And gasping Furies thirst for blood in vain,
says Pope seriously (but the sense of burlesque never leaves the reader). Also
There purple vengeance bath’d in gore retires.
In the only passage of the Dunciad meant to be poetic and not ironic and spiteful, he has “the panting gales” of a garden he describes. Match me such an absurdity among the “conceits” of the age preceding!
A noble and ingenious author, so called by high authority but left anonymous, pretends (it is always pretending with these people, never fine fiction or a frank lie) that on the tomb of Virgil he had had a vision of that deceased poet:
Crowned with eternal bays my ravished eyes
Beheld the poet’s awful form arise.
Virgil tells the noble and ingenious one that if Pope will but write upon some graver themes,
Envy to black Cocytus shall retire
And howl with furies in tormenting fire.
“Genius,” says another authoritative writer in prose, “is caused by a furious joy and pride of soul.”
If, leaving the great names, we pass in review the worse poets we find, in Pope’s essay “On the Art of Sinking in Poetry,” things like these, gathered from the grave writings of his contemporaries: