Ver. 337. But most by numbers judge, &c.] The last sort are those, from ver. 336 to 384, whose ears are attached only to the harmony of a poem. Of which they judge as ignorantly and as perversely as the other sort did of the eloquence, and for the same reason. Our author first describes that false harmony with which they are so much captivated; and shows that it is wretchedly flat and unvaried: for
Smooth or rough, with them, is right or wrong.
He then describes the true: 1. As it is in itself, constant; with a happy mixture of strength and sweetness, in contradiction to the roughness and flatness of false harmony: and 2. As it is varied in compliance to the subject, where the sound becomes an echo to the sense, so far as is consistent with the preservation of numbers, in contradiction to the monotony of false harmony. Of this he gives us, in the delivery of his precepts, four beautiful examples of smoothness, roughness, slowness, and rapidity. The first use of this correspondence of the sound to the sense, is to aid the fancy in acquiring a perfecter and more lively image of the thing represented. A second and nobler, is to calm and subdue the turbulent and selfish passions, and to raise and warm the beneficent, which he illustrates in the famous adventure of Timotheus and Alexander, where, in referring to Mr. Dryden's Ode on that subject, he turns it to a high compliment on his favourite poet.
Ver. 384. Avoid extremes, &c.] Our author is now come to the last cause of wrong judgment, partiality,—the parent of the immediately preceding cause, a bounded capacity, nothing so much narrowing and contracting the mind as prejudices entertained for or against things or persons. This, therefore, as the main root of all the foregoing, he prosecutes at large, from ver. 383 to 474. First, to ver. 394, he previously exposes that capricious turn of mind, which, by running into extremes, either of praise or dispraise, lays the foundation of an habitual partiality. He cautions, therefore, both against one and the other; and with reason; for excess of praise is the mark of a bad taste; and excess of censure, of a bad digestion.
Ver. 394. Some foreign writers, &c.] Having explained the disposition of mind which produces an habitual partiality, he proceeds to expose this partiality in all the shapes in which it appears both amongst the unlearned and the learned.
I. In the unlearned it is seen, first, in an unreasonable fondness for, or aversion to, our own or foreign, to ancient or modern writers. And as it is the mob of unlearned readers he is here speaking of, he exposes their folly in a very apposite similitude:
Thus wit, like faith, by each man is applied
To one small sect, and all are damned beside.
But he shows, from ver. 396 to 408, that these critics have as wrong notions of reason as those bigots have of God; for that genius is not confined to times or climates; but, as the common gift of nature, is extended throughout all ages and countries; that indeed this intellectual light, like the material light of the sun, may not shine at all times, and in every place with equal splendour, but be sometimes clouded with popular ignorance, and sometimes again eclipsed by the discountenance of the great; yet it shall still recover itself, and, by breaking through the strongest of these impediments, manifest the eternity of its nature.
Ver. 408. Some ne'er advance a judgment of their own,] A second instance of unlearned partiality is (as he shows from ver. 407 to 424) men's going always along with the cry, as having no fixed nor well-grounded principles whereon to raise any judgment of their own. A third is reverence for names, of which sort, as he well observes, the worst and vilest are the idolizers of names of quality; whom therefore he stigmatises as they deserve. Our author's temper as well as his judgment is here seen, in throwing this species of partiality amongst the unlearned critics. His affection for letters would not suffer him to conceive, that any learned critic could ever fall into so low a prostitution.