True to the pole, by thee the pilot guides
His steady course amid the struggling tides,
Braves with broad sail the immeasurable sea,
Cleaves the dark air, and asks no star but thee!’
This is the true false gallop of the sublime. Yet steel is a very useful metal, and doubtless performs all these wonders. But it has not, among so many others, the virtue of amalgamating with the imagination. We might quote also his description of the spinning-jenny, which is pronounced by Dr. Aikin to be as ingenious a piece of mechanism as the object it describes; and, according to Lord Byron, this last is as well suited to the manufacture of verses as of cotton-twist without end.
3. Natural interests are those which are real and inevitable, and are so far contradistinguished from the artificial, which are factitious and affected. If Lord Byron cannot understand the difference, he may find it explained by contrasting some of Chaucer’s characters and incidents with those in the Rape of the Lock, for instance. Custance floating in her boat on the wide sea, is different from Pope’s heroine,
‘Launched on the bosom of the silver Thames.’
Griselda’s loss of her children, one by one, of her all, does not belong to the same class of incidents, nor of subjects for poetry, as Belinda’s loss of her favourite curl. A sentiment that has rooted itself in the heart, and can only be torn from it with life, is not like the caprice of the moment—the putting on of paint and patches, or the pulling off a glove. The inbred character is not like a masquerade dress. There is a difference between the theatrical, and natural, which is important to the determination of the present question, and which has been overlooked by his Lordship. Mr. Bowles, however, formally insists (and with the best right in the world) on the distinction between passion and manners. But he agrees with Lord Byron, that the Epistle to Abelard is the height of the pathetic.
‘Strange that such difference should be
Twixt tweedledum and tweedledee.’