The poet having enumerated, in this account of the nature of judgment and its various depravations, the several sorts of bad critics, and ranked them into two general classes, as the first sort,--namely, the men spoiled by false learning--are but few in comparison of the other, and likewise come less within his main view (which is poetical criticism) but keep grovelling at the bottom amongst words and syllables, he thought it enough for his purpose here, just to have mentioned them, proposing to do them right hereafter. But the men spoiled by false taste are innumerable, and these are his proper concern. He therefore, from ver. 35 to 46, subdivides them again into the two classes of the volatile and heavy. He describes, in few words, the quick progression of the one through criticism, from false wit to plain folly, where they end; and the fixed station of the other, between the confines of both; who under the name of witlings, have neither end nor measure. A kind of half-formed creature from the equivocal generation of vivacity and dulness, like those on the banks of Nile, from heat and mud.

Ver. 46. _But you who seek, &c._] Our author having thus far, by way of introduction, explained the nature, use, and abuse of criticism, in a figurative description of the qualities and characters of critics, proceeds now to deliver the precepts of the art. The first of which, from ver. 45 to 68, is, that he who sets up for a critic should previously examine his own strength, and see how far he is qualified for the exercise of his profession. He puts him in a way to make this discovery, in that admirable direction given ver. 51.

And mark that point where sense and dulness meet.

He had shown above, that judgment, without taste or genius, is equally incapable of making a critic or a poet. In whatsoever subject then the critic's taste no longer accompanies his judgment, there he may be assured he is going out of his depth. This our author finely calls,

that point where sense and dulness meet.

and immediately adds the reason of his precept, the author of nature having so constituted the mental faculties, that one of them can never greatly excel, but at the expense of another. From this state of co-ordination in the mental faculties, and the influence and effects they have upon one another, the poet draws this consequence, that no one genius can excel in more than one art or science. The consequence shows the necessity of the precept, just as the premises, from which the consequence is drawn, show the reasonableness of it.

Ver. 68. _First follow nature, &c._] The critic observing the directions before given, and now finding himself qualified for his office, is shown next how to exercise it. And as he was to attend to nature for a call, so he is first and principally to follow nature when called. And here again in this, as in the foregoing precept, our poet, from ver. 67 to 88, shows both the fitness and necessity of it. I. Its fitness. 1. Because nature is the source of poetic art, this art being only a representation of nature, who is its great exemplar and original. 2. Because nature is the end of art, the design of poetry being to convey the knowledge of nature in the most agreeable manner. 3. Because nature is the test of art, as she is unerring, constant, and still the same. Hence the poet observes, that as nature is the source, she conveys life to art; as she is the end, she conveys force to it, for the force of any thing arises from its being directed to its end; and as she is the test, she conveys beauty to it, for everything acquires beauty by its being reduced to its true standard. Such is the sense of these two important lines,

Life, force, and beauty must to all impart, At once the source, and end, and test of art.

II. The necessity of the precept is seen from hence. The two constituent qualities of a composition, as such, are art and wit; but neither of these attains perfection, till the first be hid, and the other judiciously restrained. This only happens when nature is exactly followed; for then art never makes a parade; nor can wit commit an extravagance. Art, while it adheres to nature, and has so large a fund in the resources which nature supplies, disposes every thing with so much ease and simplicity, that we see nothing but those natural images it works with, while itself stands unobserved behind; but when art leaves nature, misled either by the bold sallies of fancy, or the quaint oddness of fashion, she is then obliged at every step to come forward, in a painful or pompous ostentation, in order to cover, to soften, or to regulate the shocking disproportion of unnatural images. In the first case, our poet compares art to the soul within, informing a beauteous body; but in the last, we are bid to consider it but as a mere outward garb, fitted only to hide the defects of a misshapen one. As to wit, it might perhaps be imagined that this needed only judgment to govern it; but, as he well observes,

wit and judgment often are at strife, Though meant each other's aid, like man and wife.

They want therefore some friendly mediator; and this mediator is nature: and in attending to nature, judgment will learn where he should comply with the charms of wit; and wit how she ought to obey the sage directions of judgment.

Ver. 88. _Those rules of old, &c._] Having thus, in his first precept, to follow nature, settled criticism on its true foundation; he proceeds to show, what assistance may be had from art. But lest this should be thought to draw the critic from the ground where our poet had before fixed him, he previously observes, from ver. 87 to 92, that these rules of art, which he is now about to recommend to the critic's observance, were not invented by abstract speculation; but discovered in the book of nature; and that therefore, though they may seem to restrain nature by laws, yet as they are laws of her own making, the critic is still properly in the very liberty of nature. These rules the ancient critics borrowed from the poets, who received them immediately from nature.

Just precepts thus from great examples giv'n, These drew from them what they derived from heav'n,

so that both are to be well studied.

Ver. 92. _Hear how learn'd Greece, &c._] He speaks of the ancient critics first, and with great judgment, as the previous knowledge of them is necessary for reading the poets, with that fruit which the end here proposed requires. But having, in the foregoing observation, sufficiently explained the nature of ancient criticism, he enters on the subject treated of from ver. 91 to 118, with a sublime description of its end; which was to illustrate the beauties of the best writers, in order to excite others to an emulation of their excellence. From the raptures which these ideas inspire, the poet is brought back, by the follies of modern criticism, now before his eyes, to reflect on its base degeneracy. And as the restoring the art to its original purity and splendour is the great purpose of this poem, he first takes notice of those, who seem not to understand that nature is exhaustless; that new models of good writing may be produced in every age; and consequently, that new rules may be formed from these models, in the same manner as the old critics formed theirs, which was, from the writings of the ancient poets: but men wanting art and ability to form these new rules, were content to receive and file up for use, the old ones of Aristotle, Quintilian, Longinus, Horace, &c. with the same vanity and boldness that apothecaries practise, with their doctors' bills: and then rashly applying them to new originals (cases which they did not hit) it was no more in their power, than in their inclination, to imitate the candid practice of the ancients when

The gen'rous critic fanned the poet's fire, And taught the world with reason to admire.

For, as ignorance, when joined with humility, produces stupid admiration, on which account it is commonly observed to be the mother of devotion and blind homage, so when joined with vanity (as it always is in bad critics) it gives birth to every iniquity of impudent abuse and slander. See an example (for want of a better) in a late ridiculous and now forgotten thing, called the Life of Socrates;[298] where the head of the author (as a man of wit observed) has just made a shift to do the office of a _camera obscura_, and represent things in an inverted order, himself above, and Sprat, Rollin, Voltaire, and every other writer of reputation, below.

Ver. 118. _You then whose judgment, &c._] He comes next to the ancient poets, the other and more intimate commentators of nature, and shows, from ver. 117 to 141, that the study of these must indispensably follow that of the ancient critics, as they furnish us with what the critics, who only give us general rules, cannot supply, while the study of a great original poet, in

His fable, subject, scope in ev'ry page: Religion, country, genius of his age;

will help us to those particular rules which only can conduct us safely through every considerable work we undertake to examine; and without which, we may cavil indeed, as the poet truly observes, but can never criticise. We might as well suppose that Vitruvius's book alone would make a perfect judge of architecture, without the knowledge of some great master-piece of science, such as the rotunda at Rome, or the temple of Minerva at Athens, as that Aristotle's should make a perfect judge of wit, without the study of Homer and Virgil. These therefore he principally recommends to complete the critic in his art. But as the latter of these poets has, by superficial judges, been considered rather as a copier of Homer, than an original from nature, our author obviates that common error, and shows it to have arisen (as often error does) from a truth, _viz._, that Homer and nature were the same; that the ambitious young poet, though he scorned to stoop at anything short of nature, when he came to understand this great truth, had the prudence to contemplate nature in the place where she was seen to most advantage, collected in all her charms in the clear mirror of Homer. Hence it would follow, that though Virgil studied nature, yet the vulgar reader would believe him to be a copier of Homer; and though he copied Homer, yet the judicious reader would see him to be an imitator of nature, the finest praise which any one, who came after Homer, could receive.

Ver. 141. _Some beauties yet no precepts can declare, &c._] Our author, in these two general directions for studying nature and her commentators, having considered poetry as it is, or may be reduced to rule, lest this should be mistaken as sufficient to attain perfection either in writing or judging, he proceeds from ver. 140 to 201, to point up to those sublimer beauties which rules will never reach, nor enable us either to execute or taste,--beauties, which rise so high above all precept as not even to be described by it; but being entirely the gift of heaven, art and reason have no further share in them than just to regulate their operations. These sublimities of poetry (like the mysteries of religion, some of which are above reason, and some contrary to it) may be divided into two sorts, such as are above rules, and such as are contrary to them.

Ver. 146. _If, where the rules, &c._] The first sort our author describes from ver. 145 to 152, and shows that where a great beauty is in the poet's view, which no stated rules will authorise him how to reach, there, as the purpose of rules is only to attain an end like this, a lucky licence will supply the place of them: nor can the critic fairly object, since this licence, for the reason given above, has the proper force and authority of a rule.

Ver. 152. _Great wits sometimes may gloriously offend, &c._] He describes next the second sort, the beauties against rule. And even here, as he observes, from ver. 151 to 161, the offence is so glorious, and the fault so sublime, that the true critic will not dare either to censure or reform them. Yet still the poet is never to abandon himself to his imagination. The rules laid down for his conduct in this respect are these: 1. That though he transgress the letter of some one particular precept, yet that he be still careful to adhere to the end or spirit of them all, which end is the creation of one uniform perfect whole. And 2. That he have, in each instance, the authority of the dispensing power of the ancients to plead for him. These rules observed, this licence will be seldom used, and only when he is compelled by need, which will disarm the critic, and screen the offender from his laws.

Ver. 169. _I know there are, &c._] But as some modern critics have pretended to say, that this last reason is only justifying one fault by another, our author goes on, from ver. 168 to 181, to vindicate the ancients; and to show that this presumptuous thought, as he calls it, proceeds from mere ignorance,--as where their partiality will not let them see that this licence is sometimes necessary for the symmetry and proportion of a perfect whole, in the light, and from the point, wherein it must be viewed; or where their haste will not give them time to observe, that a deviation from rule is for the sake of attaining some great and admirable purpose. These observations are further useful, as they tend to give modern critics an humbler opinion of their own abilities, and a higher of the authors they undertake to criticise. On which account he concludes with a fine reproof of their use of that common proverb perpetually in the mouths of the critics, "quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus;" misunderstanding the sense of Horace, and taking quandoque for aliquando:

Those oft are stratagems which errors seem, Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream.

Ver. 181. _Still green with bays, &c._] But now fired with the name of Homer, and transported with the contemplation of those beauties which a cold critic can neither see nor conceive, the poet, from ver. 180 to 201, breaks out into a rapturous salutation of the rare felicity of those few ancients who have risen superior over time and accidents; and disdaining, as it were, any longer to reason with his critics, offers this as the surest confutation of their censures. Then with the humility of a suppliant at the shrine of immortals, and the sublimity of a poet participating of their fire, he turns again to these ancient worthies, and apostrophises their Manes:

Hail, bards triumphant! &c.

Ver. 200. _T' admire superior sense, and doubt their own!_] This line concludes the first division of the poem; in which we see the subject of the first and second part, and likewise the connexion they have with one another. It serves likewise to introduce the second. The effect of studying the ancients, as here recommended, would be the admiration of their superior sense, which, if it will not of itself dispose moderns to a diffidence of their own (one of the great uses, as well as natural fruits of that study), our author, to help forward their modesty, in his second part shows them (in a regular deduction of the causes and effects of wrong judgment) their own bright image and amiable turn of mind.

Ver. 201. _Of all the causes, &c._] Having, in the first part, delivered rules for perfecting the art of criticism, the second is employed in explaining the impediments to it. The order of the two parts was well adjusted. For the causes of wrong judgment being pride, superficial learning, a bounded capacity, and partiality, they to whom this part is principally addressed, would not readily be brought either to see the malignity of the causes, or to own themselves concerned in the effects, had not the author previously both enlightened and convinced them, by the foregoing observations, on the vastness of art, and narrowness of wit; the extensive study of human nature and antiquity; and the characters of ancient poetry and criticism; the natural remedies to the four epidemic disorders he is now endeavouring to redress.

Ver. 201. _Of all the causes, &c._] The first cause of wrong judgment is pride. He judiciously begins with this, from ver. 200 to 215, as on other accounts, so on this, that it is the very thing which gives modern criticism its character, whose complexion is abuse and censure. He calls it the vice of fools, by which term is not meant those to whom nature has given no judgment (for he is here speaking of what misleads the judgment), but those to whom learning and study have given more erudition than taste, as appears from the happy similitude of an ill-nourished body, where the same words which express the cause, express likewise the nature of pride:

For as in bodies, thus in souls, we find, What wants in blood and spirits, swelled with wind.

It is the business of reason, he tells us, to dispel the cloud in which pride involves the mind: but the mischief is, that the rays of reason, diverted by self-love, sometime gild this cloud, instead of dispelling it. So that the judgment, by false lights reflected back upon itself, is still apt to be a little dazzled, and to mistake its object. He therefore advises to call in still more helps:

Trust not yourself; but your defects to know, Make use of ev'ry friend and ev'ry foe.

Both the beginning and conclusion of this precept are remarkable. The question is of the means to subdue pride. He directs the critic to begin with a distrust of himself; and this is modesty, the first mortification of pride: and then to seek the assistance of others, and make use even of an enemy; and this is humility, the last mortification of pride: for when a man can once bring himself to submit to profit by an enemy, he has either already subdued his vanity, or is in a fair way of so doing.

Ver. 215. _A little learning, &c._] We must here remark the poet's skill in his disposition of the causes obstructing true judgment. Each general cause which is laid down first, has its own particular cause in that which follows. Thus, the second cause of wrong judgment, superficial learning, is what occasions that critical pride, which he places first.

Ver. 216. _Drink deep, &c._] Nature and learning are the pole-stars of all true criticism: but pride obstructs the view of nature; and a smattering of letters makes us insensible of our ignorance. To avoid this ridiculous situation, the poet, from ver. 214 to 233, advises, either to drink deep, or not to drink at all; for the least sip at this fountain is enough to make a bad critic, while even a moderate draught can never make a good one. And yet the labours and difficulties of drinking deep are so great, that a young author, "fired with ideas of fair Italy," and ambitious to snatch a palm from Rome, here engages in an undertaking like that of Hannibal: finely illustrated by the similitude of an inexperienced traveller penetrating through the Alps.

Ver. 233. _A perfect judge, &c._] The third cause of wrong judgment is a narrow capacity; the natural cause of the foregoing defect, acquiescence in superficial learning. This bounded capacity our author shows, from ver. 232 to 384, betrays itself two ways: in its judgment both of the matter, and the manner of the work criticised. Of the matter, in judging by parts, or in having one favourite part to a neglect of all the rest. Of the manner, in confining men's regard only to conceit, or language, or numbers. This is our poet's order, and we shall follow him as it leads us, only just observing one general beauty which runs through this part of the poem; it is,--that under each of these heads of wrong judgment, he has intermixed excellent precepts for the right. We shall take notice of them as they occur.

He exposes the folly of judging by parts very artfully, not by a direct description of that sort of critic, but of his opposite, a perfect judge, &c. Nor is the elegance of this conversion less than the art; for as, in poetical _style_, one word or figure is still put for another, in order to catch new lights from distant images, and reflect them back upon the subject in hand, so in poetical _matter_ one person or description may be commodiously employed for another, with the same advantage of representation. It is observable that our author makes it almost the necessary consequence of judging by parts, to find fault: and this not without much discernment: for the several parts of a complete whole, when seen only singly, and known only independently, must always have the appearance of irregularity,--often of deformity; because the poet's design being to create a resultive beauty from the artful assemblage of several various parts into one natural whole, those parts must be fashioned with regard to their mutual relations in the stations they occupy in that whole, from whence the beauty required is to arise; but that regard will occasion so unreducible a form in each part, when considered singly, as to present a very mis-shapen form.

Ver. 253. _Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see_,] He shows next, from ver. 252 to 263, that to fix our censure on single parts, though they happen to want an exactness consistent enough with their relation to the rest, is even then very unjust: and for these reasons:--1. Because it implies an expectation of a faultless piece, which is a vain fancy. 2. Because no more is to be expected of any work than that it fairly attains its end. But the end may be attained, and yet these trivial faults committed: therefore, in spite of such faults, the work will merit that praise that is due to everything which attains its end. 3. Because sometimes a great beauty is not to be procured, nor a notorious blemish to be avoided, but by suffering one of these minute and trivial errors. 4. And lastly, because the general neglect of them is a praise, as it is the indication of a genius, attentive to greater matters.

Ver 263. _Most critics, fond of some subservient art, &c._] II. The second way in which a narrow capacity, as it relates to the matter, shows itself, is judging by a favourite part. The author has placed this, from ver. 262 to 285, after the other of judging by parts, with great propriety, it being indeed a natural consequence of it. For when men have once left the whole to turn their attention to the separate parts, that regard and reverence due only to a whole is fondly transferred to one or other of its parts. And thus we see, that heroes themselves, as well as hero-makers, even kings, as well as poets and critics, when they chance never to have had, or long to have lost the idea of that which is the only legitimate object of their office, the care and conservation of the whole, are wont to devote themselves to the service of some favourite part, whether it be love of money, military glory, despotic power, &c. And all, as our author says on this occasion,

to one loved folly sacrifice.

This general misconduct much recommends that maxim in good poetry and politics, to give a principal attention to the whole,--a maxim which our author has elsewhere shown to be equally true likewise in morals and religion, as being founded in the order of things; for if we examine we shall find the misconduct here complained of to arise from this imbecility of our nature, that the mind must always have something to rest upon, to which the passions and affections may be interestingly directed. Nature prompts us to seek it in the most worthy objects; and reason points us to a whole, or system: but the false lights which the passions hold out confound and dazzle us: we stop short; and, before we get to a whole, take up with some part, which thenceforth becomes our favourite.

Ver. 285. _Thus critics of less judgment than caprice, Curious not knowing, not exact but nice, Form short ideas, &c._]

2. He concludes his observations on those two sorts of judges by parts, with this general reflection:--The curious not knowing are the first sort, who judge by parts, and with a microscopic sight (as he says elsewhere) examine bit by bit. The not exact but nice, are the second, who judge by a favourite part, and talk of a whole to cover their fondness for a part, as philosophers do of principles, in order to obtrude notions and opinions in their stead. But the fate common to both is, to be governed by caprice and not by judgment, and consequently to form short ideas, or to have ideas short of truth; though the latter sort, through a fondness to their favourite part, imagine that it comprehends the whole in epitome, as the famous hero of La Mancha, mentioned just before, used to maintain, that knight errantry comprised within itself the quintessence of all science, civil, military, and religious.

Ver. 289. _Some to conceit alone, &c._] We come now to that second sort of bounded capacity, which betrays itself in its judgment on the manner of the work criticised. And this our author prosecutes from ver. 288 to 384. These are again subdivided into divers classes.

Ver. 289. _Some to conceit alone, &c._] The first, from ver. 288 to 305, are those who confine their attention solely to conceit or wit. And here again the critic by parts, offends doubly in the manner, just as he did in the matter; for he not only confines his attention to a part, when it should be extended to the whole, but he likewise judges falsely of that part. And this, as the other, is unavoidable, the parts in the manner bearing the same close relation to the whole, that the parts in the matter do; to which whole, the ideas of this critic have never yet extended. Hence it is, that our author, speaking here of those who confine their attention solely to conceit or wit, describes the distinct species of true and false wit, because they not only mistake a wrong disposition of true wit for a right, but likewise false wit for true. He describes false wit first, from ver. 288 to 297,

Some to conceit alone, &c.,

where the reader may observe our author's address in representing, in a description of false wit, the false disposition of the true; as the critic by parts is apt to fall into both these errors.

He next describes true wit, from ver. 296 to 305,

True wit is nature to advantage dressed, &c.

And here again the reader may observe the same beauty; not only an explanation of true wit, but likewise of the right disposition of it, which the poet illustrates, as he did the wrong, by ideas taken from the art of painting, in the theory of which he was exquisitely skilled.

Ver. 305. _Others for language, &c._] He proceeds secondly to those contracted critics, whose whole concern turns upon language, and shows, from ver. 304 to 337, that this quality, where it holds the principal place in a work, deserves no commendation:--1. Because it excludes qualities more essential. And when the abounding verbiage has choked and suffocated the sense, the writer will be obliged to varnish over the mischief with all the false colouring of eloquence. 2. Secondly, because the critic who busies himself with this quality alone, is unable to make a right judgment of it; because true expression is only the dress of thought, and so must be perpetually varied according to the subject, and manner of treating it. But those who never concern themselves with the sense, can form no judgment of the correspondence between that and the language.

Expression is the dress of thought, and still Appears more decent, as more suitable, &c.

Now as these critics are ignorant of this correspondence, their whole judgment in language is reduced to verbal criticism, or the examination of single words; and generally those which are most to his taste, are (for an obvious reason) such as smack most of antiquity, on which account our author has bestowed a little raillery upon it; concluding with a short and proper direction concerning the use of words, so far as regards their novelty and ancientry.

Ver. 337. _But most by numbers judge, &c._] The last sort are those, from ver. 336 to 384, whose ears are attached only to the harmony of a poem. Of which they judge as ignorantly and as perversely as the other sort did of the eloquence, and for the same reason. Our author first describes that false harmony with which they are so much captivated; and shows that it is wretchedly flat and unvaried: for

Smooth or rough, with them, is right or wrong.

He then describes the true: 1. As it is in itself, constant; with a happy mixture of strength and sweetness, in contradiction to the roughness and flatness of false harmony: and 2. As it is varied in compliance to the subject, where the sound becomes an echo to the sense, so far as is consistent with the preservation of numbers, in contradiction to the monotony of false harmony. Of this he gives us, in the delivery of his precepts, four beautiful examples of smoothness, roughness, slowness, and rapidity. The first use of this correspondence of the sound to the sense, is to aid the fancy in acquiring a perfecter and more lively image of the thing represented. A second and nobler, is to calm and subdue the turbulent and selfish passions, and to raise and warm the beneficent, which he illustrates in the famous adventure of Timotheus and Alexander, where, in referring to Mr. Dryden's Ode on that subject, he turns it to a high compliment on his favourite poet.

Ver. 384. _Avoid extremes, &c._] Our author is now come to the last cause of wrong judgment, partiality,--the parent of the immediately preceding cause, a bounded capacity, nothing so much narrowing and contracting the mind as prejudices entertained for or against things or persons. This, therefore, as the main root of all the foregoing, he prosecutes at large, from ver. 383 to 474. First, to ver. 394, he previously exposes that capricious turn of mind, which, by running into extremes, either of praise or dispraise, lays the foundation of an habitual partiality. He cautions, therefore, both against one and the other; and with reason; for excess of praise is the mark of a bad taste; and excess of censure, of a bad digestion.

Ver. 394. _Some foreign writers, &c._] Having explained the disposition of mind which produces an habitual partiality, he proceeds to expose this partiality in all the shapes in which it appears both amongst the unlearned and the learned.

I. In the unlearned it is seen, first, in an unreasonable fondness for, or aversion to, our own or foreign, to ancient or modern writers. And as it is the mob of unlearned readers he is here speaking of, he exposes their folly in a very apposite similitude:

Thus wit, like faith, by each man is applied To one small sect, and all are damned beside.

But he shows, from ver. 396 to 408, that these critics have as wrong notions of reason as those bigots have of God; for that genius is not confined to times or climates; but, as the common gift of nature, is extended throughout all ages and countries; that indeed this intellectual light, like the material light of the sun, may not shine at all times, and in every place with equal splendour, but be sometimes clouded with popular ignorance, and sometimes again eclipsed by the discountenance of the great; yet it shall still recover itself, and, by breaking through the strongest of these impediments, manifest the eternity of its nature.

Ver. 408. _Some ne'er advance a judgment of their own_,] A second instance of unlearned partiality is (as he shows from ver. 407 to 424) men's going always along with the cry, as having no fixed nor well-grounded principles whereon to raise any judgment of their own. A third is reverence for names, of which sort, as he well observes, the worst and vilest are the idolizers of names of quality; whom therefore he stigmatises as they deserve. Our author's temper as well as his judgment is here seen, in throwing this species of partiality amongst the unlearned critics. His affection for letters would not suffer him to conceive, that any learned critic could ever fall into so low a prostitution.

Ver. 424. _The vulgar thus--As oft the learned_--] II. He comes in the second place, from ver. 423 to 452, to consider the instances of partiality in the learned. 1. The first is singularity. For, as want of principles, in the unlearned, necessitates them to rest on the common judgment as always right, so adherence to false principles (that is, to notions of their own) mislead the learned into the other extreme of supposing the common judgment always wrong. And as, before, our author compared those to bigots, who made true faith to consist in believing after others, so he compares these to schismatics, who make it to consist in believing as no one ever believed before, which folly he marks with a lively stroke of humour in the turn of the thought:

So schismatics the plain believers quit, And are but damned for having too much wit.

2. The second is novelty. And as this proceeds sometimes from fondness, sometimes from vanity, he compares the one to the passion for a mistress, and the other to the pride of being in fashion; but the excuse common to both is, the daily improvement of their judgment:

Ask them the cause; they're wiser still they say; And still to-morrow's wiser than to-day.

Now as this is a plausible pretence for their inconstancy, and our author has himself afterwards approved of it, as a remedy against obstinacy and pride, where he says, ver. 570,

But you with pleasure own your errors past, And make each day a critique on the last,

he has been careful, by the turn of the expression in this place, to show the difference between the pretence and the remedy. For time, considered only as duration, vitiates as frequently as it improves. Therefore to expect wisdom as the necessary attendant of length of days, unrelated to long experience, is vain and delusive. This he illustrates by a remarkable example, where we see time, instead of becoming wiser, destroying good letters, to substitute school divinity in their place; the genius of which kind of learning, the character of its professors, and the fate, which, sooner or later, always attends whatsoever is wrong or false, the poet sums up in those four lines:

Faith, gospel, all, seemed made to be disputed, &c.

And in conclusion he observes, that perhaps this mischief, from love of novelty, might not be so great, did it not, along with the critic, infect the writer likewise, who, when he finds his readers disposed to take ready wit on the standard of current folly, never troubles himself to think of better payment.

Ver. 452. _Some valuing those of their own side or mind, &c._] 3. The third and last instance of partiality in the learned, is party and faction, which is considered from ver. 451 to 474, where he shows how men of this turn deceive themselves, when they load a writer of their own side with commendation. They fancy they are paying tribute to merit, when they are only sacrificing to self-love. But this is not the worst. He further shows, that this party spirit has often very ill effects on science itself, while, in support of faction, it labours to depress some rising genius, that was, perhaps, raised by nature to enlighten his age and country. By which he would insinuate, that all the baser and viler passions seek refuge, and find support in party madness.

Ver. 474. _Be thou the first, &c._] The poet having now gone through the last cause of wrong judgment, and the root of all the rest, partiality, and ended his remarks upon it with a detection of the two rankest kinds, those which arise out of party rage and envy, takes the occasion, which this affords him, of closing his second division in the most graceful manner, from ver. 473 to 560, by concluding from the premises, and calling upon the true critic to be careful of his charge, which is the protection and support of wit; for, the defence of it from malevolent censure is its true protection, and the illustration of its beauties, is its true support.

He first shows, the critic ought to do this service without loss of time, and on these motives:--1. Out of regard to himself, for there is some merit in giving the world notice of an excellence, but little or none, in pointing, like an index, to the beaten road of admiration. 2. Out of regard to the poem, for the short duration of modern works requires that they should begin to live betimes. He compares the life of modern wit (which in a changeable dialect, must soon pass away), and that of the ancient (which survives in an universal language), to the difference between the patriarchal age and our own, and observes, that while the ancient writings live for ever, as it were, in brass and marble, the modern are but like paintings, which, of how masterly a hand soever, have no sooner gained their requisite perfection by the softening and ripening of their tints, which they do in a very few years, but they begin to fade and die away. 3. Lastly, our author shows that the critic ought in justice to do this service out of regard to the poet, when he considers the slender dowry the muse brings along with her. In youth it is only a vain and short-lived pleasure; and in maturer years, an accession of care and labour, in proportion to the weight of reputation to be sustained, and of the increase of envy to be opposed: and therefore, concludes his reasoning on this head with that pathetic and insinuating address to the critic, from ver. 508 to 526.

Ah! let not learning, &c.

Ver. 526. _But if in noble minds some dregs remain, &c._] So far as to what ought to be the true critic's principal study and employment. But if the sour critical humour abounds, and must therefore needs have vent, he directs to its proper object, and shows, from ver. 525 to 556, how it may be innocently and usefully pointed. This is very observable; our author had made spleen and disdain the characteristic of the false critic, and yet here supposes them inherent in the true. But it is done with judgment, and a knowledge of nature. For as bitterness and astringency in unripe fruits of the best kind are the foundation and capacity of that high spirit, race, and flavour which we find in them, when perfectly concocted by the warmth and influence of the sun, and which, without those qualities, would gain no more by that influence than only a mellow insipidity, so spleen and disdain in the true critic, when improved by long study and experience, ripen into an exactness of judgment and an elegance of taste, although, in the false critic, lying remote from the influence of good letters, they remain in all their first offensive harshness and acerbity. The poet therefore shows how, after the exaltation of these qualities into their state of perfection, the very dregs (which, though precipitated, may possibly, on some occasions, rise and ferment even in a noble mind) may be usefully employed, that is to say, in branding obscenity and impiety. Of these, he explains the rise and progress, in a beautiful picture of the different geniuses of the two reigns of Charles II. and William III. The former of which gave course to the most profligate luxury; the latter to a licentious impiety. These are the crimes our author assigns over to the caustic hand of the critic; but concludes however, from ver. 555 to 560, with this necessary admonition, to take care not to be misled into unjust censure, either on the one hand, by a pharisaical niceness, or on the other by a self-consciousness of guilt. And thus the second division of his Essay ends: the judicious conduct of which is worthy our observation. The subjects of it are the causes of wrong judgment. These he derives upwards from cause to cause, till he brings them to their source, an immoral partiality: for as he had, in the first part,

traced the Muses upward to their spring,

and shown them to be derived from heaven, and the offspring of virtue, so hath he here pursued this enemy of the muses, the bad critic, to his low original, in the arms of his nursing mother immorality. This order naturally introduces, and at the same time shows the necessity of, the subject of the third and last division, which is, on the morals of the critic.

Ver. 560. _Learn then, &c._] We enter now on the third part, the morals of the critic. There seemed a peculiar necessity of inculcating precepts of this sort to the critic, by reason of that native acerbity so often found in the profession; of which, a short memorial will soon convince the reader, and at the same time inform him why our author has here included all critical morals in candour, modesty, and good breeding. When, in these latter ages, human learning reared its head in the West, and its tail, verbal criticism, was of course to rise with it, the madness of critics presently became so offensive, that the sober stupidity of the monks might appear the more tolerable evil. J. Argyropylus, a mercenary Greek, who came to teach school in Italy after the sacking of Constantinople by the Turk, used to maintain that Cicero understood neither philosophy nor Greek; while another of his countrymen, J. Lascaris by name, threatened to demonstrate that Virgil was no poet. However, these men raised in the west of Europe an appetite for the Greek language. So that Hermolaus Barbarus, a noted critic and most passionate admirer of it, used to boast that he had invoked and raised the devil, about the meaning of the Aristotelian εντελεχεια. As this man was famous for his enchantments, so one, whom Balzac speaks of, was as useful to letters by his revelations, and was wont to say, that the meaning of such a verse in Persius, no one knew but God and himself. But they were not all so modest. The celebrated Pomponius Lætus, in excess of veneration for antiquity, became a real pagan, raised altars to Romulus, and sacrificed to the gods of Greece. But if the Greeks cried down Cicero, the Italian critics knew how to support his credit. Every one has heard of the childish excesses into which the fondness for being thought Ciceronians carried the most celebrated Italians of this time. They generally abstained from reading the scripture for fear of spoiling their style, and Cardinal Bembo used to call the epistles of St. Paul by the contemptuous name of epistolaccias,--great overgrown epistles. But Erasmus cured this frenzy in that masterpiece of good sense, entitled Ciceronianus, for which, as lunatics treat their physicians, the elder Scaliger insulted him with all the brutal fury peculiar to his family and profession. His son Joseph and Salmasius had such endowments of art and nature as might have made them public blessings; yet how did these savages tear and worry one another. The choicest of Joseph's flowers of speech were _stercus diaboli_, and _lutum stercore maceratum_. It is true these were strewn upon his enemies. He treated his friends better; for in a letter to Thuanus, speaking of two of them, Clavius and Lipsius, he calls the first "a monster of ignorance," and the other "a slave to the Jesuits" and an "idiot." But so great was his love of sacred amity, that he says, at the same time, "I still keep up a correspondence with him, notwithstanding his idiotry, for it is my principle to be constant in my friendships.--Je ne reste de lui écrire nonobstant son idioterie, d'autant que je suis constant en amitié." The character he gives of his own work, in the same letter, is no less extraordinary: "Vous vous pouvez assurer que nostre Eusebe sera un tresor des merveilles de la doctrine chronologique." But this modest account of his chronology is a trifle in comparison of the just esteem Salmasius conceived of himself, as Mr. Colomies tells the story: This critic one day meeting two of his brethren, Messrs. Gaulmin and Maussac, in the royal library at Paris, Gaulmin, in a virtuous consciousness of their importance, told the other two that he believed they three could make head against all the learned in Europe. To which the great Salmasius fiercely replied, "Do you and Mr. Maussac join yourselves to all that is learned in the world, and you shall find that I alone am a match for you all." Vossius tells us that, when Laur. Valla had snarled at every name of the first order in antiquity, such as Aristotle, Cicero, and one whom I should have thought this critic was likeliest to pass by, the redoubtable Priscian, he impiously boasted that he had arms even against Christ himself. But Codrus Urcæus went further, and actually used those arms the other only threatened with. This man while he was preparing some trifling piece of criticism for the press, had the misfortune to hear his papers were burned, on which he is reported to have broke out, "Quodnam ego tantum scelus concepi, O Christe; quem ego tuorum unquam læsi, ut ita inexpiabili in me odio debaccheris? Audi ea, quæ tibi mentis compos et ex animo dicam. Si forte, cum ad ultimam vitæ finem pervenero, supplex accedam ad te oratum, neve audias, neve inter tuos accipias oro; cum infernis Diis in æternum vitam agere decrevi." Whereupon, says my author, he quitted the converse of men, threw himself into the thickest of a forest, and there wore out the wretched remains of life in all the agonies of despair.

But to return to the poem. This third and last part is in two divisions. In the first of which, from ver. 559 to 631, our author inculcates the morals by precept. In the second, from ver. 630 to the end, by example. His first precept, from ver. 561 to 566, recommends candour, for its use to the critic, and to the writer criticised.

2. The second, from ver. 565 to 572, recommends modesty, which manifests itself in these four signs: 1. Silence where it doubts,

Be silent always when you doubt your sense;

2. A seeming diffidence where it knows,

And speak, though sure, with seeming diffidence;

3. A free confession of error where wrong,

But you with pleasure own your errors past;

4. And a constant review and scrutiny even of those opinions which it still thinks right.

And make each day a critique on the last.

3. The third, from ver. 571 to 584, recommends good-breeding, which will not force truth dogmatically upon men, as ignorant of it, but gently insinuates it to them, as not sufficiently attentive to it. But as men of breeding are apt to fall into two extremes, he prudently cautions against them. The one is a backwardness in communicating their knowledge, out of a false delicacy, and for fear of being thought pedants: the other, and much more common extreme, is a mean complaisance, which those who are worthy of your advice do not need, to make it acceptable; for such can best bear reproof in particular points, who best deserve commendation in general.

Ver. 584. _'Twere well might critics, &c._] The poet having thus recommended in his general rules of conduct for the judgment, these three critical virtues to the heart, shows next, from ver. 583 to 631, upon what three sorts of writers these virtues, together with the advice conveyed under them, would be thrown away; and which is worse, be repaid with obloquy and scorn. These are the false critic, the dull man of quality, and the bad poet, each of which species of incorrigible writers he hath very exactly painted. But having drawn the last of them at full length, and being always attentive to the two main branches of his subject, which are, of writing and judging well, he re-assumes the character of the bad critic (whom he had touched upon before), to contrast him with the other; and makes the characteristic common to both, to be a never-ceasing repetition of their own impertinence.

_The poet_--still runs on in a raging vein, &c. ver. 606, &c.

_The critic_--with his own tongue still edifies his ears, 614, &c.

Than which there cannot be an observation more just, or more grounded on experience.

Ver. 631. _But where's the man, &c._] II. The second division of this last part, which we now come to, is of the morals of critics, by example. For, having in the first, drawn a picture of the false critic, at large, he breaks out into an apostrophe, containing an exact and finished character of the true, which, at the same time, serves for an easy and proper introduction to this second division. For having asked, from ver. 630 to 643, _Where's the man, &c._, he answers, from ver. 642 to 681, that he was to be found in the happier ages of Greece and Rome; in the characters of Aristotle and Horace, Dionysius and Petronius, Quintilian and Longinus, whose several excellencies he has not only well distinguished, but has contrasted them with a peculiar elegance. The profound science and logical method of Aristotle is opposed to the plain common sense of Horace, conveyed in a natural and familiar negligence; the study and refinement of Dionysius, to the gay and courtly ease of Petronius; and the gravity and minuteness of Quintilian, to the vivacity and general topics of Longinus. Nor has the poet been less careful in these examples, to point out their eminence in the several critical virtues he so carefully inculcated in his precepts. Thus in Horace he particularizes his candour; in Petronius, his good-breeding; in Quintilian, his free and copious instruction; and in Longinus, his great and noble spirit.

Ver. 681. _Thus long succeeding critics, &c._] The next period in which the true critic, he tells us, appeared, was at the revival and restoration of letters in the West. This occasions his giving a short history, from ver. 682 to 709, of the decline and re-establishment of arts and sciences in Italy. He shows that they both fell under the same enemy, despotic power; and that when both had made some little efforts to recover themselves, they were soon again overwhelmed by a second deluge of another kind, namely, superstition; and a calm of dulness finished upon Rome and letters what the rage of barbarism had begun:

A second deluge learning thus o'er-run, And the monk finished what the Goth begun.

When things had long remained in this condition, and all hopes of recovery now seemed desperate, it was a critic, our author shows us, for the honour of the art he here teaches, who at length broke the charm of dulness, who dissipated the enchantment, and, like another Hercules, drove those cowled and hooded serpents from the Hesperian tree of knowledge, which they had so long guarded from human approach.

Ver. 697. _But see! each Muse, in Leo's golden days_,] This presents us with the second period in which the true critic appeared, of whom he has given us a complete idea in the single example of Marcus Hieronymus Vida; for his subject being poetical criticism, for the use principally of a critical poet, his example is an eminent poetical critic, who had written of the Art of Poetry in verse.

Ver. 709. _But soon by impious arms, &c._] This brings us to the third period, after learning had travelled still further West, when the arms of the Emperor, in the sack of Rome by the Duke of Bourbon, had driven it out of Italy, and forced it to pass the mountains. The examples he gives in this period, are of Boileau in France, and of the Lord Roscommon and the Duke of Buckingham in England: and these were all poets, as well as critics in verse. It is true, the last instance is of one who was no eminent poet, the late Mr. Walsh. This small deviation might be well overlooked, were it only for its being a pious office to the memory of his friend. But it may be further justified, as it was an homage paid in particular to the morals of the critic, nothing being more amiable than the character here drawn of this excellent person. He being our author's judge and censor, as well as friend, it gives him a graceful opportunity to add himself to the number of the later critics; and with a character of his own genius and temper sustained by that modesty and dignity which it is so difficult to make consistent, this performance concludes.

I have here given a short and plain account of the Essay on Criticism, concerning which, I have but one thing more to say, that when the reader considers the regularity of the plan, the masterly conduct of each part, the penetration into nature, and the compass of learning so conspicuous throughout, he should at the same time know, it was the work of an author who had not attained the twentieth year of his age.

NOTES.

Ver. 28. _In search of wit, these lose their common sense_,] This observation is extremely just. Search of wit is not only the occasion, but the efficient cause of the loss of common sense; for wit consisting in choosing out, and setting together such ideas from whose assemblage pleasant pictures may be drawn on the fancy, the judgment, through an habitual search of wit, loses, by degrees, its faculty of seeing the true relation of things; in which consists the exercise of common sense.

Ver. 32. _All fools have still an itching to deride, And fain would lie upon the laughing side._]

The sentiment is just, and if Hobbes's account of laughter be true, that it arises from a silly pride, we see the reason of it. The expression too is fine; it alludes to the condition of idiots and natural fools, who are observed to be ever on the grin.

Ver. 43. _Their generation's so equivocal._] It is sufficient that a principle of philosophy has been generally received, whether it be true or false, to justify a poet's use of it to set off his wit. But to recommend his argument, he should be cautious how he uses any but the true; for falsehood, when it is set too near the truth, will tarnish what it should brighten up. Besides, the analogy between natural and moral truth makes the principles of true philosophy the fittest for this use. Our poet has been pretty careful in observing this rule.

Ver. 51. _And mark that point where sense and dulness meet._] Besides the peculiar sense explained in the comment, the words have still a more general meaning, and caution us against going on, when our ideas begin to grow obscure, as we are then most apt to do, though that obscurity be an admonition that we should leave off, for it arises, either from our small acquaintance with the subject, or the incomprehensibility of its nature, in which circumstances a genius will always write as badly as a dunce. An observation well worth the attention of all profound writers.

Ver. 56. _Thus in the soul while memory prevails, The solid pow'r of understanding fails; Where beams of warm imagination play, The memory's soft figures melt away._]

These observations are collected from an intimate knowledge of human nature. The cause of that languor and heaviness in the understanding, which is almost inseparable from a very strong and tenacious memory, seems to be a want of the proper exercise of that faculty, the understanding being in a great measure unactive, while the memory is cultivating. As to the other appearance, the decay of memory by the vigorous exercise of fancy, the poet himself seems to have intimated the cause of it in the epithet he has given to the imagination. For if, according to the atomic philosophy, the memory of things be preserved in a chain of ideas, produced by the animal spirits moving in continued trains, the force and rapidity of the imagination, breaking and dissipating the links of this chain by forming new associations, must necessarily weaken, and disorder the recollective faculties.

Ver. 67. _Would all but stoop to what they understand._] The expression is delicate, and implies what is very true, that most men think it a degradation of their genius to employ it in what lies level to their comprehension, but had rather exercise their talents in the ambition of subduing what is placed above it.

Ver. 80. _Some, to whom heaven, &c._] Here the poet (in a sense he was not, at first, aware of) has given an example of the truth of his observation, in the observation itself. The two lines stood originally thus:

There are whom heav'n has blest with store of wit, Yet want as much again to manage it.

In the first line, wit is used, in the modern sense, for the effort of fancy; in the second line it is used in the ancient sense, for the result of judgment. This trick, played the reader, he endeavoured to keep out of sight, by altering the lines as they now stand,

Some, to whom heav'n in wit has been profuse, Want as much more, to turn it to its use.

For the words, "to manage it," as the lines were at first, too plainly discovered the change put upon the reader, in the use of the word "wit." This is now a little covered by the latter expression of "turn it to its use." But then the alteration, in the preceding line, from "store of wit," to "profuse," was an unlucky change. For though he who has "store of wit" may want more, yet he to whom it was given in "profusion" could hardly be said to want more. The truth is, the poet had said a lively thing, and would, at all hazards, preserve the reputation of it, though the very topic he is upon obliged him to detect the imposition, in the very next lines, which show he meant two very different things, by the very same term, in the two preceding:

For wit and judgment often are at strife, Though meant each other's aid, like man and wife.

Ver. 88. _Those rules of old, &c._] Cicero has, best of any one I know, explained what that thing is which reduces the wild and scattered parts of human knowledge into arts. "Nihil est quod ad artem redigi possit, nisi ille prius, qui illa tenet, quorum artem instituere vult, habeat illam scientiam, ut ex iis rebus, quarum ars nondum sit, artem efficere possit.--Omnia fere, quæ sunt conclusa nunc artibus, dispersa et dissipata quondam fuerunt, ut in musicis, &c. Adhibita est igitur ars quædam extrinsecus ex alio genere quodam, quod sibi totum PHILOSOPHI assumunt, quæ rem dissolutam divulsamque conglutinaret, et ratione quadam constringeret." De Orat. l. i. c. 41, 42.

Ver. 112, 114. _Some on the leaves--Some dryly plain._] The first are the apes of those learned Italian critics who at the restoration of letters, having found the classic writers miserably deformed by the hands of monkish librarians, very commendably employed their pains and talents in restoring them to their native purity. The second, the plagiarists from the French critics, who had made some admirable commentaries on the ancient critics. But that acumen and taste, which separately constitute the distinct value of those two species of Italian and French criticism, make no part of the character of these paltry mimics at home described by our poet in the following lines,

These leave the sense, their learning to display, And those explain the meaning quite away.

Which species is the least hurtful, the poet has enabled us to determine in the lines with which he opens his poem,

But, of the two, less dang'rous is th' offence To tire our patience, than mislead our sense.

From whence we conclude that the Reverend Mr. Upton was much more innocently employed, when he quibbled upon Epictetus, than when he commented upon Shakespeare.[299]

Ver. 150. _Thus Pegasus, &c._] We have observed how the precepts for writing and judging are interwoven throughout the whole poem. The sublime flight of a poet is first described, soaring above all vulgar bounds, to snatch a grace directly which lies beyond the reach of a common adventurer; and afterwards, the effect of that grace upon the true critic; whom it penetrates with an equal rapidity, going the nearest way to his heart, without passing through his judgment. By which is not meant that it could not stand the test of judgment; but that, as it was a beauty uncommon, and above rule, and the judgment habituated to determine only by rule, it makes its direct appeal to the heart, which, when once gained, soon brings over the judgment, whose concurrence (it being now enlarged and set above forms) is easily procured. That this is the poet's sublime conception appears from the concluding words:

And all its end at once attains.

For poetry doth not attain all its end, till it hath gained the judgment as well as heart.

Ver. 209. _Pride, where wit fails, steps in to our defence, And fills up all the mighty void of sense._]

A very sensible French writer makes the following remark on this species of pride: "Un homme qui sçait plusieurs langues, qui entend les auteurs grecs et latins, qui s'élève même jusqu'à la dignité de scholiaste; si cet homme venoit à peser son véritable mérite, il trouveroit souvent qu'il se réduit avoir eu des yeux et de la mémoire; il se garderoit bien de donner le nom respectable de science à une érudition sans lumière. Il y a une grande différence entre s'enrichir des mots ou des choses, entre alléguer des autorités ou des raisons. Si un homme pouvoit se surprendre à n'avoir que cette sorte de mérite, il en rougiroit plutôt que d'en être vain."

Ver. 235. _Survey the whole, nor seek slight faults to find Where Nature moves, and rapture warms the mind_;]

The second line, in apologizing for those faults which the first says should be overlooked, gives the reason of the precept. For when a great writer's attention is fixed on a general view of nature, and his imagination becomes warmed with the contemplation of great ideas, it can hardly be, but that there must be small irregularities in the disposition both of matter and style, because the avoiding these requires a coolness of recollection, which a writer so qualified and so busied is not master of.

Ver. 248. _The world's just wonder, and ev'n thine, O Rome!_] The Pantheon I would suppose; perhaps St. Peter's; no matter which; the observation is true of both. There is something very Gothic in the taste and judgment of a learned man, who despises the masterpiece of art, the Pantheon, for those very qualities which deserve our admiration. "Nous esmerveillons comme l'on fait si grand cas de ce Pantheon, veu que son edifice n'est de si grande industrie comme l'on crie: car chaque petit masson peut bien concevoir la maniere de sa façon tout en un instant: car estant la base si massive, et les murailles si espaisses, ne nous a semblé difficile d'y adjouster la vonte à claire voye."--Pierre Belon's Observations, &c. The nature of the Gothic structures apparently led him into this mistake of the architectonic art in general; that the excellency of it consists in raising the greatest weight on the least assignable support, so that the edifice should have strength without the appearance of it, in order to excite admiration. But to a judicious eye such a building would have a contrary effect, the appearance (as our poet expresses it) of a monstrous height, or breadth, or length. Indeed, did the just proportions in regular architecture take off from the grandeur of a building, by all the single parts coming united to the eye, as this learned traveller seems to insinuate, it would be a reasonable objection to those rules on which this masterpiece of art was constructed. But it is not so. The poet tells us truly,

The whole at once is bold, and regular.

Ver. 267. _Once on a time, &c._] This tale is so very apposite, that one would naturally take it to be of the poet's own invention; and so much in the spirit of Cervantes, that we might easily mistake it for one of the chief beauties of that incomparable satire. Yet, in truth it is neither; but a story taken by our author from the spurious Don Quixote, which shows how proper an use may be made of general reading, when if there be but one good thing in a book (as in that wretched performance there scarce was more) it may be picked out, and employed to an excellent purpose.

Ver. 285. _Thus critics, &c._] In these two lines the poet finely describes the way in which bad writers are wont to imitate the qualities of good ones. As true judgment generally draws men out of popular opinions, so he who cannot get from the crowd by the assistance of this guide, willingly follows caprice, which will be sure to lead him into singularities. Again, true knowledge is the art of treasuring up only that which, from its use in life, is worthy of being lodged in the memory, and this makes the philosopher; but curiosity consists in a vain attention to every thing out of the way, and which for its inutility the world least regards, and this makes the antiquarian. Lastly, exactness is the just proportion of parts to one another, and their harmony in a whole; but he who has not extent of capacity for the exercise of this quality, contents himself with nicety, which is a busying oneself about points and syllables, and this makes the grammarian.

Ver. 297. _True wit is nature to advantage dressed, &c._] This definition is very exact. Mr. Locke had defined wit to consist "in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together, with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, whereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy." But that great philosopher, in separating wit from judgment, as he does in this place, has given us (and he could therefore give us no other) only an account of wit in general, in which false wit, though not every species of it, is included. A striking image, therefore, of nature is, as Mr. Locke observes, certainly wit; but this image may strike on several other accounts, as well as for its truth and beauty, and the philosopher has explained the manner how. But it never becomes that wit which is the ornament of true poesy, whose end is to represent nature, but when it dresses that nature to advantage, and presents her to us in the brightest and most amiable light. And to know when the fancy has done its office truly, the poet subjoins this admirable test, viz. When we perceive that it gives us back the image of our mind. When it does that, we may be sure it plays no tricks with us; for this image is the creature of the judgment, and whenever wit corresponds with judgment, we may safely pronounce it to be true.

Ver. 311. _False eloquence, &c._] This simile is beautiful. For the false colouring given to objects by the prismatic glass is owing to its untwisting, by its obliquities, those threads of light which nature had put together, in order to spread over its work an ingenious and simple candour, that should not hide but only heighten the native complexion of the objects. And false expression is nothing else but the straining and divaricating the parts of true expression; and then daubing them over with what the rhetoricians very properly term colours, in lieu of that candid light, now lost, which was reflected from them in their natural state, while sincere and entire.

Ver. 364. _'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence, The sound must seem an echo to the sense._]

The judicious introduction of this precept is remarkable. The poets, and even some of the best of them, have been so fond of the beauty arising from this trivial observance, that their practice has violated the very end of the precept, which is the increase of harmony; and so they could but raise an echo, did not care whose ears they offended by its dissonance. To remedy this abuse therefore, our poet, by the introductory line, would insinuate, that harmony is always to be presupposed as observed, though it may and ought to be perpetually varied, so as to produce the effect here recommended.

Ver. 365. _The sound must seem an echo to the sense._] Lord Roscommon says,

The sound is still a comment to the sense.

They are both well expressed, although so differently; for Lord Roscommon is showing how the sense is assisted by the sound; Mr. Pope, how the sound is assisted by the sense.

Ver. 402. _Which, from the first, &c._] Genius is the same in all ages; but its fruits are various, and more or less excellent as they are checked or matured by the influence of government or religion upon them. Hence in some parts of literature the ancients excel; in others, the moderns, just as those accidental circumstances occurred.

Ver. 444. _Scotists._] So denominated from Johannes Duns Scotus. Erasmus tells us, an eminent Scotist assured him, that it was impossible to understand one single proposition of this famous Duns, unless you had his whole metaphysics by heart. This hero of incomprehensible fame suffered a miserable reverse at Oxford in the time of Henry VIII. That grave antiquary, Mr. Antony Wood (in the vindication of himself and his writings from the reproaches of the Bishop of Salisbury), sadly laments the deformation, as he calls it, of that university, by the King's commissioners; and even records the blasphemous speeches of one of them, in his own words: "We have set Duns in Boccardo, with all his blind glossers, fast nailed up upon posts in all common houses of easement." Upon which our venerable antiquary thus exclaims: "If so be, the commissioners had such disrespect for that most famous author, J. Duns, who was so much admired by our predecessors, and so difficult to be understood, that the doctors of those times, namely, Dr. William Roper, Dr. John Keynton, Dr. William Mowse, &c. professed that, in twenty-eight years' study, they could not understand him rightly, what then had they for others of inferior note?" What indeed! But if so be, that most famous J. Duns was so difficult to be understood (for that this is a most theologic proof of his great worth is past all doubt), I should conceive our good old antiquary to be a little mistaken, and that the nailing up this Proteus of the schools was done by the commissioners in honour of the most famous Duns, there being no other way of catching the sense of so slippery and dodging an author, who had eluded the pursuit of three of their most renowned doctors in full cry after him, for eight and twenty years together. And this Boccardo in which he was confined, seemed very fit for the purpose, it being observed that men are never more serious and thoughtful than in that place of retirement.--Scribl.

Ver. 444. _Thomists_,] From Thomas Aquinas, a truly great genius, who, in those blind ages, was the same in theology, that our Friar Bacon was in natural philosophy; less happy than our countryman in this, that he soon became surrounded with a number of dark glossers, who never left him till they had extinguished the radiance of that light, which had pierced through the thickest night of monkery, the thirteenth century, when the Waldenses were suppressed, and Wickliffe not yet risen.

Ver. 445. _Amidst their kindred cobwebs._] Were common sense disposed to credit any of the monkish miracles of the dark and blind ages of the church, it would certainly be one of the seventh century recorded by honest Bale. "In the sixth general council," says he, "holden at Constantinople, Anno Dom 680, contra Monothelitas, where the Latin mass was first approved, and the Latin ministers deprived of their lawful wives, spiders' webs, in wonderfull copye were seen falling down from above, upon the heads of the people, to the marvelous astonishment of many." The justest emblem and prototype of school metaphysics, the divinity of Scotists and Thomists, which afterwards fell, in wonderfull copye on the heads of the people, in support of transubstantiation, to the marvelous astonishment of many, as it continues to do to this day.

Ver. 450. _And authors think, &c._] This is an admirable satire on those called authors in fashion, the men who get the laugh on their side. He shows on how pitiful a basis their reputation stands,--the changeling disposition of fools to laugh, who are always carried away with the last joke.

Ver. 463. _Milbourn_] The Rev. Mr. Luke Milbourn. Dennis served Mr. Pope in the same office. But these men are of all times, and rise up on all occasions. Sir Walter Raleigh had Alexander Ross; Chillingworth had Cheynel; Milton a first Edwards; and Locke a second; neither of them related to the third Edwards of Lincoln's Inn. They were divines of parts and learning: this a critic without one or the other. Yet (as Mr. Pope says of Luke Milbourn) the fairest of all critics; for having written against the editor's remarks on Shakspear, he did him justice in printing, at the same time, some of his own.[300]

Ver. 468. _For envied wit, &c._] This similitude implies a fact too often verified; and of which we need not seek abroad for examples. It is this, that frequently those very authors, who have at first done all they could to obscure and depress a rising genius, have at length been reduced to borrow from him, imitate his manner, and reflect what they could of his splendour, merely to keep themselves in some little credit. Nor hath the poet been less artful, to insinuate what is sometimes the cause. A youthful genius, like the sun rising towards the meridian, displays too strong and powerful beams for the dirty temper of inferior writers, which occasions their gathering, condensing, and blackening. But as he descends from the meridian (the time when the sun gives its gilding to the surrounding clouds) his rays grow milder, his heat more benign, and then

ev'n those clouds at last adorn its way, Reflect new glories, and augment the day.

484. _So when, &c._] This similitude from painting, in which our author discovers (as he always does on that subject) real science, has still a more peculiar beauty, as at the same time that it confesses the just superiority of ancient writings, it insinuates one advantage the modern have above them, which is this, that in these latter, our more intimate acquaintance with the occasion of writing, and with the manners described, lets us into those living and striking graces which may be well compared to that perfection of imitation given only by the pencil, while the ravages of time, amongst the monuments of former ages, have left us but the gross substance of ancient wit,--so much only of the form and fashion of bodies as may be expressed in brass or marble.

Ver. 507.--_by knaves undone!_] By which the poet would insinuate a common but shameful truth, that men in power, if they got into it by illiberal arts, generally left wit and science to starve.

Ver. 545. _Did all the dregs of bold Socinus drain;_] The seeds of this religious evil, as well as of the political good from whence it sprung (for good and evil are incessantly arising out of one another) were sown in the preceding fat age of pleasure. The mischiefs done during Cromwell's usurpation, by fanaticism, inflamed by erroneous and absurd notions of the doctrine of grace and satisfaction, made the loyal latitudinarian divines (as they were called) at the restoration, go so far into the other extreme of resolving all Christianity into morality, as to afford an easy introduction to socinianism, which in that reign (founded on the principles of liberty) men had full opportunity of propagating.

Ver. 561. _For 'tis but half a judge's task, to know._] The critic acts in two capacities, of assessor and of judge: in the first, science alone is sufficient; but the other requires morals likewise.

Ver. 631. _But where's the man, &c._] The poet, by his manner of asking after this character, and telling us, when he had described it, that such once were critics, does not encourage us to search for it amongst modern writers. And indeed the discovery of him, if it could be made, would be but an invidious affair. However, I will venture to name the piece of criticism in which all these marks may be found. It is entitled, Q. Hor. Fl. Ars Poetica, et ejusd. Ep. ad Aug. with an English Commentary and Notes.[301]

Ver. 642. _with reason on his side?_] Not only on his side, but in actual employment. The critic makes but a mean figure, who when he has found out the beauties of his author, contents himself with showing them to the world in only empty exclamations. His office is to explain their nature, show from whence they arise, and what effects they produce, or in the better and fuller expression of the poet,

To teach the world with reason to admire.

Ver. 652. _Who conquered nature, &c._] By this we must not understand physical nature, but moral. The force of the observation consists in giving it this sense. The poet not only uses the word nature, for human nature, throughout this poem; but also, where in the beginning of it, he lays down the principles of the arts he treats of, he makes the knowledge of human nature the foundation of all criticism and poetry. Nor is the observation less true than apposite. For Aristotle's natural inquiries were superficial and ill made, though extensive; but his logical and moral works are supremely excellent. In his moral, he has unfolded the human mind, and laid open all the recesses of the heart and understanding; and in his logical, he has not only conquered nature, but by his categories, has kept her in tenfold chains; not as dulness kept the muses in the Dunciad, to silence them; but as Aristæus held Proteus in Virgil, to deliver oracles.

Ver. 665. _See Dionysius, &c._] In the first of these lines, on which the other depends, the peculiar excellence of this critic, and indeed the most material and useful part of a critic's office, is touched upon, who, like the refiner, purifies the rich ore of an original writer; for such a one busied in creating, often neglects to separate and refine the mass, pouring out his riches rather in bullion than in sterling.

Ver. 667. _Fancy and art, &c._] "The chief merit of Petronius," says an objector,[302] "is that of telling a story with grace and ease." But the poet is not here speaking, nor was it his purpose to speak, of the chief merit of Petronius, but of his merit as a critic, which consisted, he tells us, in softening the art of a scholar with the ease of a courtier, and whoever reads and understands the critical part of his abominable story-telling will see that the poet has given his true character as a critic, which was the only thing he had to do with.

Ver. 693. _At length Erasmus, &c._] Nothing can be more artful than the application of this example, or more happy than the turn of the compliment. To throw glory quite round the character of this admirable person, he makes it to be (as in fact it really was) by his assistance chiefly, that Leo was enabled to restore letters and the fine arts in his pontificate.

Ver. 694. _The glory of the priesthood and the shame!_] Our author elsewhere lets us know what he esteems to be the glory of the priesthood as well as of a christian in general, where comparing himself to Erasmus, he says,

In moderation placing all my glory,

and consequently what he regards as the shame of it. The whole of this character belonged eminently and almost solely to Erasmus: for the other reformers, such as Luther, Calvin, and their followers, understood so little in what true christian liberty consisted, that they carried with them, into the reformed churches, that very spirit of persecution, which had driven them from the church of Rome.

Ver. 696. _And drove those holy Vandals off the stage._] In this attack on the established ignorance of the times, Erasmus succeeded so well as to bring good letters into fashion, to which he gave new splendour, by preparing for the press correct editions of many of the best ancient writers, both ecclesiastical and profane. But having laughed and shamed his age out of one folly, he had the mortification of seeing it run headlong into another. The virtuosi of Italy, in a superstitious dread of that monkish barbarity which he had so severely handled, would use no term (for now almost every man was become a Latin writer), not even when they treated of the highest mysteries of religion, which had not been consecrated in the capitol, and dispensed unto them from the sacred hand of Cicero. Erasmus observed the growth of this classical folly with the greater concern, as he discovered under all their attention to the language of old Rome, a certain fondness for its religion, in a growing impiety which disposed them to think irreverently of the christian faith. And he no sooner discovered it than he set upon reforming it; which he did so effectually in the dialogue, entitled Ciceronianus, that he brought the age back to that just temper, which he had been all his life endeavouring to mark out to it,--purity, but not pedantry in letters, and zeal, but not bigotry, in religion. In a word, by employing his great talents of genius and literature on subjects of general importance; and by opposing the extremes of all parties in their turns; he completed the real character of a true critic and an honest man.

RAPE OF THE LOCK.

AN HEROI-COMICAL POEM.

WRITTEN IN THE YEAR 1712.

* * * * *

THE RAPE OF THE LOCK.

AN HEROI-COMICAL POEM.

Nolueram, Belinda, tuos violare capillos, Sed juvat hoc præcibus me tribuisse tuis. MART. LIB. 12. Ep. 86.

Printed for BERNARD LINTOTT. 1712. 8vo.

This is the title-page of the original Rape of the Lock, in two cantos, which appeared anonymously in Lintot's Miscellany. The poem begins on p. 353 of the volume, and the previous piece ends at p. 320. What purported to be a second edition of the Miscellany came out in 1714, but except that the gap between p. 320 and p. 353 had been filled up, and that the Essay on Criticism is inserted at the end of the book, the work is merely a reissue, with a new title-page, of the first edition, and the Rape of the Lock, like the rest, is the old impression of 1712. Even the primitive "Table of Contents" was retained, though it omits the additional pieces, which were chiefly poems by Pope. His contributions to the Miscellany are, however, enumerated on the title-page of the second edition.

* * * * *

THE RAPE OF THE LOCK.

AN HEROI-COMICAL POEM. IN FIVE CANTOS.

Written by Mr. POPE.

----A tonso est hoc nomen adepta capillo.--OVID.

London: Printed for BERNARD LINTOTT, at the Cross Keys in Fleet Street. 1714. 8vo.

The first enlarged edition. A second and third edition followed in the same year. After the Rape of the Lock had been included in the quarto of 1717, it was still printed in a separate form, and a "fifth edition corrected" was published by Lintot in 1718. He also inserted the work in the four editions of his Miscellanies, which appeared in the twelve years from 1720 to 1732. Lintot paid Pope £7 on March 21, 1712, for the Rape of the Lock in its first form, and gave £15 for the enlarged poem on February 20, 1714.

The first sketch of this poem was written in less than a fortnight's time in 1711, in two cantos, and so printed in a Miscellany, without the name of the author. The machines were not inserted till a year after, when he published it, and annexed the dedication.--POPE, 1736.

The stealing of Miss Belle Fermor's hair was taken too seriously, and caused an estrangement between the two families, though they had lived so long in great friendship before. A common acquaintance, and well-wisher to both, desired me to write a poem to make a jest of it, and laugh them together again. It was with this view that I wrote the Rape of the Lock, which was well received, and had its effect in the two families. Nobody but Sir George Brown was angry, and he was a good deal so, and for a long time. He could not bear that Sir Plume should talk nothing but nonsense. Copies of the poem got about, and it was like to be printed, on which I published the first draught of it (without the machinery) in a Miscellany of Tonson's. The machinery was added afterwards to make it look a little more considerable, and the scheme of adding it was much liked and approved of by several of my friends, and particularly by Dr. Garth, who, as he was one of the best natured men in the world, was very fond of it. The making the machinery, and what was published before, hit so well together is, I think, one of the greatest proofs of judgment of anything I ever did.--POPE in SPENCE.

It appears by the motto "Nolueram," etc., that the following poem was written or published at the lady's request. But there are some further circumstances not unworthy relating. Mr. Caryll (a gentleman who was secretary to Queen Mary, wife of James II., whose fortunes he followed into France, author of the comedy of Sir Solomon Single, and of several translations in Dryden's Miscellanies) originally proposed the subject to him, in a view of putting an end, by this piece of ridicule, to a quarrel that was risen between two noble families, those of Lord Petre and of Mrs. Fermor, on the trifling occasion of his having cut off a lock of her hair. The author sent it to the lady, with whom he was acquainted; and she took it so well as to give about copies of it. That first sketch, we learn from one of his letters, was written in less than a fortnight, in 1711, in two cantos only, and it was so printed; first, in a Miscellany of Bern. Lintot's, without the name of the author. But it was received so well, that he made it more considerable the next year by the addition of the machinery of the sylphs, and extended it to five cantos. We shall give the reader the pleasure of seeing in what manner these additions were inserted, so as to seem not to be added, but to grow out of the poem. See Notes, Cant. I. ver. 9, etc. This insertion he always esteemed, and justly, the greatest effort of his skill and art as a poet.--WARBURTON.

I hope it will not be thought an exaggerated panegyric to say that the Rape of the Lock is the best satire extant; that it contains the truest and liveliest picture of modern life; and that the subject is of a more elegant nature, as well as more artfully conducted than that of any other heroi-comic poem. If some of the most candid among the French critics begin to acknowledge that they have produced nothing, in point of sublimity and majesty, equal to the Paradise Lost, we may also venture to affirm that in point of delicacy, elegance, and fine-turned raillery, on which they have so much valued themselves, they have produced nothing equal to the Rape of the Lock. It is in this composition Pope principally appears a poet, in which he has displayed more imagination than in all his other works taken together. It should, however, be remembered, that he was not the first former and creator of those beautiful machines, the sylphs, on which his claim to imagination is chiefly founded. He found them existing ready to his hand; but has, indeed, employed them with singular judgment and artifice.--WARTON.

The Rape of the Lock is the most airy, the most ingenious, and the most delightful of all Pope's compositions. At its first appearance it was termed by Addison "merum sal." Pope, however, saw that it was capable of improvement; and having luckily contrived to borrow his machinery from the Rosicrucians, imparted the scheme, with which his head was teeming, to Addison, who told him that his work, as it stood, was "a delicious little thing," and gave him no encouragement to retouch it. This has been too hastily considered as an instance of Addison's jealousy; for as he could not guess the conduct of the new design, or the possibilities of pleasure comprised in a fiction of which there had been no examples, he might very reasonably and kindly persuade the author to acquiesce in his own prosperity, and forbear an attempt which he considered as an unnecessary hazard. Addison's counsel was happily rejected. Pope foresaw the future efflorescence of imagery then budding in his mind, and resolved to spare no art or industry of cultivation. The soft luxuriance of his fancy was already shooting, and all the gay varieties of diction were ready at his hand to colour and embellish it. His attempt was justified by its success. The Rape of the Lock stands forward, in the classes of literature, as the most exquisite example of ludicrous poetry. Berkeley congratulated him upon the display of powers more truly poetical than he had shown before. With elegance of description and justness of precepts he had now exhibited boundless fertility of invention. He always considered the intermixture of the machinery with the action as his most successful exertion of poetical art. He indeed could never afterwards produce anything of such unexampled excellence. Those performances which strike with wonder are combinations of skilful genius with happy casualty; and it is not likely that any felicity, like the discovery of a new race of preternatural agents, should happen twice to the same man.

Of this poem the author was, I think, allowed to enjoy the praise for a long time without disturbance. Many years afterwards Dennis published some remarks upon it with very little force and with no effect; for the opinion of the public was already settled, and it was no longer at the mercy of criticism.[303]

To the praises which have been accumulated on the Rape of the Lock by readers of every class, from the critic to the waiting-maid, it is difficult to make any addition. Of that which is universally allowed to be the most attractive of all ludicrous compositions, let it rather be now inquired from what sources the power of pleasing is derived. Dr. Warburton, who excelled in critical perspicacity, has remarked that the preternatural agents are very happily adapted to the purposes of the poem. The heathen deities can no longer gain attention: we should have turned away from a contest between Venus and Diana. The employment of allegorical persons always excites conviction of its own absurdity; they may produce effects, but cannot conduct actions: when the phantom is put in motion it dissolves. Thus Discord may raise a mutiny, but Discord cannot conduct a march, nor besiege a town. Pope brought in view a new race of beings, with powers and passions proportionate to their operation. The sylphs and gnomes act at the toilet and the tea-table, what more terrific and more powerful phantoms perform on the stormy ocean or the field of battle; they give their proper help and do their proper mischief. Pope is said by an objector,[304] not to have been the inventor of this petty nation; a charge which might with more justice have been brought against the author of the Iliad, who doubtless adopted the religious system of his country; for what is there but the names of his agents which Pope has not invented? Has he not assigned them characters and operations never heard of before? Has he not, at least, given them their first poetical existence? If this is not sufficient to denominate his work original, nothing original ever can be written.

In this work are exhibited, in a very high degree, the two most engaging powers of an author. New things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new. A race of aerial people, never heard of before, is presented to us in a manner so clear and easy, that the reader seeks for no further information, but immediately mingles with his new acquaintance, adopts their interests, and attends their pursuits, loves a sylph and detests a gnome. That familiar things are made new, every paragraph will prove. The subject of the poem is an event below the common incidents of common life; nothing real is introduced that is not seen so often as to be no longer regarded; yet the whole detail of a female day is here brought before us, invested with so much art of decoration, that, though nothing is disguised, everything is striking, and we feel all the appetite of curiosity for that from which we have a thousand times turned fastidiously away.

The purpose of the poet is, as he tells us, to laugh at "the little unguarded follies of the female sex." It is therefore without justice that Dennis charges the Rape of the Lock with the want of a moral, and for that reason sets it below the Lutrin, which exposes the pride and discord of the clergy. Perhaps neither Pope nor Boileau has made the world much better than he found it, but, if they had both succeeded, it were easy to tell who would have deserved most from public gratitude. The freaks, and humours, and spleen, and vanity of women, as they embroil families in discord, and fill houses with disquiet, do more to obstruct the happiness of life in a year than the ambition of the clergy in many centuries. It has been well observed, that the misery of man proceeds not from any single crush of overwhelming evil, but from small vexations continually repeated.

It is remarked by Dennis likewise that the machinery is superfluous; that by all the bustle of preternatural operation the main event is neither hastened nor retarded. To this charge an efficacious answer is not easily made. The sylphs cannot be said to help or to oppose, and it must be allowed to imply some want of art, that their power has not been sufficiently intermingled with the action. Other parts may likewise be charged with want of connection; the game at ombre might be spared; but if the lady had lost her hair while she was intent upon her cards, it might have been inferred that those who are too fond of play will be in danger of neglecting more important interests. These perhaps are faults, but what are such faults to so much excellence?--JOHNSON.

The Rape of the Lock at once placed Pope higher than any modern writer, and exceeded everything of the kind that had appeared in the republic of letters. Dr. Johnson truly says that it is the most airy, the most ingenious, and the most delightful of all Pope's compositions. Indeed, upon this subject there cannot be two opinions. This poem is founded, however, upon local manners. And of all poems of that kind it is undoubtedly far the best, whether we consider the exquisite tone of raillery, a certain musical sweetness and suitableness in the versification, the management of the story, or the kind of fancy and airiness given to the whole. But what entitles it to its high claim of peculiar poetic excellences?--the powers of imagination, and the felicity of invention displayed in adopting, and most artfully conducting, a machinery so fanciful, so appropriate, so novel, and so poetical. The introduction of Discord, &c., as machinery in the Lutrin, &c., is not to be mentioned at the same time. Such a being as Discord will suit a hundred subjects; but the elegant, the airy sylph,

Loose to the wind, whose airy garments flew, Thin glitt'ring textures of the filmy dew, Dipped in the richest tincture of the skies, Where light disports in ever-mingling dyes:

such a being as this, is suited alone to the identical and peculiar poem in which it is employed. I will now go a step farther in appreciating the elegance and beauty of this poem, and I would ask the question, Let any other poet,--Dryden, Waller, Cowley, or Gray,--be assigned this subject, and this machinery: could they have produced a work altogether so correct and beautiful from the same given materials? Let us, however, still remember, that this poem is founded on local manners, and the employment of the sylphs is in artificial life. For this reason the poem must have a secondary rank, when considered strictly and truly with regard to its poetry. Whether Pope would have excelled as much in loftier subjects of a general nature, in the "high mood" of Lycidas, the rich colourings of Comus, and the magnificent descriptions and sublime images of Paradise Lost; or in painting the characters and employments of aerial beings,

That tread the ooze of the salt deep, Or run upon the sharp wind of the north,

is another question. He has not attempted it: I have no doubt he would have failed. But to have produced a poem, infinitely the highest of its kind, and which no other poet could perhaps altogether have done so well, is surely very high praise. The excellence is Pope's own, the inferiority is in the subject. No one understood better that excellent rule of Horace:

Sumite materiam vestris, qui scribitis, æquam Viribus.[305]--BOWLES.

From the statement of Pope in the edition of 1736, it would be inferred that the Rape of the Lock in its second form was prepared and published in 1712. As usual he ante-dated his work. The original sketch came out in 1712; the machinery was added in 1713, and the enlarged poem was not published till the spring of 1714. Warburton's narrative, which in some editions had Pope's initial affixed by an error of the press,[306] is in part derived from Pope, and the rest is erroneous. The person who bespoke the Rape of the Lock was not Mr. Secretary Caryll, but his nephew, the Sussex squire, and for years the correspondent of Pope. The assertion of Warburton, that Pope, when he wrote the work, was acquainted with his heroine, is discredited by his letter to Caryll on May 28, 1712. "Mr. Bedingfield," he there says, "has done me the favour to send some books of the Rape to my Lord Petre and Mrs. Fermor," and unless the poet had been a total stranger to them he would have presented the copies himself. The language of the motto can only bear the interpretation of Warburton, that the Rape of the Lock "was written or published at the lady's request," but Warburton ought to have seen that the motto was a deception. The piece was not _written_ at Miss Fermor's request, for it was absurd to imagine that she would ask any one to compose a poem to allay her own resentment against Lord Petre, and there is the direct statement of Pope in the body of the work, and in his conversation with Spence, that the suggestion did not come from her.[307] The piece was not _published_ at her request, for in the Dedication of the second edition to Miss Fermor, Pope says of the first edition, "An imperfect copy having been offered to a bookseller, you had the good nature for my sake to consent to the publication of one more correct. This I was forced to before I had executed half my design, for the machinery was entirely wanting to complete it." Warburton reversed the parts. The requester was Pope, and Miss Fermor gave a consent which it was vain to refuse when the sole alternative presented to her was whether the poem should be printed surreptitiously, or under the supervision of its author. The miserable farce of circulating copies of a work, and then alleging that the publication had become a necessary measure of self-defence, was one of those transparent pretences which deceived no one except the person who fancied that he was deceiving. Pope never wrote a line of the smallest value which was not intended for the printer.

The motto from Martial was doubtless attached to the Rape of the Lock in the belief that Miss Fermor would be proud to countenance the misrepresentation. The poet was mistaken. "A few years ago," says Dr. Johnson, "a niece of Mrs. Fermor, who presided in an English convent at Paris, mentioned Pope's work with very little gratitude, rather as an insult than an honour; and she may be supposed to have inherited the opinion of her family."[308] Pope told Spence that "nobody but Sir George Brown was angry," and Warburton says that Miss Fermor "took the poem so well as to give about copies of it," but we now know that Johnson was right in his inference. "Sir Plume blusters, I hear," wrote Pope to the younger Caryll, Nov. 8, 1712, five months after the Rape of the Lock appeared; "nay, the celebrated lady herself is offended, and, which is stranger, not at herself, but me. Is not this enough to make a writer never be tender of another's character or fame?" Respect for the fame and feelings of his heroine was not an act of grace; it was an imperious duty. At the request of a common friend he had composed a poem for an amiable purpose upon an incident of private life, and it would have been a hateful abuse of his commission, a slanderous violation of domestic sanctities, if he had penned a word which could sully the reputation of an innocent maiden. He is not free from reproach. Without intending to transgress he offended from inherent want of delicacy. He made Belinda the subject of some gross double meanings, which provoked the ribald comments of the critics, and, unless a morbid love of notoriety had extinguished feminine purity, she must have been deeply outraged by being associated with these licentious allusions. Her indignation may appear to have come too late, for though her consent to the publication of the work, when there was no real choice, does not involve approval, she might, through her friends, have effectually demanded the suppression of degrading couplets. Her very resentment, however, when she read the work in print, is a presumption that they were not in the manuscript which was sent her, and indeed it is incredible that she, or her family, could ever have sanctioned such revolting personalities. They are a sad exhibition of the ingrained coarseness of Pope's taste,--of his incapacity to conceive the idea of womanly homage to outward decency, to say nothing of innate refinement and modesty.

In the interval between the first and second edition of the Rape of the Lock, Pope was compelled to acknowledge that he had inflicted an injury on Miss Fermor. "I have some thoughts," he wrote to Caryll, Dec. 15, 1713, "of dedicating the poem to her by name, as a piece of justice in return to the wrong interpretations she has suffered under on the score of that piece." He tried a preface "which salved the lady's honour without affixing her name," but she preferred the dedication. She wished to be dissociated from his heroine, and he propitiated her by saying, all the incidents are "fabulous except the loss of your hair; and the character of Belinda, as it is now managed, resembles you in nothing but beauty." "I believe," he wrote to Caryll, January 9, 1714, "I have managed the dedication so nicely that it can neither hurt the lady nor the author. I writ it very lately, and upon great deliberation. The young lady approves of it, and the best advice in the kingdom, of the men of sense, has been made use of in it, even to the treasurer's." Plainer understandings will be puzzled to discover what scope there could be for the "great deliberation" of the poet, and the advice of all the ablest men throughout the kingdom, including the prime minister, Lord Oxford, in making a simple declaration of a simple fact. To complete the absolution of Miss Fermor, Pope substituted another motto for the lines from Martial, and when their temporary withdrawal had answered his purpose he restored them in the quarto edition of his works.

A more celebrated feud, if we are to trust the account of Warburton, took its rise from the Rape of the Lock. The success of the first edition "encouraged the author to give it a more important air" by the addition of the supernatural machinery. "Full," says Warburton, "of this noble conception he communicated it to Mr. Addison, who he imagined would have been equally delighted with the improvement. On the contrary, he had the mortification to see his friend receive it coldly; and even to advise him against any alteration, for that the poem in its original state was a delicious little thing, and, as he expressed it, _merum sal_. Mr. Pope was shocked for his friend, and then first began to open his eyes to his character."[309] The charge has been exposed by Johnson, Macaulay, and Croker. Mr. Croker denies that the machinery was a plausible suggestion. "I believe Addison's advice," he says, "to have been a sincere and just opinion, and such as I should have expected from the purity of his taste. The original poem tells the actual story and exhibits a picture of real manners with so much wit and poetry, but also with so much simplicity and clearness, that I can well imagine that Addison might be alarmed at the proposition of introducing sylphs and gnomes into a scene of common life already so admirably described. Even now, with the advantage of seeing all the brilliancy with which Pope has worked out what Addison thought an unfortunate conception, I will not deny that such is the charm of truth that I have lately read the first sketch with more interest, though certainly with less admiration than its more fanciful and more gorgeous successor, which really seems something like a beauty oppressed with the weight and splendour of her ornaments. The game at cards, the most ingenious and beautiful of all the additions, is only reality splendidly embellished, and would have been equally well placed in the first sketch." Macaulay vindicates the counsel of Addison upon a general principle, irrespective of the apparent want of fitness between supernatural agents and the frivolities of fashion,--a principle "the result of wide and long experience," which is, that a successful work of imagination is injured by being recast. "We cannot at this moment," he says, "call to mind a single instance in which this rule has been transgressed with happy effect, except the instance of the Rape of the Lock. Tasso recast his Jerusalem. Akenside recast his Pleasures of the Imagination, and his Epistle to Curio. Pope himself, emboldened no doubt by the success with which he had expanded and remodelled the Rape of the Lock, made the same experiment on the Dunciad. All these attempts failed. Who was to foresee that Pope would once in his life be able to do what he could not himself do twice, and what nobody else has ever done? Addison's advice was good, but if it had been bad, why should we pronounce it dishonest? Scott tells us that one of his best friends predicted the failure of Waverley. Herder adjured Goethe not to take so unpromising a subject as Faust. Hume tried to dissuade Robertson from writing the History of Charles the Fifth. Nay Pope himself was one of those who prophesied that Cato would never succeed on the stage, and advised Addison to print it without risking a representation.[310] But Scott, Goethe, Robertson, Addison, had the good sense and generosity to give their advisers credit for the best intentions. Pope's heart was not of the same kind with theirs."[311] Of the examples, which Macaulay quotes, of poems marred in the attempt to mend them, the Jerusalem of Tasso was the only one which existed in the days of Addison; and the Jerusalem was not a parallel case, for the mind of Tasso was diseased when he remodelled his work, and he yielded, against his judgment, to the cavils of critics instead of obeying the self-born calls of imagination. Most men nevertheless would instinctively recommend that whatever was beautiful should be let alone, lest it should be deteriorated in the effort to make it better. When Pope boasted that the adaptation of the new parts to the old, in the Rape of the Lock, was the greatest triumph of his skill, he himself confessed the risk and difficulty of the process, and justified the misgivings of Addison. But besides the general hazard, we should expect, with Mr. Croker, that Addison would have thought the particular project for improving the poem to be essentially bad. Pope had shown a predilection for heathen mythology, and his management of it had been clumsy and lifeless. His scheme would have called up to Addison's mind the interposition of the gods and goddesses in Homer and Virgil. The conjunction of these obsolete figments, under new names, with the trivialities of modern society, would have seemed incongruous and pedantic,[312] and the previous works of Pope would have compelled the conclusion that he had not the skill to deal with ethereal fiction. Addison could neither have divined from a conversational description how perfectly the agents would be adapted to their office, nor from Pope's existing poetry how delicious they would be rendered by the felicity of the execution. Unless there was the strongest presumption that the recommendation to leave the poem unaltered was made in good faith, we should not be warranted in believing the story, for no reliance could be placed on the unsupported testimony of Pope when he was safe from contradiction, and his object was to damage the reputation of a rival.

Pope is convicted on his own evidence. He admits that the incident "_first_ opened his eyes to the character of Addison," and by consequence that Addison's conduct had been hitherto blameless. He thus bears witness against himself of his readiness to impute the basest motives upon the most trumpery pretexts. Being "_shocked_" at the moral turpitude of "his friend," he could never again have treated him with cordiality and confidence, and the alienation which ensued, must, on Pope's own showing, have had its origin in Pope's morbid suspicions. But there was an earlier transaction, which turns the tables with fatal force upon Pope. Anterior to the conversation on the Rape of the Lock,[313] he urged Lintot the bookseller to persuade Dennis to criticise Addison's Cato.[314] Dennis published his Remarks, and Pope followed with his anonymous pamphlet, Dr. Norris's Narrative of the Phrenzy of J.D.,--a coarse, dull production, consisting of nothing but low, intemperate abuse. Pope's device pointed to three results. He would damage the reputation of Addison's play; he would provoke him into turning his wrath upon Dennis; and he would secure an opening for venting his own spleen against the critic without seeming to be actuated by personal spite. Addison was disgusted with the pamphlet; and, ignorant probably of its parentage, he let Dennis know that he repudiated and condemned it.[315] The worst was to come. More than twenty years afterwards Pope dressed up a letter which he had written to Caryll, on the occasion of an attack in the Flying Post, and pretended that it had been written to Addison when his play was assailed by Dennis. In this fraudulent document Pope congratulates him on his share in "the envy and calumny, which is the portion of all good and great men," and declares that "he felt more warmth" at the Remarks on Cato than when he read the Reflections on the Essay on Criticism.[316] Having prompted the abuse, he published a fictitious letter to persuade the world that he had overflowed with generous indignation. He wanted posterity to believe that he had poured out these magnanimous sentiments to Addison, who returned him envy and malice. His object was to magnify his own virtues, and transfer his meanness and jealousy to the amiable genius he had formerly wronged. "Addison," he said, "was very kind to me at first, but my bitter enemy afterwards,"[317] and with the consciousness of guilt, he tried to conceal that he had forfeited the kindness by misconduct. He was bold with his forgeries and falsehoods in the confidence that a dead man could tell no tales. Happily there are flaws in the best-laid dishonest plots, and the hour of retribution comes at last. At what period or in what degree Addison himself detected Pope's practices is not definitely known, but he discovered enough to avoid him. "Leave him as soon as you can," he said to Lady Mary W. Montagu; "he will certainly play you some devilish trick else. He has an appetite to satire."

Up to the Rape of the Lock, Pope had only put borrowed thoughts into verse. He now broke out into originality, but not without some obligation to his predecessors. In one place De Quincey maintains that the Rape of the Lock was not suggested by the Lutrin, because Pope did not read French with ease to himself, and in another place that Voltaire must have been wrong in saying that "Pope could hardly read French," inasmuch as there are "numerous proofs that he had read Boileau with so much feeling of his peculiar merit that he has appropriated and naturalised some of his best passages."[319] The second statement of De Quincey was the latest and the truest. Pope refers to the Lutrin in his manuscript notes on the Remarks of Dennis, and certainly had it in his mind when he framed the scheme of his poem. "The treasurer," it is said, in the summary prefixed to Boileau's work, "is the highest dignitary in the chapter. The precentor is the second dignitary. In front of the seat of the latter there was formerly an enormous reading-desk, which almost concealed him. He had it removed, and the treasurer wanted to put it back. Hence arose the dispute which is the subject of the present poem." Boileau converted the squabble into a satire on the indolence, the sensuality, and pride of the cathedral clergy in the licentious reign of Louis XIV. Pope converted the quarrel between Miss Fermor and Lord Petre into a satire on the frivolities of a young lady of fashion from her morning toilet to the close of her giddy day. Boileau called the Lutrin a new species of burlesque, "because," he said, "in other burlesques Dido and Æneas speak like fishwomen and scavengers; here a barber and his wife speak like Dido and Æneas." Pope adopted a similar vein, and invested the trifles of a gay and frivolous life with an adventitious importance. Boileau parodied some well-known passages of Virgil. Pope parodied both Virgil and Homer. The Lutrin opens with Discord appearing to the sleeping treasurer, and warning him against the encroachments of the rebellious precentor. The enlarged Rape of the Lock opens with Ariel appearing, in a dream, to Belinda, and beseeching her to beware of some disastrous impending event. The raillery on the foibles of women, which is the central idea in Pope's poem, was caught up from the exquisite pleasantry of Addison, who, in the Tatlers and Spectators, had endeavoured to laugh the fair sex out of their levities of behaviour, and extravagances of dress. Through his delicate humour, it had become the popular topic in the light literature of the day.

Johnson says of the sylphs that they are "a new race of beings," and that there is nothing "but the names of his agents which Pope has not invented." This is an exaggeration. The names were a considerable part of the novelty; for, in the fundamental conception, the sylphs in the Rape of the Lock were the time-honoured fairies of English literature. Their immediate prototypes are the elves of Shakespeare. The sprites of Pope belong to the same family with the diminutive, joyous, ethereal creatures which anciently crept into acorn cups, couched in the bells of cowslips, or lived under blossoms; who sported in air, rode on the curled clouds, and flitted with the swiftness of thought over land and sea; who hung dew-drops on flowers, fetched jewels from the deep, shaded sleeping eyes from moonbeams with wings plucked from painted butterflies, and who mingled, benignly or maliciously, in all but the graver varieties of human affairs. Pope acknowledges the ancestry of his newly-named race when Ariel,--whose own name confesses his parentage,--addressing his subjects, says,

Ye sylphs and sylphids, to your chief give ear; Fays, fairies, genii, elves, and demons hear.

The benevolent and mischievous fairies of old days were, in their turn, little more than the good and evil angels dwarfed to suit their lighter functions. For the precise outward aspect which Pope assigned to the sylphs, he was beholden to Spenser, with whose works he was well acquainted:

And all about her neck and shoulders flew A flock of little loves, and sports, and joys, With nimble wings of gold and purple hue, Whose shapes seemed not like to terrestrial boys, But like to angels playing heav'nly toys.

These are just the beings who hover round Belinda. But though Johnson's claim for Pope is over-stated, his supernatural agents are the product of genius. The vividness with which they are described, the novel offices they fulfil, the poetic beauty with which they are invested, even when engaged in employments not in their nature poetic, constitute them a distinct variety, and they rise up before our minds like a fresh creation, and not as the reflection of antecedent familiar forms. The remark is true of the work throughout. What Pope borrowed he varied, embellished, and combined in a manner which leaves the poem unique. Some of the parts may be traced to earlier sources, but few master-pieces have more originality in the aggregate.

"The Rape of the Lock," says De Quincey, "is the most exquisite monument of playful fancy that universal literature offers."[320] "The Rape of the Lock," says Hazlitt, "is the most exquisite specimen of filigree work ever invented. It is made of gauze and silver spangles. The most glittering appearance is given to everything--to paste, pomatum, billets-doux, and patches. Airs, languid airs, breathe around; the atmosphere is perfumed with affectation. A toilet is described with the solemnity of an altar raised to the goddess of vanity, and the history of a silver bodkin is given with all the pomp of heraldry. No pains are spared, no profusion of ornament, no splendour of poetic diction to set off the meanest things. The balance between the concealed irony and the assumed gravity is as nicely trimmed as the balance of power in Europe. The little is made great and the great little. You hardly know whether to laugh or weep. It is the triumph of insignificance, the apotheosis of foppery and folly. It is the perfection of the mock-heroic."[321] The world of fashion is displayed in its most gorgeous and attractive hues, and everywhere the emptiness is visible beneath the outward splendour. The beauty of Belinda, the details of her toilet, her troops of admirers, her progress up the Thames, the game at cards, the aerial escort which attend upon her, are all set forth with unrivalled grace and fascination, and all bear the impress of vanity and vexation. Nothing can exceed the art with which the satire is blended with the pomp, mocking without disturbing the unsubstantial gewgaw. The double vein is kept up with sustained skill in the picture of the outward charms and inward frivolity of women. Ariel, describing the influence of the sylphs upon them, says, that

With varying vanities from ev'ry part, They shift the moving toy-shop of their heart.

This is the tone throughout. Their hearts are toy-shops. They reverse the relative importance of things, and, as Hazlitt says, the "little" with them "is great, and the great little." The Bible is mixed up with "files of pins, puffs, powders, patches, billets-doux." Chastity and china, prayers and masquerades, love and jewellery are put upon a nominal equality, but with a manifest preponderance in favour of the china, masquerades, and jewellery. The female passion is for carriages, dress, cards, rank, and it is an insoluble mystery that "a belle should reject a lord." The "grave Clarissa," who rebukes the "airs and flights" of Belinda, can offer no higher motive for intermixing solid with trifling qualities than

That _men_ may say, when we the front-box grace, "Behold the first in virtue as in face!"

The continuous raillery against female foibles is playful in its poignancy. The whole wears a festive air, and has none of the ill-nature and venom which marked Pope's later satire.

In allotting their several functions to the sylphs, Ariel reserves Belinda's lap-dog for his own especial charge:

Ariel himself shall be the guard of Shock.

Dennis said it was "contrary to all manner of judgment and decorum" that the chief of the aerial train should be "only the keeper of a vile Iceland cur," instead of protecting "the lady's favourite lock."[322] Ruffhead repeated the futile objection.[323] "Black omens" announced that some misfortune would befall Belinda, but the precise calamity had been "wrapped by the fates in night." For aught Ariel knew, the attack might be directed against the favourite dog, which is neither "vile" nor "a cur" in Pope's poem, and which we may do Belinda the justice to believe was more precious in her eyes than even a favourite ringlet. She would rather have sacrificed her lock than her dog. Dennis from hostility, and Ruffhead from dullness, missed the meaning of the stroke. The climax of the omens which prefigured the coming disaster was that "Poll sat mute, and Shock was most unkind." The "shrieks" of the heroine, when the catastrophe arrived, were such as "when husbands or when lap-dogs breathe their last." A gnome bent upon mischief made pampered lap-dogs ill, and bright eyes wept over them. The undue fondness for dogs and parrots, to the depreciation of the higher claims of humanity, was no uncommon failing, and Pope's design was to ridicule it. Locks of hair did not usurp the same supreme dominion, and Ariel, ignorant where the danger would light, is properly represented as guarding the pet dog, which had the first place in the affections of heartless women of fashion.

To the distempered mind of Dennis the sylphs appeared an absurd excrescence. "They neither promote," he says, "nor retard the danger of Belinda."[324] Johnson admits the force of the observation, and thinks it "implies some want of art that their power has not been sufficiently intermingled with the action." The criticism seems hasty. The sylphs have a large share in the fascination of Belinda. Their province is to heighten and protect her charms,--to preside at her toilet, to imprison essences, to save the powder from too rude a gale, to steal washes from the rainbow, to assist her blushes, and inspire her airs. They perform these offices up to the fatal moment, and are not an incumbrance to the narrative merely because they cannot avert the final stroke. Nay, their impotence to stay the crisis is in keeping with the general spirit of the poem. Belinda leads a life of vanity, and the sylphs are the ministers of vanity. They are lustrous with a butterfly beauty, the patrons of ephemeral folly, and it would be inconsistent with the moral if they could have ensured a perpetual triumph to weaknesses which inevitably terminate in mortification. Pope accounts for the failure of the watchful legion to turn aside the catastrophe. Ariel recognises that his power is gone when he perceives "an earthly lover lurking at Belinda's heart,"--an intimation, perhaps, that lovers are headstrong and incapable of guidance. Johnson asserts, and with as little reason, that the game of cards, like the machinery, has no connection with the subject of the poem. That subject is the exaltation of a beautiful young lady throughout a day of glittering fashion, till the hollow pomp ends in humiliation, anger, and tears. Whatever amusements and pageantry entered into a day of the kind belonged directly to the theme, provided they could be made subservient to poetic effect.

When Ariel, baffled and weeping, is compelled to resign his charge, the gnomes rush upon the scene, and retain their ascendancy till near the end. They are but slightly sketched, and all we hear of the appearance they present is that they have "a dusky, melancholy" aspect, and "sooty pinions." Their functions are the opposite to those of the sylphs,--they give lap-dogs diseases, discompose head-dresses, raise pimples on beauteous faces, engender pride, and spoil graces. Dennis detected a flaw. Umbriel descends to the Cave of Spleen, and procures from the goddess a bag filled with the impetuous, and a phial with the depressing passions. The gnome empties the bag of "sighs, sobs, and the war of tongues" on Belinda, who immediately "burns with more than mortal ire." The gnome next breaks over her the phial of "fainting fears and soft sorrows," when she exchanges her expression of rage for "eyes half-languishing, half-drowned in tears." "Now," says Dennis, "what could be more useless, whether we look upon the bag or the bottle?"[325] Without any assistance from the contents of the bag the "livid lightning had flashed from Belinda's eyes," and she had "rent the affrighted skies with her screams of horror." Without any assistance from the bottle she was found, on the gnome's return, sunk in the arms of a friend, "her hair unbound, and her eyes dejected." Pope replied on the margin of his copy of Dennis's pamphlet, that Juno in the Æneid summons Alecto from the infernal regions to stir up Amata, who was already burning with anger. This was no answer if the cases had been parallel, which they were not, for Amata's anger was only a passive irritation, and Alecto was sent to goad her into active fury. A few words would have obviated the criticism of Dennis, but the Cave of Spleen would still be out of place. The personifications of ill-nature, affectation, and diseased fancies are literal descriptions of men and women transferred from the surface of the globe to a pretended world at its centre. Where no invention is displayed, where there is nothing to gratify and beguile the imagination, the departure from fact is distasteful to the mind. Instead of copying classic fables, unsuited to modern times, Pope might have exhibited the inhabitants of his Cave of Spleen in the midst of that society to which they belonged, and ascribed their repulsive qualities to the instigation of the gnomes. These rather nugatory beings would have gained in importance, and the pictures of the peevish, the affected, and the splenetic would have gained in force and truth.

Dennis justly found fault with particular passages, which are equally false to social usages, and the general conception of the poem. The exultation of Belinda at winning a game of cards takes the form of "shouts which fill the sky," and which are echoed back from "the woods and long canals." The impertinence of the baron in cutting off her curl required a strong expression of indignation, but not that "the affrighted skies should be rent with screams of horror." At the conclusion of the battle, which in some of its incidents is a mere vulgar brawl, Belinda again manifests her stentorian propensities by "roaring in a louder strain than fierce Othello." There is no affinity between Belinda gentle, graceful, and captivating, and Belinda shouting, screaming, and roaring. Pope called his poem "heroi-comical," and it is evident that he attached different meanings to the word. It was "heroi-comical" to bring supernatural machinery to bear upon common-place life, and surround the toilet and card-table with a fairy brilliancy. It was equally "heroi-comical" to give vent to the ebullitions of tragic or jovial frenzy on trivial occasions. The first species of the "heroi-comical" lent a borrowed splendour to its objects; the second species was burlesque, and reduced the heroine in her angry moods, to the level of a coarse, plebeian termagant, and in her joyous moments to that of an unmannerly, low-bred romp. The two species of the "heroi-comical" could not be applied to the same person without jarring discordance, and fortunately the burlesque and disenchanting element is only sparingly introduced.

"The Rape of the Lock," said Dennis, "is an empty trifle, which cannot have a moral." The Lutrin, he maintains, on the contrary, is "an important satirical poem upon the luxury, pride, and animosities of the _popish clergy_, and the moral is, that when christians, and especially the _clergy_, run into great heats about _religious_ trifles, their animosity proceeds from the want of that _religion_ which is the pretence of their quarrel."[326] Pope erased the epithet "religious," and substituting "female sex" for "popish clergy," "ladies" for "clergy," and "sense" for "religion," claimed the description for the Rape of the Lock. Dennis quotes some lines in which Boileau, he says, gives "broad hints of his real meaning," and Pope writes on the margin the words, "Clarissa's speech,"--a speech which is more definite than any of the hints in the Lutrin. In delicious verse Clarissa dwells on the transitory power of a handsome face, insists on the superior influence of good humour, and concludes with the couplet,--

Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll! Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

The moral here summed up pervades the poem, which is a continuous satire on a tinsel existence. The injunction to be sweet-tempered is indignantly rejected by Belinda, for the piece was professedly founded on a subsisting feud, but the common sense of the admonitions shames the folly which rejects them. Dennis undertook an impossible task when he laboured to demonstrate the superiority of Boileau. The Lutrin is stilted, extravagant, and prosaic by the side of the Rape of the Lock.

Dennis's pamphlet against the Rape of the Lock consisted of seven letters and a preface. Of four of these letters, Pope has written, in his copy, sarcastic summaries, which throw no light on his poem, but which betray by their exaggeration, his soreness at the criticisms.