And flies fled under shade, why then
The thing of courage,
As roused with rage, with rage doth sympathize,
And with an accent tuned i’ th’ self-same key,
Replies to chiding fortune.’
There is hardly any of this rough work in Pope. His muse was on a peace establishment, and grew somewhat effeminate by long ease and indulgence. He lived in the smiles of fortune, and basked in the favour of the great. In his smooth and polished verse we meet with no prodigies of nature, but with miracles of wit; the thunders of his pen are whispered flatteries; his forked lightnings playful sarcasms; for the ‘gnarled oak’ he gives us ‘the soft myrtle’; for rocks, and seas, and mountains, artificial grass-plats, gravel-walks, and tinkling rills; for earthquakes and tempests, the breaking of a flower-pot, or the fall of a china-jar; for the tug and war of the elements, or the deadly strife of the passions, we have
‘Calm contemplation and poetic ease.’
Yet within this retired and narrow circle, how much, and that how exquisite, was contained! What discrimination, what wit, what delicacy, what fancy, what lurking spleen, what elegance of thought, what refinement of sentiment! It is like looking at the world through a microscope, where every thing assumes a new character and a new consequence,—where things are seen in their minutest circumstances and slightest shades of difference,—when the little becomes gigantic, the deformed beautiful, and the beautiful deformed. The wrong end of the magnifier is, to be sure, held to every thing; but still the exhibition is highly curious, and we know not whether to be most pleased or surprised.
ON RESPECTABLE PEOPLE.
| The Edinburgh Magazine.] | [August 1818. |