Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 353, March 1845

by Various

NORTH'S SPECIMENS OF THE BRITISH CRITICS.

No. II.

Dryden and Pope.

Specimens of the British Critics are unavoidably an irregular history of Criticism in this island; and such a history of our Criticism is unavoidably one, too, of our Poetry. The first name in our series is Dryden. See what we have written, and you find half of our paper is on Shakspeare. Pope is our next worthy; and of three or four pillars on which his name as a critic rests, one is his character of the Protagonist. Thus, for this earlier part of a new Age, the Presidents of Criticism are the two Kings of Verse.

When the poet is a critic, how shall we sever in him the two Arts? If his prose is explicit, his verse is implicit criticism; and there was thus a reason for speaking somewhat especially of Dryden's character as a tragedian in drawing his character as a critic. But indeed the man, the critic, and the poet, are one, and must be characterized as a whole; only you may choose which aspect shall be principal. In studying his works you are struck, throughout, with a mind loosely disciplined in its great intellectual powers. In his critical writings, principles hastily proposed from partial consideration, are set up and forgotten. He intends largely, but a thousand causes restrain and lame the execution. Milton, in unsettled times, maintained his inward tranquillity of soul—and "dwelt apart." Dryden, in times oscillating indeed and various, yet quieter and safer, discloses private disturbance. His own bark appears to be borne on continually on a restless, violent, whirling, and tossing stream. It never sleeps in brightness on its own calm and bright shadow. An unhappy biography weaves itself into the history of the inly dwelling Genius.

His treatment of "The Tempest" shows that he wanted intelligence of highest passion and imagination. One powerful mind must have discernment of another; and he speaks best of Shakspeare when most generally. Then we might believe that he understood him in all the greatness of his might; but our belief cannot support itself among the many outrages offered by him to nature, in a blind or wanton desecration of her holiest revealments to her inspired priest. In the sense stated above, his transformation of "The Tempest," is an implicit criticism of "The Tempest." And, assuredly, there is no great rashness of theorizing in him who finds in this barbarous murder, evidence to a lack of apprehension in Dryden, for some part of the beauty which he swept away. It would be unjustifiable towards the man to believe that, for the lowest legitimate end of a playwright—money—or for the lower, because illegitimate end, the popular breath of a day amongst a public of a day—he voluntarily ruined one of the most delicate amongst the beautiful creations with which the divine muse, his own patroness, had enlarged and adorned the bright world of mind—ruined it down to the depraved, the degraded, the debased, the grovelling, the vulgar taste of a corrupt court and town. "The Inchanted Island" is a dolorous document ungainsayable, to the appreciation, in particulars, by that Dryden who could, in generals, laud Shakspeare so well—of that Shakspeare. And if, by Dryden, then by the age which he eminently led, and for which he created, and for which he—destroyed.

"The Inchanted Island," and "The State of Innocence" come under no criticism. They are literary FACINORA. No rational account—no theory of them can be given. There they are—melancholy, but instructive facts. They express the revolution of the national spirit, on the upper degrees of the social scale. That which thirty, twenty, ten years before was impossible, happens. The hewing in pieces of Shakspeare, to throw him into the magical caldron, to reproduce him, not in youth but in dotage, shows a death, but not yet the consequent life. Stupendous and sweet Nature whom we possessed, has vanished—fled heavenward—resolved into a dew—gone, into the country. At least, she is no longer in town! It may safely be averred, that no straining of the human intellect can compute the interval overleaped betwixt those originals, and these transcriptions. It is no translation, paraphrase, metaphrase. It is as if we should catch a confused and misapprehending glimpse of something that is going on in Jupiter. It is a transference from one order of beings to another; who have some intellectual processes in common, but are allied by no sympathy. The sublime is gone! The beautiful is gone! The rational is gone! The loving is gone! The divine is not here! Nor the angelical! Nor the human! Alas! not even the diabolical! All is corrupted! banished! obliterated!

We have seen Dryden complaining of Shakspeare's language and style—of the language as antiquated from the understanding of an audience in his own day—of the whole style as being "so pestered with the figurative expressions, that it is as affected as it is obscure." And we were aware of the modest self-attribution, "I have refined the language," in Drydenising Troilus and Cressida, "which before was obsolete." And Samuel Johnson corroborates and enlarges the self-praise. "Dryden was the first who refined the language of poetry."

At this day, such expressions fill the younger votary—creative or critical—of our vernacular muse with astonishment and perplexity, and set an older one upon thinking. Such assertions, it must be said, are "unintelligible" now, because a nobler unfolding of time, a happy return of our educated mind to the old and to the natural, has "antiquated" the literary sentiment, which Dryden and Johnson shared, and which they so confidently proposed to fitly-prepared readers.

Shakspeare obsolete! There is not a writer of to-day—whose WORDS are nearer to our hearts. Our own are hardly as intimate there, as HIS are—

"You are my true and honourable wife,
As dear to me as are the ruddy drops
That visit my sad heart,"

says the troubled Brutus to Portia, who has expressed a misdoubting of his true and clear affection for her.

Is this "antiquated" English, and thence "unintelligible?"

"Viola.—My father had a daughter loved a man,
As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman,
I should your lordship.
Duke.—And what's her history?
Viola.—A blank, my lord. She never told her love.
****
Duke.—But died thy sister of her love, my boy?
Viola.—I am all the daughters of my father's house,
And all the brothers, too."
"Miranda.—I am a fool
To weep at what I am glad of.
Ferdinand.—Where should this music be?
I' th' air?—or th' earth?
It sounds no more; and sure it waits upon
Some god o' th' island. Sitting on a bank,
Weeping again the king my father's wreck,
This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air. Thence have I follow'd it,
Or it hath drawn me, rather. But 'tis gone—
No! it begins again.
****
The ditty does remember my drown'd father.
This is no mortal business, nor no sound
That the earth owes.—I hear it now above me."

Here we have an "antiquated" touch or two of what would have distressed Dryden. "Passion" is used in the old strong general sense of powerful, possessing emotion—in this example, filial sorrow; and lower down, we have the obsolete "OWES" for the modern "OWNS," which two vitiating reliques of antiquity, along with that "pestering," "affected," and "obscure" figure, "crept by me upon the waters," would explain, without doubt, the impossibility which the reader feels himself under, of deriving any pleasure from the passage, and, to speak strictly, of discovering any signification in it!!

Assuredly we do not design transcribing whole Shakspeare, in order to contradicting a rash word of Dryden's. It might not be politic, either; for we should now and then meet with hard sentences, which might seem, like unlucky witnesses, to give evidence against the party that brings them before the tribunal. They would not. It is not in twenty places, or not in a hundred, that the obsoleteness of a word or phrase makes Shakspeare hard, nor any thing in the world but his wit, his intellect in excess, that occasionally runs away with him, and wraps up his meaning in a phraseology of his own creating; enigmas that are embarrassing to disinvolve again—which might, indeed, be an antiquated manner of his age, but not an obsolete dictionary and grammar. Neither is it required of us to convince the reader, by copious extracts, that he really understands Shakspeare, one or other of whose volumes he has always in his pocket, and whose English he sits hearing by the hour, lisped, mouthed, and legitimately spoken upon the stage, and still fancying that he understands what he hears. But it seemed not altogether out of place, when the criticism of style is moved, and Shakspeare's English challenged, to recall into the liveliest consciousness of the reader, for a moment, the principal feature of the case, which is, without doubt, that Shakspeare is, in all our literature, the writer in whom this highest art of writing—namely—start not, good, innocent reader! for it must one day be said—THE ART OF SIMPLICITY—reaches its height; that magical art of steeping the words and idioms that fall from every lip at every minute, in music, and beauty, and pathos, and power, so that the familiar sound slips along the well-known inlets into the soul, and we are—"took ere we are 'ware."

Otherwise, for the general fact, that he, the reader of 1845, does understand, without much difficulty, the dramatic poet whom, in 1665, the gulf of years and the mutations of speech from father to son had rendered "unintelligible"—for the general verity of this unforeseen and improbable, but indisputable fact, the reader's recollection of his own personal history since he was eight or ten years old, may be left satisfactorily to vouch.

Neither was it, perhaps, unreasonable to snatch the occasion of alleging and manifesting the momentous and instructive truth—that the intenser working of the mind finds out, in every age, the perpetuities of a language.

Let us take our place for a moment in the Age of our poetry, which began with Dryden inclusive, and ended, or began ending, with Cowper exclusive. It was the UNCREATIVE age of our poetry; or, if you insist upon a denomination positively grounded, the IMITATIVE; or it was the unimpassioned, or it was the rational. Only the stage—losing passion, and not being the place for reason—went mad; as with Nat Lee. However, it retained something like a creative energy in Otway—and, moreover, Cato was really and afflictingly a rational play.—The mere musical flow of the verse took the place of ever varying expression; and the name used as nearly equivalent with a good verse, at least for describing that which a verse should ordinarily be, is a smooth verse. Concurrent in time and cause was the invasion of the ten syllabled rhymed couplet, which, in place of the old diversified measures, took possession—off the stage—of our poetry. With all this went a transformation of the language accepted in verse; a severing and setting apart, as if a consecrating of the Parnassian dialect, which formerly was always caught up fresh from the lap of nature, at the risk, no doubt, of pulling weeds amongs the flowers.

In the incidental enunciations of criticism, we may easily gather notices of the movement this way, in the double matter of the language and the verse. In both, it receives, as it should do, the same name and description. It is the disengaging of Refinement—its birth from the bosom of Barbarism—distinct as mother and daughter. Shakspeare and Milton are the two great barbarous kings with a numerous court. If we try to give ourselves account of this Refinement and to vindicate for it the title, we are at a loss for names and notions. A Refinement which places the sluts of Dryden and his contemporaries above Imogen and Miranda, and above Eve. One hangs down the head in shame and perplexity. The history of England affords us a key in the name of Charles II. The Court, the Town, and Life-in-doors, are the words that resolve the mystery. The Muses that were Powers of Fell, and Flood, and Forest, and Field, that went with man wherever he went—in cottage and palace, in divan and in dungeon, in the student's or the miser's chamber, on the battle-plain, and at the dance of bacchanals—and when and wheresoever man spoke, heard their own mother-tongue, they were beguiled and imprisoned within the pale of artificial society and of high life. They had to learn the breeding of the drawing-room. Their auditors, in short, were gentlemen and ladies, who never forgot that they were such in the sudden overpowering consciousness of their being men and women.

There was therefore not only a denaturation, but an enervation of our poetry. There grew a dainty, fastidious, easily-loathing taste, betokening that the robust health of the older day—its healthy hunger, and its blood glowing and bounding like a forester's—was gone by. Never to come again? No! not so bad as that. We mark main lines. We have not room for the filling-up. The last century closing, opened another Age, and we of to-day renovate and reinvigorate ourselves the best we may.

England surely did not bring up the Heroic Tragedy on its unsown soil. It was foreign falsehood that overcame English truth and sincerity. A factitious excitement that induced a false pitch throughout. On the old French stage, there were these two eminent characteristics of tragedy: Whatever the subject—if Œdipus, and the Plague raging—there must be a love-tale; and the most impassioned persons most continually dissert. Generally, Dryden's heroic plays have these two marks—both disnaturings of tragedy. We conceive in Dryden's age, and in himself as participant, a pampered taste that cannot relish the wholesome simple meats which Nature, "good cateress," provides for her beloved, healthy, naturally-living children. That is to say, a vitiation of taste, by indulged excesses; the wine and high feasting of their own theatre—which really made them unapt for understanding Shakspeare. For in such things men understand by force of delight, and if delight deserts them intelligence does too. The writings of the great creative poets—of Homer, Dante, Chaucer, and the rest—always give you the impression that they possessed nature by observation and sympathy—outward nature and man's nature—that this, as it were, stood in their soul—the great perpetually-present original—from which they drew fancifully varied portraiture. It is there as their standard of reference, when they read other poets. In Dryden, it is not so. You know neither what he draws from, nor to what he refers in those extraordinary heroic tragedies which resemble nothing—no men and no women, that were, are, or shall be. The impossible hero, the impossible heroine, and their extravagant sentiments, afford scope for a strife and a torture of thought, which is an inseparable medley of wit and argumentation; wit reasoning, and logic jesting; a strange confusion of mental actions, with an unfavourable result; for this result is neither TRUTH nor MIRTH; but very CHIMERA—changing colour like the chameleon—shape like the clouds, and substance like the contents of an alchemist's crucible. Wit that to nonsense nearly is allied, if the thin partitions are not often actually broken down. Where you should have the living blood that flows through the living heart—the affections, the passions, and the actions that mould man and his world—you find sporting and rejoicing in their own elastic vigour, their adroitness and buoyancy, and in their wonderful starts and capricious bounds, aimless flights and aerial gambols—the bold, the keen, the nimble, the strenuous faculties, summoned together to compose the masculine, ranging, intrepid, various, piercing, and comprehensive Intellect—long the acknowledged sovereign-master of that high literature, which Milton had now left, and which Pope did not yet occupy.

Dryden dealt in the same incomprehensible way with Milton as with Shakspeare. In that famous falsifying epigram, the poet of Paradise Lost is greater than Homer and Virgil rolled into one; and his name is frequently mentioned with seeming reverence in those off-hand Prefaces. Yet even in such critical passages there is no just approbation of his genius. Thus, in the preface to "The State of Innocence," he says—"The original being undoubtedly one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced." This age! One of the greatest, &c.! The age of Charles II.! And what has become of the other great, noble, and sublime, poems which that age has produced? These wavering words were written the year Milton died; and Dennis, or some one else, tells us that, twenty years after, Dryden confessed that he had not then been sensible of half the extent of his excellence. But what, twenty years after, does he say?—

"As for Mr Milton, whom we all admire with so much justice, his subject is not of an heroic poem, properly so called. His design is the losing of our happiness; his event is not prosperous like that of all other epic works; his heavenly machines are many, and human persons are but two. But I will not take Mr Rhymer's work out of his hands; he has promised the world a critique on that author, wherein, though he will not allow his poem for heroic, I hope he will grant us that his thoughts are elevated, his words sounding, and that no man has so happily copied the manner of Homer, or so copiously translated his Grecisms, and the Latin elegancies of Virgil. It is true he runs into a flat of thoughts, sometimes for a hundred lines together, but it is when he has got into a track of Scripture. His antiquated words were his choice, not his necessity; for therein he imitated Spenser, as Spenser did Chaucer. And though, perhaps, the love of their master may have transported both too far in the frequent use of them, yet, in my opinion, obsolete words may there be laudably revived, when either they are more sounding or more significant than those in practice; and when their obscurity is taken away, by joining other words to them which clear the sense, according to the rule of Horace, for the admission of new words. But, in both cases, a moderation is to be observed in the use of them: for unnecessary coinage, as well as unnecessary revival, runs into affectation; a fault to be avoided on either hand. Neither will I justify Milton for his blank verse, though I may excuse him, by the example of Hannibal Caro, and other Italians, who have used it; for whatever causes he alleges for the abolishing of rhyme, (which I have not now the leisure to examine,) his own particular reason is plainly this, that rhyme was not his talent; he had neither the ease of doing it, nor the graces of it; which is manifest in his 'Juvenilia,' or verses written in his youth, where his rhyme is always constrained and forced, and comes hardly from him, at an age when the soul is most pliant, and the passion of love makes almost every man a rhymer though not a poet."

The general effect of this captious passage is far from pleasant. It leaves us in doubt of the sincerity of Courts, and Towns, and Dryden's admiration of Mr Milton. "His subject is not that of a heroic poem, properly so called." Milton did not call it a heroic poem. But it is an epic poem, and a divine. "The event is not prosperous." Assuredly not. For that matter, neither, to our minds, is that of the Iliad. It seems not a little unreasonable to complain that in Paradise Lost, the "human persons are but two." Dryden "will not take Mr Rhymer's work out of his hands, who has promised us a critique on that author;" and he hopes Mr Rhymer will grant so and so—look pray again at what Dryden hopes Mr Rhymer will grant to Mr Milton. Mr Rhymer had promised to favour the public "with some reflections on that Paradise Lost of Milton, which some are pleased to call a poem." But this promise, says best Sir Walter, "he never filled up the measure of his presumption by attempting to fulfil." Milton running on a flat of thought for a hundred lines together on a track of Scripture! In his poem, by unnecessary coinage of new, and unnecessary revival of old words, running into affectation! Milton not to be justified for his blank verse, no not even by the example of the illustrious and immortal Hannibal Caro! Then he took to it in despair, for rhyme was not his talent! His rhyme forced and constrained in the Hymn on the Nativity—in Lycidas—in L'Allegro—in Il Penseroso!

In the same Essay on Satire—Dryden talks, not very intelligibly, about "the beautiful turns of words and thoughts, which are as requisite in this as in heroic poetry itself;" but with which he confesses himself to have been unacquainted till about twenty years before, when "that noble wit of Scotland," Sir George Mackenzie, asked him why he did not imitate "the turns of Mr Waller and Sir John Denham, of which he repeated many to me." The memory of that "noble wit of Scotland" is far from being honoured—nay, it is execrated by his countrymen—by the common people we mean—and, in the long run, they are no bad judges of merit. He was, we believe, no great shakes as a lawyer, either within or without the bar; and, like many other well-born, weak-minded men, had a taste for elegant literature and vulgar blood. Of his "voluminous works, historical and juridical," we know less than nothing; but his "Essays on several moral subjects," have more than once fallen out of our hands. Sir Walter says, "he was an accomplished scholar, of lively talents, and ready elocution, and very well deserved the appellation of a 'noble wit of Scotland.'" "The Bluidy Mackenyie," reciting to Dryden many "beautiful turns" from Waller and Denham—and Dryden calling the poetasters "those two fathers of our English poetry," in the same page where he is writing of Milton! At Sir George's behest, in Cowley, even in his "Davideis," an heroic poem, he sought in vain for "elegant turns, either on the word or on the thought;" and his search was equally fruitless in the "Paradise Lost"—for, as Milton "endeavours every where to express Homer, whose age had not yet arrived to that fineness, I found in him a true sublimity, lofty thoughts, which were clothed with admirable Grecisms, and ancient words which he had been digging from the mines of Chaucer and Spenser; and which, with all their rusticity, had somewhat of venerable in them. But I found not there neither, that for which I looked." His search through Spenser and Tasso is more fortunate; Virgil and Ovid are the two principal fountains of them in Latin poetry; and "the French, at this day, are so fond of them, that they judge them to be first beauties; delicate et bien tourné, are the highest commendations which they bestow on somewhat which they think a masterpiece."

This sort of explicit criticism, in a small way, is rather unsatisfactory; so let us look at a specimen of implicit on Milton. In Todd's edition are detailed the names of the translators of "Paradise Lost" into rhyme and prose. "We must not" says Sir Walter, "confound with these effusions of gratuitous folly an alteration or imitation planned and executed by John Dryden." We must not; therefore let "his gratuitous folly" stand aloof from theirs, and be judged of in itself. "The State of Innocence" is an Opera! "Had the subject been of a nature which admitted its being actually represented, we might conceive that Dryden, who was under engagements to the theatre, with which it was not always easy to comply, might have been desirous to shorten his own labour by adopting the story, sentiments, and language of a poem" (how kind and cool) "which he so highly esteemed, and which might probably have been new to the generality of his audience. But the costume of our first parents, had there been no other objection, must have excluded 'The State of Innocence' from the stage; and, accordingly, it was certainly never intended for representation." One cannot well help agreeing with Sir Walter in this pleasant passage; nevertheless, might not the opera have been indited with a view to representation? With what more rational purpose could it have been "planned and executed"? The stage directions are full and minute; and, if meant for perusal only, and to be part of the poem, they are beyond the ridiculous. As, for example—

"Scene I. represents a chaos, or a confused mass of matter; the stage is almost wholly dark. A symphony of warlike music is heard for some time; then from the heavens (which are opened) fall the rebellious angels, wheeling in air, and seeming transfixed with thunderbolts. The bottom of the stage being opened, receives the angels, who fall out of sight. Tunes of victory are played, and an hymn sung; angels discovered alone, brandishing their swords. The music ceasing, and the heavens being closed, the scene shifts, and, on a sudden, represents hell. Part of the scene is a lake of brimstone or rolling fire; the earth of a burnt colour. The fallen angels appear on the lake, lying prostrate; a tune of horror and lamentation is heard."

How all this might take with a mixed audience, we do not presume to conjecture, yet very great absurdities do sometimes take almost as well on as of the stage. Must "the costume of our first parents, had there been no other objection, have excluded the 'State of Innocence' from the stage?" True, Sir Charles Sedley, and other "men of wit and fashion about town," were not well received when exhibiting themselves naked on a balcony overhanging a great thoroughfare; but then they were drunk, and acted not only indecent but insulting, nay, threatening attitudes, accompanied with abjurgations and blasphemies, which was going injudiciously in advance of that age of refinement. Suppose Booth perfectly sober in Adam, and Nell Gwynne up merely to the proper pitch of vivacity in Eve, we do not see why the opera might not have had a run during the reign of the Merry Monarch. The first sight we have of Adam is, "as newly created, laid on a bed of moss and flowers, by a rock." He rises as he begins to utter his earliest soliloquy; and we believe it is an established rule, not to turn your back on—or in playhouse phrase—not to rump your audience. In such a case; however, considerable latitude would have been conceded by both sexes to our original; and what with shades and shrubs, and, above all, the rock, an adroit actor could have had little difficulty in accommodating to his posterity their progenitor. Of Eve our first glimpse is among "trees cut out on each side, with several fruits upon them; a fountain in the midst; at the far end the prospect terminating in walks." Nelly might have worn her famous felt chapeau, broad as a coach-wheel, as appropriately in that as in any other character, and contrived to amble about with sufficient decorum for those fastidious times. Besides, as custom soon reconciles people to the most absurd dress, so would it probably, before long, reconcile them to no dress at all. A full-bottomed wig in the mimic scene, on heroic representative of a class of men, who, off the boards, had always worn, not only their own hair, but a crop, was a sine qua non condition of historic success. In puris naturalibus would have been but to fall back on nature. Why, only couple of years ago, half a million of our countrymen and countrywomen of all ages, flocked by instalments, in a single season, to look at our First Parents fresh from the hands of a French painter, naked as you were born. Such is the power of Names. No imagination—not the least in the world—had that painter; no sense—not the least in the world—of the beautiful or of the sublime in the human figure. But the population, urban and rural alike, were unhappy till they had had a sight of Adam and Eve in Paradise. We cheerfully acknowledge that Adam was a very good-looking young fellow—bang up to the mark, six feet without his shoes-close upon thirteen stone. Had he been advertised as Major Adam of the Scots Greys, the brevet would have exhibited himself on that bank to empty benches. In like manner, with the fairest of her daughters, Eve. As Pope says,

"Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see,
Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be."

Pious old gentlemen, however, pronounced her perfect, merely because they gazed on the image of the mother of mankind. Painted they both were in oils. But from what we saw—for we too were carried away by the general enthusiasm—we are justified in inferring that, under prudent management, our First Parents might be successfully got up alive during the summer season at our Adelphi.

We believe that "The State of Innocence" was written for the stage. But the playwright did not intend that Adam and Eve should be stark-naked in an acted opera. Strange to say, there is not a word in it about their naked majesty or innocence. Dryden, by his idea of an opera, was forced to depart from nature and Milton. Eve's dream, so characteristically narrated by her to Adam in the poem, is shadowed out by a vision passing before her asleep, in the opera. The stage direction gives:—"A vision, where a tree rises loaden with fruit; spirits rise with it, and draw a canopy out of the tree; and the spirits dance about the tree in deformed shapes; after the dance an angel enters, with a woman, habited like Eve." That is decisive.

But what of the opera? In the preface, Dryden says "I cannot, without injury to the deceased author of 'Paradise Lost,' but acknowledge, that the poem has received its entire foundation, part of the design, and many of the ornaments from him. What I have borrowed will be so easily discerned from my mean productions, that I shall not need to point the reader to the places." That avowal may be thought to set aside all criticism—but not so—for his illustrious editor says, "the probable motive therefore of this alteration was the wish, so common to genius, to exert itself upon a subject on which another had already attained brilliant success; or, as Dryden has termed a similar attempt, the desire to shoot in the bow of Ulysses." And he adds, that because Milton intended at first to model his poem into a dramatic form, "Dryden, conscious of his own powers, and enthusiastically admiring those of Milton, was induced to make an experiment on the forsaken plan of the blind bard, which, with his usual rapidity of conception and execution, he completed in the short space of one month." Wide-encroaching Walter would see nothing far wrong in Glorious John. It is not "the forsaken plan of the blind bard," nor any thing in the least like it. They are opposite as any things that "own antipathy in nature." But this is all mere nonsense. The opera is disgraceful to Dryden. It proves that he had no understanding of the "Paradise Lost."

"Ay, you may tag my verses, if you will." But had Milton lived to hear their taggery, wrathful fire would have been in his eyes.

The opera opens, as we saw, in chaos, the scene sinking into hell, and we have Lucifer "raising himself on the lake." His exclamatory speech, of some sixteen lines, on the lake is versified, not in Dryden's best manner, from that most sublime one of Satan on reaching with Beelzebub the burning marle, with some additions from Satan's first address to that angel, while yet they were lying side by side on the fiery flood. To those who have the First Book of the "Paradise Lost" by heart, this sort of transposition patchwork cannot but be most offensive. As if to give an air of originality, where everything is borrowed and blurred, Asmoday in Milton one of the lowest, is made one of the highest, and is substituted for Beelzebub—and to him Lucifer most unarchangel-like calls "Ho! Asmoday, awake!"

Asmoday answers in a short speech, very ill reported, formerly delivered by Milton's Beelzebub, concluding with a bit absolutely stolen from his Satan himself! Lucifer then observes to Asmoday, that "our troops, like scattered leaves in autumn, lie!" A poor plagiarism indeed from the famous description from Milton's own lips, and from Lucifer's incredibly absurd! Lucifer then announces—

"With wings expanded wide, ourselves we'll rear,
And fly incumbent on the dusky air.
Hell! thy new lord receive!
Heaven cannot envy me an empire here."
(Both fly to dry land.)

You remember the lines in Milton—

"Then with expanded wings he steers his flight,
Aloft incumbent on the dusky air"—

and the other sublimities of the description—all here destroyed by the monstrous absurdity of making Lucifer paint his own projected flight. He then asks "the rest of the devils," "Are you on beds of down?" On beds of down our grandsires lay—but think of eider-ducks in heaven. Moloch says his say from the Miltonic Satan, with a slight new reading.

"Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven."

And Beelzebub approves the dictum.

"Moloch, in that all are resolved, like thee.
The means are unprepared; but 'tis not fit,
Our dark divan in public view should sit;
Or what we plot against the Thunderer,
The ignoble CROWD OF VULGAR DEVILS hear!"

Lucifer adopts this disdainful suggestion, and, great magician as he is, exclaims—

"A golden palace let be raised on high,
To imitate—no, to outshine the sky!
All mines are ours, and gold above the rest;
Let this be done, and quick as 'twas exprest."

"A palace rises, where sit as in council, Lucifer, Asmoday, Moloch, Belial, Beelzebub, and Satan." Who he may be, deuce take us if we can tell. Up to the very moment of his making his appearance, we in our simple faith had believed Lucifer and Satan to be one devil—nay, the devil. We were taken quite aback by this unexplained phenomenon of Satan's acting the part of his own tail. In this capacity he makes but one speech—but it is the speech of the evening. One seldom hears such eloquence. Moloch having proposed battle, the mysterious stranger rises to second the motion.

"Satan. I agree
With this brave vote; and if in Hell there be
Ten more such spirits, heaven is our own again.
We venture nothing, and may all obtain.
Yet, who can hope but well, since our success
Makes foes secure, and makes our dangers less?
Seraph and Cherub, careless of their charge
And wanton, in full ease now live at large;
Unguarded leave the passes of the sky,
And all dissolved in hallelujahs lie."

In the "grand consult," as recorded by Milton, Beelzebub, after proposing the "perilous attempt," asks,

"But, first, whom we shall send
In search of this new world? Whom shall we find
Sufficient? who shall tempt with wandering feet
The dark, unbottom'd, infinite abyss,
And through the palpable obscure find out
His uncouth way, or spread his aery flight,
Upborne with indefatigable wings
Over the vast abrupt, ere he arrive
The happy isle?"

And Satan is the self-chosen missionary of the religion of Hell. In Dryden Asmoday suggests the enterprise, and

"Moloch. This glorious enterprise—(rising up.)
Lucifer. Rash angel, stay. (Rising, and laying his sceptre on Moloch's head.)
That palm is mine, which none shall take away.
Hot braves like thee may fight, but know not well
To manage this, the last great stake of hell."

The council comes to a close—and Lucifer promises to be with them again,

"Before yon brimstone lake thrice ebb and flow."

Tides in the Mediterranean! a touch beyond Milton.

"Here, while the chiefs sit in the palace, may be expressed the sports of the devils, as flights and dancing in grotesque figures; and a song, expressing the change of their condition, what they enjoyed before, and how they fell bravely in battle, having deserved victory by their valour, and what they would have done if they had conquered."

What had Dryden purposed to achieve? Out of two books of a great epic, to edify one act of an opera. To invention of situation, character, or passion, he aspires not; all he had to do—since he must needs meddle—was to select, compress, and abridge, with some judgment and feeling, and to give the result—unhappy at the best—in his own vigorous verse and dearly-beloved rhyme. But beneath the majesty and imagination of Milton, his genius, strong as it was, broke down, and absolutely sunk beneath the level of that of common men. Yet not in awe, nor in reverence of a superior power; for there is no trepidation of spirit; on the contrary, with cool self-assurance he rants his way through the fiery gloom of hell. By his hands shorn of their beams, the fallen angels are, one and all, poor devils indeed. The Son of the Morning is seedy, and has lost all authority over the swell mob, which he vainly essays to recover by cracking Moloch's organ with his sceptre. Yet Sir Walter, blinded by his generous admiration of Dryden's great endowments, scruples not to say that "the scene of the consultation in Pandemonium, and of the soliloquy of Satan (not Satan, it seems, but Lucifer) on his arrival in the newly-created universe, would possess great merit did they not unfortunately remind us of the majestic simplicity of Milton." Oh, heavens and earth! the veritable Satan's soliloquy on Niphate's top!

"O thou, that with surpassing glory crown'd,
Look'st from thy sole dominion like the God
Of this new world; at whose sight all the stars
Hide their diminish'd heads, to thee I call,
But with no friendly voice, and add thy name,
O Sun! to tell thee how I hate thy beams,
That bring to my remembrance from what state
I fell, how glorious once above thy sphere,
Till pride and worse ambition threw me down,
Warring in heaven against heaven's matchless king!"

And so on for nearly a hundred lines, in many a changeful strain, arch-angelical all, of heaven-remembering passion, while ever, as thus he spoke,

"Each passion dimm'd his face,
Thrice changed with pale, ire, envy, and despair;
Which marr'd his borrow'd visage, and betray'd
Him counterfeit, if any eye beheld;
For heavenly minds, from such distempers foul
Are ever clear."

The soliloquy of Dryden's Lucifer consists of twenty lines, taken almost at hap-hazard from that of Milton's, jumbled together without consideration, and mangled from the most multitudinous blank verse ever written, into rhymes much beneath the average merit of one who, at times, could indeed command "the long-majestic march and energy divine."

Adam and Eve fare little better than the angels under his reforming fingers. Milton, you remember, makes Adam tell Raphael the story of his birth, in language charmful to affable arch-angel's ear, albeit tuned to harmonies in heaven. Dryden burlesques that revelation into the following soliloquy, supposed to have been the first words spoken by human lips. Adam at once opens his mouth in the style of the age of refinement. After the fall, how degenerate kept growing on our father tongue, till it reached its acme in the barbarous lingo of Shakspeare! And how suited, here, the thought to the speech! How natural the natural theology of both! He anticipates Descartes.

"Adam. What am I? or from whence? For that I am (rising)
I know, because I think; but whence I come,
Or how this frame of mine began to be,
What other being can disclose to me?
I move, and see, and speak, discourse, and know;
Though now I am, I was not always so.
Then that from which I was, must be before,
Whom, as my spring of being, I adore.
How full of ornament is all I view,
In all its parts! and seems as beautiful as new:
O goodly order'd earth! O Power Divine!
Of thee I am, and what I am is thine."

A day or two after, "a cloud descends with six angels in it, and when it is near the ground breaks, and, on each side, discovers six more." Raphael and Gabriel, sent to admonish and warn, discourse with Adam, the ten others standing at a distance. The conversation instantly assumes, and throughout sustains, an intensely controversial character, and Raphael and Gabriel, though two to one, and moreover angel versus man, are hard put to it on predestination and free-will. Adam is equipped with all the weapons of the schools, and uses them defensively, and most offensively, with all the dexterity of a veteran gladiator. But our disgust soon ceases, along with our deception; and we but see and hear John Dryden puzzling a brace of would-be wits at Wills's. The whole reads like a so-so bit of the Religio Laici. It ends thus:—

"Adam. Hard state of life! since heaven foreknows my will,
Why am I not tied up from doing ill?
Why am I trusted with myself at large,
When he's more able to sustain the charge?
Since angels fell, whose strength was more than mine,
'Twould then more grace my frailty to confine.
Foreknowing the success, to leave me free,
Excuses him, and yet supports not me!"

This from Adam yet sinless in Paradise!

The loves of Adam and Eve are not perhaps absolutely coarse—at least not so for Dryden—but they are of the earth earthy, and the earth is not of the mould of Eden. Aiblins—not coarse, but verily coquettish, and something more, is Eve. And she is too silly.

"From each tree
The feather'd kinds peep down to look on me;
And beasts with upcast eyes forsake their shade,
And gaze as if I were to be obey'd.
Sure I am somewhat which they wish to be,
And cannot. I myself am proud of me."

A day or two after their marriage, Eve gives Adam a long description of her first emotions experienced in the nuptial bower. More warmly coloured than in her simplicity she seems to be aware of; and Adam, pleased with her innocent flattery, treats her with an Epithalamium.

"When to my arms thou brought'st thy virgin love,
Fair angels sang our bridal hymn above:
The Eternal, nodding, shook the firmament!
And conscious nature gave her glad consent.
Roses unbid, and every fragrant flower
Flew from their stalks to strew thy nuptial bower:
The furr'd and feather'd kinds the triumph did pursue,
And fishes leap'd above the streams the passing pomp to view."

Hats off—bravo—bravo—hurra—hurra!—Of such stuff is made, in the "State of Innocence," Dryden's implicit criticism on the Paradise Lost of Milton.

Peace be with his shade! and its forgiveness with us. It is dangerous to unite the functions of judge and executioner. The imperturbable bosom of the seated judge calmly gives forth the award of everlasting Justice, and the mandate for the punishment that must expiate or appease her violated majesty. But the judge who is obliged to turn lictor, and must step down from the tribunal to take his criminal farther in hand, undoubtedly runs a risk, when he feels his hand in, of being carried too far by his excited zeal. After all, we have stayed ours. And now, having discharged a principal part of our office, what remains, but that we turn round, heal with our right hand what our left has inflicted, and lift up Glorious John to the skies? And lift him up we will; and with good reason; for we are far indeed from being done with this first era of deliberate and formal criticism in English literature. Extol him to the clouds and to the stars we will, but not now; for lo! where another great name beckons!

The close of the seventeenth century for ever shut the eyes of John Dryden upon the clouded and fluctuating daylight of our sublunary world. It may have been, in the same year, that a solitary boy, then twelve years old, wrote five stanzas which any man might have been glad to have written—and which you have by heart—an "Ode to Solitude"—conspicuous in the annals of English poetry as the dawn-gleam of a new sun that was presently to arise, and to fill the region that Dryden had left.

A feeble frame has dedicated many a student. This, with other causes about this time, took the boy, Alexander Pope, from schools where he learned little, to commit him, under the guardian more than guiding love of indulgent parents, to his own management of his own studies. And study he did—instinctively, eagerly, ramblingly through books of sundry kinds—helping himself as he could to their languages—devouring more than he digested—wedding himself to the high and gracious muses—seeking for, and finding, his own extraordinary powers—and diminishing the small quantity of delicate health which nature had put in his keeping. He resigned himself to die, and was dying, when a strong interposition, among other sanatary measures, transferred him from the back of Pegasus to that of an earth-born horse.

Pope had a gentleness of spirit, which showed itself in his filial offices to his father and mother—to her the most, ill the prolonged wearing out of a beloved life. It appears in kindly relations to his friends, in charities, in the scheme of his life—contentedness in a bounded, quiet existence, a seclusion among books, and trees, and flowers. His life flowed on peaceably and gently, like the noble river upon which his modest dwelling looked. Ill health, as we said, often dedicates a student. The constitutional feebleness from which he suffered, might doubly favour his mind; as often the more delicate frame harbours the greater spirit; and as inaptitude for active and rough sports, throws the solitary boy upon the companionship of books, and upon the energies, avocations, and pleasures of his own intelligence and fancy. The little poem of his boyhood, and the first of his manhood, prophesy his tenor of life, and his literary career.

A commanding power, a predominant star in English literature—you might say that the last century belonged to him. Dryden reigned over his contemporaries. Pope, succeeding, took dominion over his own time and the following. The pupil of Dryden, and gratefully proud to proclaim the greatness of his master, and to own all obligations, he moulded himself nevertheless upon a type in his own mind. In the school of Dryden he is an original master. Dryden is, properly speaking, without imitators. His manner proceeds from his own genius, and baffles transcribers. But Pope completed an art which could be learned, and he left a world full of copyists.

A remarkable feature is the early acknowledgment of Pope by his contemporaries. At sixteen he is a poet for the world by his Pastorals, and at that age he has a literary adviser in Walsh and a literary patron in Trumbull. He does not seem to court. He is courted. He is the intimate friend, we do not know how soon, of scholars and polite writers, of men and women high in birth, in education, in station. Scarce twenty, by his "Essay on Criticism" he assumes a chair in the school of the Muses. At five-and-twenty, he is an acknowledged dictator of polite letters. So early, rapid, untroubled an ascension to fame, it would require some research to find a parallel to. Our literature has it not. And this acknowledgment, gratulation, triumph, which friends and circles, and the confined literary world of that day in this country could furnish, a whole age, and a whole country, and a whole world, the extended republic of letters, confirm.

In the judgment of England, in the eighteenth century, the reputation of Pope may be called the most dazzling in English literature. It was a nearer sun than Dryden, Milton, Shakspeare; as for Spenser and Chaucer, they were little better than fixed stars.

Great revolutions in the state of the heavens and of astronomical science have ensued. To say nothing of new luminaries that have come into birth, from the bosom of "chaos and unoriginal night," either we have wheeled round upon Shakspeare, or he upon us, in a surprising manner; the orb of Milton enlarges day by day; cheerily we draw large accessions of the gentlest light on Spenser; and old Father Geoffrey and we are sensibly approximating.

We have taken Pope's counsel. We have with some good-will reverted to Nature, and so we come nearer to the poets of Nature. There may have been other causes at work. The change has involved more than was just a depreciation of Pope himself: as if he were an accomplished artist in a limited sphere of art, and no poet. We dissent toto corde et toto cœlo. He was a spirit, muse-born, a hero of half celestial extraction, and so by all rule a demigod.

His age confined him. A poet is not independent of his age. He may ride on the van of the tide—no more. And we see that the greatest poets are but the most entire expression of the age, taken at the best. How shall it be otherwise? Their age is mother and nurse to them. And what air does a poet respire, but the circulating, fanning, living, breeze of sympathy? He more than all beings receives into his soul the souls of other men. So he thrives and grows; and shall he not be a partaker in his age?

In an age thus to be described, that it refines instead of creating, and that, in particular, it imposes the refinement elaborated by social, and indeed aristocratical manners, upon genius, which should only refine itself by tenderness and sanctity, and by love dwelling evermore in the inextinguishable paradise of the beautiful—he who was fitted to his age by much of his mind, by his wit, by fancy given more fully than imagination, by inclination to the limæ labor, by the susceptibility of polish, by a reasonableness of understanding, by his perception of manners, even by the delicacy of his habits—he, Alexander Pope, nevertheless, desired the greatnesses of poetry. At fourteen, he tries his hand in practice on the lofty Statius—at five-and-twenty, upon the sublime Homer. Judge of his poetical heart by his Preface to Shakspeare, by his translation of Homer, preface and all. What was the translation of Homer? Of all works, not creative, the one of most aspiring ambition, even more than that of Pindar or Æschylus. The young poet who has launched on the air the light self-buoyed, gracefully-floating Rape of the Lock, who has dipped his pen in the pathos of love and religion for Eloisa, longs to put in use the powers that kindle and struggle within him. He will do something of greater design in weightier literature; he will, so as a poet may, stir, melt, strengthen, instruct, exalt, and amplify the mind of his country; and he makes the greatest of poets, the father of all poetry—English. He pledges himself, before his country, to the task, and then trembles at the difficulties and magnitude of his undertaking, and then sits down to it, and then delivers it accomplished.

Did Homer already speak English, through the organ of Chapman? If he did, it was not English for England; least of all, for the England of Pope's day. Fiery and eloquent, and creative as it is, Chapman's Homer is hard reading now, and somewhat rare. Then, the book was, for the general capacity, precisely the same thing as if it were not. And Pope, no grudging bestower of merited honours, awards generous praise to his irregularly-great predecessor, amply acknowledging, with one word, in him both native power and effectual sympathy with their unparagoned original.

Let us reflect, also, that after all a true translation of Homer into English is, in all probability, a thing impossible. Why did not Milton leave us half a book, or some fifty verses, that we might know what the utmost poetical power, and the utmost mastery of our speech, and the utmost resources of our verse, could effect? The inspiring expressive music of the original tongue clothes the simplest and most unadorned word and phrase in wealth, splendour, gorgeous majesty, prodigal magnificence; and this, not with any incongruence or disharmony, any more than Eve's GOLDEN tresses were excessive ornament, unmeet for the primitive simplicity of Eden. The same exhilaration and vivification of the hearing soul, which this perpetual music infuses, united to the same simplicity of the thought and the words, will not easily be found in English. Again, rhyme seems wanted to the richness of the harmony. Yet how shall rhyme allow that utmost freedom and range in the flow of the thought which marks the now majestically, now impetuously sweeping, Homeric river? That measure, so measured, and yet so free; large, various, capacious—that hexameter is despair. Meanwhile no nation concludes to forego the incorporation of the great foreign works of literature into its own, merely for such discouragement, merely because the adequate representation lies wholly out of reach. We have gained much in bringing over the powerful matter, if we must leave the style behind, and yet the style is almost a part of the matter.

Homer is out of hand—Iliad and Odyssey. The Mæonian sun has ripened the powers of the occidental poet. And Pope—aged thirty-seven—declares that henceforward he will write from, as well as to, his own mind. The "Essay on Man" follows. It expresses that graver study of the universal subject, MAN, which appeared to Pope, now self-known, to be, for the time of poetical literature to which he came, the most practicable—for his own ability the aptest; and it embodies that part of anthropology which doubtless was the most congenial to his own inclination—the philosophical contemplation of man's nature, estate, destiny.

The success of this enterprise was astonishing. Be the philosophy what and whose it may, the poem revived to the latest age of poetry the phenomenon of the first, when precept and maxim were modulated into verse, that they might write themselves in every brain, and live upon every tongue.

The spirit and sweetness of the verse, the lucid and vivid expression, the pregnant brevity of the meanings, the marrying of ardent and lofty poetical imagings to moral sentiments and reflections, of which every bosom is the birth-home, the pious will of the argument, which humbles the proud and rebellious human intellect under the absolute rectitude and benevolence of the Deity—nor least of all, the pleasure of receiving easily, as in a familiar speech, thoughts that were high, and might be abstruse, that, at all events, wore a profound and philosophical air—with strokes intervening of a now playful, now piercing, but always adroit wit—and with touches, here and there strewn between, of natural painting, and of apt unsought pathos—these numerous and excellent qualifications met upon the subject of all subjects nearest to all—Man—speedily made the first great, original, serious writing of Pope a textbook and a manual for its branch of ethico-theosophy, in every house where there were books in England. These powerful excellences of this great poem did more. They inwove its terse, vigorous, clear, significant, wise, loving, noble, beautiful, and musical sentences—east, west, north, south—with all memories, the mature and the immature—even as in that old, brave day of the world or ever books were.

Pause, gentle reader, for a while, and reflect kindly on these paragraphs for the sake of Alexander Pope and Christopher North. And now accompany us while we select our specimens of the British critics, from the "Nightingale of Twickenham's" preface to the works of Shakspeare. What he proposed to accomplish in this undertaking was, "to give a more correct text from the collated copies of the old editions, without any innovation or indulgence to his own private sense, or conjecture; to insert the various readings in the margin, and to place the suspected passages or interpolations at the bottom of the page; to this was added an explanation of some of the more obsolete or unusual words; and such as appeared to him the most striking passages were marked by a star, or by inverted commas." Warton laments that Pope ever undertook this edition; "a task which the course of his reading and studies did not qualify him to execute with the ability and skill which it deserved, and with which it has since been executed;" but though it was a failure, there was no occasion for lamentation. Johnson says more wisely, "that Pope did many things wrong, and left many things undone, but let him not be defrauded of his due praise. He was the first that knew, or at least, the first that told by what helps the text might be improved. If he inspected the early editions negligently, he taught others to be more accurate. In his preface he expanded with great skill and eloquence the character which had been given of Shakspeare by Dryden; and he drew the public attention upon his works, which, though often mentioned, had been little read."

Warton, too, admits that the "preface is written with taste, judgment, purity, and elegance." Pope speaks modestly of the design of his preface, which is not, he says, to enter into a criticism upon Shakspeare, "though to do it effectually, and not superficially, would be the best occasion that any just writer could take to form the judgment and taste of our nation." His humbler aim is but to give an account of the fate of his works, and the disadvantages under which they have been transmitted to us. But he cannot neglect the opportunity thus afforded him, "of mentioning some of the principal and characteristic excellences for which (notwithstanding his defects) he is justly and universally elevated above all other dramatic writers."

"If ever any author deserved the name of an original, it was Shakspeare. Homer himself drew not his art so immediately from the fountains of nature; it proceeded through Egyptian strainers and channels, and came to him not without some tincture of the learning, or some cast of the models, of those before him. The poetry of Shakspeare was inspiration indeed: he is not so much an imitator, as an instrument, of Nature; and it is not so just to say that he speaks from her, as that she speaks through him.

"His characters are so much nature herself, that it is a sort of injury to call them by so distant a name as copies of her. Those of other poets have a constant resemblance, which shows that they received them from one another, and were but multipliers of the same image; each picture, like a mock rainbow, is but the reflection of a reflection. But every single character in Shakspeare is as much an individual as those in life itself; it is as impossible to find any two alike; and such as from their relation or affinity in any respect appear most to be twins, will, upon comparison, be found remarkably distinct. To this life and variety of character, we must add the wonderful preservation of it; which is such throughout his plays, that had all the speeches been printed without the very names of the persons, I believe one might have applied them with certainty to every speaker.

"The power over our passions was never possessed in a more eminent degree, or displayed in so different instances. Yet all along, there is seen no labour, no pains to raise them; no preparation to guide or guess to the effect, or be perceived to lead toward it, but the heart swells, and the tears burst out, just at the proper places; we are surprised at the moment we weep; and yet upon reflection, find the passion so just, that we should be surprised if we had not wept, and wept at that very moment.

"How astonishing is it again, that the passions directly opposite to these, laughter and spleen, are no less at his command? that he is not more a master of the great than the ridiculous in human nature; of our noblest tendernesses, than of our vainest foibles; of our strongest emotions, than of our idlest sensations!

"Nor does he only excel in the passions; in the coolness of reflection and reasoning he is full as admirable. His sentiments are not only in general the most pertinent and judicious upon every subject; but by a talent very peculiar, something between penetration and felicity, he hits upon that particular point on which the bent of each argument turns, or the force of each motive depends. This is perfectly amazing, from a man of no education or experience in those great and public scenes of life which are usually the subject of his thoughts; so that he seems to have known the world by intuition, to have looked through human nature at one glance, and to be the only author that gives ground for a very new opinion, that the philosopher, and even the man of the world, may be born, as well as the poet."

Nothing can be better. Dryden gave us large and grand outlines. Pope's is closer criticism. But it is more than that which Johnson says, that all the successors of Dryden have produced—an expansion only of his notions; unless, in that sense in which every follower in time could by possibility do nothing but expand the notions of the first critic who should have said—"Shakspeare was a poet of the highest description, with a good many troublesome faults." Pope's portraiture is drawn from near and intent inspection; a likeness after the life, and reflecting the life; thoroughly independent of any thing preceding him. Thus, THE COMPLETE SEVERING OF NEARLY-ALLIED PERSONAGES (upon which Pope insists, and which, more than the immense multiplicity, contemplated in a general way, of the some hundred DRAMATIS PERSONÆ, determines essential variety; attests the constituting of every character, after the manner of Nature, from an indivisible SELF, which at once rules it into unity, and holds it unconfused with all others) is a finely-just observation, of which we have not a hint from Dryden; and it carries us, instantly, deep into a most interesting study of comparisons. As of Macbeth and Richard III., both murderous usurpers, as different as two men can well be; of Leontes and Othello, two jealous husbands, and as different, even in their jealousy, as two men can be; of Coriolanus and Hotspur, each an earthly Mars; each "the soul of honour;" each sudden in passion, impetuous, and ungovernable; each with a kindliness of nature that draws and attaches his friends as much as the superiority of his character overrules them; each with a rough, abrupt, penetrating strength of intellect; each endowed, which is more peculiar, with vivid imagination, that leaps into bold poetical figures; each of a cutting wit, and, in his own way, humourous pleasantry; and yet the semi-traditionary Roman patrician, and the quite historical English earl's son, so distinct that you shall read the two plays, in which they are, ten and twenty times over, without thinking of putting the towering heroes, twinned by so many, so marked, and so profound affinities, upon a line of comparison. Or put all Shakspeare's gallant warriors in a catalogue, and what a diversified list have you drawn up! Hector, Troilus, Diomed, Coriolanus, Tullus Aufidius, Mark Antony, Othello, Cassio, nay, and Iago, Falconbridge, Hotspur, Glendower, Mortimer, Henry V., Talbot, Warwick, Richard III., Richmond, Macbeth, Banquo, Macduff, Old Seward, Edmund, Edgar, Benedict, Bertram, are some of them; for Shakspeare like Scott loved a good soldier. Compare the melancholy Hamlet and the melancholy Jaques; both shrewd observers of men; both given to philosophizing; and yet different—Heaven knows. And so on. Thus, the remark of Pope goes to the root of Shakspeare's creative art, and leads you into a method of thinking, not soon exhausted.

We endeavour, says Dryden, to follow the VARIETY and greatness of characters that are derived to us from Shakspeare and Fletcher. But does this most general attribution of a characteristic—shared with Fletcher—and such as the loosest observation of the plays forces upon the most uncritical reader—does the accident that Dryden left this inevitable word "VARIETY" written, make the critical observation of Pope no more than a "diffusing" and "paraphrasing" of Dryden's "Epitome?" Has he only "changed Dryden's gold for baser metal, of lower value, though of greater bulk?" It would at least be as near the truth to say, that he has made Dryden's bill good money by accepting it. Pope, in the precise and critical sense in which he has attached the praise of "variety" to Shakspeare, would certainly not have communicated the praise, with him, to Fletcher.

Shakspeare, says Dryden, "drew the images of Nature, not laboriously, but luckily." "All along," says Pope, "there is seen no labour, no pains to raise the passions, no preparation to lead towards the effect; but the heart swells, and the tears burst out, just at the proper places." The unstudied, spontaneous movement of the scene, in Shakspeare, both of the Action and of the Passion, as if every thing went on of its own impulse, and not as willed and ruled by the poet, is an imitation of Nature which no other dramatist has so closely urged. Pope insists upon it—for the passion, at least. Is this characteristic already contained in the "not laboriously, but luckily," of Dryden? If it is contained, it is hardly conveyed. A seed has dropped from the hand of Dryden. Under the gardening of Pope, it springs up into a fair and fairly-spread plant. That is a sort of "diffusion" very distinct from turning gold into base metal. So Pope of himself admires that, in the comedies, histories, and tragedies of the unversed Shakspeare, all the businesses, high and low, of human life, turn upon their own hinges.—If a statesman counsel, he lays down the very grounds of proceeding which greyheaded statesmanship would have propounded—a king reigns like a king, a soldier fights like a soldier, woman loves and hates like a woman, a clown is a clown, a thief is a thief. In short, besides the individual constitution and self-consistency of the CHARACTERS, besides the spontaneous and self-timed motion of the PASSIONS, we are further and distinctly to admire this—that the springs, the constitution, and the government of ACTION are imitated;—as if the inexperienced player from Avon side had stood personally, confidentially, participatingly present in the heart of all human transactions: And if it appears to the acute critic wonderful that Shakspeare should have found, in his own bosom, the archetypes of so many and so diverse individualities, that he should have found there the law given by original Nature for the flow and current, the impulsion, the meandering, and the precipitation of the passions; it strikes him as yet more wonderful, more like an inspiring, that he should have found there a divination of that which is subsequent to and ingrafted upon Nature—namely, of human life itself, of universal human experience; much in the same way as Ulysses admired most, in the song of Demodocus, his knowledge of that which had passed withinside the Wooden Horse, and concluded, hence, to the undoubted inspiration of the Muse.

This appears to us to be the meaning of Pope's eulogy; and if it but unfolds the hints of Dryden's, it unfolds them, be it said, uninvidiously, something after the fashion in which Shakspeare himself unfolded the hints which he found in old books, of plots and personages; that is to say, originally, creatively, with quite independent power; and certainly with no deterioration to the matter. Pope goes on to admit faults. We must here dissent as to facts and opinions, and must qualify.

"It must be owned, that with all these great excellences, he has almost as great defects: and that as he has certainly written better, so he has perhaps written worse than any other. But I think I can in some measure account for these defects, from several causes and accidents; without which it is hard to imagine that so large and so enlightened a mind could ever have been susceptible of them. That all these contingencies should unite to his disadvantage seems to me almost as singularly unlucky, as that so many various, nay, contrary talents should meet in one man, was happy and extraordinary.

"It must be allowed that stage-poetry, of all other, is more particularly levelled to please the populace, and its success more immediately depending upon the common suffrage. One cannot therefore wonder, if Shakspeare having at his first appearance no other aim in his writings than to procure a subsistence, directed his endeavours solely to hit the taste and humour that then prevailed. The audience was generally composed of the meaner sort of people, and therefore the images of life were to be drawn from those of their own rank; accordingly we find, that not our author's only, but almost all the old comedies have their scene among tradesmen and mechanics; and even their historical plays strictly follow the common old stories or vulgar traditions of that kind of people. In tragedy, nothing was so sure to surprise and cause admiration, as the most strange, unexpected, and consequently most unnatural, events and incidents; the most exaggerated thoughts; the most verbose and bombast expression; the most pompous rhymes, and thundering versification. In comedy, nothing was so sure to please as mean buffoonery, vile ribaldry, and unmannerly jests of fools and clowns. Yet even in these, our author's wit buoys up, and is borne above his subject; his genius in those low parts is like some prince of a romance in the disguise of a shepherd or peasant; a certain greatness and spirit now and then break out, which manifest his higher extraction and qualities.

"It may be added, that not only the common audience had no notion of the rules of writing, but few even of the better sort piqued themselves upon any great degree of knowledge or nicety that way; till Ben Jonson, getting possession of the stage, brought critical learning into vogue; and that this was not done without difficulty, may appear from those frequent lessons (and indeed almost declamations) which he was forced to prefix to his first plays, and put into the mouth of his actors, the grex, chorus, &c., to remove the prejudices, and inform the judgment of his hearers. Till then, our authors had no thoughts of writing on the model of the ancients: their tragedies were only histories in dialogue; and their comedies followed the thread of any novel as they found it, no less implicitly than if it had been true history.

"To judge, therefore, of Shakspeare by Aristotle's rules, is like trying a man by the laws of one country, who acted under those of another. He writ to the people; and writ at first without patronage from the better sort, and therefore without aims of pleasing them: without assistance or advice from them: learned, as without the advantage of education or acquaintance among them; without that knowledge of the best of models, the ancients, to inspire him with an emulation of them: in a word, without any views of reputation, and of what poets are pleased to call immortality: some or all of which have encouraged the vanity, or animated the ambition, of other writers.

"Yet it must be observed, that when his performances had merited the protection of his prince, and when the encouragement of the court had succeeded to that of the town, the works of his riper years are manifestly raised above those of his former. The dates of his plays sufficiently evidence that his productions improved, in proportion to the respect he had for his auditors. And I make no doubt this observation would be found true in every instance, were but editions extant, from which we might learn the exact time when every piece was composed, and whether writ for the town or the court."

Pope here apologises for the very middling sort of company which Shakspeare, in his Comedies, obliges us to keep, by the obligation he was under of "holding the mirror up to" his hearers, who being, for the most part, "the meaner sort of people," would only duly recognise and sympathize with "images of life drawn from those of their own rank." And so we have a pardonable cause, wherefore "our author's" (like "almost all the old") Comedies, HAVE THEIR SCENE among TRADESMEN and MECHANICS;" and some excuse for the degradation of history by the historical plays, which strictly follow the common OLD STORIES or VULGAR TRADITIONS of that sort of people.

The DEFENCE is kindly; and bears with it, we must acknowledge, a specious air. In the mean time, here lacks surely something to the regular ordering of the trial. Where, we should be glad to know, is the CORPUS DELICTI? Before justifying, let us hear some witnesses to the OFFENCE. Let us call over the Comedies. Here is the roll of them.

The Tempest!—Dramatis Personæ:—Alonso, King of Naples;—Sebastian, his Brother;—Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan!—Antonio, his Brother, the usurping Duke of Milan!—Ferdinand, son to the King of Naples!—Gonzalo, an honest old Counsellor of Naples!—Adrian, Francisco, Lords!—Really, we are afraid that all the ignobler males left, Caliban, a savage and deformed Slave; Trinculo, a Jester; Stephano, a drunken Butler; the Master of a Ship, the Boatswain, and Mariners—will not, any more than Miranda, with Ariel and the Spirits who personate in Prospero's masque, and who clear out the playbill, suffice to lay THE SCENE of the "Tempest" AMONG tradesmen and mechanics. Next come, handsomely cloaked and feathered in old Italian garb, "The Two Gentlemen of Verona!"

But we will not spare, any further, the curious reader the labour of turning over the leaves of his own copy, or of his memory. The truth is, as every reader's recollection at once answers, that the rule for the comedy of Shakspeare, respectively to the social degrees along which it moves, may be worded safely enough from the scheme of persons exhibited above. The comedy of Shakspeare removes itself, by two great strides, from the meaner sort of its auditory; for light-footed, or more seriously-pacing, it loves to tread on floors of state; it associates familiarly with the highly-born and the highly-natured. His Thalia is of a very aristocratic humour. But, more than this, she further distances the vulgar associations and experience of her spectators, by putting between herself and them the Romance of Manners. We have seen the names—Naples, Milan, Verona. Let us pursue the roll-call. In "Twelfth Night," the "scene" is a city in Illyria, and the sea-coast near it;—in "Measure for Measure," Vienna;—in "Much Ado about Nothing," Messina;—in the "Midsummer Night's dream," Athens, and a wood not far from it;—in "Love's Labour's Lost," Navarre;—in the "Merchant of Venice," Partly At Venice, and Partly at Belmont, the seat of Portia, on the continent (understand, of Italy;)—in "As You Like It," the scene lies, first, near Oliver's house; afterwards, partly in the Usurper's court, and partly in the forest of Arden;—in "All's Well that End's Well," partly in France, and partly in Tuscany;—in the "Taming of the Shrew," sometimes in Padua, and sometimes in Petruchio's house in the country;—in "The Winter's Tale," (a comedy, wherein only two of the personages die—one eaten,) the scene is sometimes in Sicilia, sometimes in Bohemia;—in the "Comedy of Errors," at Ephesus;—Last of all, in the "Merry Wives of Windsor," in Windsor and the parts adjacent. Thirteen comedies lying in Italy, Illyria, Germany, Greece, France, Asia Minor, Sicily, Bohemia, and in that uninhabited island, inhabited by a day-dream, and which lies nowhere. One in England.

We throw every thing together. To Shakspeare the boarded stage is the field of imagination. He comes from the hand of Nature an essential poet. That he is a dramatic poet, should have two reasons. The first, given in his poetical constitution; that the piercing and various inquisition of humanity for which he was gifted; the intimate mastery of passion; and the extraordinary activity of ratiocination which distinguish him, are satisfied only by the Drama. Then, in the accident of the times—that as the stage rose for Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and they for the stage—so, with Shakspeare, in England. At a certain point of the social progression, the theatre becomes the spot where poetry has living power. Shakspeare must seize upon the mind of his countrymen, as Homer took possession of Greece—VIVA VOCE. The silent and retired press is for the dream-like Spenser—for the star-like Milton. To Shakspeare, the Promethean maker of men and women, earthly-moulded if kindled into life with fire from heaven—give a stage and actors!—Give men and women, to personate men and women!—And give three thousand men and women, to throng roundabout, and look and listen—thrill and weep—suspended in one breathlessness! But not because he has deigned to trace upon those actual boards his magical ring, and because within it his powerful art calls up no air-made phantasmagoria, but breathing and sentient substantial humanity; not, therefore, is he less a magician—less a POET—less, if you will, a dreamer. Imagination is the faculty which habitually divides him, as all his brotherhood, from us, the vulgar of mankind. To him the stage is the field of imagination; therefore, he avails himself of all allowed imaginative resources. Distance, in time and place, which renders indefinite; strange, picturesque, poetical manners, and regions, are such legitimate means. In particular, imagination prefers high rank to low, for half a dozen reasons. The outward show, state, pomp, retinue, splendour of costume, of habitation, of all daily accidental conditions;—these allure imagination, which, like grief, "is easily beguiled." Ease, in human life, like that attributed to the heavenly divinities—the ρεια ζωντες—the gods who live at ease, pleases imagination;—which might be justified. But imagination is not a light and idle child, to be won by the mere toy of a throne and robe, crown and sceptre. These are the signs of a universal homage rendered; and in this meaning, besides their natural richness and beauty, pleasing. Again, imagination itself does homage to stately power—not homage servile, as to that from which it dreads evil—but free homage, contemplatively, to a wellspring of momentous effects. The power that invests the person of a sovereign, of necessity clothes him in majesty. Again, many and grave destinies hang about high persons. Each stands for many of less note; and imagination is a faculty, taking delight in the representation of many by one. Besides, high persons carry on high actions; and they are free to act. They will, and straightway they do.

Here, then, is good cause why the imaginative drama, comic or tragic, shall delight in high persons. And you see accordingly, that the plays of Shakspeare, of whatsoever description, move regularly amongst the loftily born—kings, independent dukes, nobles, gentlemen.

"The Emperor of Russia was my father:"

says the falsely accused Hermione, and you sympathize with her proud consciousness, and you THE MORE feel her abhorred indignity.

If Spenser could say, that it belongs to gentle blood to sit well on horseback—much more does the easy and inborn courage and worth of gentle blood bestride bravely, gracefully, lightly, and well, the careering, rearing, bounding, plunging, and headlong rushing horses of human destinies.

The fact, then, is this:—Shakspeare thus views the world; and he frames his idea of the drama accordingly.

What, then, does Pope mean, when he says that Shakspeare "lays his scene amongst tradesmen and mechanics?"

Surely he does not include under tradesmen, great merchants. Not, for example, the "Merchant of Syracusa," the grave and good old Ægæon, condemned to death in the "Comedy of Errors" because Ephesus and Syracusa have war. He and his fortune are as far away as a king with his—from the 'prentices of London. It is not the Venetian merchant, the princely Antonio, with his argosies, spice and silk laden, that Pope regards as letting down the dignity of the sock; nor, we hope, the Jew and usurer, Shylock; the sublime in indignation, when he vindicates to his down-spurned race the parity of the human tempering in body and soul; the sublime in hate, when he fastens like a devil his fangs—or prepares to fasten—in the quivering, living flesh of his Christian debtor.

No! these are not yet the key to the enigma—"tradesmen and mechanics."

In the "Midsummer Night's Dream," "a crew" of six "rude mechanicals," "hard-handed men," "that work for bread upon Athenian stalls," enact TWO scenes wholly to themselves—ONE, which mixes them up with the fairies; and ONE, in the presence of Theseus, Duke of Athens, and of his fair warrior-bride Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons; to say nothing of ONE, or possible TWO fairy scenes, which include one of the said "swaggering hempen homespuns," transformed by faëry.

Is this that "laying" of the "scene amongst tradesmen and mechanics," which has afforded our critic his absolute description of Shakspeare's comedy?

We greatly suspect, that it had too much to do in suggesting the strange misrepresentation.

And is this all?

No! It is not.

There is one play that, by its whole invention, lies nearest the reality, which must be taken as habitually possessing the understandings of an English—a London—audience, in the reign of Elizabeth. It is that one comedy which haunts upon English ground—"The Merry Wives of Windsor." The complexion and constitution of the play lay it in the bosom—the manners are those—of MIDDLE English life.

Here are the persons:—Sir John Falstaff; Fenton, (he is Ann Page's lover, the list of the names assigns him no rank. In conversation with mine host of the Garter, however, he asserts his own quality; with "as I am a gentleman;") Shallow, a country justice; Slender, cousin to Shallow; Mr Ford, Mr Page, two gentlemen dwelling at Windsor; William Page, a boy, son to Mr Page; Sir Hugh Evans, a Welsh parson; Dr Caius, a French Physician; Host of the Garter Inn; Bardolf, Pistol, Nym, followers of Falstaff; Robin, page to Falstaff; Simple, servant to Slender; Rugby, servant to Dr Caius.

There is no need of adding two wives and a daughter. Here is the toning of that which we will take leave to call Shakspeare's only unromantic and unaristocratical comedy.

Was this written to please the "meaner sort" of people who frequented the playhouses?

Dennis hands down the tradition—which he may have had from Dryden, who may have had it from Sir W. Davenant—that "the comedy was written at the command of Queen Elizabeth, and by her direction." At all events, and whatsoever other tastes it courted and may have gratified, it won the favour of the highest audience. The quarto edition of 1602, describes it as having been "divers times acted by the right honourable my Lord Chamberlaine's servants, both before her Maiestie, and else-where;" and in the accounts of the Revels at Court, in the latter end of 1604, it figures as performed on the Sunday following November first, "by his Majestie's plaiers."

We have thus, in part explicitly and in part summarily, documented the TONE, if it may be so called, of Shakspeare's Comic Theatre—being impelled so to do, first of all, by the duty of contradicting, the most injurious and utterly groundless characterization of a critic, whom we cite with the highest esteem and applause; further, by the fear that the positive and unqualified averment of a high and critical authority might entrap a docile and easy reader into an unhappy misrecollection of his own true and clear knowledge upon the matter. Thirdly, we were not sorry to find ourselves engaged in clearing up, once for all, our own hitherto somewhat confused and insecure impressions. In the fourth place, we do always rejoice, and are irresistibly swayed from our equipoise, and are liable to be hurried any lengths, when we fall in with any opportunity of talking in any way about Shakspeare. But in particular we are glad to be obliged to approve and authenticate any general and grounding views of his poetry; and it came not amiss to our humour, in this day of the world, to show how tenderly and reverently the Spirit, who has the most lovingly, largely, and profoundly comprehended humanity, viewed the mistrusted and assailed institutions which have all along built and sustained the societies of men. If there is "beauty" that "maketh beautiful old rhyme," there is verse that reacts upon its matter; the poetry of Shakspeare shall stand in the place of a more easily fallible political science, to strengthen, whilst it adorns, the old pillars of man's world. Song can draw down the moon from the sky—song shall draw and charm many a rugged, uncouth, untamed understanding to a more submissive political docility.

But, indeed, there lurked one other less ambitious motive. What could the accurate Pope mean by this most inaccurate description of his author? We presume that there is an answer. The eulogy which precisely describes Shakspeare, is Pope's own. The imputations against Shakspeare, of which Pope will palliate the edge, are not Pope's. They are the impeachments laid by the adversary, which Pope, zealous of mitigating, too largely and hastily concedes. Standing, then, in bare and sharp opposition, as they do, to the fact, they may serve us as constituting a fact in themselves. They attest the opinion of the day—opinion, at least, prevalent high and wide, since Pope allows it. We can understand the opinion itself only as a confused and excessive exaggeration of the admixture which Shakspeare allowed to the lower comic, in comedy and in tragedy; as a protest—in which how far did Pope join?—against that admixture. The conclusion which this day will draw, must be, that the criticism of Shakspeare in polite circles, at that day, stood low.

"Another cause (and no less strong than the former) may be deduced from our author's being a player, and forming himself first upon the judgments of that body of men whereof he was a member. They have ever had a standard to themselves, upon other principles than those of Aristotle. As they live by the majority, they know no rule but that of pleasing the present humour, and complying with the wit in fashion; a consideration which brings all their judgment to a short point. Players are just such judges of what is right, as tailors are of what is graceful. And in this view it will be but fair to allow, that most of our author's faults are less to be ascribed to his wrong judgment as a poet, than to his right judgment as a player.

"By these men it was thought a praise to Shakspeare, that he scarce ever blotted a line. This they industriously propagated, as appears from what we are told by Ben Jonson in his Discoveries, and from the preface of Heminges and Condell to the first folio edition. But in reality (however it has prevailed) there never was a more groundless report, or to the contrary of which there are more undeniable evidences; as the comedy of the Merry Wives of Windsor, which he entirely new writ; the History of Henry VI., which was first published under the title of The Contention of York and Lancaster, and that of Henry V., extremely improved: that of Hamlet, enlarged to almost as much again as at first, and many others. I believe the common opinion of his want of learning proceeded from no better ground. This too might be thought a praise by some, and to this his errors have as injudiciously been ascribed by others. For it is certain, were it true, it could concern but a small part of them; the most are such as are not properly defects, but superfœtations; and arise not from want of learning or reading, but from want of thinking or judging: or rather (to be more just to our author) from a compliance to those wants in others. As to a wrong choice of the subject, a wrong conduct of the incidents, false thoughts, forced expressions, &c., if these are not to be ascribed to the aforesaid accidental reasons, they must be charged upon the poet himself, and there is no help for it. But I think the two disadvantages which I have mentioned, (to be obliged to please the lowest of people, and to keep the worst of company,) if the consideration be extended as far as it reasonably may, will appear sufficient to mislead and depress the greatest genius upon earth. Nay, the more modesty with which such a one is endued, the more he is in danger of submitting and conforming to others against his own better judgment."

On the other hand, as the intellectual destiny of Shakspeare was to be the greatest of dramatists, the trade of a player had its advantages. He learned absolutely what a stage is, what actors can do, and what audiences are. Charles Lamb feebly maintained, that Shakspeare's Plays are unfitted for acting, by being above it. They are above reading too; at least, they are above most—why not say the truth at once—above all readers of them. Yet it would be a pity to leave them unread. They are the best fitted of all plays for acting; for of all plays they best possess the stage, and command the audience. In thus extolling the essential poetry of Shakspeare, he condemns his practical understanding, his art. He oversteps, too, the inabilities of the histrionic art. The inabilities of the histrions themselves, is another matter. The difficulty of understanding Shakspeare, must not be turned into the impossibility of representing him when understood. The power, art, science, capacity, what you will, with which he has fitted his works to their immediate use, shows itself remarkably in this, that as the stage grows in its material means, the play comes out in power, splendour, majesty, magnificence, as if the stage but grew to the dimensions of that which it must contain; and it must have been hundreds of times felt in the green-room, that only the Plays of Shakspeare try, and form actor and actress, foster and rear them to the height of their possible stature.

"But as to his want of learning, it may be necessary to say something more: there is certainly a vast difference between learning and languages. How far he was ignorant of the latter, I cannot determine; but it is plain he had much reading at least, if they will not call it learning. Nor is it any great matter, if a man has knowledge, whether he has it from one language or another. Nothing is more evident than that he had a taste of natural philosophy, mechanics, ancient and modern history, poetical learning, and mythology: we find him very knowing in the customs, rights, and manners of antiquity. In Coriolanus and Julius Cæsar, not only the spirit, but manners of Romans are exactly drawn: and still a nicer distinction is shown between the manners of the Romans in time of the former and of the latter. His reading in the ancient historians is no less conspicuous, in many references to particular passages, and the speeches copied from Plutarch in Coriolanus may, I think, as well be made an instance of his learning as those copied from Cicero in Catiline, of Ben Jonson's. The manners of other nations in general, the Egyptians, Venetians, French, &c., are drawn with equal propriety. Whatever object of nature or branch of science he either speaks of or describes, it is always with competent, if not extensive knowledge; his descriptions are still exact; all his metaphors appropriated, and remarkably drawn from the true nature and inherent qualities of each subject. When he treats of ethic or politic, we may constantly observe a wonderful justness of distinction as well as extent of comprehension. No one is more a master of the poetical story, or has more frequent allusions to the various parts of it. Mr Waller (who has been celebrated for this last particular) has not shown more learning this way than Shakspeare. We have translations from Ovid published in his name, among those poems which pass for his, and for some of which we have undoubted authority, (being published by himself, and dedicated to his noble patron, the Earl of Southampton.) He appears also to have been conversant in Plautus, from whom he has taken the plot of one of his plays. He follows the Greek authors, and particularly Dares Phrygius, in another; although I will not pretend to say in what language he read them. The modern Italian writers of novels he was manifestly acquainted with; and we may conclude him to be no less conversant with the ancients of his own country; from the use he has made of Chaucer in Troilus and Cressida, and in the Two Noble Kinsmen, if that play be his, as there goes a tradition it was; and indeed it has little resemblance of Fletcher, and more of our author than some of those that have been received as genuine.

"I am inclined to think, this opinion proceeded originally from the zeal of the partisans of our author and Ben Jonson; as they endeavoured to exalt the one at the expense of the other. It is ever the nature of parties to be in extremes; and nothing is so probable, as that because Ben Jonson had much the more learning, it was said, on the one hand, that Shakspeare had none at all; and because Shakspeare had much the most wit and fancy, it was retorted, on the other, that Jonson wanted both. Because Shakspeare borrowed nothing, it was said that Ben Jonson borrowed every thing. Because Jonson did not write extempore, he was reproached with being a year about every piece; and because Shakspeare wrote with ease and rapidity, they cried, he never once made a blot. Nay, the spirit of opposition ran so high, that whatever those of the one side objected to the other, was taken at the rebound, and turned into praises; as injudiciously as their antagonists before had made them objections."

The learning of Shakspeare! Pope, like Dryden, has said well upon it. Shakspeare, the personal friend of men of highest rank, learning, genius; and reading in the English language as much as he chose of the wit and wisdom there entreasured, inherited the mind of the world. What will you have more? That he shall read his own spirit; and, therefore, is he above all men learned. As for that seeming wildness and irregularity of his style, which many are inclined, even at this day, to set down to his imperfect education, we beg you to recollect his more elaborated rhymed poems; his Venus and Adonis; his Rape of Lucrece; his Passionate Pilgrim; his Sonnets. And are you quite sure that some of the most finished, the strictest composition as to language and verse, of his age, shall not be found there, far beyond the experience or even comprehension of Dr Parr and all his scholars?

Reader beloved from old, and with whom we have ever loved, on pleasant landing-place in spacious article, lovingly to confabulate—while printer's devil, forgetful of copy, in the far depths of Altisidora indulged in snoreless sleep—reader, beloved anew, tell us who were the Greeks? "They were that division of mankind in which Homer took mortal existence. Homer spoke Greek." Good. And so, three or five thousand years hence, somebody will be asking somebody, who were the English? "Oh! they inhabited the island in which Shakspeare was born! Then, and a little while before and after. Shakspeare spoke English. He was an Englishman." Good. Ay, ay, rough and ready, and gentle reader, in what civilized part of Central Africa such question and reply will be made, we predict not; but you and we feel, that when and wheresoever the little dialogue shall occur, we two shall have for ourselves our own sufficient share of posthumous reputation, and eke Charles Knight. These twelve volumes always lying on their own line of our table, are Charles' edition of Shakspeare, alone of all our valuables uninsured at the Sun, for they are bound in asbestos. And now, obedient reader, listen to us lecturing, like a philosophical critic as we are, on Pope's Essay on Criticism, involved in these ten volumes, edited twenty years ago by William Roscoe, now with the saints.

Essay on Criticism! What does one expect? Criticism, be it noted, has two phases. This is the first. In its origin, it follows now afar, now close upon the works out of which it has arisen. It describes the methods which genius has half-instinctively, half-thoughtfully followed. It brings out into clear statement, certain movements and felt workings of genius; and it defines formal imitation to workers that shall come. It appears, therefore, as an embodying of rules. This is, in the main, the shape in which criticism appears in classical antiquity. This was the meaning of the name with Pope and his contemporaries. "Dicta sunt omnia," remarks Quinctilian, (insisting upon the order in which nature produces, first, the arts themselves, poetry or eloquence, in power—operative; then, the deduction and exposition of the method,) "antequam præciperentur." And so in Pope and his contemporaries, we read of nothing but RULES—RULES—RULES! At this day, the word then in honour, grates, albeit a smooth one, upon one's ear. It seems to depress and to tame, to shut up and imprison thought, which would range and soar, and asks breath, and vigour, and liberty, from true criticism. The truth is, that since that day the world has turned round, and we are turned philosophers. Thus the second phasis has arisen. We want no longer the rules, but the PRINCIPLES—the facts or the laws in our nature, and the nature of things about us, which have given out the rules; whence they flowed to Homer and to Demosthenes. We will drink from the fountains; not even from those "golden urns!" And with right and with reason, for we, too, are the children of nature. Besides, we will JUDGE Homer and Demosthenes. Without doubt, criticism, founded as an art empirical, tends continually to its second phasis, of a science grounding an art. And it is to be hoped, that something towards this profounder constitution has been attained, and that we, in following down our critics, shall follow out some part of such a progress. In the mean time, let us not rate our predecessors too low, merely upon the showing of their own modesty. Do not believe that Aristotle could propound a rule, through which a principle did not gleam out. And, in sooth, when this Essay sprang from the brain of Pope,—were not, possibly, the papers lying in the desk of Addison, in which he began, for our literature, the deliberate and express examination into the Philosophy of Criticism, within the domain of the beautiful in Art and Nature?

Addison, in a commendatory critique in the Spectator, said, that the observations in the Essay "follow one another without that methodical regularity that would have been requisite in a prose writer." And Warton, in opposition to Warburton, who asserted that it was a regular piece, written on a regular and consistent plan, has spoken scornfully of the Bishop's Commentary, and concluded in his usual forcible-feeble way, that Pope had no plan in the poem at all. Roscoe spiritedly rates Warton for assuming to know Pope's mind better than Pope himself, who gave the Commentary his imprimatur. It may occasionally refine rather too ingeniously, but on the whole it is elucidatory, and Roscoe did well to give it entire in his edition of Pope. The Essay is in one book, but divided into three principal parts or numbers; and Warburton in a few words tells its plan:—"The rest gives the rules for the study of the art of criticism; the second exposes the causes of wrong judgment; and the third marks out the morals of the critic." And Roscoe says, with equal truth, that "a certain degree of order and succession prevails, which leads the reader through the most important topics connected with the subject; thereby uniting the charm of variety with the regularity of art." Adding finely, that "poetry abhors nothing so much as the appearance of formality and restraint."

An excellent feature of the Essay, giving it practical worth, and interesting as native to the character of the writer, is the strenuous requisition to the poet himself, that he shall within his own soul, and for his own use of his own art, accomplish himself in criticism. It is recorded that Walsh, "the muses' judge and friend," said to Pope—"There is at least one virtue of writing in which an English poet of to-day may excel his predecessors; that is—CORRECTNESS." But it is more likely that the perception of this virtue in the poetical intellect of Pope drew out the remark from Walsh, than that the remark suggested to the poet the pursuit of the virtue. Pope, in his verse, in his prose, in his life, rules himself. Deliberated purpose, resolutely adopted and consistently executed, characterises the man and the writer. It is nature, or some profounder control than a casual suggestion of a literary aim, that imparts this pervading character. As little could he owe to another the nice discrimination, the intellectual precision, the delicacy of perception—in a word, the critical sense and apprehension which make up one aspect of the mind, impressed upon the style, generally considered, of Pope. As far, then, as the virtue of correctness is to be predicated of his writings—and we do not believe that the countrymen of a poet go on predicating of him, for generation after generation, gratuitously—we must believe that we have to thank himself for it, and not Walsh.

We said, "UPON THE STYLE, GENERALLY CONSIDERED,"—for we acknowledge exceptions and contradictions to the general position; inaccuracies and incorrectnesses, that would make an answer to the question—"What is the correctness of Pope?" a somewhat troublesome affair. But we resolutely insist that when, in his "Essay on Criticism," he calls upon the poet himself severely to school his own mind in preparation; when he requires, that in working he shall not only feel and fancy, but understand too; when, in a word, he claims that he shall possess his art AS AN ART; he speaks, his own spirit impelling; and so stamps a fine personality, which is one mode of originality, on his work.

The praise that is uppermost in one's mind of the Essay on Criticism, is its rectitude of legislation. Pope is an orthodox doctor—a champion of the good old cause. Hence, after almost a century and a half, this poem of a minor (Warburton says his twentieth year) carries in our literature the repute and weight of an authority and a standard. It is of the right good English temper—thoughtful and ardent—discreet and generous—firm, with sensibility—bold and sedate—manly and polished. He establishes himself in well-chosen positions of natural strength, commanding the field; and he occupies them in the style of an experienced leader, with forces judiciously disposed, and showing a resolute front every way of defence and offence. You do not curiously enquire into the novelty of his doctrines. He has done well if, in small compass, he has brought together, and vigorously compacted and expressed with animation, poignancy, and effect, the best precepts. Such writing is beneficial, not simply by the truths which it newly propounds, or more luminously than heretofore unfolds, but by the authority which it vindicates to true art—by the rallying-point which it affords to the loyal adherents of the high and pure muses—by the sympathy which its wins, or confirms, to good letters—by its influence in dispersing pestilent vapours, and rendering the atmosphere wholesome.

In perusing the "Essay on Criticism," the reader is occasionally tempted to ask himself "whether he has under his eyes an art of criticism or an art of poetry." 'Tis no wonder; since, in some sort, the two arts are one and the same. They coincide largely; criticism being nothing else than the reasoned intelligence of poetry. Just the same spirit, power, precision, delicacy, and accomplishment of understanding, which reign in the soul of the great poet creating, rule in that of the good critic judging. The poet, creating, criticizes his own work; he is poet and critic both. The critic is a poet without the creation. As Apelles is eye and hand, both; the critic of Apelles is eye only. This identification, so far as it goes, has been variously grounded and viewed. Of old, it was urged that only the poet is the judge of poetry, the painter of painting, the musician of music, and so on. Such positions proceed upon a high and reverential estimation of art. To judge requires the depth and sharpness of sensibility, the vivid and pathetic imagination, which characterize the artist. It asks more. To see the picture as it should be gazed upon, to hear the poem as it would be listened to, laborious preparation is needed—study, strenuous and exact, learned and searching—that ardent and lover-like communing with nature, the original of arts, and that experience in the powers, the difficulties, and the significancy of art, which only the dedication of the votary to the service of an art can easily be supposed to induce. There is, in practice, a verity and an intimacy of knowledge, without which theoretical criticism wants both light and life. So Pope contends—

"Let such judge others who themselves excel;
And censure freely, who have written well."

He seems, at the same time, to be aware that this doctrine is not likely to find general favour; and that an objection will be taken up by those with whom it is unpalatable, grounded in the poet's liability to be seduced, beguiled, transported, misled, by his sympathy with that which is in the art specifically his own—the inventive power. And he admits the danger; but rebuts the objection by averring that, on the other side, the critic who is not a poet has his own temptation. He will be run away with by his intellectual propensities; the opinion of his own infallibillity; the pleasure of pronouncing sentence—dispositions all, that move to a hasty, and are adverse to a generous, decision.

"Poets are partial to their wit, 'tis true,
But are not critics to their judgment, too?"

The two arts, poetry and the criticism of poetry, thus running together, so as that in the mind of the poet they are one thing, and that it is hard well to distinguish in speaking of them in prose, it will not seem surprising if Pope, intending to write of the lesser, and so inveigled into writing of the greater, should not always distinctly know of which he writes.

Let us cite a celebrated passage as an example of such almost unavoidable confusion.

"First fathom nature, and your judgment frame
By her just standard, which is still the same.
Unerring Nature, still divinely bright,
One clear, unchanged, and universal light;
Life, force, and beauty, must to all impart,
At once the source, and end, and test of art.
Art from that fund each just supply provides,
Works without show, and without pomp presides.
In some fair body thus the informing soul
With spirits feeds, with vigour fills the whole,
Each motion guides, and every nerve sustains,
Itself unseen, but in th' effect remains.
Some, to whom heaven in wit has been profuse,
Want as much more to turn it to its use;
For wit and judgment often are at strife,
Though meant each other's aid, like man and wife.
'Tis more to guide than spur the muse's steed
Restrain his fury, than provoke his speed;
The winged courser, like a generous horse,
Shows most his mettle when you check his course."

Now, lend your ears. Pray, attend.

It these memorable twenty lines—memorable by the truth of the thinking, and the spirited or splendid felicity of expression—the subject of the rules delivered is for two verses—Criticism Proper, that is to say, the faculty of judging in the mind of the critic, who is not necessarily a poet, and whose function in the world is the judgment of the work produced and complete, and exposed for free censure.

"First fathom nature, and your judgment frame
By her just standard, which is still the same."

This general reference to the fountain-head of law and of power, is spoken to the critic—the writer of critiques—the public censurer—the man of judgment.

For the next four lines, the creative power, and the presiding criticism in the mind of the poet, and the judicial criticism in the mind of the official critic, are all three in hand together.

"Unerring Nature, still divinely bright,
One clear, unchanged, and universal light;
Life, force, and beauty, must to all impart,
At once the source, and end, and test of art."

Warburton has remarked, that the two last verses run parallel to one another, inasmuch as "source" respects "life," the ever-welling—"end" reflects "force," for the force of any thing arises from its being directed to its end—and "test" looks back to "beauty," for every thing acquires beauty by its being reduced to its true standard. Very well said.

But in what sense is nature the "end" of art? Warburton explains the word, by "the design of poetry being to convey knowledge of nature in the most agreeable manner." Might not one think that nature is this "end" rather, inasmuch as art aims at reaching nature in our bosoms? In this acceptation, "end" and "force" would precisely belong to one another.

In the mean time, "life" and "source" distinctly concern the creative power in the soul of the poet; art's "end" must be known, and fixedly looked at, as the lodestar by the mariner, by presiding criticism in the same soul; and the "test" of art must evidently be applied by the critic discharging his peculiar functions; whilst "unerring nature," imaged as the sun, enlightens, of course, both poet and critic.

And now the critic, who was at the outset of the strain—six verses ago—alone in contemplation, is dismissed for good or for ill. The poet is on Pegasus's back; the lashing out of a heel kicks the unfortunate devil to the devil; and away we go.

For one verse, the creative power, and the presiding criticism in the mind of the poet, are confounded together under the freshly suggested name—ART.

"Art from that fund each just supply provides."

That is to say, "Art," as the inventive power in the poet, draws from the sole "fund," nature, its abundant "supplies." Art, as the critical power in the poet, takes care that precisely the "just" supply be drawn.

In the next line, this same art, signifies this presiding criticism only.

"Works without show, and without pomp presides."

Clearly, the intent, inostensive, virtuous faculty of criticism alone, influencing, guarding, leading, and ruling.

Then out of the four lines, which elaborate an excellent simile, due in propriety to the presiding criticism, two are chequered with a lingering recollection of the creative power—

"In some fair body thus the informing soul
With spirit feeds, with vigour fills the whole,
Each motion guides, and every nerve sustains;
Itself unseen, but in th' effect remains."

What feeds? What fills? You cannot help looking back to that provision of "supplies;" and yet a profounder truth would be disclosed, another brilliancy imparted, and an unperplexed significancy given to the fine image, if Criticism alone might be the informing soul—if the delicate Reason of Art in the accomplished poetical spirit, had been boldly and frankly represented as inspiriting and invigorating, no less than as guiding and supporting; for criticism is the virtue of art, ruling the passions, and surely neither orator, nor poet, nor philosopher, will pause in answering, that virtue "feeds" with "spirits," and "fills with vigour." That which, itself unseen, remains in its effect, is clearly that authorized criticism which genius, in the poet's soul, obeys.

In the next verse wit signifies the creative power alone.

"Some to whom Heaven in wit has been profuse."

In the next, wit is the presiding criticism alone.

"Want as much more to turn it to its use."

In the two following, wit is the creative power only, and judgment is the presiding criticism.

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

The four closing verses, which deservedly ring in every ear, and grace every tongue—lucid and vigorous—born of the true poetical self-understanding—extol duly the presiding criticism, of which only they speak.

"'Tis more to guide than spur the muse's steed,
Restrain his fury, than provoke his speed;
The winged courser, like a generous horse,
Shows most his mettle when you check his course."

A happy commentary on the "feeding with spirits," and "filling with vigour," as we would accept them. The rein provokes into action the plenitude of life that else lies unused.

By the by, Gilbert Wakefield, not the happiest of critics in his services to Pope, here rightly warns against the unskilful and indolent error of apprehending from the word "like" a most inapt simile, which would explain a horse by a horse, and exalt Pegasus by cutting off his wings. The words are clearly to be understood, "like a generous horse—AS HE IS."

We have seen, then, instructed reader, that the poet begins giving advice to the critic. Then he entangles for a moment the critic and poet together. Then he discards the critic wholly, and takes the poet along with him to the end. Do not forget, we beseech you, that there are, in the soul of the poet, two great distinct powers. There is the primary creative power, which, strong in love and passion and imagination, converses with nature, draws thence its heaped intellectual wealth, and transmutes it all into poetical substance. Then there is the great presiding power of criticism, which sits in sovereignty, ruling the work of the poet engaged in exercising his art. These two are confounded and confused by Pope once and again. They are so, under the name of Art!—which, at first, comprehends the two; and then suddenly means only the power of criticism in the poet. Again, they shift place confusedly under the name "Wit"—which at first means the creative power only—then, the critical power only. Then, once more, the creative power only; in which sense it is here at last opposed explicitly to judgment. The close is, under a fit and gallant figure, a spirited description of the creative power firily working under the control of criticism.

These deceiving interchanges run through a passage otherwise of great lucidity and beauty, and of sterling strength and worth. Probably, most attentive of readers, though possibly not the least perplexed, thou wilt not rest with less satisfaction upon what is truly good in the passage, now thou hast with us taken the trouble of detecting the slight disorder which overshadows it. The possibility of the first confusion which slips from the critic to the poet, attests the strength of the opinion in Pope's mind, that the poet must entertain as an intellectual inmate a spirit of criticism, as learned and severe as that of the mere critic. Perhaps the latter infers how close the cognation of the creative and the critical faculty.

And now for another striking instance of sliding, unconsciously, from critic to poet.

"But most by numbers judge a poet's song,
And smooth or rough, with them is right or wrong:
In the bright muse, though thousand charms conspire,
Her voice is all these tuneful fools admire;
Who haunt Parnassus but to please their ear,
Not mend their minds; as some to church repair,
Not for the doctrine, but the music, there.
These equal syllables alone require,
Though oft the ear the open vowels tire;
While expletives their feeble aid do join,
And ten low words oft creep in one dull line.
While they ring round the same unvaried chimes,
With sure returns of still expected rhymes;
Where'er you find the 'cooling western breeze,'
In the next line, it 'whispers through the trees;'
If crystal streams 'with pleasing murmurs creep,'
The reader's threaten'd (not in vain) with 'sleep;'
Then, at the last and only couplet fraught
With some unmeaning thing they call a thought,
A needless Alexandrine ends the song,
That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.
Leave such to tune their own dull rhymes!"—

Who are the "MOST" that "JUDGE a poet's song by numbers?" with whom "smooth or rough is RIGHT or WRONG?" Who are "the tuneful fools," who, of the Muse's thousand charms, "ADMIRE her tuneful voice" only? The haunters of Parnassus, whose attraction thither is the "PLEASURE" of their ear, not the instruction of their mind; who "REQUIRE" nothing more than "equal syllables?"—For these first eight lines, you have the bad critic, and the bad critic only.

But who are "THEY" that "ring round the same unvaried chimes" of rhymes; who bestow upon "you," "the reader,"—"breeze," "trees;" "creep," and "sleep;" whose one thought has no meaning; who have scotched the snake, not killed it; and who are to be abandoned to the solitary delight of their own bad verses? In these last ELEVEN lines, you have the bad poet, and the bad poet only. Whilst in the three intermediate verses, "Though oft the ear," &c., you have the imperceptible slide effected from critic to poet. Did Pope know and intend this? We think not; and we think there is in the construction itself proof positive to the inadvertency. For where is the antecedent referred to in

"While THEY ring round?"

He who looks for it will arrive first at the "THESE," who "equal syllables alone require." But he has now escaped from the bad poet's into almost worse company. The said "THESE" are clearly a SECOND smaller division of the condemned EAR-CRITICS. The greater division, the "MOST", have ears, forsooth, and can distinguish "smooth" and "rough." But "THESE" WOULD HAVE ears. They have none; they have only FINGERS. They can tell that the syllables keep the RULE of the measure, and that is all. They stand on the lowest round of the ladder, or on the ground at the foot of the ladder.

| | | | |
Tho' oft the ear the open vowels tire,

is to them "excellent music," an unimpeachable verse, for it COUNTS RIGHT. They are the arithmeticians of the Muse—no musicians.

We agree with Warburton, who says that it is "impossible to give a full and exact idea of poetical criticism without considering at the same time the art of poetry, so far as poetry is an ART." But we must contend, that a poet who addresses or discourses of two such distinct species as the writer who criticizes, and the writer who is criticized—two human beings, at least, placed in such very different predicaments—is bound continually to know and to keep his reader aware, which he exhorts and which he smites—the sacrificer or the victim.

You have in your memory, and a thousand times recollected, the following fine passage; but are you sure that you have fully and clearly understood, as well as felt it?

"A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring;
There shallow drafts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts,
While from the bounded level of our mind
Short views we take, nor see the length behind;
But more advanced, behold with strange surprise,
Far distant views of endless science rise!
So pleased at first the towering Alps we try,
Mount o'er the vales, and seem to tread the sky,
Th' eternal snows appear already past,
And the first clouds and mountains seem the last.
But those attain'd, we tremble to survey
The growing labours of the lengthen'd way,
Th' increasing prospect tires our wondering eyes,
Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise."

The precept must be given to somebody. To whom? The whole Essay addresses itself to two descriptions of persons—to those who will be critics, and to those who will be poets. Both are here addressed, and indistinctively. But we may distinguish—nay, must—in turning verse into prose. What is the counsel bestowed? "Meddle not with criticism, as a professed or unprofessed critic, unless you are prepared to invade the depths of criticism." "Touch not the lyre of Apollo to call forth a tone, unless you are willing to put your hand under the most rigorous discipline in the school of the musicians." What is the motive, the reason of the counsel? The twofold monitory and hortatory counsel, proceeds upon a twofold contemplation; upon the view of the beginning, and upon that of the end.

A taste of criticism—the possession of half a dozen rules—the sitting, for a few furtive and perilous instants, upon that august seat of high judgment, before which the great wits of all ages and nations come to receive their award—infatuates the youthful untempered brain with dazzling, bewildering, and blinding self-opinion. Enough to mislead is easily learned. Right dictates of clearest minds—oracles of the old wisdom—crudely misunderstood. Rules of general enunciation made false in the applying, by the inability of perceiving in the instance the differencing conditions which qualify the rule, or suspend it. So, on the other hand, canons of a narrower scope, stretched beyond their true intent. And last, and worst of all, in the ignorance and in the disdain of statutes, and sanctions, and preceding authoritative judgments—the humours and fancies, the likings and the mislikings, the incapable comprehension and the precipitate misapprehensions of an untrained, uninstructed, inexperienced, self-unknowing spirit, howsoever of Nature gifted or ungifted, to be taken for the standard of the worth which the generations of mankind have approved, or which has newly risen up to enlighten the generations of mankind!

Abstain, then, from judging, O Critic that wilt be! Humble thine understanding in reverence! Open thy soul to beliefs! Yield up thy heart, dissolving and overcome, to love! Cultivate self-suspicion! and learn! learn! learn! The bountiful years that lift up the oak to maturity, shall rear, and strengthen, and ripen thee! Knowledge of books, knowledge of men, knowledge of Nature—and solicited, and roused, and sharpened, in the manifold and studious conversation with books, and with men, and with Nature—last and greatest—the knowledge of thyself—shall bring thee out large-hearted, high-minded, sensitive, apprehensive, comprehensive, informed and original, clear and profound, genial and exact, scrutinizing and pardoning, candid, and generous, and just—in a word, a finished CRITIC. The steadfast and mighty laws of the moral and intellectual world have taken safe care and tutelage of thee, and confer upon thee, in thy now accomplished powers, the natural and well-earned remuneration of honestly, laboriously, and pertinaciously dedicated powers!

And as for thee, O Poet that wilt be, con thou, by night and by day, the biography of John Milton!

And now—in conclusion—for the very noblest strain in didactic poetry.

"Those Rules of old discover'd, not devised,
Are Nature still, but Nature methodised;
Nature, like Liberty, is but restrain'd
By the same laws which first herself ordain'd.
"Hear how learn'd Greece her useful rules indites,
When to repress, and when indulge our flights:
High on Parnassus' top her sons she show'd,
And pointed out those arduous paths they trod;
Held from afar, aloft, th' immortal prize,
And urged the rest by equal steps to rise:
Just precepts thus from great examples given,
She drew from them what they derived from Heaven.
The gen'rous critic fann'd the poet's fire,
And taught the world with reason to admire.
Then Criticism the Muse's handmaid proved,
To dress her charms, and make her more beloved.
****
"You, then, whose judgment the right course would steer,
Know well each Ancient's proper character:
His fable, subject, scope in ev'ry page;
Religion, country, genius of his age:
Without all these at once before your eyes,
Cavil you may, but never criticise.
Be Homer's works your study and delight,
Read them by day, and meditate by night;
Thence form your Judgment, thence your maxims bring,
And trace the muses upward to their spring.
Still with itself compared, his text peruse;
And let your comment be the Mantuan muse.
"When first young Maro in his boundless mind
A work t' outlast immortal Rome design'd,
Perhaps he seem'd above the critic's law,
And but from Nature's fountains scorn'd to draw:
But when t' examine ev'ry part he came,
Nature and Homer were, he found, the same.
Convinced, amazed, he checks the bold design;
And rules as strict his labour'd work confine,
As if the Stagyrite o'erlook'd each line.
Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem;
To copy nature is to copy them.
Some beauties yet no precepts can declare,
For there's a happiness as well as care.
Music resembles poetry; in each
Are nameless graces which no methods teach,
And which a master-hand alone can reach.
If, where the rules not far enough extend,
(Since rules were made but to promote their end,)
Some lucky license answer to the full
Th' intent proposed, that license is a rule.
Thus Pegasus, a nearer way to take,
May boldly deviate from the common track;
Great wits sometimes may gloriously offend,
And rise to faults true critics dare not mend.
From vulgar bounds with brave disorder part,
And snatch a grace beyond the reach of art,
Which, without passing through the judgment, gains
The heart, and all its end at once attains.
In prospects thus, some objects please our eyes,
Which out of nature's common order rise,
The shapeless rock, or hanging precipice.
But though the ancients thus their rules invade,
(As kings dispense with laws themselves have made,)
Moderns, beware! or if you must offend
Against the precept, ne'er transgress its end;
Let it be seldom, and compell'd by need,
And have, at least, their precedent to plead,
The critic else proceeds without remorse,
Seizes your fame, and puts his laws in force.
I know there are, to whose presumptuous thought
Those freer beauties, ev'n in them, seem faults.
Some figures monstrous and mis-shaped appear,
Consider'd singly, or beheld too near;
Which, but proportion'd to their light or place,
Due distance reconciles to form and grace.
A prudent chief not always must display
His powers in equal ranks, and fair array,
But with the occasion and the place comply,
Conceal his force, nay seem sometimes to fly.
Those oft are stratagems which errors seem;
Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream.
Still green with bays each ancient altar stands,
Above the reach of sacrilegious hands;
Secure from flames, from Envy's fiercer rage,
Destructive war, and all-involving age.
See from each clime the learn'd their incense bring!
Hear, in all tongues consenting paeans ring!
In praise so just let ev'ry voice be join'd,
And fill the gen'ral chorus of mankind.
Hail, bards triumphant! born in happier days;
Immortal heirs of universal praise!
Whose honours with increase of ages grow,
As streams roll down, enlarging as they flow;
Nations unborn your mighty names shall sound,
And worlds applaud that must not yet be found
O may some spark of your celestial fire,
The last, the meanest of your sons inspire,
(That on weak wings, from far, pursues your flights;
Glows while he reads, but trembles as he writes,)
To teach vain wits a science little known,
T' admire superior sense, and doubt their own!

A magnificent burst of thoughtful enthusiasm! an urgent and monitory exhortation, in which Pope calls upon rising critics and poets to pursue, in the great writings of classical antiquity, the study of that art which proceeds from the true study of Nature. It depictures his own studies; and expresses the admiration of a glowing disciple, who, having found his own strength and light in the conversation of his high instructors, will utter his own gratitude, will advance their honour, and will satisfy his zeal for the good of his brethren, by engaging others to use the means that have prospered with himself.

The art delivered by Greece was self-regulated nature. Criticism was the well-expounded Reason of inspiration, calling and instructing emulation. The critic that will be, must transport himself into the mind of antiquity; and, in particular, into the mind of his author for the time being. Homer is your one great, all-sufficient lesson. Read him, after Virgil's manner of reading him, who sought Nature by submitting himself to rules drawn from her, and emblazoned in the Iliad and Odyssey.

Nevertheless, the rules do not yet comprehend every thing; and emergencies occur when they whom the rules have trained to mastery, inspired by their spirit, and following out their design, transcend them: so creating a new excellence, which, in its turn, becomes a rule—but, O ye moderns! beware, and dare tremblingly!

There are critics of a confined and self-confident wit, who impeach these liberties, even of the masters, most unthinkingly and rashly; for sometimes the skillful tactician is on his way to winning the victory, when you think him flying.

The fame of those ancients is now safe and universal. Withhold not your solitary voice. Hail, ye victorious inheritors of ever-gathering renown! And, oh! enable the last and least of poets to teach the pretenders of criticism modesty and reverence!

Edinburgh: Printed by Ballantyne and Hughes, Paul's Work.

---

Footnotes:

[1] Daguerreotype, &c.

[2] Valerius Flaccus.

[3] Cicero, in a well-known passage of his Ethics, speaks of trade as irredeemably base, if petty; but as not so absolutely felonious if wholesale. He gives a real merchant (one who is such in the English sense) leave to think himself a shade above small-beer.

[4] "The astonishment of science."—Her medical attendants were Dr Percival, a well-known literary physician, who had been a correspondent of Condorcet, D'Alembert, &c., and Mr Charles White, a very distinguished surgeon. It was he who pronounced her head to be the finest in its structure and development of any that he had ever seen—an assertion which, to my own knowledge, he repeated in after years, and with enthusiasm. That he had some acquaintance with the subject may be presumed from this, that he wrote and published a work on the human skull, supported by many measurements which he had made of heads selected from all varieties of the human species. Meantime, as I would be loth that any trait of what might seem vanity should creep into this record, I will candidly admit that she died of hydrocephalus; and it has been often supposed that the premature expansion of the intellect in cases of that class, is altogether morbid—forced on, in fact, by the mere stimulation of the disease. I would, however, suggest, as a possibility, the very inverse order of relation between the disease and the intellectual manifestations. Not the disease may always have caused the preternatural growth of the intellect, but, on the contrary, this growth coming on spontaneously, and outrunning the capacities of the physical structure, may have caused the disease.

[5] Amongst the oversights in the Paradise Lost, some of which have not yet been perceived, it is certainly one—that, by placing in such overpowering light of pathos the sublime sacrifice of Adam to his love for his frail companion, he has too much lowered the guilt of his disobedience to God. All that Milton can say afterwards, does not, and cannot, obscure the beauty of that action: reviewing it calmly, we condemn—but taking the impassioned station of Adam at the moment of temptation, we approve in our hearts. This was certainly an oversight; but it was one very difficult to redress. I remember, amongst the many exquisite thoughts of John Paul, (Richter,) one which strikes me as peculiarly touching upon this subject. He suggests—not as any grave theological comment, but as the wandering fancy of a poetic heart—that, had Adam conquered the anguish of separation as a pure sacrifice of obedience to God, his reward would have been the pardon and reconciliation of Eve, together with her restoration to innocence.

[6]

"I stood in unimaginable trance
And agony, which cannot be remember'd."
—Speech of Alhadra in Coleridge's Remorse.

[7] Some readers will question the fact, and seek no reason. But did they ever suffer grief at any season of the year?

[8] Φυγη μονου προς μονον.—Plotinus.

[9] The thoughts referred to will be given in final notes; as at this point they seemed too much to interrupt the course of the narrative.

[10] "Everlasting Jew!"—der ewige Jude—which is the common German expression for The Wandering Jew, and sublimer even than our own.

[11] "I felt."—The reader must not forget, in reading this and other passages, that, though a child's feelings are spoken of, it is not the child who speaks. I decipher what the child only felt in cipher. And so far is this distinction or this explanation from pointing to any thing metaphysical or doubtful, that a man must be grossly unobservant who is not aware of what I am here noticing, not as a peculiarity of this child or that, but as a necessity of all children. Whatsoever in a man's mind blossoms and expands to his own consciousness in mature life, must have pre-existed in germ during his infancy. I, for instance, did not, as a child, consciously read in my own deep feeling these ideas. No, not at all; nor was it possible for a child to do so. I the child had the feelings, I the man decipher them. In the child lay the handwriting mysterious to him; in me the interpretation and the comment.

[12] I except, however, one case—the case of a child dying of an organic disorder, so therefore as to die slowly, and aware of its own condition. Because such a child is solemnized, and sometimes, in a partial sense, inspired—inspired by the depth of its sufferings, and by the awfulness of its prospect. Such a child having put off the earthly mind in many things, may naturally have put off the childish mind in all things. I therefore, speaking for myself only, acknowledge to have read with emotion a record of a little girl, who, knowing herself for months to be amongst the elect of death, became anxious even to sickness of heart for what she called the conversion of her father. Her filial duty and reverence had been swallowed up in filial love.

[13] The Englishwoman in Egypt.—Letters from Cairo, written during a residence in 1842, 1843, and 1844, with E. W. Lane, Esq., author of the Modern Egyptians. By his Sister.

[14] Blue eyes are regarded in the East as so unlucky, that the epithet "blue-eyed" is commonly applied as a term of abuse—(see Lane's Thousand and One Nights, chap. XV. note 9.) We find from Miss Pardoe, that a similar prejudice prevails among the Osmanlis.

[15] A representation of ladies thus mounted, is found in the Modern Egyptians, Vol. i. p. 240, first edit.

[16] Observations on the Mussulmans of India, by Mrs Meer Hassan Ali, (Parbury and Allen, 1832.) The authoress of these volumes became, under what circumstances she does not inform us, the wife of a Moslem native of wealth and rank in India, of whose hareem she had been twelve years an inmate, without once having had reason, by her own account, to regret her apparently strange choice of a partner.

[17] Knight's Quarterly Magazine, ii. 414, a talented but shortlived periodical, chiefly by members of the University of Cambridge, to which Praed was a principal contributor under the assumed signature of Peregrine Courtenay.

[18] Lane's Thousand and One Nights, i. 176, ii. 345.

[19] A representation of the Mahmal is given in the Modern Egyptians, ii. 182.

[20] Mrs Damer describes this lady, to whose amiability and accomplishments she does ample justice, as "a sort of Turkish chanoinesse," who had renounced marriage in order to devote herself to her mother—a circumstance which, if correctly stated, would be almost unparalleled in the East. But Mrs Poole's silence would rather lead us to suppose that Mrs Damer was mistaken.

[21] A belief precisely similar prevailed throughout Christendom, previous to the year 1260 of our own era: the reference being to the two mystic periods in the eleventh chapter of the Apocalypse.

[22] An anecdote of this personage is given in Mr Lane's works, i. 153.

[23] It is hareem etiquette to address mothers by the names of their children.

[24] Marriages of slaves from the khalif's hareem occur more than once in the Thousand and One Nights.

[25] The higher classes are not free from this reproach if we are to believe the story told by Mrs Damer, that Nezleh Hanum punished a female slave who had offended her by the daily amputation of a joint of one of her fingers!

[26] A Spanish proverb of former days, defines "Castilian faith and Moorish works" as the ingredients of a good Christian.

[27] Lectures on Agricultural Chemistry and Geology. 1 vol. 8vo.

Elements of Agricultural Chemistry and Geology. 4th Edition.

Catechism of Agricultural Chemistry and Geology. 7th Edition.

[28] Elements of Agricultural Chemistry and Geology, 4th Edition, p. 239.

[29] Yet we are sometimes led to doubt if our author be really so kind-hearted as he would have us to believe. The following passage, for example, would lead us to believe that he is really savage at heart, and that his humanity is little better than affectation. The contrast between the two passages which we have put in italics is very amusing. He is speaking of the weeding of pigeons.

"Every bird that is caught should be examined and recognized and every one exhibiting signs of old age should be destroyed, by pushing the joint of the thumb with force into the back of the head, and severing the cervical vertebræ, or applying the teeth for that purpose; but should these modes be disliked or impracticable, rather than torture the poor devoted animals by abortive attempts, let their heads be cut off at once by a sharp table-knife."—(Vol. ii. p. 253.)

[30] Diaries and Correspondence of James Harris, First Earl of Malmesbury. Edited by his Grandson, the Third Earl, Vols. 3 and 4, London: 1844.

[31] Barrancas are those immense clefts or ravines, some of them several thousand feet deep, which abound upon the plateau, or table-land, on which the city of Mexico stands.

[32] Orizava—in Mexican, Citlatepetl, or the Star Mountain.

[33] The Mexican wolf.

[34] A proverbial expression amongst the Indians, signifying something inimical or prejudicial; the day of ill luck.

[35] Bixa Orellana—a species of dye-wood. String is made out of the bark. The wood takes fire easily upon friction.

[36] Infamous by birth. The children of whites and negroes, or whites and Indians, or Indians and negroes, were infames de derecho.

[37] Guachinango is another name for Lépero. Pulque is the favourite drink of the Mexicans, made from the sap of the agave or aloe.

[38] Beef, salted and dried.

[39] Walpole's Memoirs of the Reign of George III. London: 1845. 2 vols.

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Transcriber's Notes:

Printer's inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation have been retained.

Some quotes are opened with marks but are not closed. Obvious errors have been silently closed, while those requiring interpretation have been left open.

Other punctuation has been corrected without note.