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same principle, we have him, towards the end of his life, boldly proclaiming the last and greatest art to be the art to blot.' Nothing can go beyond the contempt which he at all times expresses for mere copiousness and fluency. Every reader will recollect at once 'the mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease,'— and the

“One simile that solitary shines,

In the dry desert of a thousand lines,"and the common scribbler, “proud of a vast extent of flimsy lines'—and the sneer at Lord Hervey, “Lord Fanny spins a thousand such a day'—and other passages in the same strain. Good poetry, or indeed good writing, whether in verse or in prose, was in his notion only to be achieved by unsparing labour. The lightnings of song, like the thunderbolts of Jove, were not to be forged even by the divine might of genius except by hard hammering on the ringing anvil :

“ Antra Ætnæa tonant, validique incudibus ictus
Auditi referunt gemitum, striduntque cavernis

Stricturæ chalybum, et fornacibus ignis anhelat.” For, it is almost needless to say, correctness alone, or the mere obliteration of flaws and roughnesses, was not the object of all this toil and painstaking. Nobody could have held the quality of simple faultlessness in poetry in lower estimation than it was held in by Pope. The getting rid of what was thrown out was nothing; the substitution of something else in its place, this was the part of the operation that alone tested the poet and tried his strength :

“ Hoc opus, hic labor est. Pauci, quos æquus amavit
Jupiter, aut ardens evexit ad æthera virtus,

Dis geniti, potuere.”
Let us hear his own description :

But how severely with themselves proceed
The men who write such verse as we can read !
Their own strict judges, not a word they spare
That wants or force, or light, or weight, or care:
Howe'er unwillingly it quits its place,
Nay, though at court, perhaps, it may find grace,
Such they'll degrade; and sometimes in its stead,
In downright charity, revive the dead;
Mark where a bold, expressive plirase appears
Bright through the rubbish of some hundred years;
Command old words, that long have slept, to wake,
Words that wise Bacon, or brave Raleigh, spake;
Or bid the new be English ages hence,
(For use will father what's begot by sense;)

Pour the full tide of eloquence along,
Serenely pure and yet divinely strong,
Rich with the treasures of each foreign tongue;
Prune the luxuriant, the uncouth refine,
But show no mercy to an empty line;
Then polish all, with so much life and ease,
You think 'tis nature, and a knack to please;
But ease in writing flows from art, not chance;

As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance. The aim and result of the whole process was to convert whatever there was of languor or weakness into life and force-whatever moved sluggishly or stiffly into ease, grace, and spirit-to smooth and rivet whatever was loose or disjointed—to enrich, illumine, raise, and refine, both the expression and the thought. It was a creative process throughout.

It is not easy to see how it can be disputed that this is the right way to attain the highest excellence in writing. The only possible danger is that of overdoing the work of correction and improvement-in which case it ceases to be improvement and becomes the reverse, becomes perversion or deterioration ; but we must suppose enough of good taste and good sense in the writer to prevent that. The humble operation of washing foul linen might be pushed so far as to ruin what it is desired to clean; but such a result, we presume, will happen only in the hands of the simplest of washerwomen. Of course, if any writer finds that the first words that suggest themselves to him are in all cases the best, and that his most extemporaneous expression never admits of any alteration except for the worse, he will do wisely to write on as fast as his pen will run, and never to think twice either for phrase or matter. But even with writers in prose we must take leave to doubt if this is often the case. It is well known that some of the styles which have most of the appearance of being what is called natural have been really the produce of the most anxious elaboration. If we confine ourselves to the consideration of expression alone, there is no reason why the first word that presents itself to embody any particular idea or conception should uniformly be the best; let the conception be ever so distinctly present to the mind, it does not necessarily follow that the fittest verbal representation of it should occur to the mind in the same moment. But this is immensely to understate the case even of mere expression, which does not consist simply in finding the right words for thoughts and things, but involves the most effective presentment of each thought and portion of thought with reference to the rest, and also in all writing of any elevation, whether it be verse or prose, some conformity

to the requisitions of the ear as well as to those of the intellect. In poetry, the musical or metrical necessities that are to be submitted to are paramount. Here it never has been pretended that much can be done upon the extemporaneous principle; all men have admitted the indispensableness of some elaboration, more or less, in the production of poetry. But such an admission concedes the entire question. If any elaboration, why not as much as possible? The theory of extemporaneous or purely natural expression being given up, there is no other for us to adopt except that of expression elaborated to the utmost point to which anything can be gained by carrying the process. This was Pope's theory and practice. And upon such a principle alone, we apprehend, can any poetry be written, at least in a literary age, which shall long continue to be read.

The qualities, at any rate, which most eminently distinguish Pope's poetry, and which have chiefly contributed to its popularity and preservation, are evidently the produce of this his manner of working. Hence his concentration, which always compresses the largest quantity of meaning into the fewest words, yet without any undue elliptical licence or injury to the completeness of the expression. Hence the perfectly satisfying effect, in general, of his writing, arising from its precision and clearness, the absence of all unnecessary words, and the aptness of those that have been selected to convey the thought. Hence the frequent occurrence of those mucrones verborum, as they were called by the ancients, those pointed and edged sentences, which in their compactness and polish, as well as their sharpness, resemble daggers, and may be carried about one and used in discourse much in the same way as those are in fight. No other English poet, with the exception of Shakspeare alone, has struck out so many lines and phrases as Pope which have had the luck to be adopted, as it were, into the common speech,—-virum volitare per ora, — to become, in a peculiar sense, énex T TEPoevta. Open which of his poems we may, and we can hardly read ten lines anywhere without encountering one or more which everybody has by heart. Surely this, if anything be so, is for a writer to have taken root in his land's language, and to live on the lips and in the minds

Still the question remains, what is Pope's rank as a poet? or to what degree are his writings endowed with distinctly poetical qualities? It does not follow that his writings are highly poetical because they are highly popular. They may be popular notwithstanding a deficiency of the poetical element, or even in consequence of that deficiency. Their attraction may lie in qualities other than those of a poetical character. There may be qualities

of men.

in writing that are more generally attractive than poetical ones. There is every reason à priori for supposing that there are. The appreciation of the highest things, at least in the region of the intellectual, belongs, from the nature of the case, to the few, not to the many. The question of Pope's poetical rank has been commonly discussed with an almost exclusive reference to the class of subjects to which he has, for the most part, confined himself,—the principles of morals and metaphysics, and the manners and characters of artificial life and of the society of the day. But, properly speaking, his preference for that range of subjects is rather an indication of what we may call the disposition or temper of his genius than any evidence of the extent of his poetical powers. We are not prepared to affirm that any great aspect of life or of human affairs is essentially unsusceptible of the highest poetical illumination. The amount of the poet's endowment of

the vision and the faculty divine' must be determined, not by his choice of his subject, but by what he has made of it, or by his manner of treating it. There are only three poetical compositions of Pope's in which he can be said to have shown any invention, commonly so called :—the Temple of Fame,' the · Rape of the Lock,' and the · Dunciad.' In no one of the three cases can the inventive power displayed be held to be of the highest or even of a very high order. In the first he had Chaucer, not indeed for his guide or original throughout, but yet for his example and model; in both the other cases, his region was the lawless border-land of the mock-heroic, and his task the comparatively easy one of producing merely a brilliant extravaganza, in which it was his privilege to run riot among all sorts of licences and eccentricities, and in the construction of which fancy and wit were much more needed than creative imagination. Pope is recorded to have said of himself that he had very little invention as compared with many other poets. Probably he did not consider the defect to be one of much importance; nor was it, for the manner of writing which he usually followed. But we suppose there is no person competent to express or to have an opinion upon such subjects who will seriously maintain that in any other kind of imaginative power, any more than in this, he is to be compared with either Spenser, or Shakespeare, or Milton. It may be argued, indeed, that these poets are too imaginative, and that Pope, in virtue of being less so, is a better writer than any of them. That is another affair. The fact will nevertheless remain undisputed, and, as we conceive, indisputable, that their poetry is of a much more highly imaginative character than his. And can it be doubted that their minds were so too? All things were evidently seen by them coloured with another light than

a

what they wore to him. This is attested by the whole strain, and we might almost say by every word, of his poetry and of theirs. Picture, metaphor, passion, music, are the characteristics of theirs; precision, polish, point, and propriety, of his. The characteristics, we say, or distinguishing and predominating attributes; not, of course, that either passion or the shaping spirit

• of imagination' is altogether wanting in Pope. But both come only upon special occasions, and when they are sent for; he may be said to keep them, like a pair of spectacles, in his pocket, or corked up in bottles, as magicians are said to keep their subject demons, ready to be let out when they are wanted to conjure with; in his ordinary poetical operations their assistance is dispensed with. With Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, they are ever present; these great poets can do nothing without imagination and passion. Many readers may prefer Pope's correctness and clearness to their imaginativeness; or they may set up prose as a higher thing than poetry at once; it must at least be admitted that his poetry is something of a kind essentially different from theirs. He may be classed below them, or above them; he cannot be classed with them. Pope's proper predecessors must be considered to have been Dryden and Chaucer; it is only with these two, or with one of them, that he can be reasonably ranked or compared. But surely, whatever advantage he may have derived from writing in an era when the language had become more matured and fixed, no one will for a moment place him on the same level with Chaucer, either as a narrative poet or as a satirist. He has produced no work that can be brought into comparison with the Canterbury Tales, any more than with Paradise Lost, or with Hamlet, Othello, or Macbeth. In invention, in richness and delicacy of imagination, in picturesqueness, in pathos, the poetry of Chaucer stands, it might be said, in violent contrast to that of Pope; it belongs not to the same school at all, but to the opposite—to that of Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton. But even in nearly all the qualities which they may be said to have in common-in wit and humour, in pungency and sarcasm, in the graphic delineation of character, in force, directness, and cordiality of style, and the art of narration generally—the elder writer is far the greater of the two. Even for compactness and finish of expression, making allowance for the less regulated state of the language in Chaucer's day, we should not say that the modern poet has any pretensions to the preference. Chaucer's expression, considered as expression simply, or without reference to the thought of which it is the vehicle, is as clear and precise as Pope's, and for the most part much more natural.

The only preceding poet with whom Pope can be properly