the whole-a sheet lightning of wit that plays Cloviscourt and Nornyth. This affectation of fine harmlessly over the page. Take, as a sample, names is only one degree less offensive than Mr. these consolations afforded to young witlings disappointed in the success of their bon mots. "What would you have? There are three gene

rations

At once on earth: can your ambition be
So ravenous as at once to ask all three?
Hold to your age: 'twill shift an you have
patience.

Soon your facetious ball-room observations
Shall tickle learned ladies after tea.
Envy no more your elders: not a few
Of those distinguished worthies envy you.
"Dance! while your limbs are limber! Laugh!
while laughter
Comes bubbling from the fount of youthful

merriment!

Dickens' predilection for such patronymics as
Chuzzlewit and Nickleby. It savours of the cheap
gentility of the upstart or the swindler. We also
object entirely to the mode of Agnes's death.
The sudden snapping of the cord in the midst of
youth, and health, and enjoyment, may be excused
when it is necessary to the story; but Agnes
lingers, and the broken back is useless as well as
revolting; and though Mr. Cayley is far above
the cockney ignorance which made the author of
"Ten Thousand a-Year" describe his heroine, when
out with the hounds, as "spurring her eager filly,"
vet he should have remembered, that when young
ladies do commit such escapades, they are not
trusted to the care of boys from Eton, but there is
invariably some papa, or uncle, or steady elder
brother, or prudent old stud-groom, to take care
of them. "Old Hughes" would have known his
business better than to let his young mistress
ride at
an awkward palisade
(Backed by a deepish drop) both stiff and high,
when her "coal-black steed" was "a little blown."
Besides, the gate would not have been locked. We
dislike the story so much that we are writing our-
selves into the conviction that it could not be so.

No pungent dry dust, beaten from the cerement Of Reputation's mummy-rags, hereafter Shall ever prove so pleasant on experiment. No breath of praise shall half so sweet waft e'er Upon your stale self-love as maidens' sighs: No lamps of glory beam as maidens' eyes." Such are the charms over which we have lingered with delight in reading "Sir Reginald Mohun." We must now remonstrate with Mr. Cayley anent one or two matters. In the first These, however, are, after all, minor matters. place, where did he get his names? To say nothing We part from Mr. Cayley with gratitude for the of the hero, did ever five young men with such pleasure he has given us all the more lively as names as St. Oun, De Lacy, Wilton, Tancarville, we look for future favours. We shall be delighted and Vivian meet together? The ladies are as to resume our task of criticism when the fourth bad-Lady Eve Fitz Pharamond, the Countess and succeeding cantos of "Sir Reginald Mohun" Merovinge; and the places, if possible, worse, make their appearance.

ANACREON.-O DE XX.

AN old woman was changed to a stone, ohone!
At which all her relations did groan, ohone!
King Pandion's daughter,

When her father sought her,

In the shape of a swallow had flown, ohone!

But I'd be a looking-glass clear, my dear!
Or a soft robe thy form to insphere, my dear!
Or water, cool flowing,

To circle thee, glowing,

And embrace thee without any fear, my dear.

A perfume thy beauty to greet, my sweet;
A scarf on thy bosom to beat, my sweet;
The pearl that's reclining

Where tresses are twining,

Or the slipper that's under thy feet, my sweet.

LORD CARLISLE ON POPE.

BY THOMAS DE QUINCEY, ESQ.

[THE paper of last month, on Lord Carlisle's lec- them, and oftentimes pursuing them through their ture, having been written under the oppression of unlinkings with the sequaciousness (pardon a a nervous illness, accompanied by great suffering, Coleridgian word) that belongs to some process may probably enough have been found heavy. of creative nature, such as the unfolding of a Another objection to that paper is, that it too easily flower. But Pope was all jets and tongues of assumes the radical falseness of Pope, as a notori- flame; all showers of scintillation and sparkle. ous fact needing no evidence or illustration. To Dryden followed, genially, an impulse of his myself it did not need either. But to any casual healthy nature. Pope obeyed, spasmodically, an reader, whose attention had never been attracted overmastering febrile paroxysm. Even in these to the circumstantialities of Pope's satiric sketches, constitutional differences between the two are this assumption would be startling; and it would written and are legible the corresponding necessihave done him a service to offer a few exemplifi- ties of "utter falsehood in Pope, and of loyalty to cations of the vice attributed to Pope, both as sub- truth in Dryden." Strange it is to recall this one stantiating the charge and as investing it with striking fact, that if once in his life Dryden might some little amusement. This it had been my in- reasonably have been suspected of falsehood, it was tention to do at the moment; but being disabled in the capital matter of religion. He ratted from by the illness above-mentioned, I now supply the his Protestant faith; and according to the literal omission.] origin of that figure he ratted; for he abjured it Whom shall we pronounce a fit writer to be as rats abjure a ship in which their instinct of laid before an auditory of working-men, as a model divination has deciphered a destiny of ruin, and of what is just in composition-fit either for at the very moment when Popery wore the proconciliating their regard to literature at first or mise of a triumph that might, at any rate, have afterwards for sustaining it? The qualifications lasted his time. Dryden was a Papist by apostacy; for such a writer are apparently these two: first, and perhaps, not to speak uncharitably, upon some that he should deal chiefly with the elder and bias from self-interest. Pope, on the other hand, elementary affections of man, and under those re- was a Papist by birth, and by a tie of honour; and lations which concern man's grandest capacities; he resisted all temptations to desert his afflicted secondly, that he should treat his subject with faith, which temptations lay in bribes of great magsolemnity, and not with sneer-with earnestness, nitude prospectively, and in persecutions for the as one under a prophet's burden of impassioned present that were painfully humiliating. How truth, and not with the levity of a girl hunting a base a time-server does Dryden appear on the one chance-started caprice. I admire Pope in the very side!-on the other, how much of a martyr should highest degree; but I admire him as a pyrotech- we be disposed to pronounce Pope! And yet, for nic artist for producing brilliant and evanescent all that, such is the over-ruling force of a nature effects out of elements that have hardly a moment's originally sincere, the apostate Dryden wore upon life within them. There is a flash and a startling his brow the grace of sincerity, whilst the pseudoexplosion, then there is a dazzling coruscation, all martyr Pope, in the midst of actual fidelity to his purple and gold; the eye aches under the sudden- Church, was at his heart a traitor-in the very ness of a display that, springing like a burning oath of his allegiance to his spiritual mistress had arrow out of darkness, rushes back into darkness a lie upon his lips, scoffed at her whilst kneeling with arrowy speed, and in a moment all is over. in homage to her pretensions, and secretly forLike festal shows, or the hurrying music of such swore her doctrines whilst suffering insults in her

shows

It was, and it is not.

Untruly, therefore, was it ever fancied of Pope, that he belonged by his classification to the family of the Drydens. Dryden had within him a principle of continuity which was not satisfied without lingering upon his own thoughts, brooding over

written

service.

The differences as to truth and falsehood lay exactly where, by all the external symptoms, they ought not to have lain. But the reason for this anomaly was, that to Dryden sincerity had been a perpetual necessity of his intellectual nature, whilst Pope, distracted by his own activities of mind, living in an irreligious generation, and beset by * It is no matter of wonder or complaint that a paper infidel friends, had early lost his anchorage of by a correspondent at a distance of 400 miles, or something more, traditional belief; and yet, upon an honourable from the press, requiring, therefore, a diaulos of above 800 miles scruple of fidelity to the suffering Church of his for every letter and its answer, a distance which becomes strictly fathers, he sought often to dissemble the fact of infinite in the case when the correspondent sends no answer at all, should exhibit some press errors. These, having now done his own scepticism, which yet often he thirsted their worst, I will not vex the reader or the compositor by recalling. ostentatiously to parade. Through a motive of Only with respect to one, viz., the word genuine, which is twice truthfulness he became false. And in this parprinted for the true word generic, I make an exception, as it defeats the meaning in a way that may have perplexed a pains-taking ticular instance he would, at any rate, have become reader. Such readers are rare, and deserve encouragement. false, whatever had been the native constitution of [This same diaulos which Mr. De Quincey laments is also the his mind. cause of his present paper appearing incomplete. It will be resumed It was a mere impossibility to reconin the next number.-ED.] real allegiance to his Church with his

cile any

on butterfly-wings to the right and the left, obeying no guidance but that of some instant and fugitive sensibility to some momentary phasis of beauty. In this dream of drunken eclecticism, and in the original possibility of such an eclecticism, lay the ground of that enormous falsehood which Pope

known irreverence to religion. But upon far more subjects than this Pope was habitually false in the quality of his thoughts, always insincere, never by any accident in earnest, and consequently many times caught in ruinous self-contradiction. Is that the sort of writer to furnish an advantageous study for the precious leisure, pre-practised from youth to age. An eclectic philocious as rubies, of the toil-worn artizan?

The root and the pledge of this falseness in Pope lay in a disease of his mind, which he (like the Roman poet Horace) mistook for a feature of preternatural strength; and this disease was the incapacity of self-determination towards any paramount or abiding principles. Horace, in a wellknown passage, had congratulated himself upon this disease as upon a trophy of philosophic emancipation:

Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri,

Quo me cunque rapit tempestas, deferor hospes : which words Pope thus translates, and applies to himself in his English adaptation of this

But ask not to what doctors I applySworn to no master, of no sect am I. As drives the storm, at any door I knock; And house with Montaigne now, or now with Locke. That is, neither one poet nor the other having, as regarded philosophy, any internal principle of gravitation or determining impulse to draw him in one direction rather than another, was left to the random control of momentary taste, accident, or caprice; and this indetermination of pure, unballasted levity both Pope and Horace mistook for a special privilege of philosophic strength. Others, it seems, were chained and coerced by certain fixed aspects of truth, and their efforts were overruled accordingly in one uniform line of direction. But they, the two brilliant poets, fluttered

sopher already, in the very title which he assumes, proclaims his self-complacency in the large liberty of error purchased by the renunciation of all controlling principles. Having severed the towingline which connected him with any external force of guiding and compulsory truth, he is free to go astray in any one of ten thousand false radiations

tions rising spontaneously from the heart under the ordinary gleams of chance and change in the human things that lay around hini. But Pope is more ambitious. He is not content with borrowing from philosophy the grace of a passing sanction or countersign, but undertakes to lend her a systematic coherency of development, and some. times even a fundamental basis. In his "Essay on Man" his morals epistle-gathered together in his chance eclectic rambles amongst books connect themselves with metaphysics. The metaphysics had been of philosophy, such as Montaigne, Charron, and latterly amongst the fossil rubbish and debris of Bayle's Dictionary. Much also had been suggested to his piercing intellect in conversation, espe cially with Lord Bolingbroke; but not so exclusively by any means with him as the calunniators of Pope would have us supservilely to beg or to steal. It was indispensable to his own com pose. Adopt he did from all quarters, but Pope was not the man fort that he should at least understand the meaning of what he took from others, though seldom indeed he understood its wider anguish and horror upon Pope in his latter days, such as rarely relations, or pursued its ultimate consequences. Hence came can have visited any but the death-bed of some memorable criminal. To have rejected the verba magistri might seem well, interests of truth; but he forgot that, in rejecting the master, it might look promising, as all real freedom is promising, for the he had also rejected the doctrine-the guiding principle-the unity of direction secured for the inquirer by the master's par ticular system with its deep internal cohesion. Coming upon his own distracted choice of principles from opposite angles and lines of direction, he found that what once and under one aspect had seemed to him a guiding light, and one of the buoys for narrowing the uncertainties of a difficult navigation, absolutely under another aspect, differently approached and differently associated, did the treacherous office of a spanselled horse, as in past days upon the Cornish and the South Irish coast it was employedexpressly for showing false signals, and leading right amongst breakers. That hortus siccus of pet notions, which had won Pope's fancy in their insulated and separate existence, when brought together as parts and elements of the same system in the elaborate and haughty "Essay on Man," absolutely refused to cohere. No doctoring, no darning, could disguise their essential inter-repulsion. Dismal rents, chasms, hiatuses, gaped and grinned in a theory whose very office and arrogant pretension had been to harmonise the dislocated face of nature, and to do that in the way of justification for God which God had forgotten to do for himself. How if an enemy should come, and fill up these ugly chasms with some poisonous fungus of a nature to spread the dry rot through the main timbers of the vessel? And, fact, such an enemy did come. This enemy spread dismay through Pope's heart. Pope found himself suddenly shown up as an anti-social monster, as an Which nobody can speak, and nobody can spell." incendiary, as a disorganiser of man's most aspiring hopes. "O Heavens! What is to be done? what can be done?" he cried Vain would it be to fasten any blame upon a poet armed with such out. "When I wrote that passage, which now seems so wicked, heaven-born playfulness that upon a verbal defect he raises a certainly I meant something very good; or, if I didn't, at any triumph of art, and upon a personal defect raises a perpetual me- rate I meant to mean it." The case was singular; if no friend mento of smiling and affectionate forgiveness. We "condone" of the author's could offer a decent account of its meaning, to a his cowardice, to use language of Doctors' Commons, many times certainty the author could not. Luckily, however, there are two over, before we know whether he would have cared for our con- ways of filling up chasms; and Warburton, who had reasons best donation; and protest our unanimous belief, that, if he did run known to himself for cultivating Pope's favour, besides consideraway from battle, he ran no faster than a gentleman ought to run. able practice during his youth in a special pleader's office, In fact, his character would have wanted its amiable unity had he took the desperate case in hand. He caulked the chasms with not been a coward, or had he not been a rake. Vain were it to philosophic oakum, he "payed" them with dialectic pitch, he level reproaches at him, for whom all reproaches become only occa-sheathed them with copper and brass by means of audacious sions of further and surplus honour. But, in fact, for any serious dogmatism and insolent quibbles, until the enemy seemed to have purposes of Horace, philosophy was not wanted. Some slight been silenced, and the vessel righted so far as to float. The pretence of that kind served to throw a shade of pensiveness over result, however, as a permanent result, was this-that the demurs his convivial revels, and thus to rescue them from the taint of which had once been raised (however feebly pressed) against the plebeian grossness. So far, and no farther, a slight colouring of poem, considered in the light of a system compatible with religion, philosophy was needed for his moral musings. But Pope's case is settled upon it permanently as a sullen cloud of suspicion that a different. The moral breathings of Horace are natural exhala-century has not availed to dissipate.

* “ The two brilliant pocts." As regards Horace, it is scarcely worth while to direct the reader's attention upon inconsistency of this imaginary defiance to philosophic authority with his profession elsewhere of allegiance to Epicurus; for had it even been possible to direct the poet's own attention upon it, the same spirit of frank simplicity which has converted his very cowardice, his unmitigated cowardice (relictá non bene parmulá), into one of those amiable and winning frailties which, once having come to know it, on no account could we consent to forego-would have reconciled us all by some inimitable picturesqueness of candour to inconsistency the most shocking as to the fulfilment of some great moral obligation; just as from the brute restiveness of a word (Equotuticum), that positively would not come into the harness of hexameter verse, he has extracted a gay, laughing alias (viz., "versu quod dicere non est"); a pleasantry which is nowhere so well paralleled as by Southey's on the name of Admiral Tchichakoff:

"A name which you all must know very well,

from the true centre of rest. By his own choice | heresy, if by such an act he could have added a he is wandering in a forest all but pathless,

hue of brilliancy to his colouring or a new depth to his shadows. There is nothing he would not have sacrificed, not the most solemn of his opinions, nor the most pathetic memorial from his personal experiences, in return for a sufficient consideration, which consideration meant always with him poetic effect. It is not, as too commonly is believed, that he was reckless of other people's feelings; so far from that, he had a morbid facility in his kindness; and in cases where he had no reason to suspect any lurking hostility, he showed even a paralytic benignity. But, simply and constitutionally, he was incapable of a sincere thought or a sincere emotion. Nothing that ever he uttered, were it even a prayer to God, but he had a fancy for reading it backwards. And he was evermore false, not as loving or preferring falsehood, but as one who could not in his heart perceive much real difference between what people affected to call falsehood and what they affected to call truth. Volumes might be filled with illustrations: I content myself with three or four.

For Horace, as I have endeavoured to explain in the note, the apology is so much the readier as his intrusions into this province of philosophy are slighter, more careless, and more indirect. But Pope's are wilful, premeditated, with malice aforethought; and his falsehoods wear a more malignant air, because they frequently concern truth speculative, and are therefore presumably more deliberate in their origin, and more influential in the result. It is precisely this part of Pope's errors that would prove most perplexing to the unlearned student. Beyond a doubt the " Essay on Man" would, in virtue of its subject, prove the most attractive to a labouring man of all Pope's writings, as most of all promising a glimpse into a world of permanence and of mysterious grandeur, and having an interest, therefore, transcendant to any that could be derived from the fleeting aspects of manners or social conventionalisms, though illuminated and vivified by satire. Here would be the most advantageous and remunerative station to take for one who should undertake a formal exposure of Pope's hollow-heartedness; that is, it would most commensurately reward the pains and difficulties of such an investigation. But it would be too long a task for this situation, and it would be too polemic. It would move through a jungle of controversies. For, to quote a remark which I once made myself in print, the "Essay on Man" in one point resembles some doubtful inscriptions in ancient forms of Oriental languages, which, being made up elliptically of mere consonants, can be read into very different senses according to the different sets of vowels which the particular reader may choose to interpolate. According to the choice of the interpreter, it may be read into a loyal or a treasonable meaning. Instead of this I prefer, as more amusing, as less elaborate, and as briefer, to expose a few of Pope's personal falsehoods, and falsehoods as to the notorieties of fact. Truths speculative oftentimes, drives its roots into depth, so dark that the falsifications to which it is liable, though detected, cannot always be exposed to the light of day-the result is known, but not therefore seen. Truth personal, on the other hand, may be easily made to confront its falsifier, not with refutation only, but with the visible shame of refutation. Such shame would settle upon every And all the mighty mad in Dennis raged. page of Pope's satires and moral epistles, oftentimes upon every couplet, if any censor, armed with an Upon this line (the 106th) of the text he hangs a adequate knowledge of the facts, were to prosecute note, in the course of which he quotes a few senthe inquest. And the general impression from tences about Dennis from Theobald. One of these such an inquest would be, that Pope never de- begins thus: "Did we really know how much this lineated a character, nor uttered a sentiment, nor poor man suffers by being contradicted-" &c.; breathed an aspiration, which he would not wil-upon which Pope thinks proper to intercalate the lingly have recast, have retracted, have abjured or following pathetic parenthesis in italics: "I wish trampled under foot with the curses assigned to that reflection on POVERTY had been spared."

I. Pope felt intellectually that it was philosophic and also that it wore an air of nobility, not to despise poverty. Morally, however, he felt inversely: nature and the accider is of his life had made it his necessity to despise nothing so heartily. If in any one sentiment he ever was absolutely sincere, if there can be cited one insulated case upon which he found it difficult to play the hypocrite, it was in the case of that intense scorn with which he regarded poverty, and all the painful circumstances that form the equipage of poverty. To look at a pale, dejected fellow-creature creeping along the highway, and to have reason for thinking that he has not tasted food since yesterday-what a pang would such a sight, accompanied by such a thought, inflict upon many a million of benign human hearts! But in Pope, left to his spontaneous nature, such a sight and such a thought would have moved only fits of laughter. Not that he would have refused the poor creature a shilling, but still he would have laughed. For hunger, and cold, and poverty appeared to him only in the light of drolleries, and too generally of scoundrelisms. Still he was aware that some caution was requisite in giving public expression to such feelings. Accordingly, when he came forward in gala-dress as a philosopher, he assumed the serene air of one upon whom all such idle distinctions as rich and poor were literally thrown away. But watch him : follow his steps for a few minutes, and the deep realities of his nature will unmasque themselves. For example, in the first book of the "Dunciad" he has occasion to mention Dennis :

How amiable! how pretty! Could Joseph Sur- and he knows that no possible testamentary abdiface have more dexterously improved the occasion: cation of an estate disturbs his own absolute com"The man that disparages poverty, is a man that-"mand over it so long as he lives, or bars his power &c. It is manifest, however, at a glance, that this virtuous indignation is altogether misplaced; for "poor" in the quotation from Theobald has no reference whatever to poverty as the antithesis to wealth. What a pity that a whole phial of such excellent scenical morality should thus have been uncorked and poured out upon the wrong man and the wrong occasion! Really, this unhappy blunder extorts from me as many tears of laughter as ever poverty extorted from Pope. Meantime, reader, watch what follows. Wounded so deeply in his feelings by this constrained homage to poverty, Pope finds himself unable to re-settle the equilibrium in his nervous system until he has taken out his revenge by an extra kicking administered to some old mendicant or vagrant lying in a ditch.