"As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, These performances, too, are perhaps, upon tle, and Cicero, which follow, are executed the whole, the most imaginative of all their with almost equal felicity. Altogether, poetical compositions. But both in these what we have here, though not matching two poems and in everything else that they the brilliant wit and fancy of the Rape of have written, the great advantage which the Lock, and, we apprehend, much less Pope has over his predecessor is his supe-read and known, is far higher poetry. So riority in regularity, refinement, and dig- again, in such passages as the following, nity. It may be affirmed, indeed, that in the mild grace, blended of dignity and tenthe uniform observance of this accuracy derness (of neither of which qualities Dryand chastity of execution, without any sa- den had much, or almost any), is all Pope's crifice of spirit, he has excelled every pre-own :ceding English poet. This is his great distinctive excellence, as well as the main secret of his extensive and enduring popularity. It is an excellence peculiarly suited for general appreciation; capable, as it is, of being completely understood and felt by all persons of cultivated taste, even although not at all imaginative or of a poetical temperament; satisfactory even to minds of the commonest and humblest intelligence; nay, carrying with it an attraction by which it recommends itself to the moral sense, even without reference to the intellect and the taste. The following passage, for example, from the "Temple of Fame," and from the portion of the poem that has been superadded to Chaucer's original, exhibits throughout a greater purity of style than Dryden has perhaps anywhere preserved for the same number of lines. It is the commencement of the description of the six columns that rose in the centre of the choir : "High on the first the mighty Homer shone; A golden column next in rank appeared, I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came; But why then publish? Granville the polite, Or this (at least after the first six or seven lines) : "E'en in a bishop I can spy desert: But does the court a worthy man remove? I studied Shrewsbury, the wise and great; And, if yet higher the proud list should end, Yet with all this superior dignity and finish of manner, Pope has paid no panegyrical tribute that can be compared for florid and sportive fancy, or true poetic life and spirit, with some of Dryden's; for instance, with that which he addressed in his old age to the Duchess of Ormond, along The pictures of Pindar, Horace, Aristo- with his version of Chaucer's Palamon and Arcite. Of what he has himself so well his poetry can stand no competition with described as "The varying verse, the full resounding line, The long majestic march, and energy divine," What there is of finish about that of such a supreme artist as Virgil. Something may be attributable to the difference between the two languages; something to the necessities of rhyme, to which of Dryden, his disciple has not caught the modern poet has been obliged to conmuch. Where the poetry of the one is an im- form; but the superiority of the ancient petuous and foaming flood, carrying every-one is mainly, there can be no doubt, to be thing before it as it bounds along, that of laid to the account of his superiority of the other wins our admiration by the stately genius. evenness of its flow, and by the clearness with which its smooth and bright surface reflects the scenery through which it takes its way. This calm beauty, however, is often very noble. The following passage is in a different style from those last quoted, and in felicity, and we may almost say perfection, of execution, still further transcends anything in Dryden. It is the description of the effects of the immortal yawn of the goddess, which finishes the Dunciad : "In vain, in vain! the all-composing hour She comes! she comes! the sable throne behold Pope's poetry is to the ever-present spirit of grace and harmony, which pervades and actuates that of Virgil like a living soul, only a false outside show, or dead imitation of true beauty. And still further, perhaps, are both Pope and Dryden distanced as reasoners in verse by the magnificence of Lucretius. The poetry of Pope, trim, formal, and stately, was the natural progeny and sequel of that of Dryden, its relation to which is partly that of an imitation, partly that of a reaction. Pope occupies nearly the same place in the history or progress of our poetic literature that Samuel Johnson does in that of our prose literature. Their allotted function was, each in his own department, to reform the writing of the language, by subjecting it to a certain regularity, unknown before, both of grammar and of rhythm. And both, it cannot be denied, have, to a certain extent, proved real legislators. The new character which they impressed upon our prose and verse has never been since lost. We may have gradually freed ourselves from much of the restraint which they imposed in the first instance, and recovered something of our old liberty, that was for a time suspended; but it is a more regulated liberty than formerly. If we have got rid of some stiffness and monotony, we have retained the correctness introduced by Pope and Johnson. Nobody now writes with the same natural negligence which was common before their time. There is a measured flow, as well as a grammatical precision, in the easiest, loosest style now written, which formerly was It is certainly a mistake, however, to scarcely to be found in the most labored. suppose, as many people do, that Pope's We may have paid something for this; we poetry is uniformly characterized by this may have paid more for it than it is worth; faultless finish. He has not, it is true, but surely it is, in itself, not a loss, but a nearly so many careless lines as Dryden; gain. Nor is there any reason to suppose perhaps, strictly speaking, he has no care- that correctness is necessarily inconsistent less lines, for the marks of great pains- with either ease and freedom or life and vataking are everywhere visible; nevertheless, riety of style. One of the freest and most he has a good many that are far from being various, as well as most expressive and picperfectly successful or satisfactory. Eventuresque, of styles, is that of Livy; and it in respect of the mere absence of blemishes, is not only correct, but may be said to be In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die. Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine; even highly rhetorical. Whether it was a good or an evil, however, the change in our manner of writing which Pope and Johnson heralded, or rather first exemplified, was an inevitable one. It was a necessity of the stage at which the language had arrived; of that complete crystallization of the language of which the production of such a work as Johnson's Dictionary was another of the natural results. The Dictionary was, as it were, the Theodosian Code, authoritatively proclaiming the state of the law, and declaring, from a survey of all preceding enactments and decisions, how much of what had hitherto been held for right or allowable was to stand good for the future. Hence the literature of the day came to be looked upon as, in a more especial sense, a portion of the glory of the prince, in the same way as it was under Augustus at Rome, or under Louis XIV. in France, Within the compass of these brilliant five or six years are crowded the Tatlers, Spectators, and Guardians of Steele and Addison and their associates; Addison's Cato; a long succession of the most vigorous of Swift's political effusions, both in prose and verse; and all Pope's poems down to the translation of the Iliad; while Bolingbroke, Atterbury, Prior, Garth, Arbuthnot, Parnell, and Gay, all arrived at, or fast ascending to, the meridian of their reputation, were also shedding light around them, As Pope was the natural, as well as the either by means of the press or in some actual, successor of Dryden, so Johnson other way, or, if in no other, by the very may be accounted the natural successor of lustre of their names, It was undeniably Swift. In the revolutions of literature, a time of extraordinary literary activity the new prose has thus, in most instances, and productiveness; never before had so kept at some short distance behind the new many works appeared among us within so verse. So formerly, in our English litera- short a space, which have retained their ceture, Bacon had followed close upon Spen-lebrity, and to a certain extent their popuser and Shakspeare. It is remarkable that larity so long. Pope, who had only seen Dryden, just lived to hear the first sound of the rising reputation of Johnson, who, although not the greatest genius that was to adorn the next era, was, more than any other figure, to fill that space in the public eye which he himself and Dryden had previously filled. The three generations, making up about a century of our literature, may be, with sufficient general propriety, designated by their names, and called the ages of Dryden, of Pope, and of Johnson. As for the real worth of the literature of this our so called Augustan age, or the rank which it is entitled to hold, as compared with that of any of our other great literary eras, that is another matter. It does not follow that it should be our highest literature because it took something of its inspiration from the best society. Even its popularity, although that should be allowed to be, or to have been, greater than what any other portion of our literature has enjoyed, will be no demonstration of its Objections have been made by some re- claims to such supremacy. It was, indeed, cent writers to the title which it has been well adapted to the taste of the most nucustomary to give to the period in which merous class of readers in its own day, and Pope first came before the world, of the for a long time afterwards. The period Augustan age of our literature. But its during which it maintained its ascendency meaning seems to be misunderstood. The was principally characterized by the spread last five or six years of the reign of Anne of intelligence among the middle classes, are to be considered as the Augustan age and the extension of the reading public of English literature, because literature was from the capital over the provinces, from the then more distinctly patronized by the court towns to the villages and the country. But and the government than it has ever been the general intelligence with which it thus in this country at any other era. The lead- found acceptance was not of the highest ing writers were all intimately connected order. It had been originally created and with one or other of the two great political nourished much more by political than by parties, either as being themselves public poetical reading. The age of newspapers, men, as were Steele and Addison, Boling- it is true, had hardly yet come; but the broke and Prior, or as the personal friends same stimulant was applied in another form and most familiar associates of the persons by an incessant production of political at the head of affairs. There never was pamphlets, which seem to have kept up before, there never has been since, so close rather a more intense excitement in regard an alliance between literature and politics. I to public affairs than exists in our own day Arcite descri 45 a the 447 In other respects, however, the extension of the reading public over the provinces, that was now going on, operated in another direction. It thrust aside some kinds of popular literature, the town or metropolitan spirit and character of which were too essential and too exclusive for country readers in general, as yet, to find much attraction in them. It is very remarkable, in particular, how what is especially a metropolitan literature, writing for the stage, almost entirely ceased for a time on the opening of the new era. The busy dramatists of the immediately preceding period now almost all, as if with one consent, dropt their pens, or disappeared, and no others arose to take their places. Wycherley, indeed, was old and worn out, and his brief dramatic career had been long termi indeed, that it ex- and his contemporaries had to court and to y over the whole endeavor to charm with their verses. Perthen. The popu-haps he might have been a greater poet in reneral subjects, another era; in that age it was impossible. headed or led No poetry more ideal than what he actually he age of Anne, produced was then producible, at least by etry of Pope, was in its him. And yet he was certainly the most mainly an attempt to dilute, imaginative and impassioned, as well as the infusion of a less inflammatory most terse and polished, the most epigramof reading, the strong interests in matic and brilliant, of all the poetical politics which held almost exclusive pos- writers of that time. session of the public mind. It endeavored, therefore, in the first instance, to ally itself to, and to lean for support upon, what it was destined eventually in a great degree to supersede. The Tatler, at its commencement, was partly a newspaper. But, even after actual political intelligence or discussion was dropt in this description of publications, there remained, whether for essayists or poets, only the same public, with such tastes as its previous habits of reading and thinking had given it; and these could not be other than artificial and conventional. That was the inevitable effect of absorption in the party politics of the day. When the battle, indeed, is between the great fundamental principles of government or society, whether it be fought with words or with swords, a time of civil contest awakens and calls forth men's high-nated. Farquhar, after having produced a est mental powers and strongest passions; new comedy every year on an average since but the mere ordinary struggle between the the beginning of the century, died in 1707, occupants of office and their would-be suc- while his eighth, "The Beau's Stratagem,' cessors is an affair of another kind alto- was in the midst of its run. But Congreve, gether. The general interest which the Vanbrugh, Steele, Rowe, and Southerne, prospects and vicissitudes of such a strug- were all still in the vigor of life. Yet Congle excite rather resembles that which is greve produced nothing except a slight felt by the lookers-on at any other game of Masque, and a still slighter Opera, after strength, or skill, or chance; it is an in- 1700, and nothing whatever after 1707, terest centring more in the game itself, in Vanbrugh, also, with the exception of a the players and the manner in which they farce which he translated from the French acquit themselves, than in any important in 1715, wrote nothing after 1706. principle which is ordinarily felt to hang Steele's four comedies, the first three were upon the result. The habitual disposition written and brought out between 1702 and of mind which it engenders and maintains 1706; the fourth not till after an interval in the community is to look not so much to of fifteen years, during which he was occuprinciples as to persons. It tends to with- pied with quite another description of litedraw the mind from all large or distant rature-with the Tatler, the Spectator, the views, fixing it upon the present to the ex- Guardian, the Englishman, the Reader, clusion alike of the future and the past. the Lover, and other periodical publicaMoreover, by keeping the general atten- tions. Rowe, who by the year 1708 had tion so much directed upon the seat of go-produced four tragedies and one comedy vernment, it spreads what we may call a since the commencement of the century, metropolitan infection throughout society, spoiling or dulling all relish for everything except what is understood to be in vogue in the politest town circles. Such was the character of the public taste which Pope after that date turned, in like manner, to other work; and his next dramatic piece, his tragedy of "Jane Shore," did not appear till 1713, nor in the five remaining years of his life did his pen, formerly so Of productive in that line, yield any other ex-| ble of the Bees, in which the cooler judg- We shall take in very nearly the entire 29 The habits of a valetudinarian prevented Pope from making many new acquaintances in the latter part of his life; but even of the writers who succeeded those by whom he was surrounded when he first entered upon the stage, and who had either already become conspicuous before he passed from it, or were giving promise of being the lights of the next era, some of the most remarkable had enjoyed his friendship, or even been cheered by his encouragement. Warburton was the most intimate associate of his last days. He does not appear to have greatly admired Thomson's, more than any other, blank verse; Spence makes him speak of that poet's Winter as being a "huddled composition, and oftentimes not quite intelligible." Yet he owned, it is added, that the author discovered the true spirit of poetry. And it is known, that he always lived on the best terms with Thomson, and had a great regard for him, which he showed on many occasions. He wrote, in conjunction with Mallet, the prologue to Thomson's tragedy of Sophonisba; he afterwards addressed a poetical epistle to him while he was travelling in Italy; and some years subsequently, when he seldom made his appearance in public, he came to the first representation of Thomson's tragedy of Agamemnon, on which occasion he was welcomed to the theatre, Johnson relates, by a general clap. Young, who, indeed, was Pope's senior by birth, although he survived him many years, and although his principal works belong to a later epoch than those of Pope, was one of his familiar friends of early date. But the most interesting circumstance that connects Pope with the next age of our literature, is his anticipation and prophetic announcement of the future eminence of Samuel Johnson. When Johnson's "London" was published, in May, 1738, many readers are said to have exclaimed, in their first surprise: "Here is an unknown poet, greater even than Pope;" and Pope himself, when the younger Richardson, whom he had desired to find out who the new poet was, reported to him that he had only been able to discover that his name was Johnson, and that he was some obscure individual, observed |