first former and creator of those beautiful machines, the sylphs; on which his claim to imagination is chiefly founded. He found them existing ready to his hand, but has, indeed, employed them with singular judgment and artifice.

(from An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 1782)

POPE is naturally introduced as the successor of Dryden. His character is thus given by our lecturer.

In comparing and estimating different poets of the first class, we ought to observe something like mathematical accuracy, we ought to weigh the whole aggregate of their respective merits. In making comparative estimates, with this justice to Pope, we should find in him so many, and so apparently incompatible excellences, that we should deem the possible and eternal privation of his works as great a single loss as could happen to the republic of letters. Of what a melancholy and irreparable chasm, among the poetical ornaments of England, would feeling hearts be sensible, if the Abelard to Eloisa could be lost! This poem is quite unrivalled in the ancient and modern world: it consists of three hundred and sixty lines, and every line is superlatively elegant, harmonious, and pathetic. This observation is not applicable to any other poem of such a length; but this is not its only glorious singularity. The hopes, the fears, the wishes, the raptures and the agonies of love, were never so naturally and forcibly impressed on the soul by any other eloquence, if we except Rousseau.

Pope is an excellent poet; but this is not a way to lecture on his merits. This is the common-place language, which every miss at a boarding-school could utter, if she had the boldness to acknowledge having read Eloisa to Abelard. Yet we have sought in vain for a more rational and discriminate eulogy on the favourite poet of the last century. The poem of Eloisa does indeed glow with the finer fires of passion and of feeling. It is his great work; but he is much indebted to Ovid for many of its beauties. There is much in Sappho to Phaon of which Eloisa's warmest and most enchanting passages remind us. Had Mr Stockdale told us, that Eloisa to Abelard is the finest of English love-epistles,

we should not make any exception to the expression; had he called it the finest of all epistles antient or modern, we should have at least understood him; but what he means by saying, it is absolutely unrivalled in antient or modern times, is by no means so easily comprehended. Is it superior to the fourth book of Virgil's Æneid? is it superior to every thing of every kind in the poetical treasures of Greece and Rome? Were a parallel started between this epistle and some of the finest passages in antiquity, we have no doubt that Mr Stockdale would decide with as little hesitation, and probably with as much justice, as he devotes Homer to contempt, and all his pedantic admirers. But a modest man is slow in giving, and a reasonable man in believing, these decisions on comparison of old and new writings, especially against the antients. We shall not therefore believe, either that Homer is inferior to Milton, or that Pope's Eloisa is superior to every thing antient, merely on Mr Stockdale's assertion, till we ascertain with better certainty that he is competent to draw the comparison. To estimate Pope's value as a poet, by 'the melancholy chasm, of which feeling hearts would be sensible, if Eloisa's epistle were lost', we confess, exceeds our computing faculty. Our lecturer may have clearer notions on the subject; but there is something in the supposition which perplexes and confuses us. If the feeling hearts recollected the poem, then, it could not be lost; and if it was totally lost and forgotten, then they could not be aware that there was any thing so good to lament for.

We are told that Pope unites those excellences which are apparently incompatible. Now, superlative terms should always be used with caution, but above all when speaking of such a poet as Pope. He is one to be measured by no mean standard. What is good in his poetical character, is greatly good; so that, to match one acknowledged quality, that which we bring to prove his uniting with it another great quality, should be striking indeed. Our lecturer has, as usual, left those apparently incompatible excellences undefined. Correctness, which distinguishes Pope as one great excellence, is united with his shrewdness, his wit, and his common sense. There is nothing in these qualities apparently incompatible with correctness. The poetical quality,

which we should least expect to see united with correctness, is that daring luxuriance of fancy or association which distinguishes Spencer or Shakespeare, and which is found even in Dryden in no scanty degree. But neither this romantic fancy, nor extreme pathos, nor sublimity of the very first order, are discoverable in Pope.

In the midst of this chapter, however unwilling we may be to submit to the universal authority of Dr Johnson, yet it is quite refreshing to meet with passages of his better sense and more dispassionate decisions, which our author quotes. The sentences of Johnson stand indeed with peculiar advantage in this insulated situation; and Mr Stockdale is entitled to the same sort of gratitude which we feel to a dull landlord who has invited us to dine with an interesting visitor. In fact, after the one has bewildered us, the other puts us right. It is not easy to add to what Johnson has said; still less should we presume to take away from the truly admirable summary of Pope's character which he has drawn. But when we assent to the opinions of a superior mind, we generally find its utterance so conveyed, that we can assent in a qualified manner, where assent is, on the whole, due, and yet find room for some partial distinction of our own. 'If Pope is not a poet, (says Johnson), where is poetry to be found?' This is certainly true; for though the forte of Pope be neither pathos, sublimity, nor daring originality, yet that he moves the affections, approaches to majesty of thought, and possesses much of his own creation, who shall deny? The indiscriminate praise of our author is, that Pope united apparently inconsistent excellences. Dr Johnson touches off his picture more rationally, by saying, that he had, in proportions very nicely suited to each other, all the qualities which constitute genius. The excellences of Pope were adjusted by proportion to each other, and not incompatible qualities. 'He had invention, (Dr Johnson continues), by which new trains of ideas are formed, and new scenes of imagery displayed, as in the Rape of the Lock; or extrinsic embellishments and illustrations are connected with a known subject, as in the Essay on Criticism.' The adaptation of his Rosicrucian machinery in the Rape of the Lock, is indeed an inventive and happy creation, in

the limited sense of the word, to which all poetical creation must be restricted. There is no finer gem than this poem in all the lighter treasures of English fancy. Compared with any other mock-heroic in our language, it shines in pure supremacy for elegance, completeness, point and playfulness. It is an epic poem in that delightful miniature which diverts us by its mimicry of greatness, and yet astonishes by the beauty of its parts, and the fairy brightness of its ornaments. In its kind, it is matchless; but still it is but mock-heroic, and depends, in some measure, for effect on a ludicrous reference in our own minds to the veritable heroics whose solemnity it so wittily affects. His aerial puppets of divinity, his sylphs and gnomes, and his puppet heroes and heroines, the beaux and belles of high life, required rather a subtle than a strong hand to guide them through the mazes of poetry. Among inventive poets, this single poem will place him high. But if our language contains any true heroic creations of fancy, the agents of Spencer's and Milton's machinery will always claim a superior dignity to their Lilliputian counterfeits.

'He had imagination', Johnson observes, 'which enables him to convey to the reader the various forms of nature, incidents of life, and energies of passion, as in his Eloisa, his Windsor Forest, and his Ethic Epistles.' It is true that Pope's imagination could convey the forms of nature, yet many poets have looked upon nature much less through a medium than Pope, and have seen her and painted her in less artificial circumstances. The landscapes of Pope are either such as the tourist would sketch within ten miles of London; or, if he attempts more enchanting scenery, he gives, by his vague and general epithets, only the picture of a picture; he writes more by rote than by conception, like a man who saw nature through the medium of the classics, and not with the naked eye. In vain we shall search his Pastorals, or Windsor Forest, for such a landscape as surrounds the Castle of Indolence, the Bower of Eden, or the inimitable Hermitage of Beattie.

Without defining the picturesque, we all feel that it is a charm in poetry seldom applicable to Pope. In the knowledge and description of refined life, Pope is the mirror of his times. He saw through human character as it rose in the living manners of