The Age of Pope / (1700-1744)

by John Dennis

THE POETS.

CHAPTER I.

ALEXANDER POPE.

It is not unreasonable to call the period we are considering 'the Age of Pope.' He is the representative poet of his century. Its literary merits and defects are alike conspicuous in his verse, and he stands immeasurably above the numerous versifiers who may be said to belong to his school. Savage Landor has observed that there is no such thing as a school of poetry, and this is true in the sense that the essence of this divine art cannot be transmitted, but the form of the art may be, and Pope's style of workmanship made it readily imitable by accomplished craftsmen. Although he affected to call poetry an idle trade he devoted his whole life to its pursuit, and there are few instances in literature in which genius and unwearied labour have been so successfully united. It is to Pope's credit, that, with everything against him in the race of life, he attained the goal for which he started in his youth. The means he employed to reach it were frequently perverse and discreditable, but the courage with which he overcame the obstacles in his path commands our admiration.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744).

Alexander Pope was born in London on May 21st, 1688. He was the only son of his father, a merchant or tradesman, and a Roman Catholic at a time when the members of that church were proscribed by law. The boy was a cripple from his birth, and suffered from great bodily weakness both in youth and manhood. Looking back upon his life in after years he called it a 'long disease.' The elder Pope seems to have retired from business soon after his son's birth, and at Binfield, nine miles from Windsor, twenty-seven years of the poet's life were spent. As a 'papist' Pope was excluded from the Universities and from every public career, but even under happier circumstances his health would have condemned him to a secluded life. He gained some instruction from the family priest, and also went for a short time to school, but for the most part he was self-educated, and studied so severely that at seventeen his life was probably saved by the sound advice of Dr. Radcliffe to read less and to ride on horseback every day. The rhyming faculty was very early developed, and to use his own phrase he 'lisped in numbers.' As a boy he felt the magic of Spenser, whose enchanting sweetness and boundless wealth of imagination have been now for three hundred years a joy to every lover of poetry. Something, too, he learned from Waller and from Sandys, both of whom, but especially the former, had been of service in giving smoothness to the iambic distich, in which all of Pope's best poems are written. Dryden, however, whom when a little boy he saw at Will's coffee-house—'Virgilium tantum vidi' records the memorable day—was the poet whose influence he felt most powerfully. Like Gray several years later, he declared that he learnt versification wholly from his works. From 'knowing Walsh,' the best critic in the nation in Dryden's opinion, the youthful Pope received much friendly counsel; and he had another wise friend in Sir William Trumbull, formerly Secretary of State, who recognized his genius, and gave him as warm a friendship as an old man can offer to a young one. The dissolute Restoration dramatist, Wycherley, was also his temporary companion. The old man, if Pope's story be true, asked him to correct his poems, which are indeed beyond correction, as the youthful critic appears to have hinted, and the two parted company.

The Pastorals, written, according to Pope's assertion, at the age of sixteen, were published in 1709, and won an amount of praise incomprehensible in the present day. Mr. Leslie Stephen has happily appraised their value in calling them 'mere school-boy exercises.' Not thus, however, were they regarded by the poet, or by the critics of his age, yet neither he nor they could have divined the rapid progress of his fame, and that in about six years' time he would be regarded as the greatest of living poets. The Essay on Criticism, written, it appears, in 1709, was published two years later, and received the highest honour a poem could then have. It was praised by Addison in the Spectator as 'a very fine poem,' and 'a masterpiece in its kind.' The 'kind,' suggested by the Ars Poetica of Horace, and the Art Poétique of Boileau—translated with Dryden's help by Sir William Soame—suited the current taste for criticism and argument in rhyme, which had led Roscommon to write an Essay on Translated Verse, and Sheffield an Essay on Poetry. The Essay on Criticism is a marvellous production for a young man who had scarcely passed his maturity when it was published. To have written lines and couplets that live still in the language and are on everyone's lips is an achievement of which any poet might be proud, and there are at least twenty such lines or couplets in the poem.

In 1713 Windsor Forest appeared. Through the most susceptible years of life the poet had lived in the country, but Nature and Pope were not destined to become friends; he looked at her 'through the spectacles of books' and his description of natural objects is invariably of the conventional type. Although never a resident in London he was unable in the exercise of his art to breathe any atmosphere save that of the town, and might have said, in the words of Lessing to his friend Kleist, 'When you go to the country I go to the coffee-house.'[11]

The use, or as it would be more correct to say the abuse, of classical mythology in the description of rural scenes had the sanction of great names, and Pope was not likely to reject what Spenser and Milton had sanctioned. Gods and goddesses therefore play a conspicuous part in his description of the Forest. The following lines afford a fair illustration of the style throughout, and the sole merit of the poem is the smoothness of versification in which Pope excelled.

'Not proud Olympus yields a nobler sight,
Though gods assembled grace his towering height,
Than what more humble mountains offer here,
When in their blessings all those gods appear.
See Pan with flocks, with fruits Pomona crowned,
Here blushing Flora paints th' enamelled ground,
Here Ceres' gifts in waving prospect stand,
And nodding tempt the joyful reaper's hand;
Rich Industry sits smiling on the plains,
And peace and plenty tell a Stuart reigns.

Pope, who was never known to laugh, was a great wit, but his sense of humour was small, and the descent from these deities to Queen Anne savours not a little of bathos.

In 1712 Pope had published The Rape of the Lock, which Addison justly praised as 'a delicious little thing.' At the same time he advised the poet not to attempt improving it, which he proposed to do, and Pope most unreasonably attributed this advice to jealousy. In 1714 the delightful poem appeared in its present form with the machinery of sylphs and gnomes adopted from the mysteries of the Rosicrucians. Pope styles it an heroi-comical poem, and judged in the light of a burlesque it is conceived and executed with an art that is beyond praise. Lord Petre, a Roman Catholic peer, had cut off a lock of Miss Arabella Fermor's hair, much to the indignation of her family and possibly of the young lady also. Pope wrote the poem to remove the discord caused by the fatal shears, but its publication, and two or three offensive allusions it contained, only served to add to Miss Fermor's annoyance. 'The celebrated lady herself,' the poet wrote, '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?' But Pope, whose praise of women is too often a libel upon them, was not as tender as he ought to have been of the lady's reputation.

The offence felt by the heroine of the poem is now unheeded; the dainty art exhibited is a permanent delight, and our language can boast no more perfect specimen of the poetical burlesque than the Rape of the Lock. The machinery of the sylphs is managed with perfect skill, and nothing can be more admirable than the charge delivered by Ariel to the sylphs to guard Belinda from an apprehended but unknown danger. The concluding lines shall be quoted:

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

Another striking portion of the poem is the description of the Spanish game of Ombre, imitated from Vida's Scacchia Ludus. 'Vida's poem,' says Mr. Elwin, 'is a triumph of ingenuity, when the intricacy of chess is considered, and the difficulty of expressing the moves in a dead language. Yet the original is eclipsed by Pope's more consummate copy.'[12]

Many famous passages illustrative of Pope's art might be extracted from this poem, but it will suffice to give the portrait of Belinda:

'On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore,
Which Jews might kiss and infidels adore;
Her lively looks a sprightly mind disclose,
Quick as her eyes and as unfixed as those;
Favours to none, to all she smiles extends,
Oft she rejects, but never once offends.
Bright as the sun her eyes the gazers strike,
And, like the sun, they shine on all alike.
Yet graceful ease, and sweetness void of pride,
Might hide her faults, if belles had faults to hide:
If to her share some female errors fall,
Look on her face and you'll forget them all.'

The Temple of Fame, a liberal paraphrase of Chaucer's House of Fame, followed in 1715, and despite the praise of Steele, who declared that it had a thousand beauties, and of Dr. Johnson, who observes that every part is splendid, must be pronounced one of Pope's least attractive pieces. Two poems of the emotional and sentimental class, Eloisa to Abelard and the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady (1717), are more worthy of attention. Nowhere, probably, in the language are finer specimens to be met with of rhetorical pathos, but poets like Burns, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Tennyson can touch the heart more deeply by a phrase or couplet than Pope is able to do by his elaborate representations of passion. The reader is not likely to be affected by the following response of Eloisa to an invitation from the spirit world:

'I come, I come! prepare your roseate bowers,
Celestial palms and ever-blooming flowers.
Thither, where sinners may have rest, I go,
Where flames refined in breasts seraphic glow;
Thou, Abelard! the last sad office pay,
And smooth my passage to the realms of day;
See my lips tremble and my eye-balls roll,
Suck my last breath and catch my flying soul!
Ah no—in sacred vestments may'st thou stand,
The hallowed taper trembling in thy hand,
Present the Cross before my lifted eye,
Teach me at once and learn of me to die.'

The music or the fervour of the poem delighted Porson, famous for his Greek and his potations, and whether drunk or sober he would recite, or rather sing it, from the beginning to the end. The felicity of the versification is incontestable, but at the same time artifice is more visible than nature throughout the Epistle, and this is true also of The Elegy, a composition in which Pope's method of treating mournful topics is excellently displayed. The opening lines are suggested by Ben Jonson's Elegy on the Marchioness of Winchester, a lady whose death was also lamented by Milton. These we shall not quote, but take in preference a passage which is perhaps as graceful an expression of poetical rhetoric as can be found in Pope's verse.

'By foreign hands thy dying eyes were closed,
By foreign hands thy decent limbs composed,
By foreign hands thy humble grave adorned,
By strangers honoured, and by strangers mourned!
What though no friends in sable weeds appear,
Grieve for an hour, perhaps, then mourn a year,
And bear about the mockery of woe,
To midnight dances and the public show?
What though no weeping Loves thy ashes grace,
Nor polished marble emulate thy face?
What though no sacred earth allow thee room,
Nor hallowed dirge be muttered o'er thy tomb?
Yet shall thy grave with rising flowers be drest,
And the green turf lie lightly on thy breast;
There shall the morn her earliest tears bestow,
There the first roses of the year shall blow;
While angels with their silver wings o'ershade
The ground, now sacred by thy reliques made.'

For some years Pope had been brooding over and slowly labouring at a task which was destined to add greatly to his fame and also to his fortune.

In 1708 his early friend, Sir William Trumbull, had advised him to translate the Iliad, and five years later the poet, following the custom of the age, invited subscriptions to the work, which was to appear in six volumes at the price of six guineas. About this time Swift, who by the aid of his powerful pen was assisting Harley and St. John to rule the country, made Pope's acquaintance, and ultimately became perhaps the most faithful of his friends. Swift, who was able to help everybody but himself, zealously promoted the poet's scheme, and was heard to say at the coffee-houses that 'the best poet in England Mr. Pope a Papist' had begun a translation of Homer which he should not print till he had a thousand guineas for him.

He was not satisfied with this service, but introduced the poet to St. John, Atterbury, and Harley. The first volume of Pope's Homer appeared in 1715, and in the same year Addison's friend Tickell published his version of the first book of the Iliad. Pope affected to believe that this was done at Addison's instigation.

Already, as we have said, there had been a misunderstanding between the two famous wits, and Pope, whose irritable temperament led him into many quarrels and created a host of enemies, ceased from this time to regard Addison as a friend. Probably neither of them can be exempted from blame, and we can well believe that Addison, whose supremacy had formerly been uncontested, could not without some jealousy 'bear a brother near the throne,' but the chief interest of the estrangement to the literary student is the famous satire written at a later date, in which Addison appears under the character of Atticus.[13] It is necessary to add here that the whole story of the quarrel comes to us from Pope, who is never to be trusted, either in prose or verse, when he wishes to excuse himself at the expense of a rival.

Pope had no cause for discontent at his position; not even the strife of parties stood in the way of his Homer, which was praised alike by Whig and Tory, and brought the translator a fortune. It has been calculated that the entire version of the Iliad and Odyssey, the payments for which covered eleven years, yielded Pope a clear profit of about £9,000, and it is said to have made at the same time the fortune of his publisher. Pope, I believe, was the first poet who, without the aid of patronage or of the stage, was able to live in comfort from the sale of his works.

He knew how to value money, but fame was dearer to him than wealth, and of both he had now enough to satisfy his ambition. Posterity has not endorsed the general verdict of his contemporaries on his famous translation. He had to encounter indeed some severe comments, and Richard Bentley, the greatest classical scholar then living, must have vexed the sensitive poet when he told him that his version was a pretty poem but he must not call it Homer. By this criticism, however, as Matthew Arnold has observed, the work is judged in spite of all its power and attractiveness. Pope wants Homer's simplicity and directness, and his artifices of style are utterly alien to the Homeric spirit. Dr. Johnson quotes the judgment of critics who say that Pope's Homer 'exhibits no resemblance of the original and characteristic manner of the Father of Poetry, as it wants his awful simplicity, his artless grandeur, his unaffected majesty,' and observes that this cannot be totally denied. He argues, however, that even in Virgil's time the demand for elegance had been so much increased that mere nature could be endured no longer, that every age improves in elegance, that if some Ovidian graces are, alas! not to be found in the English Iliad 'to have added can be no great crime if nothing be taken away.' Johnson was not aware that to add 'poetical elegances' to the words and thoughts of a great poet is to destroy much of the beauty of his verse and many of its most striking characteristics. As well might he say that the beauty of a lovely woman can be enhanced by a profusion of trinkets, or that a Greek statue would be more worthy of admiration if it were elegantly dressed. Dr. Johnson says, with perfect truth, that Pope wrote for his own age, and it may be added that he exhibits extraordinary art in ministering to the taste of the age; yet it is hardly too much to affirm that in the exercise of his craft as a translator he is continually false to nature and therefore false to Homer.

On the other hand his Iliad if read as a story runs so smoothly, that the reader, and especially the young reader, is carried through the narrative without any sense of fatigue. It is not a little praise to say that it is a poem which every school-boy will read with pleasure, and in which every critical reader who is content to surrender his judgment for awhile, will find pleasure also. Mr. Courthope in his elaborate and masterly Life of Pope, which gives the coping stone to an exhaustive edition of the poet's works, praises a fine passage from the Iliad, which in his judgment attains perhaps the highest level of which the heroic couplet is capable, and 'I do not believe,' he adds, 'that any Englishman of taste and imagination can read the lines without feeling that if Pope had produced nothing but his translation of Homer, he would be entitled to the praise of a great original poet.'

Pope's editor could not perhaps have selected a better illustration of his best manner than this speech of Sarpedon to Glaucus, which is parodied in the Rape of the Lock. The concluding lines shall be quoted.

'Could all our care elude the gloomy grave,
Which claims no less the fearful than the brave,
For lust of fame I should not vainly dare
In fighting fields, nor urge the soul to war,
But since, alas! ignoble age must come,
Disease, and death's inexorable doom;
The life which others pay let us bestow,
And give to fame what we to nature owe;
Brave though we fall, and honoured if we live,
Or let us glory gain, or glory give.'

We may add that neither its false glitter nor Pope's inability—shared in great measure with every translator—to catch the spirit of the original, can conceal the sustained power of this brilliant work. Its merit is the more wonderful since the poet's knowledge of Greek was extremely meagre, and he is said to have been constantly indebted to earlier translations. Gibbon said that his Homer had every merit except that of faithfulness to the original; and Pope, could he have heard it, might well have been satisfied with the verdict of Gray, a great scholar as well as a great poet, that no other version would ever equal his.

All that has been hitherto said with regard to Pope and Homer relates to his version of the Iliad. On that he expended his best powers, and on that it is evident he bestowed infinite pains. The Odyssey, one of the most beautiful stories in the world, appears to have been taken up with a weary pen, and in putting it into English he sought the assistance of Broome and Fenton, two minor poets and Cambridge scholars. They translated twelve books out of the twenty-four, and so skilfully did they catch Pope's style that it is almost impossible to discern any difference between his work and theirs. The literary partnership led to one of Pope's discreditable manœuvres, in which, strange to say, he was assisted by Broome, whom he induced to set his name to a falsehood. Pope as we have said, translated twelve books, while eight were allotted to Broome and four to Fenton. Yet he led Broome, unknown to his colleague, to ascribe only three books to himself and two to Fenton, and at the same time the poet, who confessed that he could 'equivocate pretty genteely,' stated the amount he had paid for Broome's eight books as if it had been paid for three. The story is disgraceful both to Pope and Broome, and why the latter should have practised such a deception is unaccountable. He was a beneficed clergyman and a man of wealth, so that he could not have lied for money even if Pope had been willing to bribe him. Fenton was indignant, as he well might be, but he was too lazy or too good-natured to expose the fraud. Broome had his deserts later on, but Pope, who ridiculed him in the Dunciad, and in his Treatise on the Bathos, was the last man in the world entitled to render them.

The partnership in poetry which produced the Odyssey was not a great literary success, and most readers will prefer the version of Cowper, whose blank verse, though out of harmony with the rapid movement of the Iliad is not unfitted for the quieter beauties of the Odyssey.

In 1721, prior to the publication of his version, the poet had agreed to edit an edition of Shakespeare, a task as difficult as any which a man of letters can undertake. Pope was not qualified to achieve it. He was comparatively ignorant of Elizabethan literature, the dry labours of an editor were not to his taste, and he lacked true sympathy with the genius of the poet. Failure was therefore inevitable, and Theobald, who has some solid merits as a commentator, found it easy to discern and to expose the errors of Pope. For doing so he was afterwards 'hitched' into the Dunciad, and made in the first instance its hero. The "Shakespeare" was published in 1725 in six volumes quarto. 'Its chief claim,' Mr. Courthope writes, 'to interest at the present day, is that it forms the immediate starting-point for the long succession of Pope's satires.... The vexation caused to the poet by the undoubted justice of many of Theobald's strictures procured for the latter the unwelcome honour of being recognized as the King of the Dunces, and coupled with Bentley's disparaging mention of the Translation of the Iliad provoked the many contemptuous allusions to verbal criticism in Pope's later satires.'[14]

A striking peculiarity of Pope's art may be mentioned here. He was able only to play on one instrument, the heroic couplet. When he attempted any other form of verse the result, if not total failure, was mediocrity. It was a daring act of Pope to suggest by his Ode on St. Cecilia's Day, a comparison with the Alexander's Feast of Dryden. The performance is perfunctory rather than spontaneous, and the few lyrical efforts he attempted in addition, show no ear for music. The voice of song with which even the minor poets of the Elizabethan age were gifted was silent in England, though not in Scotland, during the first half of the eighteenth century, or if a faint note is occasionally heard, as in the lyrics of Gay, it is without the grace and joyous freedom of the earlier singers. Not that the lyrical form was wanting; many minor versifiers, like Hughes, Sheffield, Granville, and Somerville, wrote what they called songs, but unfortunately without an ear for singing.

In this short summary and criticism of a poet's literary life it would be out of place to insert many biographical details, were it not that, in the case of Pope, the student who knows little or nothing of the man will fail to understand his poetry. A distinguished critic has said that the more we know of Pope's age the better shall we understand Pope. With equal truth it may be said that a familiarity with the poet's personal character is essential to an adequate appreciation of his genius. His friendships, his enmities, his mode of life at Twickenham, the entangled tale of his correspondence, his intrigues in the pursuit of fame, his constitutional infirmities, the personal character of his satires, these are a few of the prominent topics with which a student of the poet must make himself conversant. It may be well, therefore, to give the history in brief outline, and we have now reached the crisis in his fortunes which will conveniently enable us to do so.

In 1716 Pope's family had removed from Binfield to Chiswick. A year later he lost his father, to whose memory he has left a filial tribute, and shortly afterwards he bought the small estate of five acres at Twickenham with which his name is so intimately associated. Before reaching the age of thirty Pope was regarded as the first of living poets. His income more than sufficed for all his wants. At Twickenham the great in intellect, and the great by birth, met around his table; he was welcomed by the highest society in the land, and although proud of his intimacy with the nobility, 'unplaced, unpensioned,' he was 'no man's heir or slave,' and jealously preserved his independence. 'Pope,' says Johnson, 'never set genius to sale, he never flattered those whom he did not love, or praised those whom he did not esteem,' and he was, we may add, in this respect a striking contrast to Dryden, who lavished his flatteries wholesale.

With a mother to whom he was tenderly attached, with troops of friends, with an undisputed supremacy in the world of letters, and with a vocation that was the joy of his heart,—if possessions like these can confer happiness, Pope should have been a happy man.

But his 'crazy carcass,' as the painter Jervas called it, was united to the most suspicious and irritable of temperaments, and the fine wine of his poetry was rarely free from bitterness in the cup. Pope could be a warm friend, but was not always a faithful one, and even women whose friendship he had enjoyed suffered from the venom of his satire. He was not a man to rise above his age, and it would be charitable to ascribe a portion of his grossness to it. Voltaire is said by his loose talk to have driven Pope's good old mother from the table at Twickenham; Walpole's language not only in his home at Houghton, but at Court, was insufferably coarse; and Pope wrote to ladies in language that must have disgusted modest women even in his free-speaking day. His foul lines on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, to whom he had formerly written in a most ridiculous strain of gallantry, and to whom he is said to have made love,[15] cannot easily be characterized in moderate language. Lady Mary had little delicacy herself, but the poet, who thought himself a gentleman, had no excuse for abusing her. Excuses indeed are not easily to be offered for Pope's moral defalcations. His life was a series of petty intrigues, trickeries, and deceptions. He could not, it has been said,—the conceit is borrowed from Young's Satires—'take his tea without a stratagem,' and knew how to utter the loftiest sentiments while acting the most contemptible of parts.

The long and intricate deceptions which he practised to secure the publication of his letters, while so manipulating them as to enhance his credit, were suspected to some extent in his own age, and have been painfully laid bare in ours. It is an amazing story, which may be read at large in Mr. Dilke's Papers of a Critic, or in the elaborate narrative of Mr. Elwin in the first volume of his edition of Pope. It will be there seen how the poet compiled fictitious letters, suppressed passages, altered dates, manufactured letters out of other letters, and secretly enabled the infamous bookseller Curll to publish his correspondence surreptitiously in order that he might have the excuse for printing it himself in a more carefully prepared form. The worst feature of the miserable story is the poet's conduct with regard to Swift, his oldest and most faithful friend. On this subject the writer may be allowed to quote what he has said elsewhere.

'Years before, Swift, who cared little for literary reputation, and never resorted to any artifice to promote it, had suspected Pope of a desire to make literary capital out of their correspondence, and the poet had excused himself according to his wonted fashion. After the publication by Curll, he begged Swift to return him his letters lest they should fall into the bookseller's hands. The Dean replied, no doubt to Pope's infinite chagrin, that they were safe in his keeping, as he had given strict orders in his will that his executors should burn every letter he might leave behind him. Afterwards he promised that Pope should eventually have them but declined giving them up during his lifetime. Hereupon Pope changed his tactics and begged that he might have the letters to print. The publication by Curll of two letters (probably another ruse of Pope's) formed an additional ground for urging his request. All his efforts were unavailing until he obtained the assistance of Lord Orrery, to whom Swift was at length induced to deliver up the letters. There was a hiatus in the correspondence and Pope took advantage of this and of a blunder made by Swift, whose memory at the time was not to be trusted, to hint, what he dared not directly assert, that the bulk of the collection remained with the Dean, and that Swift's own letters had been returned to him. We have now irresistible proof that the Dublin edition of the letters was taken from an impression sent from England and sent by Pope. Nor was this all. The poet acted with still greater meanness, for he had the audacity to deplore the sad vanity of Swift in permitting the publication of his correspondence, and to declare that "no decay of body is half so miserable."'[16]

That he had many fine qualities in spite of the littlenesses which mar his character one would be loath to doubt. Among his nobler traits was an ardent passion for literature, a courage which enabled him to face innumerable obstacles—'Pope,' says Mr. Swinburne, 'was as bold as a lion'—and a constant devotion to his parents, especially to his mother, who lived to a great age. There are no sincerer words in his letters than those which relate to Mrs. Pope. 'It is my mother only,' he once wrote, regretting his inability to leave home, 'that robs me of half the pleasure of my life, and that gives me the greatest at the same time,' and the lines expressing his affection for her are familiar to most readers. Truly does Johnson say that 'life has among its soothing and quiet comforts few things better to give than such a son.'

Among his lady friends the dearest was Martha Blount, the younger of two beautiful sisters, of whom Gay sang as 'the fair-haired Martha and Teresa brown.' They came of an old Roman Catholic family residing at Mapledurham, and were little more than girls when Pope first knew them. With the elder sister he quarrelled, but Martha was faithful to him for life, and when he was dying it is said that her coming in 'gave a new turn of spirits or a temporary strength to him.' Swift, as we have said, was one of the warmest of Pope's friends, and his letters to the poet are by far the most attractive portion of the published correspondence. He visited him at Twickenham more than once, and on one occasion spent some months under his roof. Bolingbroke, his 'guide, philosopher, and friend,' who for a time lived near to him at Dawley, was a frequent guest, so also, in the days of their intimacy, was Lady Mary, who had a house at Twickenham. Thomson the poet, too, lived not far off, and was visited by his brother bard, whom Thomson's barber describes as 'a strange, ill-formed, little figure of a man,' but he adds, 'I have heard him and Quin and Patterson[17] talk so together that I could have listened to them for ever.' Arbuthnot, one of the finest wits and best men of his time, who, as Swift said, could do everything but walk, was also a faithful friend of Pope; so was Gay, and so was Bishop Atterbury, who, as the poet said, first taught him to think "as becomes a reasonable creature."

James Craggs, who had been formerly Secretary of State, and was on the warmest terms of intimacy with the poet, resided for some time near his friend in order to enjoy the pleasure of his society. When in office he proposed to pay him a pension of £300 a year out of the secret service money, but Pope declined the offer. Statesmen and men of active pursuits cultivated the society of the poetical recluse, and Pope, whose compliments are monuments more enduring than marble, has recorded their visits to Twickenham:

'There, my retreat the best companions grace,
Chiefs out of war, and statesmen out of place,
There St. John mingles with my friendly bowl,
The feast of reason and the flow of soul,
And he whose lightning pierced the Iberian lines[18]
Now forms my quincunx and now ranks my vines.'

Among Pope's associates was the 'blameless Bethel,'

'—— who always speaks his thought,
And always thinks the very thing he ought,'

and Berkeley who had 'every virtue under heaven,' and Lord Bathurst who was unspoiled by wealth and joined

'With splendour, charity; with plenty, health;'

and 'humble Allen' who

'Did good by stealth and blushed to find it fame;'

and many another friend who lives in his verse and is secure of the immortality a poet can confer.

The five volumes which contain the letters between Pope and his friends exhibit an interesting picture of the times and of the writers. The poet's own letters, as may be supposed from the thought he bestowed on them, are full of artifice, and composed with the most elaborate care. Every sentence is elaborately turned, and the ease and naturalness which give a charm to the letters of Cowper and of Southey are not to be found in Pope. His epistles are weighted with compliments and with professions of the most exalted morality. 'He laboured them,' says Horace Walpole, 'as much as the Essay on Man, and as they were written to everybody they do not look as if they had been written to anybody.' Pope said once, what he did not mean, that he could not write agreeable letters. This was true; his letters are, as Charles Fox said, 'very bad,' but some of Pope's friends write admirably, and if there is much that can be skipped without loss in the correspondence, there is much which no student of the period can afford to neglect. 'There has accumulated,' says Mark Pattison, 'round Pope's poems a mass of biographical anecdote such as surrounds the writings of no other English author,' and not a little knowledge of this kind is to be gleaned from his correspondence.

In the years spent at Twickenham Pope produced his most characteristic work. It is as a satirist that he, with one exception, excels all English poets, and Pope's careful workmanship often makes his satirical touches more attractive than Dryden's.

'To attack vices in the abstract,' he said to Arbuthnot, 'without touching persons, may be safe fighting indeed, but it is fighting with shadows;' and Pope, under the plea of a detestation of vice, generally betrayed his contempt or hatred of the men whom he assailed. No doubt the critics and Grub Street hacks of the day gave him provocation. Pope, however, was frequently the first to take the field, and so eager was he to meet his foes that it would seem as if he enjoyed the conflict. Yet there were times when he felt acutely the assaults made upon him. 'These things are my diversion,' he once said, with a ghastly smile, and it was observed that he writhed in agony like a man undergoing an operation. The attacks made with these paper bullets, not only on the side of Grub Street but on his own, show very vividly the coarseness of London society. Courtesy was disregarded by men who claimed to be wits and scholars. Pope held, perhaps, a higher place in literature in his own day than Lord Tennyson has held in ours, for the best beloved of Laureates had noble rivals and friends who came near to him in fame, while Pope, until the publication of Thomson's Seasons, in 1730, stood alone in poetical reputation. Yet he was reviled in the language of Billingsgate, and had no scruple in using that language himself. Late in life Pope collected the libels made upon him and bound them in four volumes, but he omitted to mention the provocation which gave rise to many of them. Eusden, Colley Cibber, Dennis, Theobald, Blackmore, Smyth, and Lord Hervey are among the prominent criminals placed in Pope's pillory, and the student of the age may find an idle entertainment in tracking the poet's thorny course, while he gives an unenviable notoriety to names of which the larger number were 'born to be forgot.'

In 1725 Swift had written to Pope advising him not to immortalize the names of bad poets by putting them in his verse, and Pope replied to this advice by saying, 'I am much the happier for finding (a better thing than our wits) our judgments jump in the notion that all scribblers should be passed by in silence.' How entirely his inclination got the better of his judgment was seen three years later in the Dunciad. The first three books of this famous satire were published in 1728. It is generally regarded as Pope's masterpiece, but the accuracy of such an estimate is doubtful. So heavily weighted is the poem with notes, prefaces, and introductions that the text appears to be smothered by them. It was Pope's aim to mystify his readers, and in this he has succeeded, for the mystifications of the poem even confound the commentators. The personalities of the satire excited a keen interest, and much amusement to readers who were not included in Pope's black list of dunces. At the same time it roused a number of authors to fury, as it well might. His satire is often unjust, and he includes among the dunces men wholly undeserving of the name, who had had the misfortune to offend him. To place a great scholar like Bentley, an eloquent and earnest preacher like Whitefield, and a man of genius like Defoe among the dunces was to stultify himself, and if Pope in his spite against Theobald found some justification for giving the commentator pre-eminence for dulness in three books of the Dunciad, his anger got the better of his wit when in Book IV. he dethroned Theobald to exalt Colley Cibber. For Cibber, with a thousand faults, so far from being dull had a buoyancy of heart and a sprightliness of intellect wholly out of harmony with the character he is made to assume.

That he might have some excuse for his dashing assaults in the Dunciad, Pope had published in the third volume of the Miscellanies, of which he and Swift, Arbuthnot and Gay were the joint authors, an Essay on Bathos in which several writers of the day were sneered at. The assault provoked the counter-attack for which Pope was looking, and he then produced the satire which was already prepared for the press. In its publication the poet, as usual, made use of trickery and deception. At first he issued an imperfect edition with initial letters instead of names, but on seeing his way to act more openly, the poem appeared in a large edition with names and notes.

'In order to lessen the danger of prosecution for libel,' Mr. Courthope writes, 'he prevailed on three peers, with whom he was on the most intimate terms, the good-natured Lord Bathurst, the easy-going Earl of Oxford, and the magnificent Earl of Burlington, to act as his nominal publishers; and it was through them that copies of the enlarged edition were at first distributed, the booksellers not being allowed to sell any in their shops. The King and Queen were each presented with a copy by the hands of Sir R. Walpole. In this manner, as the report quickly spread that the poem was the property of rich and powerful noblemen, there was a natural disinclination on the part of the dunces to take legal proceedings, and the prestige of the Dunciad being thus fairly established, the booksellers were allowed to proceed with the sale in regular course.'[19]

The Dunciad owes its merit to the literary felicities with which its pages abound. The theme is a mean one. Pope, from his social eminence at Twickenham, looks with scorn on the authors who write for bread, and with malignity on the authors whom he regarded as his enemies. There is, for the most part, little elevation in his method of treatment, and we can almost fancy that we see a cruel joy in the poet's face as he impales the victims of his wrath. Some portions of the Dunciad are tainted with the imagery which, to quote the strong phrase of Mr. Churton Collins, often makes Swift as offensive as a polecat,[20] and there is no part of it which can be read with unmixed pleasure, if we except the noble lines which conclude the satire. Those lines may be almost said to redeem the faults of the poem, and they prove incontestably, if such proof be needed, Pope's claim to a place among the poets.

'In vain, in vain,—the all-composing Hour
Resistless falls; the Muse obeys the Power.
She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold,
Of Night primæval and of Chaos old!
Before her Fancy's gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying rainbows die away.
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
The meteor drops, and in a flash expires,
As one by one at dread Medea's strain,
The sickening stars fade off the etherial plain;
As Argus' eyes by Hermes' wand opprest,
Closed one by one to everlasting rest;
Thus at her felt approach and secret might,
Art after Art goes out, and all is Night.
See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled,
Mountains of Casuistry heaped o'er her head!
Philosophy that leaned on Heaven before,
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more;
Physic of Metaphysic begs defence,
And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense!
See Mystery to Mathematics fly!
In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.
Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,
And unawares Morality expires.
Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;
Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restored;
Light dies before thy uncreating word;
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And universal Darkness buries All.'

The publication of the Dunciad showed Pope where his main strength as a poet lay. That the writers he had attacked, in many instances without provocation, should resent the ungrateful notoriety conferred upon them was inevitable. In self-defence, and to add to the provocation already given, he started a paper called the Grub Street Journal, which existed for eight years—Pope, who had no scruple in 'hazarding a lie,' denying all the time that he had any connection with it.

His next work of significance, The Essay on Man, a professedly philosophical poem by an author who knew little of philosophy, was published in four epistles, in 1733-4. Bolingbroke's brilliant, versatile, and shallow intellect had strongly impressed Swift, and had also fascinated Pope. It has been commonly supposed that the Essay owes its existence to his suggestion and guidance. The poet believed in his philosophy, and had the loftiest estimate of his genius. In the last and perhaps finest passage of the poem he calls Bolingbroke the 'master of the poet and the song,' and draws a picture of the ambitious statesman as beautiful as it is false. In Mark Pattison's Introduction to The Essay on Man,[21] which every student of Pope will read, he objects to the notion that the poet took the scheme of his work from Bolingbroke, observing that both derived their views from a common source.

'Everywhere, in the pulpit, in the coffee-houses, in every pamphlet, argument on the origin of evil, on the goodness of God, and the constitution of the world was rife. Into the prevailing topic of polite conversation Bolingbroke, who returned from exile in 1723, was drawn by the bent of his native genius. Pope followed the example and impulse of his friend's more powerful mind. Thus much there was of special suggestion. But the arguments or topics of the poem are to be traced to books in much vogue at the time; to Shaftesbury's Characteristics (1711), King on the Origin of Evil (1702), and particularly to Leibnitz, Essais de Théodicée (1710).'

In admitting that Pope followed the impulse of a more powerful mind, Mr. Pattison asserts as much perhaps as can be known with certainty as to Bolingbroke's influence, but it is reasonable to believe that the close intercourse of the two men did immensely sway the more impressionable, and, so far as philosophy is concerned, the more ignorant of the two. Mr. Pattison also overlooks the fact that Pope confessed to Warburton that he had never read a line of Leibnitz in his life. That the poet acknowledges his large debt to Bolingbroke, and that Bolingbroke confesses it was due, is all that can be declared with certainty. That which makes the Essay worthy the reading is the fruit, not of the argument but of the poetry, and for that Pope trusted to his own genius.

His attempt to 'vindicate the ways of God to man' is confused and contradictory, and no modern reader, perplexed with the mystery of existence, is likely to gain aid from Pope. Nominally a Roman Catholic, and in reality a deist, apart from poetry he does not seem to have had strong convictions on any subject, and was content to be swayed by the opinions current in society. In undertaking to write an ethical work like the Essay his ambition was greater than his strength, yet if Pope's philosophy does not 'find' us, to use Coleridge's phrase, it did appeal to a large number of minds in his own day, and had not lost its popularity at a later period. The poem has been frequently translated into French, into Italian, and into German; it was pronounced by Voltaire to be the most useful and sublime didactic poem ever written in any language; it was admired by Kant and quoted in his lectures; and it received high praise from the Scotch philosopher, Dugald Stewart. The charm of poetical expression is lost or nearly lost in translations, and while the sense may be retained the aroma of the verse is gone. The popularity of the Essay abroad is therefore not easily to be accounted for, unless we accept the theory that the shallow creed on which it is based suited an age less earnest than our own.[22]

Pope has no strong convictions in this poem, but he has many moods. On one page he is a pantheist, on another he says what he probably did not mean, that God inspires men to do evil, and on a third that 'all our knowledge is ourselves to know.' Nowhere in the argument does Pope seem to have a firm standing, and De Quincey is not far wrong in saying that it is 'the realization of anarchy.'

Read the poem for its poetical merits and you will forget its defects. Pope was a superficial teacher, but direct teaching is not the end of poetry. The Essay on Man is not a poem which can be read and re-read with ever-growing delight, but there are passages in it of as fine an order as any that he has composed on more familiar subjects. Pope was, as Sir William Hamilton said, a curious reader, and the ideas versified in the poem may be traced to a variety of sources. Students who wish to follow this track will find all the help they need in Mr. Pattison's instructive notes, and in the comments attached to the poem in Elwin and Courthope's edition. In his Introduction Mr. Pattison observes that 'the subject of the Essay on Man is not, considered in itself, one unfit for poetry. Had Pope had a genius for philosophy there was no reason why he should not have selected a philosophical subject. Didactic poetry is a mistake if not a contradiction in terms. But poetry is not necessarily didactic because its subject is philosophical.'

It is always difficult to define the themes suitable for poetry. Many theories have been formed as to the scope of the art, and poets have been amply instructed by critics as to what they ought to do, and what they should avoid doing. The theories may appear sound, the arguments convincing, until a great poet arises and knocks them on the head. In a sense every poet of the highest order is also a philosopher and a prophet who sees into 'the life of things.' Whether a philosophical subject can be fitly represented in the imaginative light of poetry is a matter for discussion rather than for decision. In the case of Pope, however, it will be evident to all studious readers that he was incapable of the continuous thought needed for the argument of the Essay.

'Anything like sustained reasoning,' says Mr. Leslie Stephen,' was beyond his reach. Pope felt and thought by shocks and electric flashes.... The defect was aggravated or caused by the physical infirmities which put sustained intellectual labour out of the question.'[23]

Crousaz, a Swiss pastor and professor, who appears to have competed with Berkeley for a prize and won it, attacked Pope's Essay for its want of orthodoxy, and his work was translated into English. The poet became alarmed, but had the good fortune to find a champion in Warburton, who for the rest of his life did Pope much service, not always of a reputable kind. We shall have more to say of him later on, and it will suffice to observe here that Warburton, who through Pope's friendship obtained a good wife, a fortune, and a bishopric, was not a man of high character. His sole object was to advance in life, and he succeeded.

The Moral Essays as they are called, and the Imitations from Horace are the final and crowning efforts of the poet's genius. They contain his finest workmanship as a satirist, and will be read, I think, with more pleasure than the Dunciad, despite Mr. Ruskin's judgment of that poem as 'the most absolutely chiselled and monumental work "exacted" in our country.'[24] It is impossible to concur in this estimate. The imagery of the poem serves only to disgust, and the spiteful attacks made in it on forgotten men want the largeness of purpose that lifts satire above what is of temporary interest, making it a lesson for all time.

Pope's venom, and the personal animosities which give the sharpest sting, and in some instances a zest, to his verse, are also amply displayed in the Moral Essays and in the Imitations, but the scope is wider in these poems, and the subjects allow of more versatile treatment. They should be read with the help of notes, a help generally needed for satirical poetry, but it should be remembered always that editorial judgments are to be received with discretion and not servilely followed. There is perhaps no danger more carefully to be shunned by the student of literature than the habit of resting satisfied with opinions at second-hand. Better a wrong estimate formed after due reading and thought, than a right estimate gleaned from critics, without any thought at all.

According to Warburton, who is as tricky as Pope himself when it suits his purpose to be so, the Essay on Man was intended to form four books, in which, as part of the general design, the Moral Essays would have been included, as well as Book IV. of the Dunciad, but to have welded these Essays, which were published separately, into one continuous poem would neither have suited Pope's genius nor the character of the poems; and how the last book of the Dunciad could have been included in such an olla podrida it is difficult to conceive. The poet was fond of projects, and this, happily for his readers, remained one. The dates of the four Essays, which are really Epistles, and appeared in folio pamphlets, run over several years, but were afterwards re-arranged by Pope. That to Lord Burlington, Of the Use of Riches (Epistle IV.), was published in 1731, under the title, Of False Taste; that to Lord Bathurst, Of the Use of Riches (Epistle III), in 1732; the epistle to Lord Cobham (Epistle I.), Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men, bears the date of 1733; and that To a Lady (Epistle II.), Of the Characters of Women, in 1735. Pope wrote other Epistles, some at a much earlier period of his career, which follow the Moral Essays but are not connected with them. Of these one is addressed to Addison, two are to Martha Blount, for whom the second of the Moral Essays was written; one to the painter Jervas, originally printed in 1717; while another, a few lines only in length, was addressed to Craggs when Secretary of State. Space will not allow of examining each of the Essays minutely, but there are portions of them which call for comment.

The first Moral Essay, Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men, in which Pope enlarges on his theory of a ruling passion, affords a significant example of his incapacity for sustaining an argument, since Warburton, to use his own words, entirely changed and reversed the order and disposition of the several parts to make the composition more coherent. That he has succeeded is doubtful, that he should have ventured upon such a task shows where Pope's weakness lay as a philosophical poet. It is the least interesting of the Essays, but is not without lines that none but Pope could have written. The Characters of Women, the subject of the second Essay, was not one which the satirist could treat with justice. He saw little in the sex save their foibles, and the lines with which it opens show the spirit that animates the poem:

'Nothing so true as what you once let fall;
"Most women have no character at all,"
Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear,
And best distinguished by black, brown, or fair.'

The satire contains one of Pope's offensive allusions to Lady Mary, and the celebrated portrait drawn from two notable women, the Duchess of Buckingham and Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, from the latter of whom the poet, at one time, despite his unquestionable love of independence, received £1,000. The story, like many another in the career of Pope, is wrapt in mystery.

Pope took great pains with the Epistle Of the Use of Riches. It was altered from the original conception by the advice of Warburton, who cared more for the argument of a poem than for its poetry. The thought and purpose of the Essay are defective, notwithstanding Warburton's effort to clear them, but these defects are of slight moment when compared with the brilliant passages with which the poem is studded. Among them is the famous description of the Duke of Buckingham's death-bed which should be compared with Dryden's equally famous lines on the same nobleman's character.

'In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half-hung,
The floors of plaster, and the walls of dung,
On once a flock-heel, but repaired with straw,
With tape-tied curtains never meant to draw,
The George and Garter dangling from that bed
Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red,
Great Villiers lies—alas! how changed from him,
That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim!
Gallant and gay, in Cliveden's proud alcove,
The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love;
Or just as gay at council, in a ring
Of mimic statesmen and their merry King.
No wit to flatter left of all his store!
No fool to laugh at, which he valued more.
There, victor of his health, of fortune, friends,
And fame, this lord of useless thousands ends.'

There is also a covert attack in this Epistle upon the moneyed interest represented by Walpole, and on the political corruption which he sanctioned and promoted. Yet Pope knew how to praise the great Whig statesman for his social qualities:

'Seen him I have, but in his happier hour
Of social pleasure, ill exchanged for power;
Seen him uncumbered with the venal tribe,
Smile without art and win without a bribe.'

Epistle IV. pursues the same subject as the third, and deals mainly with false taste in the expenditure of wealth, and with the necessity of following 'sense, of every art the soul.' In this poem there is the far-famed description of Timon's Villa, and by Timon Pope was accused of representing the Duke of Chandos, whose estate at Canons he is supposed to have held in scorn after having been, as he acknowledges, 'distinguished' by its master. That would not have deterred Pope from producing a brilliant picture, and his equivocations did but serve to increase suspicion. Probably he found it convenient to use some features of what he may have seen at Canons while composing a general sketch with no special application. The Moral Essays, it may be added, are not especially moral, but they are full of fine things, and form a portion of Pope's verse second only to the Imitations from Horace.

These Imitations are introduced by the Prologue addressed to Dr. Arbuthnot, a poem of more than common brilliancy, and also more than commonly venomous. Nowhere, perhaps, is there in Pope's works so powerful and bitter an attack as the twenty-five lines in the Prologue devoted to the vivisection of Lord Hervey, which we are forced to admire while feeling their malevolence; nowhere is there a more consummate piece of satire than the twenty-two lines that contain the poet's masterpiece, the character of Atticus; and nowhere, I may add, are there lines more personally interesting. Portions of the poem were written long before the date of publication, and this is Pope's excuse, a rather lame one perhaps, for printing the character of Atticus and the lines on his mother after the death of Addison and of Mrs. Pope.

'When I had a fever one winter in town,' Pope said to his friend Spence, 'that confined me to my room for some days, Lord Bolingbroke came to see me, happened to take up a Horace that lay on the table, and in turning it over dipt on the first satire of the second book. He observed how well that would hit my case if I were to imitate it in English. After he was gone I read it over, translated it in a morning or two, and sent it to press in a week or fortnight after. And this was the occasion of my imitating some other of the satires and epistles afterwards.'

Bolingbroke did his friend a better service in giving this advice than he had done with regard to the Essay on Man; and the six Imitations, with the Prologue and Epilogue, which are among the latest fruits of Pope's genius as a satirist, are also the ripest.

Warburton, writing of the Imitations of Horace, says: 'Whoever expects a paraphrase of Horace or a faithful copy of his genius or his manner of writing in these Imitations will be much disappointed. Our author uses the Roman poet for little more than his canvas; and if the old design or colouring chance to suit his purpose, it is well; if not, he employs his own without scruple or ceremony.'

This is true. Pope makes use of Horace when it suits his convenience, but never follows him servilely, and quits him altogether when his design carries him another way.

It was inevitable that he should exercise this freedom, since, as Johnson has pointed out, there will always be an irreconcilable dissimilitude between Roman images and English manners. Moreover, the aim of the two poets was different, Pope's main object being to express personal enmities and to give an exalted notion of his own virtue.

In the opening lines of his First Satire Pope follows Horace pretty closely. Both poets complain that some persons think them too severe, and others too complaisant; both take the advice of a lawyer, Horace of C. Trebatius Testa, who gives him the pithiest replies; and Pope of Fortescue. Both complain that they cannot sleep, the prescription of a wife and cowslip wine being given by the English adviser, while Testa advises Horace to swim thrice across the Tiber and moisten his lips with wine. Throughout the rest of the satire Pope takes only casual glances at the Roman original, and if in the Second Satire the English poet follows Horace in the first few verses in recommending frugality, and in the advice to keep the middle state, and neither to lean on this side or on that, the resemblance between the poets is seldom striking, and the spirit which animates them is different,—Horace being classical, and therefore open to the apprehension of all educated readers, while Pope is in a sense provincial, and, as I have already said with reference to the Dunciad, cannot be fully enjoyed or even understood without some knowledge of the time and of the men whom he lashes in his satire. The Sixth Epistle of the First Book of Horace, which Pope attempts to imitate, is, as Mr. Courthope observes, 'incapable of imitation. Its humour, no less than its philosophy, belongs entirely to the Pagan World.' In a general sense it is also true that Horace's style, whether of language or of thought, will not bear transplanting. Indeed, whatever is most characteristic and most exquisite in a poet's work is precisely the portion which cannot be clothed in a foreign dress.

'Life,' said Pope, 'when the first heats are over is all down hill,' and with him the downward progress began at a time when most men are still standing on the summit. Never was there a more fiery spirit in so weak a body. He suffered frequently from headaches, which he relieved by inhaling the steam of coffee. Unfortunately he pampered his appetite and paid a heavy penalty for doing so. Every change of weather affected him; and at the time when most people indulge in company, he tells Swift that he hid himself in bed. Although he sneers at Lord Hervey for taking asses' milk he tried that remedy himself, and he frequently needed medical aid. In his early days he was strong enough to ride on horseback, but in later life his weakness was so great that he was in constant need of help. M. Taine, whose criticism of Pope needs to be read with caution, indulges in an exaggerated description of his bodily condition, observing that when arrived at maturity he appeared no longer capable of existing, and styling him 'a nervous abortion.' The poet's condition was sad enough as told by Dr. Johnson, without amplifying it as M. Taine has done. 'One side was contracted. His legs were so slender that he enlarged their bulk with three pairs of stockings, which were drawn on and off by the maid; for he was not able to dress or undress himself, and neither went to bed nor rose without help. His weakness made it very difficult for him to be clean.' After this forlorn description of the poet's state it is a little grotesque to read that his dress of ceremony was black, with a tie-wig and a little sword. A distorted body often holds a generous and untainted soul. This was not the case with Pope, and the sympathy he stood in so large a need of himself, was seldom given to others.

In the spring of 1744 it became evident that the end was approaching. Three weeks before his death he distributed the Moral Epistles among his friends, saying: 'Here I am, like Socrates, dispensing my morality amongst my friends just as I am dying.' He died peacefully on May 30th, 1744, and was buried in Twickenham Church near the monument erected to his parents.

Pope's standing among his country's poets has been the source of much controversy. There have been critics who deny to him the name of a poet, while others place him in the first rank. In his own century there was comparatively little difference of opinion with regard to his merits. Chesterfield gave him the warmest praise; Swift, Addison, and Warburton ranked him with the peers of song; Johnson, whose discriminative criticism reaches perhaps its highest level in his Life of Pope, in reply to the question which had been asked, even in his day, whether Pope was a poet? asks in return, 'If Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found?' and adds that 'to circumscribe poetry by a definition will only show the narrowness of the definer, though a definition which shall exclude Pope will not readily be made.' Joseph Warton, too, Johnson's contemporary and friend, while preferring the Romantic School to the Classical, allows that in that species of poetry wherein Pope excelled he is superior to all mankind.

In our century Bowles, whose edition of his works provoked prolonged discussion, in which Campbell, Byron, and the Quarterly Review took part, places Pope above Dryden. Byron, with more enthusiasm than judgment, regarded him as the greatest name in our poetry; Scott, with generous appreciation of a genius so alien to his own, called him a 'true Deacon of the craft,' and at one time proposed editing his works, a task projected also by Mr. Ruskin, who, putting Shakespeare aside as rather the world's than ours, holds Pope 'to be the most perfect representative we have since Chaucer of the true English mind.' 'Matched on his own ground,' says Mr. Swinburne, 'he never has been nor can be.' And Mr. Lowell in the same strain observes that 'in his own province he still stands unapproachably alone.'

What then is Pope's ground? What is this province of which he is the sole ruler? To a considerable extent the question has been answered in these pages, but it may be well to sum up with more definiteness what has been already stated.

In poetry Pope takes a first place in the second order of poets. The deficiencies which forbid his entrance into the first rank are obvious. He cannot sing, he has no ear for the subtlest melodies of verse, he is not a creative poet, and has few of the spirit-stirring thoughts which the noblest poets scatter through their pages with apparent unconsciousness. There are no depths in Pope and there are no heights; he has neither eye for the beauties of Nature, nor ear for her harmonies, and a primrose was no more to him than it was to Peter Bell.

These are defects indeed, but nothing is more unfair says a great French critic than to judge notable minds solely by their defects, and in spite of them Pope's position is so unassailable that the critic must take a contracted view of the poet's art who questions his right to the title.

His merits are of a kind not likely to be affected by time; a lively fancy, a power of satire almost unrivalled, and a skill in using words so consummate that there is no poet, excepting Shakespeare, who has left his mark upon the language so strongly. The loss to us if Pope's verse were to become extinct cannot readily be measured. He has said in the best words what we all know and feel, but cannot express, and has made that classical which in weaker hands would be commonplace. His sensibility to the claims of his art is exquisite, the adaptation of his style to his subject shows the hand of a master, and if these are not the highest gifts of a poet, they are gifts to which none but a poet can lay claim.

FOOTNOTES:

[11] Some qualification may be made to these statements. Pope took pleasure in landscape gardening on the English plan, as opposed to the formality of the French and Dutch systems, and the design of the Prince of Wales's garden is said to have been copied from the poet's at Twickenham.

[12] Elwin and Courthope's Pope, vol. ii. p. 160.

[13] See the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.

[14] Elwin and Courthope's Pope, vol. v., p. 195.

[15] 'Lady Mary,' says Byron, 'was greatly to blame in that quarrel for having encouraged Pope.... She should have remembered her own line,

'"He comes too near who comes to be denied."'

[16] Studies in English Literature, p. 47.—Stanford.

[17] Quin (1693-1766) was the famous actor, and Patterson was Thomson's deputy in the surveyor-generalship of the Leeward Isles, and ultimately his successor.

[18] The Earl of Peterborough, the meteor-like brilliancy of whose actions forms one of the most striking chapters in the history of his time.

[19] Life of Pope, p. 216.

[20] 'Pope and Swift,' says Dr. Johnson, 'had an unnatural delight in ideas physically impure, such as every other tongue utters with unwillingness, and of which every ear shrinks from the mention.'

[21] Clarendon Press, Oxford.

[22] No doubt many distinguished foreigners who appreciated the beauty of the poem had read it in the original.

[23] Stephen's Pope, p. 163.

[24] Lectures on Art, p. 70, Oxford.

CHAPTER II.

PRIOR, GAY, YOUNG, BLAIR, THOMSON.

Matthew Prior (1664-1721).

The ease with which the Queen Anne wits obtained office and rose to posts of high trust through the pleasant art of verse-making, is conspicuous in the career of Prior. His parents are unknown, the place of his birth is somewhat doubtful, although he is claimed by Wimborne-Minster, in Dorsetshire, and the first trustworthy facts recorded of his early career are that he was a Westminster scholar when the famous Dr. Busby, whose discipline was physical as well as mental, presided over the school. His father died, and his mother being no longer able to pay the school fees, Prior was placed with an uncle who kept the Rhenish Wine Tavern in Westminster. His seat was in the bar, and there the Earl of Dorset (1637-1705-6), a small poet, but a generous patron of poets, found the youth reading Horace, and, pleased with his 'parts,' sent him back to Westminster, whence he went up to Cambridge as a scholar at St. John's, the college destined a century later to receive one of the greatest of English poets.

Charles Montague, afterwards Earl of Halifax (1661-1715), the son of a younger son of a nobleman, was also a Westminster scholar. He entered Trinity College in 1679, and like Prior appears to have owed his good fortune to the rhymer's craft. 'At thirty,' writes Lord Macaulay, 'he would gladly have given all his chances in life for a comfortable vicarage and a chaplain's scarf. At thirty-seven he was First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a Regent of the Kingdom.' The literary history of the Queen Anne age has many associations with his name. He proved a liberal patron of the wits, and of Pope among them, by subscribing largely to his Homer; but the poet's memory was stronger for imaginary injuries than for real benefits, and because Halifax had patronized Tickell, he figures in the Prologue to the Satires as 'full-blown Bufo, puffed by every quill.'

Prior and Montague began their rhyming career early, and a partnership production, entitled the Hind and Panther, transversed to the story of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse (1687), a parody of Dryden's famous poem published in the same year, brought both authors into notice. At the age of twenty-six Prior, who had previously obtained a fellowship, was appointed Secretary to the Embassy at the Hague. After that he rose steadily to eminence, became Secretary of State in Ireland, and was finally appointed Ambassador at the French Court. High office brings its troubles, and in those days was not without its perils. In 1711 Prior was sent secretly to Paris to negotiate a peace, for which, when the Whigs came again into power, he was imprisoned and expected to lose his head. While in prison, where he remained for two years (1715-1717), the poet wrote Alma, a humorous and speculative poem on the relations of the soul and body, and when released published his Poems by subscription in a noble folio, said to be the largest-sized volume in the whole range of English poetry. He gained 4,000 guineas by the publication, and with that sum and an estate purchased for him by Lord Harley, Prior was able to live in comfort. He died in September, 1721, in his fifty-eighth year, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, under a monument for which he had had the vanity to pay five hundred pounds.

The peculiar merit of Prior is better understood in our day than it was in his own. We read his poems solely for the sake of the 'lighter pieces,' which Johnson despised. The poet thought Solomon his best work, but no one who toils through the three books which form that poem is likely to agree with this estimate. Dulness pervades the work like an atmosphere, but it had its admirers in the last century, and among them was John Wesley, who, in reply to Johnson's complaint of its tediousness, said he should as soon think of calling the Second or Sixth Æneid tedious. In the preface to the poem Prior declares that he "had rather be thought a good Englishman than the best poet or greatest scholar that ever wrote," a passage which does more honour to the poet than any in the text. A far more popular piece was Henry and Emma, which even so fine a judge of poetry as Cowper called 'inimitable.' Tastes change, let us hope for the better, and possibly none but the greatest poets remain unaffected by time. Assuredly Prior does not, and Henry and Emma affords a striking illustration of the contrast between the poetical spirit of Prior's age and that which influences ours. The poem is founded on the fine ballad of the Nut-Browne Maide. The story, as originally told, is homely and quaint, written without apparent effort and told in 360 lines. Prior requires considerably more than twice that number, and his maid and her lover, instead of using the simple language befitting the theme, employ the conventional machinery of the age, and bring Jove and Mars, Cupid and Venus upon the scene, with allusions to Marlborough's victories and to 'Anna's wondrous reign.'

Alma, a poem written in Hudibrastic verse, which shows that Prior had in a measure caught the vein of Butler, has some couplets familiar in quotations. He won, too, not a little contemporary reputation for his tales in verse, which are singularly coarse; but an age that tolerated Mrs. Manley and read the plays and novels of Aphra Behn was not likely to object to the grossness of Prior. Dr. Johnson would not admit that his poems were unfit for a lady's table, and Wesley, who appears to have been strangely oblivious to Prior's moral delinquencies, observes that his tales are the best told of any in the English tongue. Cowper praised him for his 'charming ease,' and this gift enabled him to write some of the most delightful occasional verses produced in the century. There is nothing more exquisite of its kind than his address, To a Child of Quality, written when the child was five years old and the poet forty, and one is not surprised to learn that Prior was admired by Thomas Moore, who more than once caught his note. A reader familiar with Moore and ignorant of Prior would without hesitation attribute the following stanzas, from the Answer to Chloe Jealous, to the Irish poet:

'The god of us versemen (you know, Child), the sun,
How after his journeys he sets up his rest;
If at morning o'er earth 'tis his fancy to run,
At night he declines on his Thetis's breast.

'So when I am wearied with wandering all day,
To thee, my delight, in the evening I come;
No matter what beauties I saw in my way;
They were but my visits, but thou art my home.

'Then finish, dear Cloe, this pastoral war,
And let us, like Horace and Lydia, agree;
For thou art a girl as much brighter than her
As he was a poet sublimer than me.'

"The grammatical lapse in these last two lines," says Mr. Austin Dobson, "perhaps calls for correction, but many readers will probably agree with Moore (Diary, November, 1818), 'that it is far prettier as it is.' 'Nothing,' he says truly, 'can be more gracefully light and gallant than this little poem.'"

It was fancy and not imagination which conceived the following lines, but how charming is the fancy! The poem, which is given in a slightly abridged form, is addressed

'To a Lady: she refusing to continue a dispute with me, and leaving me in the argument.

'In the dispute whate'er I said,
My heart was by my tongue belied;
And in my looks you might have read
How much I argued on your side.

'You, far from danger as from fear,
Might have sustained an open fight;
For seldom your opinions err;
Your eyes are always in the right.

'Alas! not hoping to subdue,
I only to the fight aspired;
To keep the beauteous foe in view
Was all the glory I desired.

'But she, howe'er of victory sure,
Contemns the wreath too long delayed;
And, armed with more immediate power,
Calls cruel silence to her aid.

'Deeper to wound, she shuns the fight:
She drops her arms, to gain the field;
Secures her conquest by her flight;
And triumphs, when she seems to yield.

'So when the Parthian turned his steed,
And from the hostile camp withdrew;
With cruel skill the backward reed
He sent; and as he fled, he slew.'

Wit and a ready command of verse are the characteristics of Prior's poetry. Both of these gifts are to be seen in his lively English ballad on the Taking of Namur by the King of Great Britain, in which he travesties Boileau's Ode sur la prise de Namur. As an epigrammatist he reaped his advantage from a study of Martial, and in this department of verse Prior is often successful. If brevity be a prominent merit in an epigram, he sometimes excels his master, as, for example, in this stanza:

'To John I owed great obligation;
But John unhappily thought fit
To publish it to all the nation;
Sure John and I are more than quit.'[25]

This is half the length of the original Latin, and what it loses in elegance it gains in point.

It may be hoped that the next quotation is a libel on Bishop Atterbury; if so, the lines have every merit but truth. The epigram is on the funeral of the Duke of Buckingham, who died in 1721.

'I have no hopes,' the duke he says, and dies;
'In sure and certain hopes,' the prelate cries:
Of these two learned peers, I prithee say, man,
Who is the lying knave, the priest or layman?
The duke he stands an infidel confest;
'He's our dear brother,' quoth the lordly priest.
The duke, though knave, still 'brother dear,' he cries;
And who can say the reverend prelate lies?

Prior, it may be observed here, could say pointed things in prose as well as in verse, and nothing can be happier than his reply to the Frenchman's inquiry whether the King of England had anything to show in his palace equal to the paintings at Versailles illustrating the victories of Louis XIV: 'The monuments of my master's actions,' said the poet, 'are to be seen everywhere except in his own house.'

It is always interesting to link poet with poet, and in relation to Prior many readers will recall the pathetic incident related of Sir Walter Scott when the wonderful intellect which had entranced the world was giving indications of decay. Lockhart relates how, as they were travelling together, a quotation from Prior led Scott to make another, slightly altered for the occasion, and he adds:

'This seemed to put him into the train of Prior, and he repeated several striking passages both of the Alma and the Solomon. He was still at this when we reached a longish hill, and he got out to walk a little. As we climbed the ascent, he leaning heavily on my shoulder, we were met by a couple of beggars, who were, or professed to be, old soldiers both of Egypt and the Peninsula. One of them wanted a leg, which circumstance alone would have opened Scott's purse-strings, though, ex facie, a sad old blackguard; but the fellow had recognized his person as it happened, and in asking an alms bade God bless him fervently by his name. The mendicants went on their way, and we stood breathing on the knoll. Sir Walter followed them with his eye, and planting his stick firmly on the sod, repeated, without break or hesitation Prior's verses to the historian Mezeray. That he applied them to himself was touchingly obvious, and therefore I must quote them.

'"Whate'er thy countrymen have done,
By law and wit, by sword and gun,
In thee is faithfully recited;
And all the living world that view
Thy work, give thee the praises due,
At once instructed and delighted.

'"Yet for the fame of all these deeds,
What beggar in the Invalides,
With lameness broke, with blindness smitten,
Wished ever decently to die,
To have been either Mezeray,
Or any monarch he has written?

'"It strange, dear author, yet it true is,
That down from Pharamond to Louis
All covet life, yet call it pain:
All feel the ill, yet shun the cure;
Can sense this paradox endure?
Resolve me Cambray[26] or Fontaine.

'"The man in graver tragic known
(Though his best part long since was done),
Still on the stage desires to tarry;
And he who played the Harlequin,
After the jest still loads the scene,
Unwilling to retire, though weary."'

John Gay (1685-1732).

Gay, who enjoyed an unbroken friendship with the brotherhood of wits, and was treated by them like a spoilt child, was born at Barnstaple in 1685, and left an orphan at the age of ten. He was educated at the free grammar school in the town, and was afterwards, to his discontent, apprenticed to a mercer in London. He escaped from this uncongenial employment to be dependent on an uncle, and thus early exhibited his life-long disposition to rely upon others for support. 'Providence,' Swift writes, 'never designed Gay to be above two-and-twenty by his thoughtlessness and gullibility. He has as little foresight of age, sickness, poverty, or loss of admirers as a girl of fifteen.' His weakness, it has been said, appealed to Swift's strength, and Swift, Pope, and Arbuthnot were Gay's most faithful friends. They found something in him to laugh at and to love. Ladies, too, treated him with the kind of friendliness which has a touch of commiseration. In 1714 Gay was appointed secretary to Lord Clarendon, a post which he owed to Swift, but the death of Queen Anne in that year brought the Whigs into office, and destroyed the poet's prospects. Prior to this he had been secretary to the imperious Duchess of Monmouth. He was now left without money or employment, and owed much to the generosity of Pope. It was Gay's lot 'in suing long to bide,' to be always hoping, and nearly always disappointed. 'He seems,' says his latest biographer, 'to have begun his career under the impression that it was somebody's duty to provide for him in the world, and this impression clung to him through nearly the whole of a lifetime.'[27] Ten years before his death he was eagerly looking to others for support. Writing to Swift, he says: 'I lodge at present in Burlington House, and have received many civilities from many great men, but very few real benefits. They wonder at each other for not providing for me, and I wonder at them all.'

Gay's first poem of any mark was The Shepherd's Week (1714), six burlesque pastorals, a subject proposed to him by Pope, who was then smarting from the praise Philips had received in The Guardian. But if Pope meant Gay to poke his fun at Philips in The Shepherd's Week, he must have been disappointed, for the poems were accepted as genuine bucolics, and although humorously absurd, are, to say the least, more true to rustic life than the pastorals either of Philips or of Pope. The Shepherd's Week was followed by Trivia (1715), a piece suggested by Swift's City Shower. It is one of Gay's most notable productions, not as a poem, but as a vivid description of the streets of London nearly two hundred years ago. The great reputation he obtained as the author of The Fables (1727), and still more of The Beggar's Opera (1728), the idea of which was suggested to Gay by Swift, survived him for some years. The Fables were written for and dedicated to the youthful Duke of Cumberland, who is asked to "accept the moral lay, and in these tales mankind survey." There is skill and ingenuity in the poems, but higher merit they cannot boast, and young readers are likely to prefer the illustrations which generally accompany The Fables to the letterpress. Many of Gay's allusions are beyond the apprehension of the young, and have a political flavour. The Beggar's Opera was intended as a burlesque of the Italian opera, which had been long the laughing-stock of men of letters, and as the play was thought to have political significance, and the character of Macheath to be a portrait of Walpole, it was received with enthusiasm, and acted in London for about sixty nights. So popular did the opera become, that ladies carried about the songs on their fans.

Eight years before, Gay had published his poems by subscription, and in those happy days for versemen had gained £1,000 by the venture. He put the money into South Sea stock, and lost it all. For The Beggar's Opera he received about £800. It was followed by Polly, a play of the same coarse character, which, for political reasons, was not allowed to be acted. The result was that it had a large sale, and put money in Gay's purse. Ten thousand five hundred copies are said to have been printed in one year, and the £1,200 realized by the sale were very wisely retained for the poet's use by the Duke of Queensberry, under whose roof he had at length found a warm nest. To the student Gay is chiefly interesting as the only noteworthy poet of the period, south of the Tweed, gifted with a lyrical capacity. Two or three of his songs and ballads, and especially Black-Eyed Susan, have a charm beyond the reach of the mechanical versifier. But the art of song is at a low level even in the hands of Gay. The lyric which the Elizabethan and Jacobean poets loved so well, and of which the present century has produced specimens to be matched only by Shakespeare, may be said to have been lost to English poetry for the first half of the last century, since neither Prior's verse, delightful though it be, nor the songs of Gay, have enough of the poetical element to form exceptions to this statement.

In his Tales he follows Prior in grossness, while inferior to him in art. Like the greater number of the Queen Anne poets, Gay flatters with a free hand. In an epistle addressed to Lintot, the bookseller, he declares that Anacreon lives once more in Sheffield, and Waller in Granville, that Buckingham's verse will last to distant time; while Ovid sings again in Addison, and 'Homer's Iliad shines in his Campaign.'

One of the liveliest and most graceful of Gay's poems is addressed to Pope 'On his having finished his translation of Homer's Iliad.' It is called A Welcome from Greece, and describes the friends who assembled to greet the poet on his return to England.

Three stanzas from the Epistle shall be quoted:

'Oh, what a concourse swarms on yonder quay!
The sky re-echoes with new shouts of joy;
By all this show, I ween 'tis Lord Mayor's day;
I hear the voice of trumpet and hautboy—
No, now I see them near.—Oh, these are they
Who come in crowds to welcome thee from Troy.
Hail to the bard, whom long as lost we mourned
From siege, from battle, and from storm returned!

'What lady's that to whom he gently bends?
Who knows not her? Ah! those are Wortley's eyes:
How art thou honoured, numbered with her friends!
For she distinguishes the good and wise.
The sweet-tongued Murray near her side attends;
Now to my heart the glance of Howard flies;
Now Hervey, fair of face, I mark full well,
With thee Youth's youngest daughter, sweet Lepell.

'I see two lovely sisters hand in hand,
The fair-haired Martha and Teresa brown;
Madge Bellenden, the tallest of the land;
And smiling Mary, soft and fair as down.
Yonder I see the cheerful Duchess stand,
For friendship, zeal, and blithesome humours known;
Whence that loud shout in such a hearty strain?
Why, all the Hamiltons are in her train!'

Gay's love of good living was known to all his friends. 'As the French philosopher,' Congreve wrote, 'used to prove his existence by cogito ergo sum, the greatest proof of Gay's existence is edit ergo est.' For a long time his health compelled him to give up wine, and he tells Swift that he had also left off verse-making, 'for I really think that man must be a bold writer who trusts to wit without it.' He was dispirited, he told Swift not long before his death, for want of a pursuit, and found 'indolence and idleness the most tiresome things in the world.'

Gay died in 1732 at the Duke of Queensberry's house, and Pope grieved that one of his nearest and longest ties was broken. He was interred, to quote Arbuthnot's words, 'as a peer of the realm,' in Westminster Abbey. The superficial character of the poet may be seen in his couplet transcribed upon the monument:

'Life is a jest, and all things show it;
I thought so once, and now I know it.'

Edward Young (1684-1765).

Gay's moderate gift of song was withheld from the famous author of the Night Thoughts. Yet Young was vain enough to think that he possessed it, and wrote a patriotic ode called Ocean, preceded by an elaborate essay on lyric poetry. He also produced Imperium Pelagi (1729), A Naval Lyric written in Imitation of Pindar's spirit. The lyric, which was travestied by Fielding in his Tom Thumb,[28] reads like a burlesque, and badly treated though Pindar was by the versemen of the last century, there is perhaps not one of them who mocks him more outrageously than Young. He says that this ode is an original, and no critic is likely to dispute the assertion.

Young was born in 1684 at Upham, near Winchester, his father, who was afterwards Dean of Sarum, being at that time the rector of the village. Edward was placed upon the foundation at Winchester College, and remained there until he was eighteen. He was then sent up to New College, and afterwards removed to Corpus. At the age of twenty-seven he was nominated to a law fellowship at All Souls, and took his degree of B.C.L. and his doctor's degree some years later. Characteristically enough he began his poetical career by An Epistle to Lord Lansdowne (1712), who is praised for his heavenly numbers, and is said to have been born "to make the muse immortal." His next poem of any consequence, The Last Day, written in heroic couplets, and filling three books, is correct, or fairly so, in versification, and execrable in taste. Young, it may be supposed, wished to produce a sense of solemnity in the treatment of his theme, and he does so by lamenting that the very land 'where the Stuarts filled an awful throne' will in that day be forgotten. The want of taste which so often deforms Young's verse is also seen in the imagery he employs to illustrate the fear which even good men may have on appearing before that 'dread tribunal.'

'Thus the chaste bridegroom, when the priest draws nigh,
Beholds his blessing with a trembling eye;
Feels doubtful passions throb in every vein,
And in his cheeks are mingled joy and pain,
Lest still some intervening chance should rise,
Leap forth at once, and snatch the golden prize,
Inflame his woe, by bringing it so late,
And stab him in the crisis of his fate.'

His next poem, The Force of Religion, or Vanquished Love, was suggested by the execution of Lady Jane Grey and Lord Guildford, a subject chosen for a tragedy by John Banks (1694), by Rowe in 1715, and treated with considerable dramatic power in our own day by Ross Neil. In Young's hands this fine theme becomes a rhetorical exercise without poetry and without pathos. A few lines will suffice to show the style of the poem. Jane and Dudley, it must be premised, are imprisoned in a gloomy hall:

'What can they do? They fix their mournful eyes—
Then Guildford, thus abruptly: "I despise
An empire lost; I fling away the crown;
Numbers have laid that bright delusion down;
But where's the Charles, or Dioclesian, where,
Could quit the blooming, wedded, weeping fair?
Oh! to dwell ever on thy lip! to stand
In full possession of thy snowy hand!
And thro' the unclouded crystal of thine eye
The heavenly treasures of thy mind to spy!
Till rapture reason happily destroys,
And my soul wanders through immortal joys!
Give me the world, and ask me, where's my bliss?
I clasp thee to my breast and answer, this."'

Verse of this quality, which might be amply quoted, is of interest to the student of literature, since in Young's day it passed current for poetry. But in accepting his claims as a poet the faith of the age must have been often strained.

Walpole, who despised the whole tribe of poets, and cared nothing for literature, had by some strange chance awarded to Young a pension of £200 a-year, whereupon in a piece called The Instalment, addressed to Sir Robert, Britain is called upon to behold

'His azure ribbon and his radiant star,'

and the poet's breast 'glows with grateful fire' as he exclaims:

'The streams of royal bounty turned by thee
Refresh the dry domains of poesy.
My fortune shows, when arts are Walpole's care,
What slender worth forbids us to despair:
Be this thy partial smile from censure free,
'Twas meant for merit, though it fell on me.'

Following in the steps of George Sandys, but with inferior power, and in a less racy diction, Young performed the vain task of paraphrasing part of the Book of Job, one of the noblest poems the world possesses, and translated in our authorized version in language not to be surpassed for dignity and simplicity.

In 1719 his Busiris was performed. The Revenge, a better known tragedy, written on the French model, followed in 1721, and kept the stage for some time. Seven years later The Brothers, his third and last tragedy, was in rehearsal, but the poet, who had lately taken holy orders, withdrew it at the last moment. These tragedies, which are full of sound and fury, are destitute of tragic power. The Revenge, in which Zanga acts the part of an Iago, has some forcible scenes, and so, despite much rant and fustian, has Busiris. Plenty of blood is shed, of course, and the heroines of the plays die by their own hands. Tragedy is supposed to exercise an elevating influence, but to counteract this happy result, Busiris and The Revenge are followed by indecent epilogues, in which the speakers jest at the feelings which the plays may have excited. For The Brothers Young wrote his own epilogue. It is decent and dull. His genius was better fitted for satire than for the drama, and The Universal Passion, which consists of seven satires published in a collected form in 1728, brought him reputation and money. The poet Crabbe was never more surprised in his life than when John Murray (the famous 'My Murray' of Byron) gave him £3,000 for the copyright of his poems; Young received the same sum for work immeasurably inferior in value, and in a less legitimate way. Two thousand pounds, it is stated, was a gift from the Duke of Grafton, who said it was the best bargain he ever made, as the satires were worth £4,000. Young, it will be seen, preceded Pope as a satirist. He is more generous and humane, and has none of the venomous attacks on living persons by which Pope added piquancy to his verse. But he is a careless writer, and for the most part lacks the exquisite precision, the subtle wit, the rhythmical felicity, which make the couplets of Pope so memorable. The Dunciad, the Moral Essays, and the Imitations are read by all lovers of literature, but The Universal Passion is forgotten. Of the six satires, the two on women are the most spirited, and may be compared with Pope's on the same subject. The different foibles, and faults worse than foibles of the women of that day are exhibited with a satirist's licence, and occasionally with a Pope-like terseness. Take the following, for example:

'There is no woman where there's no reserve,
And 'tis on plenty your poor lovers starve.'

'Few to good breeding make a just pretence;
Good breeding is the blossom of good sense.'

'A shameless woman is the worst of men.'

'Naked in nothing should a woman be,
But veil her very wit with modesty.'

It was not until he was nearly fifty that Young, disappointed of the preferment he sought, took holy orders, and in 1730 accepted the college living of Welwyn, in Herts, which he held till his death.

In the following year the poet married Lady Elizabeth Lee, a daughter of the Earl of Lichfield, a union that lasted ten years. One son was the offspring of this marriage. Lady Elizabeth had a daughter by a former marriage, who was married to Mr. Temple, a son of Lord Palmerston, and shortly before her own death she lost both daughter and son-in-law, who, there can be little doubt, are the Philander and Narcissa of the Night Thoughts, the earlier books of which were published in 1742. This once celebrated poem, written in his old age, is the one effort of Young's genius that has enjoyed a great popularity. It suited well an age which, while far from moral, delighted in moral treatises and in didactic verse. In the Night Thoughts Young remembers that he is a clergyman, and puts on his gown and bands. He puts on also his singing robes, and shows the reader what none of his earlier poems prove, that he is in the presence of a poet.

The Night Thoughts is remarkable in its finest passages for a strong, but sombre imagination, and for a command of his instrument that puts Young at times nearly on a level with the greatest masters of blank verse. On this height, however, he does not stay long. He is rich in great thoughts, but they do not fall unconsciously, as it were, while the poet pursues his argument. They are aphorisms uttered generally in single lines which are apt to break the continuity of the poem and to injure the harmony of its versification. The theme of Life, Death, and Immortality is not a narrow one, and affords ample space for imaginative treatment. Young's treatment of it is too often declamatory; he drops the poet in the rhetorician and the wit. There is much of the false sublime in the poem, and much that reveals the hollow character of the writer. The first book is the finest, sparkling with felicitous expressions and rising frequently to true poetry. The poetical quality of that book, however, is lessened by the author's passion for antithesis. The merit of the following passage, for example, is not due to poetical inspiration:

'How poor, how rich, how abject, how august,
How complicate, how wonderful is man!
How passing wonder He, who made him such!
Who centered in our make such strange extremes
From different natures, marvellously mixed,
Connexion exquisite of distant worlds!
Distinguished link in being's endless chain!
Midway from nothing to the Deity;
A beam etherial, sullied, and absorbt!
Though sullied and dishonoured still divine!
Dim miniature of greatness absolute!
An heir of glory! a frail child of dust!
Helpless immortal! insect infinite!
A worm! a god!—I tremble at myself,
And in myself am lost. At home a stranger,
Thought wanders up and down, surprised, aghast,
And wondering at her own: How reason reels!
O what a miracle to man is man!
Triumphantly distressed! what joy! what dread!
Alternately transported and alarmed!
What can preserve my life? or what destroy?
An angel's arm can't snatch me from the grave:
Legions of angels can't confine me there.'

The opening of the ninth and last book will give a more favourable illustration of Young's style:

'As when a traveller, a long day past
In painful search of what he cannot find,
At night's approach, content with the next cot,
There ruminates awhile, his labour lost;
Then cheers his heart with what his fate affords,
And chants his sonnet to deceive the time,
Till the due season calls him to repose;
Thus I, long-travelled in the ways of men,
And dancing with the rest the giddy maze
Where Disappointment smiles at Hope's career;
Warned by the languor of life's evening ray,
At length have housed me in an humble shed,
Where, future wandering banished from my thought,
And waiting, patient, the sweet hour of rest,
I chase the moments with a serious song.
Song soothes our pains, and age has pains to soothe.'

While moralizing on man's mortality Young is seldom a cheerful monitor, he dwells with too great persistence on the incidents of death and of bodily corruption, too little on life with which we have more to do than with death. Thus with a strange perversion he exclaims:

'This is the desart, this the solitude,
How populous, how vital, is the grave!
This is creation's melancholy vault,
The vale funereal, the sad cypress gloom,
The land of apparitions, empty shades!
All, all on earth is shadow, all beyond
Is substance; the reverse is folly's creed.'

and harping on the same theme in the ninth book, says:

'What is the world itself? Thy world—a grave.
Where is the dust that has not been alive?
The spade, the plough, disturb our ancestors;
From human mould we reap our daily bread;
The globe around earth's hollow surface shakes,
And is the ceiling of her sleeping sons.
O'er devastation we blind revels keep;
Whole buried towns support the dancer's heel.'

Robert Blair (1699-1746).

On laying down the Night Thoughts the student may be advised to read Blair's Grave, a poem in less than 800 lines of blank verse, composed in a fresher and more rigorous style than the far larger work of Young, and rather moulded, as Mr. Saintsbury has observed, 'upon dramatic than upon purely poetical models.' The Grave, which was written before the publication of the Night Thoughts,[29] abounds with poetical felicities, and is pregnant with suggestions that seize the imagination, and appeal alike to the intellect and the heart. The brevity of the piece is in its favour; there is not a line that flags.

'Tell us, ye dead! will none of you, in pity
To those you left behind, disclose the secret?
Oh! that some courteous ghost would blab it out,—
What 'tis you are and we must shortly be.
I've heard that souls departed have sometimes
Forewarned men of their death. 'Twas kindly done
To knock and give the alarm. But what means
This stinted charity? 'Tis but lame kindness
That does its work by halves. Why might you not
Tell us what 'tis to die? Do the strict laws
Of your society forbid your speaking
Upon a point so nice?—I'll ask no more:
Sullen, like lamps in sepulchres, your shine
Enlightens but yourselves. Well, 'tis no matter;
A very little time will clear up all,
And make us learn'd as you are, and as close.'

Blair, who was a Scotch clergyman, wrote also an Elegy in Memory of William Law, a Professor of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh, whose daughter he married. He writes in a masculine and homely style. His imagery is often more powerful than pleasing, but some of his similes win attention by their beauty. For example:

"Look how the fair one weeps! the conscious tears
Stand thick as dewdrops on the bells of flowers."

Among the victims claimed by the grave is

'The long demurring maid,
Whose lonely unappropriated sweets
Smiled, like yon knot of cowslips on the cliff,
Not to be come at by the willing hand.'

And the death of a good man is pictured in this musical couplet:

'Night dews fall not more gently to the ground
Nor weary worn out winds expire so soft.'

Cowper, referring to the poets of his century, said that every warbler had Pope's tune by heart. But if they had the tune by heart, many of them did not make it a vehicle for their verse, and among these are poets of the weight and worth of Thomson and Young, of Gray and Collins. Poets of a minor order, too, such as Somerville, Armstrong, Glover, Shenstone, Akenside, and John Dyer, either did not use the heroic distich which Pope crowned with such honour, or used it in their least significant poems.

James Thomson (1700-1748).

Thomson's influence, though less visible than Pope's, was probably as great. It was felt by the poets who loved Nature, and had no turn for satire. To pass to him from Prior, Gay, and Young is to leave the town for the country. English poetry owes much to the author of The Seasons, who was the first among the poets of his century to bring men back to 'Nature, the Vicar of the Almighty Lord.' He could not, indeed, shake off altogether the fetters of the conventional diction current in his day, and his style is often turgid and verbose. But Thomson had, to use a phrase of his own, 'a fine flame of imagination,' and when brought face to face with Nature he has the inspiration of a poet who discerns the lessons which Nature is ready to teach.

James Thomson was born at Ednam, on the banks of the Tweed, on September 11th, 1700, but his father removed to Jedburgh shortly afterwards, and there the future poet gained his first impression of rural scenes. He began to rhyme in boyhood, but, unlike most young poets, had the good sense to make an annual bonfire of his youthful effusions. At the early age of fifteen he was sent to the university at Edinburgh, his father, who was a Presbyterian minister, wishing that his son should follow the same vocation. But Thomson was not destined to 'wag his head in a pulpit.' He had a friend at this time in David Mallet, a minor poet of more prudence than principle, and when Mallet had the good fortune to gain a tutorship in London, his companion also started for the metropolis in search of money and fame. It was a desperate venture, and the young poet's difficulties were increased by the loss of his letters of introduction. Scotchmen however have always countrymen willing to help them, and Thomson whose pedigree on the mother's side connected him with the famous house of Home, found temporary employment as tutor to a child of Lord Binning who belonged by marriage to the same family. Afterwards he resided with Millan, a bookseller at Charing Cross, and then having finished Winter (1726), on which he had been at work for some time, he sold it to the publisher for three guineas. Before long it was read and warmly praised by Aaron Hill, then a man of mark in the world of letters. Sir Spencer Compton, the Speaker, to whom the poem was dedicated, gave the poet twenty guineas for the compliment; Rundle, the Bishop of Derry, and several ladies of rank cheered him with their praise, and Thomson's success was assured. It was the age of patrons, and he practised without shame and without discrimination the art of flattery. Each book of The Seasons had a dedication, and the honour was one for which some kind of payment was expected. Summer appeared in 1727 and Spring in the year following. In 1729 the appearance of Britannia showed the popularity of the poet and of his theme, for three editions were sold. It is a distinctly party poem, and contains an attack upon Walpole—whom he had previously praised as the 'most illustrious of patriots'—for submitting to indignities from Spain. The British Lion roars loudly in it, but there is more of fustian in the piece than of true patriotism. 'How dares,' the poet exclaims, 'the proud Iberian rouse to wrath the masters of the main:'

'Who told him that the big incumbent war
Would not ere this have rolled his trembling ports
In smoky ruin? and his guilty stores,
Won by the ravage of a butchered world,
Yet unatoned, sunk in the swallowing deep,
Or led the glittering prize into the Thames?'

In February, 1729-30, Thomson's tragedy of Sophonisba, a subject previously chosen by Marston (1606), and by Lee (1676), was acted at Drury Lane. The play was dedicated to the queen, and on the opening night the house was crowded, but the success of the piece was slight. Thomson's genius was not dramatic, and while his characters declaim, they do not act. His next play, Agamemnon (1738), was not lost for want of labour or of friends. Pope appeared in the theatre on the first night, and was greeted with applause. The Prince and Princess of Wales were present on another occasion, but the play did not live long. His third attempt, Edward and Eleanora, was prohibited by the Lord Chamberlain, since it was supposed to praise the Prince of Wales at the expense of the Court. In 1740 the Masque of Alfred, by Thomson and Mallet, was performed. Tancred and Sigismunda followed in 1745, and this tragedy, in which Garrick played the leading part, had at the time a considerable measure of success. The plot is more interesting than that of Sophonisba, and the characters are more life-like. Despite its effusive sentiment, Garrick's splendid acting would, no doubt, make the tragedy effective on the stage, but it does not add to the literary reputation of the poet. Coriolanus, Thomson's last drama, was not performed upon the stage until the year after his death.

Voltaire, who had met Thomson and liked him—the liking, indeed, seemed to be universal—praised his tragedies for being 'elegantly writ.' 'It may be,' he says, 'that his heroes are neither moving nor busy enough, but taking him all in all, methinks he has the highest claim to the greatest esteem.' The value of Voltaire's criticism of an English dramatist is best appreciated by remembering his ignorant judgment of Shakespeare.

Thomson's laurels were gained in another field of poetry. On the production of Autumn in 1730, The Seasons in its complete form was published by subscription in quarto. The four books, as we have already said, appeared at different times, Winter being the first in order and Autumn the latest. The Hymn with which the poem concludes may be compared, and will not greatly suffer in the comparison, with Adam's morning hymn in the fifth book of Paradise Lost, and with Coleridge's Hymn in the Valley of Chamouni. Like them it is raised, to use the poet's own words, to an 'Almighty Father.' A brief extract shall be given:

'His praise, ye brooks, attune, ye trembling rills;
And let me catch it as I muse along.
Ye headlong torrents, rapid, and profound;
Ye softer floods, that lead the humid maze
Along the vale; and thou, majestic main,
A secret world of wonders in thyself,
Sound His stupendous praise, whose greater voice
Or bids you roar, or bids your roarings fall.
Soft roll your incense, herbs, and fruits, and flowers,
In mingled clouds to Him, whose sun exalts,
Whose breath perfumes you, and whose pencil paints.
Ye forests bend, ye harvests wave, to Him;
Breathe your still song into the reaper's heart,
As home he goes beneath the joyous moon.

* * * * *

Great source of day! best image here below
Of thy Creator, ever pouring wide,
From world to world, the vital ocean round,
On Nature write with every beam His praise.
The thunder rolls: be hushed the prostrate world;
While cloud to cloud returns the solemn hymn.
Bleat out afresh, ye hills; ye mossy rocks
Retain the sound: the broad responsive low,
Ye valleys, raise; for the Great Shepherd reigns,
And His unsuffering kingdom yet will come.'

Swift complains that the Seasons, being all descriptive, nothing is doing, a defect inseparable from the subject. But the work has a poet's best gift—imagination—and a poet's instinct for apprehending the charm of what is minute in Nature, as well as of what is grand.

Thomson has been called the naturalist's poet, and Hartley Coleridge observes that he is 'a perfect reservoir of natural images.' In his account of what he had learnt only by report he depends sometimes on the ignorant traditions of the country people; but in describing what he observes with the bodily eye, and with the eye of the mind, he is faithful to what he sees, and to what he perceives. No Dutch painter can be more exact and accurate than Thomson in the delineation of familiar scenes, and of animal life. In illustration of this gift, which Cowper shares with him, a scene, not to be surpassed for truthfulness of description, shall be quoted from Winter:

'Through the hushed air the whitening shower descends,
At first thin-wavering; till at last the flakes
Fall broad and wide and fast, dimming the day
With a continual flow. The cherished fields
Put on their winter robe of purest white.
'Tis brightness all; save where the new snow melts
Along the mazy current. Low the woods
Bow their hoar head; and ere the languid sun,
Faint from the west, emits his evening ray,
Earth's universal face, deep-hid and chill,
Is one wild dazzling waste, that buries wide
The works of man. Drooping, the labourer-ox
Stands covered o'er with snow, and then demands
The fruit of all his toil. The fowls of heaven,
Tamed by the cruel season, crowd around
The winnowing store, and claim the little boon
Which Providence assigns them. One alone,
The redbreast, sacred to the household gods,
Wisely regardful of th' embroiling sky,
In joyless fields and thorny thickets, leaves
His shivering mates, and pays to trusted man
His annual visit. Half afraid, he first
Against the window beats; then brisk, alights
On the warm hearth; then, hopping o'er the floor,
Eyes all the smiling family askance,
And pecks, and starts, and wonders where he is—
Till more familiar grown, the table-crumbs
Attract his slender feet. The foodless wilds
Pour forth their brown inhabitants. The hare,
Though timorous of heart and hard beset
By death in various forms, dark snares, and dogs,
And more unpitying men, the garden seeks
Urged on by fearless want. The bleating kind
Eye the bleak heaven, and next the glistening earth,
With looks of dumb despair; then, sad-dispersed
Dig for the withered herb through heaps of snow.'

Thomson loves also to paint the landscape on a broad scale, and though his diction is sometimes too florid, he generally satisfies the imagination, as, for instance, in the splendid description in Summer of a sand-storm in the desert.

'Breathed hot
From all the boundless furnace of the sky,
And the wide, glittering waste of burning sand,
A suffocating wind the pilgrim smites
With instant death. Patient of thirst and toil,
Son of the desert! even the camel feels,
Shot through his withered heart, the fiery blast.
Or from the black-red ether, bursting broad,
Sallies the sudden whirlwind. Straight the sands,
Commoved around, in gathering eddies play;
Nearer and nearer still they darkening come;
Till with the general all-involving storm
Swept up, the whole continuous wilds arise;
And by their noonday fount dejected thrown,
Or sunk at night in sad disastrous sleep,
Beneath descending hills, the caravan
Is buried deep. In Cairo's crowded streets
The impatient merchant, wondering, waits in vain,
And Mecca saddens at the long delay.'

The Seasons was at one time, and for many years the most popular volume of poetry in the country. It was to be found in every cottage, and passages from the poem were familiar to every school-boy. The appreciation of the work was more affectionate than critical, and Thomson's faults were sometimes mistaken for beauties; but the popularity of the Seasons was a healthy sign, and the poem, a forerunner of Cowper's Task, brought into vigorous life, feelings and sympathies that had been long dormant.

Pope, who is twice mentioned in the poem, took a great interest in its progress through the press. Thomson consulted him frequently, and accepted many of his suggestions, while apparently retaining at all times an independent judgment. To the familiar episode of 'the lovely young Lavinia' the following graceful passage is said, but on very doubtful authority to have been added by Pope.[30] The first line, given for the sake of the context, is from Thomson's pen:

'Thoughtless of beauty, she was Beauty's self,
Recluse amid the close-embowering woods;
As in the hollow breast of Apennine,
Beneath the shelter of encircling hills,
A myrtle rises, far from human eye,
And breathes its balmy fragrance o'er the wild;
So flourished, blooming and unseen by all,
The sweet Lavinia; till, at length, compelled
By strong necessity's supreme command
With smiling patience in her looks she went
To glean Palemon's fields.'

Thomson had now gained the highest mark of his fame, and, like Pope, had won it in a few years. Nearly two years of foreign travel followed, the poet having obtained the post of governor to a son of the Solicitor-General. The fruit of this tour was a long poem in blank verse on Liberty, which probably gave him infinite labour, but his ascent upon this occasion of what he calls 'the barren, but delightful mountain of Parnassus,' was labour lost. It is enough to say of Liberty, that it contains more than three thousand lines of unreadable blank verse. Sinecures were the rewards of genius in Thomson's day, and he was made Secretary of Briefs in the Court of Chancery. He took a cottage at Richmond, within an easy walk of Pope, and the two poets met often and lived amicably.

Thomson did not enjoy his official fortune long, for his patron died, and though he might have kept his post had he applied to the Lord Chancellor, in whose gift it was, he appears to have been too lazy to do so. His friend Lyttelton in this emergency introduced him to the Prince of Wales, who, on learning that his affairs 'were in a more poetical posture than formerly,' gave him a pension of £100 a year. There was no certainty in a gift of this nature, and in about ten years it was withdrawn.

The Castle of Indolence (1748) was the latest labour of Thomson's life, and in the judgment of many critics takes precedence of The Seasons in poetical merit. This verdict may be questioned, but the poem, written in the Spenserian stanza, has a soothing beauty and an enchanting felicity of expression which show the poet's genius in a new light. It is unlike any poetry of that age, and when compared with The Seasons, the verse, as Wordsworth justly says, 'is more harmonious and the diction more pure.' All the imagery of the poem is adopted to the vague and sleepy action of the characters represented in it. It is a veritable poet's dream, which carries the reader in its earliest stanzas into 'a pleasing land of drowsy-head:'

'In lowly dale, fast by a river's side,
With woody hill o'er hill encompassed round,
A most enchanting wizard did abide,
Than whom a fiend more fell is nowhere found.
It was, I ween, a lovely spot of ground;
And there a season atween June and May
Half prankt with Spring, with Summer half embrowned,
A listless climate made, where, sooth to say,
No living wight could work, ne carèd even for play.'

There are verbal inspirations in a great poet which satisfy the ear, capture the imagination, and live in the memory for ever. Milton's pages are studded with them like stars; Gray has a few, Wordsworth many, and Keats some not to be surpassed for witchery. Of such poetically suggestive lines Thomson has his share, and although it seems unfair to remove them from their context, the excision may be made in a few cases, since they show not only that a new poet had appeared in an age of prose, but a poet of a new order, whose inspiration was felt by his successors. How poetically imaginative is Thomson's imagery of the 'meek-eyed morn, mother of dews;' of

'Ships dim discovered dropping from the clouds;'

of

'Autumn nodding o'er the yellow plain;'

of the summer wind

'Sweeping with shadowy gust the fields of corn;'

and of the Hebrid-Isles

'Placed far amid the melancholy main,'

a line which may have suggested the lovelier verse of Wordsworth descriptive of the cuckoo:

'Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.'

Thomson did not live long after the publication of The Castle of Indolence. A cold caught upon the river led to a fever, which ended fatally on August 27th, 1748. He had for some years been in love with a Miss Young, the 'Amanda' of his very feeble love lyrics, and her marriage is said to have hastened his death. Men, however, do not die for love at the mature age of forty-nine, and as Thomson was 'more fat than bard beseems,' and was not always temperate in his habits, constitutional causes are more likely to have led to the poet's death than Amanda's cruelty.

Dr. Johnson says somewhere that the further authors keep apart from each other the better, and the literary squabbles of the last century afforded him good ground for the remark. It is to Thomson's credit that, like Goldsmith twenty-six years later, he died, leaving behind him many friends and not a single enemy. His fame rests upon two poems, The Seasons and The Castle of Indolence, and on a song which has gained a national reputation. Apart from Rule Britannia, which appeared originally in the Masque of Alfred and is spirited rather than poetical, his attempts to write lyrical poetry resulted in failure; but from his own niche in the Temple of Fame time is not likely to dislodge Thomson.

FOOTNOTES:

[25] See Martialis Epigrammata, book v. lii.

[26] Fénelon was Archbishop of Cambray.

[27] The Poetical Works of Gay, edited, with Life and Notes, by John Underhill, 2 vols.

[28]

'I'll swim through seas; I'll ride upon the clouds;
I'll dig the earth; I'll blow out every fire;
I'll rave; I'll rant; I'll rise; I'll rush; I'll war;
Fierce as the man whom smiling dolphins bore
From the prosaic to poetic shore.
I'll tear the scoundrel into twenty pieces.'

'The reader,' Fielding adds in a note, 'may see all the beauties of this speech in a late ode called a Naval Lyric.'

[29] Written but not published. The earlier books of the Night Thoughts appeared in 1742, the Grave in 1743, but in a letter dated Feb. 25th, 1741-2, Blair in transmitting the MS. of the poem to a friend states that the greater portion of it was composed several years before his ordination ten years previously. Southey states that Blair's Grave is the only poem he could call to mind composed in imitation of the Night Thoughts, but the style as well as the date contradicts this judgment.

[30] The tradition is founded on a volume in the British Museum containing MS. corrections supposed to be in Pope's handwriting. It is now, however, the opinion of experts that the writing is not Pope's. If he be the author, it is the only example of blank verse which we have from his pen.

CHAPTER III.

MINOR POETS.

Sir Samuel Garth—Ambrose Philips—John Philips—Nicholas Rowe—Aaron Hill—Thomas Parnell—Thomas Tickell—William Somerville—John Dyer—William Shenstone—Mark Akenside—David Mallet—Scottish Song-Writers.

Sir Samuel Garth (1660-1717-18).

In Pope's day even the medical profession was influenced by party feeling, and Samuel Garth became known as the most famous Whig physician, but his friendships were not confined to one side, and he appears to have been universally beloved.

Garth came of a Yorkshire family, and was born in 1660. He was admitted a Fellow of the College of Physicians in 1693, gained a large practice, and is said to have been very benevolent to the poor. The Dispensary (1699) is a satire called forth by the opposition of the Society of Apothecaries, to an edict of the College, and is a mock-heroic poem, which the quarrel made so effective at the time that it passed through several editions. The merit of achieving what the satirist intended may therefore be granted to the Dispensary. Few modern readers, however, will appreciate the welcome it received, and it is ludicrous to read in Anderson's edition of the poet that the poem 'is only inferior in humour, discrimination of character, and poetical ardour to the Rape of the Lock.' It would be far more accurate to say that the Dispensary has not a single merit in common with that poem, and but slight merit of any kind.

The following passage upon death is the most vigorous, and is interesting as having supplied Cowper with a line in the poem on his Mother's Picture:[31]

''Tis to the vulgar Death too harsh appears,
The ill we feel is only in our fears;
To die is landing on some silent shore
Where billows never break, nor tempests roar;
Ere well we feel th' friendly stroke 'tis o'er.
The wise through thought th' insults of death defy,
The fools through blest insensibility.
'Tis what the guilty fear, the pious crave;
Sought by the wretch and vanquished by the brave.
It eases lovers, sets the captive free,
And though a tyrant, offers liberty.'

Addison in defending Garth in the Whig-Examiner from the criticisms of Prior in the Examiner, the organ of the Tory party, says he does not question but the author 'who has endeavoured to prove that he who wrote the Dispensary was no poet, will very suddenly undertake to show that he who gained the battle of Blenheim is no general.' The comparison was an unfortunate one. Marlborough's military reputation has grown brighter with time, Garth's fame as a poet has long ago ceased to exist.

A literary although not a poetical interest is associated with the name of "well-natured Garth," who, as Pope acknowledges, was one of his earliest friends; like Arbuthnot, he lived among the wits, and as a member of the famous Kit-cat Club he wrote verses upon the Whig beauties toasted by its members. His name is linked with Dryden's as well as with that of his illustrious successor. It will be remembered how, on the death of Dryden, the poet's body lay in state in the College of Physicians, and how, before the great procession started for Westminster Abbey, Sir Samuel, who was then President, delivered a Latin oration.

Garth died in January, 1717-18, and, according to Pope, was a good Christian without knowing it. Addison, however, who visited Garth in his last illness, told Dr. Berkeley that he rejected Christianity on the assurance of his friend Halley that its doctrines were incomprehensible, and the religion itself an imposture. According to another report which comes through Pope, he actually 'died a papist.'

Ambrose Philips (1671-1749).

Ambrose Philips, who belonged, like Tickell, to Addison's 'little senate,' was born in 1671, and educated at St. John's, Cambridge. His Pastorals were published in Tonson's Miscellany (1709), and the same volume contained the Pastorals of Pope. Log-rolling was understood in those days, and Philips's verses received warm praise in more than one number of the Guardian, the writer in one place declaring that there have been only four masters of the art in above two thousand years: 'Theocritus, who left his dominions to Virgil; Virgil, who left his to his son Spenser; and Spenser, who was succeeded by his eldest born, Philips.'

Pope's Pastorals were not mentioned, and in revenge he devised the consummate artifice of sending an anonymous paper to the Guardian, in which, while appearing to praise Philips, he exalted himself. Steele took the bait, and considering that the essay depreciated Pope would not publish it without his permission, which was of course readily granted. 'From that time,' says Johnson, 'Pope and Philips lived in a perpetual reciprocation of malevolence.'

Philips's tragedy, The Distrest Mother (1712), a translation, or nearly so, of Racine's Andromaque, was puffed in the Spectator. It is the play to which Sir Roger de Coverley was taken by his friends, and the representation supplied the good knight with an opportunity for much humorous comment.

'When Sir Roger saw Andromache's obstinate refusal to her lover's importunities, he whispered me in the ear that he was sure she would never have him; to which he added with a more than ordinary vehemence, "You cannot imagine, sir, what it is to have to do with a widow." Upon Pyrrhus his threatening afterwards to leave her, the knight shook his head, and muttered to himself, "Ay, do if you can." This part dwelt so much upon my friend's imagination that at the close of the third Act, as I was thinking of something else, he whispered in my ear, "These widows, sir, are the most perverse creatures in the world. But pray," says he, "you that are a critic, is this play according to your dramatic rules, as you call them? Should your people in tragedy always talk to be understood? Why, there is not a single sentence in this play that I do not know the meaning of."'[32] Addison also inserted and praised in the Spectator Philips's translations from Sappho (Nos. 223, 229).

His odes to babes and children earned for him the sobriquet of 'Namby Pamby,' 'a term which has been incorporated into the English language to designate mawkish sentiment. Namby was the infantine pronunciation of Ambrose, and Pamby was formed by the first letter of Philips's surname and that reduplication of sound which is natural to lisping children.'[33]

Between simplicity and absurdity the line is a narrow one, and Philips stepped over it when he wrote to a child in the nursery—

'Dimply damsel, sweetly smiling,
All caressing, none beguiling;
Bud of beauty, fairly blowing,
Every charm to nature owing.'

The longest of his baby songs is addressed to the Hon. Miss Carteret, in which he pictures the child's progress to womanhood, and anticipates her future loveliness and maiden reign:

'Then the taper-moulded waist
With a span of ribbon braced;
And the swell of either breast,
And the wide high-vaulted chest;
And the neck so white and round,
Little neck with brilliants bound;
And the store of charms which shine
Above, in lineaments divine,
Crowded in a narrow space
To complete the desperate face;
These alluring powers, and more,
Shall enamoured youths adore;
These and more in courtly lays
Many an aching heart shall praise.'

The inventory of the maiden's physical charms which follows includes veiny temples, sloping shoulders, a hazely lucid eye, and cheek of health; but in the category the only allusion to the attractions of intellect and heart is in a couplet foretelling her

'Gentleness of mind,
Gentle from a gentle kind.'

That Philips translated The Persian Tales is indelibly recorded by Pope:

'The bard whom pilfered Pastorals renown,
Who turns a Persian tale for half-a-crown,
Just writes to make his barrenness appear,
And strains from hard-bound brains eight lines a year.'

But even Pope could award praise to Philips. In a letter to Henry Cromwell, in 1710, he observes that he was capable of writing very nobly, 'as I guess by a small copy of his, published in the Tatler, on the Danish winter;' and two years later he says to his friend Caryll: 'Mr. Philips has two lines which seem to me what the French call very picturesque, that I cannot omit to you:

'All hid in snow in bright confusion lie,
And with one dazzling waste fatigue the eye!'

The lines, not quite accurately quoted by Pope, are from an epistle, addressed to Lord Dorset from Copenhagen, which contains a few striking couplets, two of which may be transcribed before bidding adieu to Ambrose Philips:

'The vast leviathan wants room to play,
And spout his waters in the face of day.
The starving wolves along the main sea prowl,
And to the moon in icy valleys howl.'

John Philips (1676-1708).

Ambrose Philips must not be confounded with his namesake John, the author of a clever burlesque of Milton, called The Splendid Shilling (1705); of Blenheim (1705), a poem which he was urged to write by the Tories in opposition to Addison's Campaign; and of a poem upon Cider (1706), in 'Miltonian verse,' which seems to have afforded several suggestions to Pope in his Windsor Forest. It is said to display a considerable knowledge of the subject, and in that its principal merit consists. From The Splendid Shilling a brief extract may be given:

'So pass my days. But when nocturnal shades
This world envelop, and th' inclement air
Persuades men to repel benumbing frosts
With pleasant wines, and crackling blaze of wood;
Me, lonely sitting, nor the glimmering light
Of make-weight candle, nor the joyous talk
Of loving friend delights; distressed, forlorn,
Amidst the horrors of the tedious night,
Darkling I sigh, and feed with dismal thoughts
My anxious mind; or sometimes mournful verse
Indite, and sing of groves and myrtle shades,
Or desperate lady near a purling stream,
Or lover pendent on a willow tree.
Meanwhile I labour with eternal drought
And restless wish, and rave; my parched throat
Finds no relief, nor heavy eyes repose.
But if a slumber haply does invade
My weary limbs, my fancy still awake,
Thoughtful of drink, and eager, in a dream
Tipples imaginary pots of ale
In vain; awake I find the settled thirst
Still gnawing, and the pleasant phantom curse.'

'Philips,' says the poet Campbell, 'had the merit of studying and admiring Milton, but he never could imitate him without ludicrous effect, either in jest or earnest. His Splendid Shilling is the earliest and one of the best of our parodies; but Blenheim is as completely a burlesque upon Milton as The Splendid Shilling, though it was written and read with gravity, ... yet such are the fluctuations of taste that contemporary criticism bowed with solemn admiration over his Miltonic cadences.'

Nicholas Rowe (1673-1718).

Nicholas Rowe had the honour, if it was one in those days, of being made Laureate on the accession of George I. His odes, epistles, and songs are without merit, but he gained reputation as the translator of Lucan's Pharsalia, of which Sir Arthur Gorges had produced a version in 1614, and his plays entitle him to a place, though not a high one, in our dramatic literature.

Rowe edited an edition of Shakespeare, and should have known his author, yet in a prologue he declares that he could not draw women—an amazing assertion echoed by Collins, who praises Fletcher for his knowledge of the 'female mind,' and adds that 'stronger Shakespeare felt for man alone.'

The chronological list of Rowe's dramas runs as follows: The Ambitious Step-mother (1700); Tamerlane (1702); The Fair Penitent (1703); Ulysses (1705); The Royal Convert (1707); the Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714); and the Tragedy of Lady Jane Grey (1715). Measured by his contemporary dramatists he is a distinguished playwright. His characters do not live, but he could invent effective scenes, though in some cases the poet's taste may be questioned.

For many years Tamerlane was acted at Drury Lane on the anniversary of King William's landing in England, and under the names of Tamerlane and Bajazet the king is belauded at the expense of Louis XIV. The Fair Penitent, a piece even more successful upon the stage, will still please the reader, though he may question the high eulogium of Johnson, that "scarcely any work of any poet is at once so interesting by the fable, and so delightful by the language." Rowe has not the tragic power which can express passion without rant, and pathos without extravagance. In The Fair Penitent Calista gives utterance to her feelings by piling up expletives. Thus, when her husband attacks the lover who has ruined her, she exclaims, 'Destruction! fury! sorrow! shame! and death!' and, on another occasion, she cries out, 'Madness! confusion!' words which give a sense of the ludicrous rather than of the tragic; and so also does Calista's last utterance when, addressing Altamont, she says:

'Had I but early known
Thy wondrous worth, thou excellent young man
We had been happier both—now 'tis too late!'

Rowe may be regarded as the principal representative of tragedy in the 'age of Pope,' but his respectable work shows a fatal degeneration from the 'gorgeous tragedy' of the Elizabethans.

Aaron Hill (1684-1749).

Aaron Hill, unlike Rowe, was not distinguished as a dramatist, and succeeded only in two or three adaptations from the French. His claims as a poet are also insignificant. He was born in London in 1684, with expectations that were not destined to be realized, but Fortune was not unkind to him. His uncle, Lord Paget, Ambassador at Constantinople, gave the youth a warm welcome, supplied him with a tutor, and sent him to travel in the East. On Lord Paget's return to England, Hill accompanied him, and together they are said to have visited a great part of Europe. Some time later Hill went abroad again, and was absent two or three years. For awhile—it could not have been long—he was secretary to the Earl of Peterborough, and at the age of twenty-six, his good star being still in the ascendant, he married a young lady 'of great merit and beauty, with whom he had a very handsome fortune.' Hill was then appointed manager of Drury Lane, and he wrote a number of plays, the very names of which are now forgotten. Few men indeed so well known in his own day have sunk into such insignificance in ours. He wrote eight books of a long and unfinished epic called Gideon, which I suppose no one in the present century has had the hardihood to read; like Young he wrote a poem on The Judgment Day, a theme attempted also, shortly before his death, by John Philips, and that, after his kind, he produced a Pindaric ode goes without saying. A long poem called The Northern Star, a panegyric on Peter the Great, is said to have passed through several editions. The poem does not prove Hill to be a poet, but it shows his command of the heroic couplet. The style of the poem, which is an indiscriminate panegyric, may be judged from the following lines:

'Transcendent prince! how happy must thou be!
What can'st thou look upon unblessed by thee?
What inward peace must that calm bosom know,
Whence conscious virtue does so strongly flow!

* * * * *

Such are the kings who make God's image shine,
Nor blush to dare assert their right divine!
No earth-born bias warps their climbing will,
No pride their power, no avarice whets their skill.
They poise each hope which bids the wise obey,
And shed broad blessings from their widening sway;
To raise the afflicted, stretch the healing hand,
Drive crushed oppression from each rescued land,
Bold in alternate right, or sheath or draw
The sword of conquest, or the sword of law;
Spare what resists not, what opposes bend,
And govern cool, what they with warmth defend.'

Hill has the merit of having turned the tables upon Pope, who had put him into the treatise on the Bathos, and then into the Dunciad, where, however, the lines have more of compliment than censure, since he is made to mount 'far off among the swans of Thames.' Irritated by a note in the Dunciad, Hill replied in a long poem entitled The Progress of Wit, a Caveat, which opens with the following pointed lines:

'Tuneful Alexis, on the Thames' fair side,
The ladies' plaything, and the Muses' pride;
With merit popular, with wit polite,
Easy though vain, and elegant though light;
Desiring, and deserving others' praise,
Poorly accepts a fame he ne'er repays;
Unborn to cherish, sneakingly approves,
And wants the soul to spread the worth he loves.'

In a letter to Hill Pope complained of these lines, and had the hypocrisy to say that he never thought any great matters of his poetical capacity, but prided himself on the superiority of his moral life. Hill returned a masterly and incisive reproof to this ridiculous statement, in the course of which he says:

'I am sorry to hear you say you never thought any great matters of your poetry. It is in my opinion the characteristic you are to hope your distinction from. To be honest is the duty of every plain man. Nor, since the soul of poetry is sentiment, can a great poet want morality. But your honesty you possess in common with a million who will never be remembered; whereas your poetry is a peculiar, that will make it impossible that you should be forgotten.'

He adds that if Pope had not been in the spleen when he wrote, he would have remembered that humility is a moral virtue; and how, asks the writer, can you know that your moral life is above that of most of the wits 'since you tell me in the same letter that many of their names were unknown to you?'

Aaron Hill, though he could write a sensible letter, was not a wise man. He was 'everything by turns and nothing long.' Poetry was but one of his accomplishments, and we are told that he cultivated it 'as a relaxation from the study of history, criticism, geography, physic, commerce, agriculture, war, law, chemistry, and natural philosophy, to which he devoted the greatest part of his time.'

As a poet Hill has the facility in composition exhibited by so many of his contemporaries, and he has occasionally a pretty turn of fancy. His last labour was the successful adaptation of Voltaire's Merope to the English stage (1749); sixteen years before he had adapted Zara with equal success.

Thomas Parnell (1679-1718).

Among the minor poets of the period an honourable place must be given to Parnell, who possessed the soul of a poet, but gave limited expression to it, for it was only during the later years of a short life that he discovered where his genius lay. The friend of Pope, Arbuthnot, and Swift, his biography has been written by Johnson, and more discursively by his countryman Goldsmith.

Thomas Parnell was born in Dublin, 1679, entered Trinity College at the early age of thirteen, and in 1700 obtained the degree of Master of Arts. Having taken orders he gained preferment in the Church, became, in 1706, Archdeacon of Clogher, and through the recommendation of Swift obtained also a good living. Parnell was fond of society, and was accustomed as often as possible to join the wits in London. He was a member of the Scriblerus Club, wrote for the Spectator, preached eloquent sermons, and had the ambition of a poet. But the loss of his wife preyed upon his mind, and he is said, though I believe chiefly on Pope's authority, to have given way to intemperance. He died suddenly at Chester at the age of thirty-nine in 1718.

Parnell was one of the poets whose fortunes Swift did his best to promote. Writing in 1712, he says, 'I gave Lord Bolingbroke a poem of Parnell's. I made Parnell insert some compliments in it to his lordship. He is extremely pleased with it, and read some parts of it to-day to Lord Treasurer, who liked it as much. And indeed he outdoes all our poets here a bar's length.' And a month later he writes, 'Lord Bolingbroke likes Parnell mightily, and it is pleasant to see that one who hardly passed for anything in Ireland, makes his way here with a little friendly forwarding.'

The Hermit, the Hymn to Contentment, an Allegory on Man, and a Night Piece on Death, give Parnell his title to a place among the poets. The Rise of Woman, and Health, an Eclogue, have also much merit, and were praised by Pope (but this was to their author) as 'two of the most beautiful things he ever read.' The story of The Hermit, written originally in Spanish, is given in Howell's Letters (1645-1655), and is admirably told by Parnell, but much that he wrote, including a series of long poems on Scripture characters, is poetically worthless. His poems, published five years after his death, were edited by Pope, who wisely suppressed some pieces unworthy of the poet. Then, as now, literary scavengers were at work. In 1758 the suppressed poems were published, and called forth the comment from Gray, 'Parnell is the dunghill of Irish Grub Street.' To Parnell Pope was indebted for the Essay on Homer prefixed to the translation, with which he does not seem to have been well pleased. He complained of the stiffness of the style, and said it had cost him more pains in the correcting than the writing of it would have done.

If Parnell's prose has the defect of stiffness, his lines glide with a smoothness that must have satisfied the ear of Pope. The higher harmonies of verse were unknown to him, but ease is not without a charm, and in illustration of Parnell's gift the final lines of A Night Piece on Death shall be quoted:

'When men my scythe and darts supply,
How great a king of fears am I!
They view me like the last of things,
They make and then they draw my stings.
Fools! if you less provoked your fears,
No more my spectre form appears.
Death's but a path that must be trod,
If man would ever pass to God;
A port of calms, a state to ease
From the rough rage of swelling seas.
Why then thy flowing sable stoles,
Deep pendent cypress, mourning poles,
Loose scarfs to fall athwart thy weeds,
Long palls, drawn hearses, covered steeds,
And plumes of black that as they tread,
Nod o'er the scutcheons of the dead?
Nor can the parted body know,
Nor wants the soul these forms of woe;
As men who long in prison dwell,
With lamps that glimmer round the cell,
Whene'er their suffering years are run,
Spring forth to greet the glittering sun;
Such joy, though far transcending sense,
Have pious souls at parting hence.
On earth and in the body placed,
A few and evil years they waste;
But when their chains are cast aside,
See the glad scene unfolding wide,
Clap the glad wing, and tower away,
And mingle with the blaze of day.'

Thomas Tickell (1686-1740).

Tickell wished to be remembered as the friend of Addison, and with Addison his name is indissolubly associated. The poem dedicated to the essayist's memory is perhaps over-praised by Macaulay when he says that it would do honour to the greatest name in our literature, but it proved incontestibly that Tickell, as a poet, was superior to the master whom he so loved and honoured. His reputation hangs upon this elegy, which Fox pronounced perfect.[34] The Prospect of Peace, which passed through several editions, had at one time a considerable reputation, not assuredly for its poetry, but because it appealed to the spirit of the time The style of the poem may be judged from these lines:—

'Accept, great Anne, the tears their memory draws,
Who nobly perished in their sovereign's cause;
For thou in pity bidd'st the war give o'er,
Mourn'st thy slain heroes, nor wilt venture more.
Vast price of blood on each victorious day!
(But Europe's freedom doth that price repay.)
Lamented triumphs! when one breath must tell
That Marlborough conquered and that Dormer fell.'

His Colin and Lucy called forth high praise from Goldsmith as one of the best ballads in our language, and Gray terms it the prettiest ballad in the world. Three stanzas from this once famous poem shall be quoted:—

'"I hear a voice you cannot hear,
Which says I must not stay;
I see a hand you cannot see,
Which beckons me away.
By a false heart and broken vows,
In early youth I die;
Was I to blame because his bride
Was thrice as rich as I?

'"Ah, Colin, give not her thy vows,
Vows due to me alone;
Nor thou, fond maid, receive his kiss,
Nor think him all thy own.
To-morrow in the church to wed,
Impatient, both prepare!
But know, fond maid, and know, false man,
That Lucy will be there!

'"Then bear my corse, my comrades, bear,
This bridegroom blithe to meet,
He in his wedding trim so gay,
I in my winding-sheet."
She spoke, she died; her corse was borne
The bridegroom blithe to meet,
He in his wedding trim so gay,
She in her winding-sheet.'

There is some fancy but no imagination in the machinery of Tickell's long poem on Kensington Gardens, a title which recalls Matthew Arnold's exquisite stanzas. But the pathetic beauty of Arnold's lines belongs to a world of poetry wholly unlike that in which even the best of the Queen Anne poets lived and moved.

Tickell's translation of the first book of the Iliad led to the quarrel already mentioned in the account of Pope. He wrote, also, a rather lengthy poem on Oxford, in which there is some absurd criticism of insignificant poetasters, and, as a matter of course, an extravagant eulogium of Addison.

The few facts recorded of Tickell's life may be summed up in a paragraph. He was born in 1686 at Bridekirk, in Cumberland, and entered Queen's College, Oxford, in 1701. In 1708 he obtained his M.A. degree, and two years later was chosen Fellow. For sixteen years Tickell held his fellowship, but resigned it on his marriage in 1726. In a poem addressed to the lady before marriage, he asks whether

'By thousands sought, Clotilda, canst thou free
Thy crowd of captives and descend to me?'

Praise which in those days would be regarded as fulsome secured the friendship and patronage of Addison, who employed him in public affairs, and when he became Secretary of State made Tickell Under-Secretary. To him Addison left the charge of editing his works, which were published by subscription, and appeared in four quarto volumes in 1721. In 1725 he was made secretary to the Lord Justices of Ireland, 'a place of great honour,' which he held until his death in 1740. The praise of Wordsworth, a poet always chary of expressing approbation, has been bestowed upon Tickell. 'I think him,' he said, 'one of the very best writers of occasional verses.'

William Somerville (1692-1742).

Tickell had written some lines on hunting, which he published as a fragment. His contemporary Somerville, selecting the same subject, wrote The Chase (1735), a poem in blank verse. He was born at Edston, in Warwickshire, and was said, Dr. Johnson writes, 'to be of the first family in his county.' He was educated at Winchester and Oxford, and had the tastes of a scholar as well as of a country gentleman, which, among other accomplishments, included that of hard drinking. We know little about him, and what we do know is deplorable, for his friend Shenstone writes that he was plagued and threatened by low wretches, and 'forced to drink himself into pains of the body in order to get rid of the pains of the mind.' He died in 1742, the owner of a good estate, which, owing to a contempt for economy, he was never able to enjoy. 'I loved him for nothing so much,' said Shenstone, 'as for his flocci-nauci-nihili-pili-fication of money.'

In The Chase Somerville had the advantage of knowing his subject, but knowledge is not poetry, and the interest of the poem is not due to its poetical qualities. He deserves some credit for his skill in handling a variety of metres as well as blank verse, in which his principal poem is written. In an address To Mr. Addison, the couplet,

'When panting Virtue her last efforts made,
You brought your Clio to the virgin's aid,'

is praised by Johnson as one of those happy strokes which are seldom attained. In the same poem Shakespeare and Addison are brought together in a way that is far from happy:

'In heaven he sings; on earth your muse supplies
Th' important loss, and heals our weeping eyes,
Correctly great, she melts each flinty heart
With equal genius, but superior art.'

Praise can be too strong even for a poet's digestion, and Somerville, who writes a great deal more nonsense in the same strain, should have remembered that he was not addressing a fool. If the poetical adulation of the time is to be excused, it must be on the ground that a poet had to live by patronage and not by the public. In a pecuniary point of view his subservience to men in high position was often successful. An almost universal custom, it was not regarded as degrading; but the poet must have been peculiarly constituted who was not degraded by it.

John Dyer (1698(?)-1758).

In the last century any subject was deemed suitable for poetry, and the Welsh poet, John Dyer, who was born about 1698, found in his later life poetical materials in The Fleece (1757), a poem in four books of blank verse. His genius for descriptive poetry and his passionate and intelligent delight in natural objects are seen more pleasantly in Grongar Hill (published in the same year as Thomson's Winter), a poem not without grammatical inaccuracies, one of which deforms the first couplet, but full of poetical feeling. In an ease of composition which runs into laxity he reminds us occasionally of George Wither. His chief merit is, that while independent of Thomson, he was inspired by the same love, and wrote with the same aim. Dyer is not content with bare description, but likes to moralize on the landscape he surveys. Thus, when looking on a ruined tower, the poet exclaims:

'Yet time has seen, that lifts the low,
And level lays the lofty brow,
Has seen this broken pile compleat,
Big with the vanity of state;
But transient is the smile of fate!
A little rule, a little sway,
A sunbeam in a winter's day,'
Is all the proud and mighty have
Between the cradle and the grave.'

Dyer who is best seen in the octosyllabic metre, chose it also for The Country Walk, a poem in which, notwithstanding an occasional lapse into the conventional diction of the period, the rural pictures are drawn from life. He takes the reader into the farm-yard and fields as he writes:

'I am resolved this charming day
In the open field to stray,
And have no roof above my head
But that whereon the gods do tread.
Before the yellow barn I see
A beautiful variety
Of strutting cocks, advancing stout,
And flirting empty chaff about;
Hens, ducks, and geese, and all their brood,
And turkeys gobbling for their food;
While rustics thrash the wealthy floor,
And tempt all to crowd the door.

* * * * *

And now into the fields I go,
Where thousand flaming flowers glow,
And every neighbouring hedge I greet
With honey-suckles smelling sweet;
Now o'er the daisy meads I stray
And meet with, as I pace my way,
Sweetly shining on the eye
A rivulet gliding smoothly by,
Which shows with what an easy tide
The moments of the happy glide.'

An Epistle to a Friend in Town, records his satisfaction with the country retirement in which his days are passed. In a rather awkward stanza he says that he is more than content, and is indeed charmed with everything, and the lines close with the moralizing that was dear to Dyer's heart:

'Alas! what a folly that wealth and domain
We heap up in sin and in sorrow!
Immense is the toil, yet the labour how vain!
Is not life to be over to-morrow?
Then glide on my moments, the few that I have,
Smooth-shaded and quiet and even;
While gently the body descends to the grave,
And the spirit arises to heaven.'

Dyer was an artist as well as a poet, and visited Italy, which suggested a poem in blank verse, The Ruins of Rome (1740). After his return to England he entered into holy orders, took a wife, who is said to have been a descendant of Shakespeare, and settled at Calthorp in Leicestershire, which he afterwards exchanged for a living in Lincolnshire. There is much to like in Dyer, and he has had the good fortune to win the applause of two great poets. Gray says, in a letter to Horace Walpole, that he had 'more of poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number,' and Wordsworth in a sonnet, To the Poet, John Dyer, writes:

* * * * *
'Though hasty Fame hath many a chaplet culled
For worthless brows, while in the pensive shade
Of cold neglect she leaves thy head ungraced,
Yet pure and powerful minds, hearts meek and still,
A grateful few, shall love thy modest Lay,
Long as the shepherd's bleating flock shall stray
O'er naked Snowdon's wide aerial waste;
Long as the thrush shall pipe on Grongar Hill!'

William Shenstone (1714-1764).

'The true rustic style,' Charles Lamb writes, 'I think is to be found in Shenstone,' and he calls his Schoolmistress the 'prettiest of poems.'

William Shenstone was born in 1714 at the Leasowes in Hales-Owen, a spot upon which he afterwards expended his skill as a landscape gardener. In 1732 he went up to Pembroke College, Oxford, and remained there for some years without taking a degree. Those years appear to have been devoted to poetry. In 1737 Shenstone published a small volume anonymously. This was followed by the Judgment of Hercules (1741), and by the Schoolmistress (1742). In 1745 he undertook the management of his estate, and began, to quote Dr. Johnson's quaint description, 'to point his prospects, to diversify his surface, to entangle his walks, and to wind his waters; which he did with such judgment and such fancy, as made his little domain the envy of the great and the admiration of the skilful; a place to be visited by travellers and copied by designers.' On this estate, with its lakes and cascades, its urns and poetical inscriptions, its hanging woods, and 'wild shaggy precipice,' Shenstone appears to have spent all his fortune. He led the life of a dilettante, and died unmarried at the age of fifty. His elegies and songs are dead, and whatever vitality remains in his verse will be found in the Pastoral Ballad and the Schoolmistress.

The ballad written in anapæstic verse has an Arcadian grace, against which even Johnson's robust intellect was not proof. For the following lines he says, 'if any mind denies its sympathy it has no acquaintance with love or nature':

'When forced the fair nymph to forego,
What anguish I felt in my heart!
Yet I thought—but it might not be so—
'Twas with pain that she saw me depart.
She gazed as I slowly withdrew,
My path I could hardly discern;
So sweetly she bade me adieu,
I thought that she bade me return.

The Schoolmistress, written in imitation of Spenser, has the merits of simplicity and homely humour. The village dame is a life-like character, and the urchins whom she is supposed to teach, and does sometimes teach by chastisement, are cunningly portrayed.

From the verses Written at an Inn in Henley three stanzas may be quoted. The last will be already known to readers familiar with their Boswell:

'I fly from pomp, I fly from plate,
I fly from falsehood's specious grin!
Freedom I love, and form I hate,
And choose my lodgings at an inn.

'Here, waiter! take my sordid ore,
Which lacqueys else might hope to win;
It buys what courts have not in store,
It buys me freedom at an inn!

'Whoe'er has travelled life's dull round,
Where'er his stages may have been,
May sigh to think he still has found
The warmest welcome at an inn.'

Unhappily this final verse, which Johnson is said to have repeated 'with great emotion,' has lost its application. The modern traveller, instead of being warmly welcomed at an inn, loses his identity and becomes a number.

Mark Akenside (1721-1770).

Akenside, who was born at Newcastle, 1721, received his education in Edinburgh, where he was sent to prepare for the ministry among the Dissenters. He, however, changed his mind, became a medical student, and finally, though much disliked for his manners, gained reputation as a physician in London. He is stated to have been excessively stiff and formal, and a frigid stiffness marks the Pleasures of Imagination (1744), a remarkable work considering the writer's age, since it is without the faults of youth. The poem is founded on Addison's Essays on the subject in the Spectator, and the poet also owes a considerable debt to Shaftesbury. Akenside's blank verse has the merits of dignity and strength. But the work is as cold as the author's manners were said to be, and in spite of what may be called poetical power, as distinct from a high order of inspiration, the poem leaves the reader unmoved. Pope, who saw it in MS., said that Akenside was 'no everyday writer,' which is a just criticism. The Pleasures of Imagination has the merits of careful workmanship and of some originality, but the interest which it at one time excited is not likely to be revived. In 1757 Akenside re-wrote the poem, and I believe that no critic, with the exception of Hazlitt, regards the second attempt as an improvement on the first. His skill in the use of classical imagery is seen to advantage in the Hymn to the Naiads (1746), and he deserves praise, too, for his inscriptions, which are distinguished for conciseness and vigour of style. The poet, it may be added, wrote a great number of odes that lack all, or nearly all, the qualities which should distinguish lyrical poetry. Not a spark of the divine fire warms or illuminates these reputable verses, but the author states that his chief aim was to be correct, and in that he has succeeded.

David Mallet (1700-1765).

David Mallet, a friend or acquaintance of Thomson, was contemptible as a man and comparatively insignificant as a poet. He did a large amount of dirty work, and appears to have made a good income by it. The base character of the man was known to Bolingbroke, of whose basest purpose he made him the instrument (see c. vii.). Mallet's ballad of William and Margaret (1724) is known to many readers, and so is the inferior ballad Edwin and Emma, which was written many years afterwards. In 1728 he published The Excursion, a poem not sufficiently significant to prevent Wordsworth from selecting the same title. In Mallet's poem on Verbal Criticism (1733), Johnson states that he paid court to Pope, and was rewarded by a travelling tutorship gained through the poet's influence. In 1731 his tragedy, Eurydice, was acted at Drury Lane. He joined Thomson, as we have said elsewhere, in the composition of the masque of Alfred, and 'almost wholly changed' the piece after Thomson's death. Amyntor and Theodora, a long poem in blank verse, appeared in 1747; Britannia, a masque, in 1753, and Elvira, a tragedy, in 1763. Mallet, who was without qualifications for the task, wrote a life of Lord Bacon. He is said to have obtained a pension for inflaming the mind of the public against Admiral Byng, and thereby hastening his execution.

In Anderson's edition of the poets, Mallet's biography is related with more fulness than by Dr. Johnson, and, after frankly recording acts which fully justify Macaulay's statement that Mallet's character was infamous, the writer adds, 'his integrity in business and in life is unimpeached.'

Scottish Song-Writers.

When the poets of England were writing satires, moral essays, and elaborate didactic treatises, the poets of Scotland were singing, in bird-like notes, songs of humour and of love. It is remarkable that the Scotch, the shrewdest, hardest, and most business-like people in these islands, should be so richly endowed with a gift shared and enjoyed by rich and poor alike. The most exquisite of English lyrics fall, where culture is wanting, on regardless ears; the songs of Ramsay and of Burns, of Lady Anne Lindsay and Jane Elliot, of Hogg and Lady Nairne, of Tannahill and Macneil, are household words in Scotland to gentle and simple. A few of the choicest songs of Scotland are due to ladies of rank, but the larger number have sprung from 'the huts where poor men lie.' Ramsay was a barber and wig-maker; Burns, as all the world knows, followed the plough; Tannahill was a weaver; Hogg a shepherd; and Robert Nicoll the son of a small farmer, 'ruined out of house and hold.'

Allan Ramsay (1686-1758).

Allan Ramsay was, born at Leadhills, in Lanarkshire, in 1686, and was therefore Pope's senior by two years. He has been called 'the restorer of Scottish poetry,' and by his compilation of The Evergreen (1724), and of The Tea-Table Miscellany, published in the same year, he gathered up the wealth of song scattered through the country. The Miscellany extended to four volumes, and before the poet's death had reached twelve editions. An undying interest belongs to both anthologies. The Evergreen was the first poetry Walter Scott perused, and in a marginal note on his copy of The Tea-Table Miscellany he writes: 'This book belonged to my grandfather, Robert Scott, and out of it I was taught Hardiknute by heart before I could read the ballad myself. It was the first poem I ever learnt, the last I shall ever forget.' The ballad Scott loved so well, I may say in passing, was written as a whole or in part by Lady Wardlaw (1677-1727),[35] and belongs therefore either to our period or to the later years of the seventeenth century.

In 1725 Ramsay published The Gentle Shepherd, a pastoral that puts to shame the numerous semi-classical and mythological poems which appeared under that name in England. It is essentially a rural poem, in which the action and language harmonize with what we know, or think we know, of country manners and life. There is neither striking invention in the plot nor much individuality in the characters, but there is poetical harmony throughout, many pretty rustic scenes, and sufficient interest to carry the reader pleasantly over the ground. The Gentle Shepherd is the work of a poet, and gives a higher impression of Ramsay's power than his songs alone would warrant. His lyrical pieces, though not wholly without the lilt and charm such verse exacts, are perhaps mainly of service in showing the immeasurable superiority of Burns. Ramsay was a successful poet, and not too much of a poet to be also a successful man of business. He exchanged wig-making for bookselling, kept a shop in the High Street of Edinburgh, and finally retired to a villa which he had built for himself on the Castle Hill. A good-humoured, care-defying man, he enjoyed life in an easy way, and was not disposed to repine when his road lay down the hill. In an epistle to a friend he writes:

'And now in years and sense grown auld,
In ease I like my limbs to fauld,
Debts I abhor, and plan to be
From shackling trade and dangers free;
That I may, loosed frae care and strife,
With calmness view the edge of life;
And when a full ripe age shall crave,
Slide easily into my grave.'

Among the Scottish song-writers of the period may be mentioned Robert Crawford (1695?-1732), whose love verses, written in a conventional strain, are not without music; Lord Binning (1696-1732), the author of a pretty song called Ungrateful Nanny; and William Hamilton of Bangour (1704-1754), who wrote the well-known Braes of Yarrow. The most charming of Scottish lyrics belong, however, to a later period of the century than the age of Pope.

The student who reads the minor poets who figured, in some cases with much applause, during the years of Pope's ascendency, will be struck by the almost total absence from their works of creative power. These rhymers wrote for the age, and illustrate it, but they did not write for all time, and a small volume would suffice to hold all their verse which is of permanent value. Too often they imagined that by the composition of flowing couplets they proved their title to rank with inspired poets. They confounded the art of verse-making with the divine art of poetry, and were not aware that the substance of their work is prose. Now and then the digger in this mine will discover a small nugget of gold, but for the most part the interest called forth by the poets mentioned in the present chapter, is more historical than poetical, and the reader in passing to the great prose writers of the age will be conscious of gain rather than of loss.

FOOTNOTES:

[31] Cowper's line,

'Where tempests never beat nor billows roar,'

is not an improvement upon Garth's. Tempests, it has been justly said, do not beat.

[32] The Spectator, No. 335.

[33] Elwin and Courthope's Pope, vol. vii., p. 62.

[34] Edward Young tried his skill on the same theme in a poetical epistle to Tickell, but his lines are leaden and his praise absurd. Addison's glory was so great, he says, as a statesman and a patriot, that

'It borders on disgrace
To say he sung the best of human race.'

[35] To Lady Wardlaw Dr. Robert Chambers attributed twenty-five ballads, and among them several of the finest we possess, which are regarded as ancient by every other authority. If the assumption were proved, this lady would hold a distinguished and unique position among the poets of the Pope period, but there is absolutely no ground for the theory so zealously advocated by Chambers.

PART II.