THEN HE IS AN ATTORNEY.

Job, as a vile offender, God indites,
And terrible decrees against me writes.
God will not be my advocate,

My cause to manage or debate.*

In the following lines he is a GOLDBEATER,

Who the rich metal beats, and then, with care, Unfolds the golden leaves, to gild the fields of air. †

THEN A FULLER.

the exhaling reeks that secret rise,

Borne on rebounding sunbeams through the skies, Are thicken'd, wrought, and whiten'd till they grow, A heavenly fleece.‡

A MERCER, OR PACKER.

Didst thou one end of air's wide curtain hold,
And help the bales of ether to unfold;

Say, which cerulean pile was by thy hand unroll'd?§

A BUTLER.

He measures all the drops with wondrous skill, Which the black clouds, his floating bottles, fill.||

+ P. 181.

P. 18. § P. 174.

Warburton.

* Blackm. p. 61. P. 131. It is remarkable that Swift highly commends Blackmore in more than one place; from whom Dr. Johnson strangely asserts that Pope might have learnt the art of reasoning in verse, exemplified in the Poem on Creation; but Ambrose Philips related that Blackmore, as he proceeded in this poem, communicated it from

AND A BAKER.

God in the wilderness his table spread,
And in his airy ovens bak'd their bread.*

time to time to a club of wits, his associates, and that every man contributed as he could, either improvement or correction; so that there are perhaps no where in the book thirty lines together that now stand as they were originally written.

Warton.

W.

* Blackm. Song of Moses, p. 218. There is nothing so offensive to taste as the mixture of sublime and vulgar imagery, but there are very few poets who stand clear of it: Virgil has his simile of a top; Homer his jack-ass ; Dryden, Cowley, and indeed all our early writers, abound in this false imagery. It seems indifferent whether they pursue a metaphor drawn from the sun, or from a candle: witness Dryden's description of the fire of London, &c. Milton has himself been, in some passages, too little attentive to this impropriety; in general, his great mind naturally embraced worthy and lofty illustration, but if a meaner illustration suggested itself, he did not pause to reject it. So in the exquisite Comus :

O thievish night,

Why should'st thou, but for some felonious end,

In thy dark lantern thus close up the stars,

That Nature hung in Heav'n, and fill'd their lamps

With everlasting oil? &c.

Pope is in general very pure in this respect: indeed such is the present taste and good sense, that as T. Warton observes, "almost every writer avoids such palpable absurdities; but in the present age, had Comus been written, we should not perhaps have had the greatest beauties of its wild and romantic imagery." In fact, avoiding faults, is one thing; creating beauties, another. Bowles.

CHAP. VI.

OF THE SEVERAL KINDS OF GENIUSES IN THE PRO

FUND, AND THE MARKS AND CHARACTERS OF EACH.

DOUBT not but the reader, by this cloud of examples, begins to be convinced of the truth of our assertion, that the Bathos is an art; and that the genius of no mortal whatever, following the mere ideas of Nature, and unassisted with an habitual, nay, laborious peculiarity of thinking, could arrive at images so wonderfully low and unaccountable. The great author, from whose treasury we have drawn all these instances (the father of the Bathos, and indeed the Homer of it), has, like that immortal Greek, confined his labours to the greater poetry, and thereby left room for others to acquire a due share of praise in inferior kinds. Many painters, who could never hit a nose or an eye, have with felicity copied a small-pox, or been admirable at a toad or a red-herring. And seldom are we without geniuses for still-life, which they can and stiffen with incredible accuracy.

work up

An universal genius rises not in an age: but when he rises, armies rise in him! he pours forth five or six epic poems with greater facility, than five or six pages can be produced by an elaborate and servile copier after Nature or the ancients. It

is affirmed by Quintilian,* that the same genius which made Germanicus so great a general, would with equal application have made him an excellent heroic poet. In like manner, reasoning from the affinity there appears between arts and sciences, I doubt not but an active catcher of butterflies, a careful and fanciful pattern-drawer, an industrious collector of shells, a laborious and tuneful bagpiper, or a diligent breeder of tame rabbits, might severally excel in their respective parts of the Bathos.

I shall range these confined and less copious geniuses under proper classes, and (the better to give their pictures to the reader) under the names of animals of some sort or other: whereby he will be enabled, at the first sight of such as shall daily come forth, to know to what kind to refer, and with what authors to compare them.

1. The Flying Fishes: These are writers who now and then rise upon their fins, and fly out of the profund; but their wings are soon dry, and they drop down to the bottom. G. S. A. H. C. G.

* In a fine passage of the tenth book: "Germanicum Augustum ab institutis studiis deflexit cura terrarum; parumque diis visum est esse eum maximum poetarum." Warton.

† This was the chapter which gave so much offence, and excited such loud clamours against our author by his introduction of these initial letters, which he in vain asserted were placed at random, and meant no particular writers: which was not believed. These initial letters cannot now be authentically filled up.

Warton.

It was the intention of the author that the reader should fill

up these initials according to his own ideas.

2. The Swallows are authors that are eternally skimming and fluttering up and down, but all their agility is employed to catch flies. L. T. W. P. Lord H.

3. The Ostriches are such, whose heaviness rarely permits them to raise themselves from the ground; their wings are of no use to lift them up; and their motion is between flying and walking; but then they run very fast. D. F. L. E. The Hon. E. H.

4. The Parrots are they that repeat another's words, in such a hoarse odd voice, as makes them seem their own. W. B. W. H. C. C. The Reverend D. D.

5. The Didappers are authors that keep themselves long out of sight, under water, and come up now and then where you least expected them. L. W. G. D. Esq. The Hon. Sir W. Young.

6. The Porpoises are unwieldy and big; they put all their numbers into a great turmoil and tempest, but whenever they appear in plain light (which is seldom) they are only shapeless and ugly monsters. I. D. C. G. I. O.

7. The Frogs are such as can neither walk nor fly, but can leap and bound to admiration: they live generally in the bottom of a ditch, and make