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who might supply their place, supposing that their names were wanting to our isle? In comparison with them, how does he shrink in degree, if not in kind! Having them to rely on, we want not him. But what nation is it in which Pope is considered to be essential to the poetical reputation of our country? The French! Why? Pope had flattered their vanity; he had borrowed from their writers, and formed his style upon theirs in extolling him, they only praised themselves in another. Did the poetical character of this country depend upon Pope, it must be inferior to that of France, as being an emanation from it; but, happily, it is far superior :it took its stand upon original ground, so high that our neighbours have never been able to approach it. Upon the Continent, Shakspeare is unrivalled,-Milton unequalled yet. The French school of poetry is confessedly inferior to the English, and the utmost merit of Pope is, that he engrafted the French mode upon the substance of English intellect, with considerable success. Thus, so far from the opinions of foreigners indicating a poet of considerable original power, it is founded altogether upon the fact of his being an imitator, and on nothing else.

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We inquire not (continued the member who closed the discussion) whether Pope's merits be great, compared with others,-whether he may rank among the higher poets of England; but whether he possesses that superlative excellence, which justly entitles him to claim the rank of the first? Every great and original poet creates an order for himself; a star apart," dwelling in his own intellectual identity, -surrounded with attributes, united only in himself. Thus Milton resideth alone, in his own unapproachable ideality, which absorbed every thing into its own essence; and Shakspeare hath a peculiar orb, whence his mind went forth" on strange quest," and divided itself amongst all it saw, and became whatever it beheld. Pope, on the contrary, is never viewed but in connection with certain great names which preceded him, and to whom he was so immensely indebted, and particularly in connection with Dryden, whose disciple he was, and to whom he bears the same relation that Aristotle did to Plato-and with a crowd of imitators, imitating imitations, who availed themselves of his resources, and adopted the mechanism of his verse,-till the public ear, tired of eternal sing-song, was glad to submit to the extreme of the most desultory and extravagant versification, so that it were fairly rid of that perpetual monotony of sound, and recurrence of imagery, common to all subjects, and distinguishing none. This is a singularity in the poetical character of Pope, which argues against his individual energy, and results from his

inaptitude for original and independent exertion. Most assuredly, he was not of the order of Shakspeare, or of Milton. Whether or not he was at the head of his own order, we have not to determine. Our question inquires of kind, not of degree. It might admit, however, a doubt, whether Dryden was not superior in degree. We ask, whether Shakspeare and Milton were not superior in kind ?

Our opponents are inimical to metaphysical distinctions. Had they been favourable to such analysis, they might have observed the fact just adverted to, and traced it to that exclusive predisposition of the faculties, in which peculiar genius consists, and that overpowering energy by which it is developed, Metaphysics appear to be essential to poetry; and, by consequence, to be metaphysical, is essential to a poet. Metaphysics have been termed the poetry of thought; and, verily, they are not that dry, uninteresting study, which the merely physical would have us to believe: they withdraw our attention from the corporeal vicissitudes with which we are beset, and fix it upon the infinite,-eternal,—and immutable ; the infinite, the eternal, the immutable, into which it is the peculiar office of the imagination to transmute every thing it touches. And I cannot conceive how-without knowledge of the operations of the mind, and of the modes by which the human spirit manifests itself in its different moods of passion or of apathy, it was possible for Shakspeare or Milton to have produced those combinations of character and conduct, which have never since been equalled. Metaphysical science was absolutely necessary for the concoction of "Paradise Lost;" and, from reference to his prose works, I cannot doubt for a moment that Milton was the most excellent metaphysician of his day. Shakspeare is the best metaphysician the world ever produced; and every character which he drew is an illustration, and a witness to the truth, of this remark!

But this objection to metaphysical distinctions came with an ill grace from the advocates of Pope's "monotony in wire," for they themselves were most metaphysical. It seems, the "Rape of the Lock" was not amenable to the censure passed upon burlesque poetry; it did not degrade, but it exalted; it raised a mean subject to importance, and invested the ridiculous with ideal distinction: it was not a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, but from the ridiculous to the sublime. But what will the advocates of Pope say for the following passage?

"Now Jove suspends his golden scales in air,
Weighs the men's wits against the lady's hair;
The doubtful beam long nods from side to side,
At length the wits mount up, the hairs subside."

Compare this with the following extract from Homer, in his own translation:

"But when the sun the height of heav'n ascends,
The sire of gods his golden scale suspends,
With equal band in these explor'd the fate

Of Greece and Troy, and pois'd the mighty weight;
Press'd with its load, the Grecian balance lies

Low sunk on earth, the Trojan strikes the skies."

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"The Rape of the Lock," and "the Dunciad," are composed of parodies, managed in the wey which the passages just recited illustrate. Is there any one who is prepared to argue, that the sublime original, thus reduced to association with the ridiculous and little, and degraded to purposes so trivial and ludicrous, is not unfeelingly injured and violated? I cannot conceive the writer to have sympathy or regard for the beauty and the greatness which he so abuses! But yet more, "the Almighty-the God of Gods*!" is introduced as an agent active in this scene of ridicule and burlesque. Pope cannot excuse himself from the charge by the employment of the word "Jove," and pretend that the Heathen Mythology is fair game; he has himself taught us better,

“Father of all in every age,

In every clime ador'd,

By saint, by savage, and by sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!"

One name with me is as hallowed as the other; and it avails him but little to say, that to propitiate his propensity for the burlesque, he has only profaned the name under which the sublime Plato, and the Stagyrite, and Homer, and the mighty and the philosophical intellects of the Heathen world, worshipped the great First Cause, least understood."

. But a classical mind associates these two passages, thus parodied, with two others wherewith they are parallel,-one from Milton, "God's own poet;" the other from the Bible, God's own poem! Turn to the end of the fourth book of "Paradise Lost." Gabriel, drawing forth his bands of nightwatch to walk the round of Paradise, appoints two strong angels to Adam's bower, lest the evil spirit should be there doing some harm to Adam and Eve sleeping; there they find him at the ear of Eve, tempting her in a dream, and bring him, though unwilling, to Gabriel; by whom questioned, he scornfully answers, and prepares resistance.

* See Iliad, b. viii. 1. 22.

"Now dreadful deeds
Might have ensued, nor only Paradise
In this commotion, but the starry cope
Of Heaven perhaps, or all the elements
At least had gone to wrack, disturb'd and torn
With violence of this conflict, had not soon
The Eternal, to prevent such horrid fray,
Hung forth in Heaven his golden scales, yet seen
Betwixt Astrea and the Scorpion sign,
Wherein all things created first he weigh'd,
The pendulous round Earth with balanc'd air
In counterpoise, now ponders all events,
Battles and realms: in these he put two weights,
The sequel each of parting and of fight:

The latter quick up flew, and kick'd the beam;
Which Gabriel spying, thus bespake the fiend.

'Satan, I know thy strength, and thou know'st mine ;

Neither our own, but given: what folly then

To boast what arms can do! since thine no more
Than Heaven permits, nor mine, though doubled now
To trample thee as mire: for proof look up,

And read thy lot in yon celestial sign;

Where thou art weigh'd, and shown how light, how weak,
'If thou resist.' The fiend look'd up, and knew

His mounted scale aloft; nor more; but fled

Murmuring, and with him fled the shades of night."

The passage from the Scriptures is the second part of Daniel's interpretation of the hand-writing on the wall:"TEKEL, thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting."-Daniel, c. v. v. 27.

This coincidence between Sacred and Profane writ has been often remarked; and it is observable, that the passage in Milton is not so much imitated from Homer as from Daniel, -it is Homer Hebraised. In my mind, the three passages are always associated; and from the effect of such association, the parody of Pope appears to me to involve that Being, and that, Incommunicable Name, before whom the Jew trembled with hallowed awe, and for which his reverence was so great, that, even upon holy occasions, he feared to trust his lips with the tremendous word, though touched with the coal from heaven! Shall it be said that that Being, and, implicitly, that Name, may be introduced into a scene of burlesque, with moral impunity, for the mere purpose of deciding the difference between the weight of the wit, or whiskers, of a beau,—and the hair, natural or artificial, of a belle?

But, say our opponents, the "Essay on Man," is within the terms that define the highest kind or degree of poetry. The "Essay on Man," is a metaphysical poem. Its metaphy

sics, however, are not his own; they were derived from Bolingbroke, and there is reason to believe that they were unintelligible to himself. And we cannot concede that the poetical or metaphysical imitator is of the same rank and order, or of the same grade, with the original poet or metaphysician. But had the matter been his own, a question arises as to the order of the poem-It is a didactic poem. Lord Byron, in the controversy with Bowles, endeavoured to set the ethical over the epical,—and again, in “Don Juan,”

"The poets-and the moralists, their betters."

But until we can concede that it is nobler to think than to act, the epic poem must retain its supremacy. The epic poem relates an action, and illustrates, as it were, in practice, what the other teaches by way of precept. Whether is it nobler for the hermit to indulge uncommunicated, and perhaps incommunicable, reveries in a solitary cell,-or for a man to come forth from his closet and benefit the world by illustrating, in his own conduct, the virtue of the principles which he has conceived, or into an Institution, like the present, to make others participant of the conclusions at which he hath arrived? Verily, it is nobler to act than to think; for action is the End and the Result of thought.

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Our opponents still insist upon making a translator equal to an original poet, and descant upon the merits of Pope's paraphrase of Homer. Cowper failed as a translator. But not, therefore, is he a poet inferior to Pope. Cowper had not the idiosyncrasy adapted for translation; but, as a poet, he is superior to Pope, because he is original. We do not mean to say that he has no imitations; but imitation is, with him, one of the modes of his genius, not the substance. Of Pope it was the substance-the idiosyncrasy-the native aptitude-the predisposition-the genius! Whatever there was of originality in Pope's translation was its style, which, as we have before said, was a Gallican adaptation; a style the most unsuitable as the medium of epic poetry, and one which has degraded the epic of Homer into a succession of antitheses and a sorites of epigrams; substituting, moreover, for the majestic simplicity of the original, the meretricious embellishments of an artificial and complex diction.

Pope never wrote an epic poem. From what has been said, it appears that the elements of epical excellence were not in him. Because he did not write an epic, we might say, therefore, he was not a poet of the first order, an epic poem being of that description; and such a course of argument might be more germain to the general understanding. But, since it is possible for a simple ballad to contain the elements proper

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