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or histories Johnson has written nothing, and of Congreve, Garth, Gay, Goldsmith, and other such unspotted names.' We may leave our readers to imagine for themselves what a simple notion Mr. Roscoe must have had of Cowper, if he imagined that either the lives or the writings of almost any one of these distinguished individuals would have been very likely to command his unqualified approval, however represented. But upon this same string our author continues to harp throughout his volume. No reader can misunderstand him when he afterwards talks of a work yet to be written, which may rescue the genius 'of English poetry from the dominion of unfeeling criticism, and 'relieve its professors from the obloquy so unjustly cast upon their 'fame.' Johnson, again, has at least given us a picture of the man Pope, whether it be correct or distorted; Mr. Roscoe has given us none. The particulars which give a lifelike reality to his predecessor's delineation, he has no other way of describing than as that eaves-dropping kind of information in which John'son delighted,' and on which 'not much reliance can be placed.' This is hardly becoming from a writer whose own attempts in the way of portraiture hardly rise higher than telling us that Pope's usual handwriting, though formal, was distinct and legible'characteristics,' it is solemnly added, "the acquisition of which, as it is in the power of every one to attain them, ought to be 'considered as a kind of moral duty.' There is, at any rate, very little in Johnson's Life of this kind of twaddle. Johnson may have occasionally dropped a splenetic remark about Pope or his poetry; but we deny that he has systematically disparaged either him or it. At all events, the worst of his delinquencies in that way are sobriety and good sense, in comparison with Mr. Roscoe's extravagances in the opposite direction. Johnson may be too severe upon the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady,' but his stern and cold criticism is more creditable even to his poetical taste than Mr. Roscoe's declaration that the paragraph about the frequent hearses,' is one of the most terrific passages which poetry, either ancient or modern, can exhibit.' And if the one biographer has detected and chronicled too many of the littlenesses of Pope's conduct and character, even this overkeenness of vision is a more respectable fault than the purblindness of the other, who can see no defects at all in his hero, but boldly pronounces him, without qualification, to be one of the 'best and wisest men that this country has produced.'

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If a poetical reputation acquired at an early age were to be taken as a proof of a writer having been born a poet, Pope's claim to that distinction would be perhaps as strong as that of any writer on record. It was not only that, as he has told us, he 'lisped in

numbers, for the numbers came' (or, as the writer of his life in the 'Biographia Britannica' ludicrously misquotes the line, 'lisped in verses, for the verses came'-a striking illustration of how slight a touch will sometimes destroy the delicacy of poetical effect). He had hardly reached the age at which manhood ordinarily begins, when he had distanced every other living writer of verse, and secured for himself what would have certainly proved a lasting memory, and a high place in the literature of his country, if he had died then or written nothing more. Mr. Roscoe somewhat misstates the case when he asserts that 'before he had arrived at the twenty-fifth year of his age, he had ' written and published almost all the works on which, as pieces ' of originality, genius, and imagination, his reputation and rank as a poet essentially depend.' Surely the Essay on Man, the Moral Epistles, the Satires, and the Dunciad, are among the compositions that sustain Pope's poetical reputation as essentially and as much as anything else that he has left us; and, however Warton or Bowles might maintain the superiority of his earlier productions in originality, genius, and imagination, such a doctrine is in direct opposition to every critical principle which Mr. Roscoe professes to hold. Indeed, such is his inconsistency upon this point, that we find him in a subsequent page describing the Dunciad as a production which, beyond any other, displays the poetical powers of the author, the fertility of his invention, the variety of his illustrations, the unrivalled facility and force of his diction, and his perfect acquaintance with every excellence of his art.' But it is true, that, before he was four-andtwenty, Pope had given to the world, among other pieces, his Pastorals, his Tale of January and May, imitated from Chaucer, his Essay on Criticism, his Temple of Fame, his Messiah, his Windsor Forest, his Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, and his Rape of the Lock. His Epistle from Eloisa to Abelard was not produced till some years later. Speaking of his Pastorals, which were written when he was sixteen, Warton, who was master of Winchester School, tells us, 'that it has been his fortune, from his way of life, to have seen many compositions ' of youths of sixteen years old far beyond these Pastorals in point of genius and imagination, though not, perhaps, of correctness." Their excellence, indeed,' he adds, might be owing to having ⚫ had such a predecessor as Pope.' One would have thought, if there was any respect in which these marvellous schoolboys were likely to write the better for having had a model to imitate, it would be correctness, which, however, was the only quality, it seems, in which their compositions were defective. We can only say that we wonder Warton did not preserve a few speci

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mens of all this genius and imagination; and also, that nothing should have afterwards come of it of which the world has ever heard. Pope's precocity, it must be acknowledged, was at least not so soon exhausted. Elsewhere Warton instances the reception given to Pope's Pastorals as contrasted with the little notice taken of Gray's Ode on Eton College, on its first appearance, as showing how much more plentiful good compositions must have become when the later than they were when the earlier poet first came before the public; and he adds, that he supposes no critic can be found that will not place Gray's poem far above Pope's. Gray's Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, written at twenty-six, and about as long as one of Pope's four Pastorals, consists of ten stanzas, of which the first four, and, in a certain degree, the last, are natural, tender, and melodious, but the remaining five at once as overstrained and as commonplace as any example that it would be easy to cite of posture-making Accordingly, everybody has the former by heart, and they have supplied several expressions which have come to be among the proverbial phrases of literature; the latter are by universal tacit consent neglected and forgotten. If Pope's Pastorals can boast of few great beauties, they are equally free from conspicuous blemishes. In the style and upon the principles of execution to which they belong, they are faultless. No such uniform polish of versification had been exhibited by any preceding English writer. No other four hundred continuous lines existed in the language, to which, if you only admitted the principle of poetical composition upon which they were constructed, so little exception could be taken either for the manner or for the matter. In the faculty, call it by what name we may, by which perfect workmanship, according to the standard adopted, is ensured, no previous English poet had equalled Pope. No other, at least, had ever applied the faculty in question so diligently and systematically. It has been commonly denominated judgment; but that term expresses too much in one direction, and too little in another. The highest judgment in a poet would include the adoption, in every case, of the right principle of poetical composition; on the other hand, judgment alone would not produce the faultless workmanship. There seems, however, to be no better name; taste is also at once too comprehensive and not specific enough; skill imports the mere talent of performing a required operation, without any invention at all, as we might talk of skill inversifying; correctness indicates only one effect of the faculty so large an endowment of which Pope brought to the elaboration of his poetry. One of the respects in which his judgment, to adopt the common term, was most won

derful was its early maturity; it is, understood as we have defined it, as remarkably displayed in his Pastorals written at sixteen as in what he wrote at fifty. He improved, of course, in skill and force of execution, as his experience of life became enlarged, and his powers of reflection grew stronger and were more exercised; his style may have acquired much more both of compression and of expression; both the form and the spirit, both the body and the soul, of his poetry may have attained more of completeness and development; but, in respect of the success with which all its requisitions were met and satisfied, his earliest manner is not to be distinguished from his latest.

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Spence records Pope as saying:- About fifteen I got ac'quainted with Mr. Walsh. He used to encourage me much, ' and used to tell me that there was one way left of excelling; 'for, though we had several great poets, we never had any one great poet that was correct; and he desired me to make that 'my study and aim.' This, I suppose,' adds Spence, 'first led 'Mr. Pope to turn his lines over and over again so often, which 'he continued to do till the last; and did it with surprising facility.' But we have seen that he was also early exercised by his father in extreme rigour and precision of versification. As for his acquaintance with Walsh, he was certainly not fifteen but seventeen when it began; and it was the perusal of his Pastorals in manuscript, sent to him by Wycherley, which made Walsh desire to know the writer. But we do not know whether they may not have been still further polished afterwards by Walsh's advice. Wycherley, whose acquaintance with the young poet seems to have dated from about half a year earlier, was struck with his judgment from the first, and immediately availed himself of his assistance in the correction of some poems of his own which he was about to send to the press. From the beginning to the end of his career as a writer, it was a maxim or article of faith with Pope, which he never hesitated to avow, that half his strength lay in his talent for correcting. In the Preface to the first volume of his collected pieces, published in 1717, we find him thus expressing himself:-I confess it was want of consider'ation that made me an author; I writ because it amused me; I corrected because it was as pleasant to me to correct as to ' write.' And again, after accounting for the success of the ancients in their literary productions principally from the circumstance that they made it the business of their lives to correct and finish their works for posterity:-'I believe no one qualifi'cation is so likely to make a good writer as the power of rejecting his own thoughts; and it must be this (if any thing) 'that can give me a chance to be one.' Holding steadily to the

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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,”—

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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,
Dîs 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 phrase 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;)

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