especially with that last unsurpassable line; all these and many more exemplify and illustrate that indescribable raising of the expression—that making the common as if it were not common—which is the essence of poetry and the privilege of verse.
How this side of the matter was produced (in the mathematical sense) and maintained throughout the century would take many times the space of the present paper to show in anything but the briefest and barest epitome. Almost all Prior's own shorter later poems would have to be quoted; Swift, though so much greater in prose, and though best in verse on the severer side, especially in the magnificent and quite sufficiently authenticated Judgment Day verses, could not be left out; and it might be possible to make more fight than even lovers of the eighteenth century have recently made for Gray. But perhaps the scraps and orts of lesser men of letters—though sometimes not lesser men—show the strong point of the century even more convincingly. Where will you find more musical lightness of a certain easy but far from unpoetical kind than in those verses on Strawberry Hill in which Pulteney almost paid his rather heavy debts in more serious ways to the House of Walpole? Or than in the others in which he and Chesterfield combined to estimate "Hanover Bremen and Verden," that is to say, the whole continental dominions for which George the Second was making England fight, as worthless compared with the charms of Molly Lepell? Go lower still, take a professional littérateur and laureate like William Whitehead, to whom hardly anybody save Mr. Austin Dobson (and it is certainly no small exception) has been favourable, and read the piece on Celia, which is a more or less independent expansion of Ausonius on Crispa. It begins with a sort of pettish avowal of ignorance how the mischief of love came, and goes on with rather rude depreciations of the lady's face, figure, air, and even sense. Then it slides rapidly into a sort of grudging allowance:
Her voice, her touch, might give the alarm—
'Twas both perhaps or neither,
and then capitulates headlong:
In short 'twas that provoking charm
Of Celia altogether!
Trivial, of course, but then it ought to be trivial, and the trivial can be, and is, here super-trivialised.
One might go on, even in this skipping fashion, for a long time till one came to the great political satires of the close of the century, but once more time and space forbid. As it has been frivolously said:
You have only to search
In Dodsley and Pearch
(the standard ten volumes of eighteenth-century miscellaneous poetry) and you will find; though, of course, if you only look for bad things you will find them, too, in plenty. But even this collection is by no means exhaustive, and with some of the more famous verse-writers it does not deal at all; while we have in this survey confessedly left most of them alone. What has been intended is to show that making of the common uncommon by means of treatment in verse was not an unknown thing between 1700 and 1800; that it was attempted and achieved in various kinds. Finally, if the attempts were rarely and the achievements hardly ever in kinds that can be called the very highest, one may at least urge that there is not an absolute vacuum between the loftiest mountain-tops of poetry and the actual plain of prose—that Parnassus has lower slopes, some of which are not so very low