One dip the pencil, and one string the lyre.
Yet should the Graces all thy figures place,
And breathe an air divine on ev’ry face;
Yet should the Muses bid my numbers roll
Strong as their charms, and gentle as their soul;
With Zeuxis’ Helen thy Bridgewater vie,
And these be sung till Granville’s Myra die:
Alas! how little from the grave we claim!
Thou but preserv’st a face, and I a name.’
And shall we cut ourselves off from beauties like these with a theory? Shall we shut up our books, and seal up our senses, to please the dull spite and inordinate vanity of those ‘who have eyes, but they see not—ears, but they hear not—and understandings, but they understand not,’—and go about asking our blind guides, whether Pope was a poet or not? It will never do. Such persons, when you point out to them a fine passage in Pope, turn it off to something of the same sort in some other writer. Thus they say that the line, ‘I lisp’d in numbers, for the numbers came,’ is pretty, but taken from that of Ovid—Et quum conabar scribere, versus erat. They are safe in this mode of criticism: there is no danger of any one’s tracing their writings to the classics.