cannot be refused,-to the impassioned movements of the "Who would not laugh, if such a man there be, " Why must we laugh? Because we find a grotesque assembly of noble and ignoble qualities. Very well; but why, then, must we weep? Because this assemblage is found actually existing in an eminent man of genius. Well, that is a good reason for weeping; we weep for the degradation of human nature. But then revolves the question, Why must we laugh? Because, if the belonging to a man of genius were a sufficient reason for weeping, so much we know from the very first. The very first line The very first line says, "Peace to all such. But were there one whose fires true genius kindles and fair fame inspires." Thus falls to the ground the whole antithesis of this famous character. We are to change our mood from laughter to tears upon a sudden discovery that the character belonged to a man of genius; and this we had already known from the beginning. Match us this prodigious oversight in Shakspere.1 Again, take the "Essay on Criticism": it is a collection of independent maxims, tied together into a fasciculus by the printer, but having no natural order or logical dependency: generally so vague as to mean nothing: like the general rules of justice, &c., in ethics, to which every man assents; but, when the question comes about any practical case, is it just? The opinions fly asunder far as the poles. And, what is remarkable, many of the rules are violated by no man so often as by Pope, and by Pope nowhere so often as in this very poem. As a single instance, he proscribes monosyllabic lines; and in no English poem of any pretensions are there so many lines of that class as in this. We have counted above a score, and the last line of all is monosyllabic.2 Not, therefore, for superior correctness, but for qualities the very same as belong to his most distinguished brethren, is Pope to be considered a great poet for impassioned thinking, powerful description, pathetic reflection, brilliant narration. His characteristic difference is simply that he carried these powers into a different field, and moved chiefly amongst the social paths of men, and viewed their characters as operating through their manners. And our obligations to him arise chiefly on this ground,-that, having already, in the persons of earlier poets, carried off the palm in all the grander trials of intellectual strength, for the majesty of the epopee and the impassioned vehemence of the tragic drama, to Pope we owe it that we can now claim an equal pre-eminence in the sportive and aërial graces of the mock heroic and satiric muse; that in the "Dunciad 1 See note at the end of this paper.-M. 2 "Not free from faults, nor yet too vain to mend."-M. we possess a peculiar form of satire, in which (according to a plan unattempted by any other nation) we see alternately her festive smile and her gloomiest scowl; that the grave good sense of the nation has here found its brightest mirror; and, finally, that through Pope the cycle of our poetry is perfected and made orbicular, that from that day we might claim the laurel equally, whether for dignity or grace. APPENDED NOTES POPE'S BIRTH-DAY.-Page 237. Dr. Johnson, however, and Joseph Warton, for reasons not stated, have placed his birth on the 22d. To this statement, as opposed to that which comes from the personal friends of Pope, little attention is due. Ruffhead and Spence, upon such questions, must always be of higher authority than Johnson and Warton, and a fortiori than Bowles. But it ought not to be concealed, though hitherto unnoticed by any person, that some doubt after all remains whether any of the biographers is right. An anonymous writer, contemporary with Pope, and evidently familiar with his personal history, declares that he was born on the 8th of June; and he connects it with an event that, having a public and a partisan interest (the birth of that Prince of Wales who was known twenty-seven years afterwards as the Pretender), would serve to check his own recollections, and give them a collateral voucher. It is true he wrote for an ill-natured purpose; but no purpose whatever could have been promoted by falsifying this particular date. What is still more noticeable, however, Pope himself puts a most emphatic negative upon all these statements. pathetic letter to a friend, when his attention could not have been wandering, for he is expressly insisting upon a sentiment which will find an echo in many a human heart,-viz., that a birthday, though from habit usually celebrated as a festal day, too often is secretly a memorial of disappointment, and an anniversary of sorrowful meaning, -he speaks of the very day on which he is then writing as his own birthday; and indeed what else could give any propriety to the passage? Now the date of this letter is January 1, 1733. Surely Pope knew his own birthday better than those who have adopted a random rumour without investigation. In a But, whilst we are upon this subject, we must caution the readers of Pope against too much reliance upon the chronological accuracy of his editors. All are scandalously careless; and generally they are faithless. Many allusions are left unnoticed, which a very little research would have illustrated; many facts are omitted, even yet recoverable, which are essential to the just appreciation of Pope's satirical blows; and dates are constantly misstated. Mr. Roscoe is the most careful of Pope's editors; but even he is often wrong. For instance, he has taken the trouble to write a note upon Pope's humorous report to Lord Burlington of his Oxford journey on horseback with Lintot; and this note involves a sheer impossibility. The letter is undated, except as to the month; and Mr. Roscoe directs the reader to supply 1714 as the true date; which is a gross anachronism. For a ludicrous anecdote is there put into Lintot's mouth, representing some angry critic, who had been turning over Pope's Homer with frequent pshaws, as having been propitiated, by Mr. Lintot's dinner, into a gentler feeling towards Pope, and finally, by the mere effect of good cheer, without an effort on the publisher's part, as coming to a confession that what he ate and what he had been reading were equally excellent. But in the year 1714 no part of Pope's "Homer" was printed. June 1715 was the month in which even the subscribers first received the four earliest books of the "Iliad," and the public generally not until July. This we notice by way of specimen. In itself, or as an error of mere negligence, it would be of little importance; but it is a case to which Mr. Roscoe has expressly applied his own conjectural skill, and solicited the attention of his reader. We may judge, therefore, of his accuracy in other cases which he did not think worthy of examination. There is another instance, presenting itself in every page, of ignorance concurring with laziness on the part of all Pope's editors, and with the effect not so properly of misleading as of perplexing the general reader. Until Lord Macclesfield's bill for altering the style, in the very middle of the eighteenth century, six years therefore after the death of Pope, there was a custom, arising from the collision between the civil and ecclesiastical year, of dating the whole period that lies between December 31st and March 25th (both days exclusively) as belonging indifferently to the past or the current year. This peculiarity had nothing to do with the old and new style, but was, we believe, redressed by the same Act of Parliament. Now, in Pope's time it was absolutely necessary that a man should use this double date, because else he was liable to be seriously misunderstood. For instance, it was then always said that Charles I had suffered on the 30th of January 1648; and why? Because, had the historian fixed the date to what it really was, 1649, in that case all those (a very numerous class) who supposed the year 1649 to commence on Ladyday, or March 25, would have understood him to mean that this event happened in what we now call 1650, for not until 1650 was. there any January which they would have acknowledged as belonging to 1649, since they added to the year 1648 all the days from January 1 to March 24. On the other hand, if he had said simply that 1648 1649 Charles suffered in 1648, he would have been truly understood by the class we have just mentioned; but by another class, who began the year from the 1st of January, he would have been understood to mean what we now mean by the year 1648. There would have been a sheer difference, not of one, as the reader might think at first sight, but of two entire years in the chronology of the two parties; which difference, and all possibility of doubt, is met and remedied by the fractional date for that date says in effect it was 1648 to you who do not open the new year till Ladyday; it was 1649 to you who open it from January 1. Thus much to explain the real sense of the case; and it follows from this explanation that no part of the year ever can have the fractional or double date except the interval from January 1 to March 24 inclusively. And hence arises a practical inference,--viz., that the very same reason, and no other, which formerly enjoined the use of the compound or fractional date,-viz., the prevention of a capital ambiguity or dilemma,-now enjoins its omission. For in our day, when the double opening of the year is abolished, what sense is there in perplexing a reader by using a fraction which offers him a choice without directing him how to choose. In fact, it is the denominator of the fraction, if one may so style the lower figure, which expresses to a modern eye the true year. Yet the editors of Pope, as well as many other writers, have confused their readers by this double date; and why? Simply because they were confused themselves. Many errors in literature of large extent have arisen from this confusion. Thus it was said properly enough in the contemporary accounts-for instance, in Lord Monmouth's Memoirs-that Queen Elizabeth died on the last day of the year 1602, for she died on the 24th of March; and by a careful writer this event would have been dated as March 24, 1883. But many writers, misled by the phrase above cited, have asserted that James I. was proclaimed on the 1st of January 1603. Heber, Bishop of Calcutta, again, has ruined the entire chronology of the life of Jeremy Taylor, and unconsciously vitiated the facts, by not understanding this fractional date. Mr. Roscoe even too often leaves his readers to collect the true year as they can thus e.g., at p. 500 of his Life, he quotes from Pope's letter to Warburton, in great vexation for the surreptitious publication of his letters in Ireland, under date of February 4, 1749. But why not have printed it intelligibly as 1741 ? Incidents there are in most men's lives which are susceptible of a totally different moral value according as they are dated in one year or another. That might be a kind and honourable liberality in 1740 which would be a fraud upon creditors in 1741. Exile to a distance of 10 miles from London in January 1744 might argue that a man was a turbulent citizen and suspected of treason; while the same exile in January 1745 would simply argue that, as a Papist, he had been included amongst his whole body in a general measure of precaution to meet the public dangers of that year. This explanation we have thought it right to make, both for its extensive application to all editions of Pope, and on account of the serious blunders which have arisen from the case when ill understood; and because, in a work upon. 1602 |