[592]. The most important of these is the sentence on Crashaw (with whom Pope has some points of sympathy), that he is wanting in “design, form, fable, which is the soul of poetry,” and “exactness or consent of parts, which is the body,” while he grants him “pretty conceptions, fine metaphors, glittering expressions, and something of a neat cast of verse, which are properly the dress, gems, or loose ornaments” of it. See my friend Mr Courthope (in his Life, ed. cit. of the Works, v. 63), with whom, for once, I am in irreconcilable disagreement.
[593]. Spence (whose Anecdotes were printed partly by Malone, and completely by Singer in 1820, reprinted from the latter edition in 1858, and re-selected by Mr Underhill (London, n. d.) in the last decade of the nineteenth century) has sometimes received praise as a critic himself. His Polymetis usefully brought together classical art and letters, and the Anecdotes themselves are not without taste. But his elaborate criticism of Pope’s Odyssey, published in 1726, is of little value, neither praising nor blaming its subject for the right things, and characterised as a whole by a pottering and peddling kind of censorship.
[594]. Selecta Poemata Italorum qui Latine Scripserunt. Cura cujusdam Anonymi anno 1684 congesta, iterum in lucem data, una cum aliorum Italorum operibus. Acccurante A. Pope. 2 vols., London, 1740. The title-page contains absolutely all the ostensible editorial matter, and, as I have not got hold of the work of the Anonymus, I do not know how much Pope added. But his collection, as I can testify from some little knowledge of the subject, is good.
[595]. Ep. to Aug., l. 263.
[596]. Pope, v. supra, p. [454], actually admitted this as regards Aristotle and Shakespeare; yet the admission practically revokes most of the Essay.
[597]. Individual preference, in the case of the famous pair of epigrams on the books and the troop of horse sent by George I. to Cambridge and to Oxford respectively, may be biassed by academical and by political partisanship. But while it is matter of opinion whether “Tories own no argument but force,” and whether, in certain circumstances, a University may not justifiably “want loyalty,” no one can ever maintain that it is not disgraceful to a university to “want learning.” This it is which gives the superior wing and sting to Trapp’s javelin.
[598]. Prælectiones Poeticæ, London, 3rd ed., 1736. The first of the first batch was printed as early as 1711, and an English translation (not by the author) was published in 1742. I hope to give in the next volume, as a prelude to notice of Mr Arnold’s work in the Oxford Chair, a survey of all the more noteworthy of his predecessors.
[599]. The first ed. is that of Edinburgh, 1783: mine is that of London, 1823.
[600]. I have it with The Poems of Ossian, 2 vols., London, 1796. Blair had taken Macpherson under his wing as early as 1760.
[601]. It had reached its eighth edition in 1807, the date of my copy. Perhaps some may think that Kames, as being mainly an æsthetician, ought to be postponed with Shaftesbury, Hume, &c. My reason for not postponing is the large amount of positive literary criticism in his book.