now and then in Fairyland, among imaginary beings, is a pleasing variety, and helps to distinguish the poet from the orator or historian, but to be always there is irksome.
Boileau.—Is not Spenser likewise blamable for confounding the Christian with the Pagan theology in some parts of his poem?
Pope.—Yes; he had that fault in common with Dante, with Ariosto, and with Camoëns.
Boileau.—Who is the poet that arrived soon after you in Elysium, whom I saw Spenser lead in and present to Virgil, as the author of a poem resembling the “Georgics”? On his head was a garland of the several kinds of flowers that blow in each season, with evergreens intermixed.
Pope.—Your description points out Thomson. He painted nature exactly, and with great strength of pencil. His imagination was rich, extensive, and sublime: his diction bold and glowing, but sometimes obscure and affected. Nor did he always know when to stop, or what to reject.
Boileau.—I should suppose that he wrote tragedies upon the Greek model. For he is often admitted into the grove of Euripides.
Pope.—He enjoys that distinction both as a tragedian and as a moralist. For not only in his plays, but all his other works, there is the purest morality, animated by piety, and rendered more touching by the fine and delicate sentiments of a most tender and benevolent heart.
Boileau.—St. Evremond has brought me acquainted with Waller. I was surprised to find in his writings a politeness and gallantry which the French suppose to be appropriated only to theirs. His genius was a composition which is seldom to be met with, of the sublime and the agreeable. In his comparison between himself and Apollo, as the lover of Daphne, and in that between Amoret and Sacharissa, there is a finesse and delicacy of wit which the most elegant of our writers have never exceeded. Nor had Sarrazin or Voiture the art of praising more genteelly the
ladies they admired. But his epistle to Cromwell, and his poem on the death of that extraordinary man, are written with a force and greatness of manner which give him a rank among the poets of the first class.
Pope.—Mr. Waller was unquestionably a very fine writer. His Muse was as well qualified as the Graces themselves to dress out a Venus; and he could even adorn the brows of a conqueror with fragrant and beautiful wreaths. But he had some puerile and low thoughts, which unaccountably mixed with the elegant and the noble, like schoolboys or a mob admitted into a palace. There was also an intemperance and a luxuriancy in his wit which he did not enough restrain. He wrote little to the understanding, and less to the heart; but he frequently delights the imagination, and sometimes strikes it with flashes of the highest sublime. We had another poet of the age of Charles I., extremely admired by all his contemporaries, in whose works there is still more affectation of wit, a greater redundancy of imagination, a worse taste, and less judgment; but he touched the heart more, and had finer feelings than Waller. I mean Cowley.