Pomfret left one popular poem behind him, The Choice; the attraction of which may be supposed to lie rather in the subject than in the peculiar merit of the execution.
Lord Dorset, for the playful ease and elegance of his verses, is not surpassed by any of the poets of that class.
J. Philips‘s Splendid Shilling makes the fame of this poet—it is a lucky thought happily executed.
Halifax (of whom two short poems are here retained) was the least of the Minor poets—one of ‘the mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease.’
The praise of Parnell‘s poetry is, that it was moral, amiable, with a tendency towards the pensive; and it was his fortune to be the friend of poets.
Prior is not a very moral poet, but the most arch, piquant, and equivocal of those that have been admitted into this collection. He is a graceful narrator, a polished wit, full of the delicacies of style amidst gross allusions.
Pope is at the head of the second class of poets, viz. the describers of artificial life and manners. His works are a delightful, never-failing fund of good sense and refined taste. He had high invention and fancy of the comic kind, as in the Rape of the Lock; wit, as in the Dunciad and Satires; no humour; some beautiful descriptions, as in the Windsor Forest; some exquisite delineations of character (those of Addison and Villiers are master-pieces); he is a model of elegance everywhere, but more particularly in his eulogies and friendly epistles; his ease is the effect of labour; he has no pretensions to sublimity, but sometimes displays an indignant moral feeling akin to it; his pathos is playful and tender, as in his Epistles to Arbuthnot and Jervas, or rises into power by the help of rhetoric, as in the Eloisa, and Elegy on the Death of an Unfortunate Lady; his style is polished and almost faultless in its kind; his versification tires by uniform smoothness and harmony. He has been called ‘the most sensible of poets:’ but the proofs of his sense are to be looked for in his single observations and hints, as in the Essay on Criticism and Moral Epistles, and not in the larger didactic reasonings of the Essay on Man, which is full of verbiage and bombast.
If good sense has been made the characteristic of Pope, good-nature might be made (with at least equal truth) the characteristic of Gay. He was a satirist without gall. He had a delightful placid vein of invention, fancy, wit, humour, description, ease and elegance, a happy style, and a versification which seemed to cost him nothing. His Beggar’s Opera indeed has stings in it, but it appears to have left the writer’s mind without any.
The Grave of Blair is a serious and somewhat gloomy poem, but pregnant with striking reflections and fine fancy.
Swift‘s poetry is not at all equal to his prose. He was actuated by the spleen in both. He has however sense, wit, humour, ease, and even elegance when he pleases, in his poetical effusions. But he trifled with the Muse. He has written more agreeable nonsense than any man. His Verses on his own Death are affecting and beautiful.