by University prizemen and the like. The author of its excessive acceptance, it cannot be denied, suffered in fame from being confounded with his uninspired followers. It was but a partial obscuration. Goldsmith, Rogers, Campbell, Byron, from time to time reminded the world that the measure Pope was accused of having stereotyped wants only a meaning and a mind at its back to be a living voice again. It is, and always has been, the same with himself. In direct contradiction of the law that nothing in literature is mortal like fashion, Pope's Muse seemed to be nothing, at her prime, if not in the fashion, yet never dies. She may close her eyes, as if having drawn her last breath. In favouring circumstances, even at the spurn of an insolent hoof, she returns in an instant to lusty life. I open a volume of Pope, with a sigh at its stilted, artificial, superannuated, icy rhetoric; within five minutes the mildew dries off, the dust has flown, the frost melts; the page sparkles again, with its own poetic standard re-established; I could almost believe that the epigrammatic vitriol was a gush of spontaneous melody, that the writer might have been Byron, or Tennyson, if only he had been born a century or so later, and had willed the metempsychosis. And for the man himself-listen to every sneer and curse; to every half-stifled groan; to every appeal for a licence to be perverse; to every muttered whisper how grateful he would have been, had nature but fashioned him kindly ;and resist, if you can, the impulse to assent, admire, forgive —yes, and even love! The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope (Aldine British Poets). Three vols. William Pickering, 1835. 1 To Lord Bathurst, Epistle III. 2 To Dr. Arbuthnot, Satires, Prologue. 3 Ode for Music on St. Cecilia's Day. 4 An Essay on Man, Epistle I. The Rape of the Lock, Canto iii. 6 Ibid., Canto iv. › An Essay on Man, Epistle II. 10 Ibid., Epistle I, Part iii. 12 Ibid., Canto ii. • Moral Essays, Epistle II. 11 Ibid., Epistle III. Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady. 13 On the Hon. Simon Harcourt. 14 Moral Essays, Epistle I, Part iii. 15 Ibid., Epistle III. 16 The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace. 17 Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, Prologue to the Satires. 18 Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue ii. 19 The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace. 20 Moral Essays, Epistle I 21 Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, Prologue, &c. 22 Ibid. 23 Cowper, Table Talk. JOHN GAY 1685-1732 GAY has been one of my perplexities. Can I put him anywhere among our poets-and if anywhere, where, and how? When I search for proofs of his title to a place, I can discover but two or three songs to give the merest colour to a claim. Without his name to them, I think it doubtful how I should have classed even them. At highest they would have had to be content with a corner among the Waifs and Strays. Yet, omit Gay from the noble assembly of Poets! I should blush before the Shade of Pope. Certainly Swift would quit the party, and prefer Limbo with, to Elysium without, him! The man manifestly was a poet. Poets in any age would have loved him, and have insisted on keeping him in their fellowship. So, there he must abide; to be made the best of. The comfort, since he has to be there, is that any twentieth-century reader will find, as found Pope, Bolingbroke, Swift, Peterborough, Addison, Atterbury, and Prior, besides Queen Caroline, in the eighteenth, that whatever his rank poetically, he is himself very good company indeed. Go with him fishing, with the fly, not Izaak Walton's bait : Around the steel no tortur'd worm shall twine, I warrant he will provide pleasant sport with him, though in vain you cast the feather'd hook With pliant rod athwart the pebbled brook.1 Are you curious in feminine adornments, of early eighteenthcentury fashion? Accompany him without more heed than he personally takes of his warning not to dare The toilette's sacred mysteries declare. He will show you no little of the nursery of charms, Completely furnish'd with bright Beauty's arms; Pins, paint, a flattering glass, and black-lead combs.2 With him, in instructive Trivia, explore the Town he knew so well. You must not mind, however, being, though in St. James's Street itself, jostled at night off flinty, lanternless pavements with open sewers, by brawny chairmen, who the wall command or by the bully, coward at heart, who with assuming pace, Cocks his broad hat, edg'd round with tarnish'd lace.3 Even from the safe pages of a book, long before your promenade is over, you will sigh thankfully for having been born centuries later, in the days of stalwart police, and gas lamps. Never was there a more complaisant fancy. It produced, at will, didactic discourses, epistles, eclogues, and the Beggar's Opera. From it fables, too, flowed by the score, in easy cheerful verse, with irreproachable morals for the diversion and, we will hope, edification, of numberless generations of childhood, down, at all events, to mine. He was the philosopher and showman of the nursery, with his Elephant and the Bookseller, the Monkey who had seen the World, the Courtier and Proteus, the Jugglers, the Hare and Many Friends, and a whole menagerie besides ! At the same time, his sly innuendoes in the famous Opera alarmed a Ministry, and took the public by storm. Snatches of verse in it have been incorporated into the language; for instance, the parental lament over a wrongheaded daughter : I wonder any man alive will ever rear a daughter ! For she must have both hoods and gowns, and hoops to swell her pride, With scarfs and stays, and gloves and lace, and she'll have men beside; 4 And when she's drest with care and cost, all-tempting, fine and gay, Whatever the topic, it reeled itself off into rhyme. It might be a useful Receipt for Stewing or a panegyric on the charms of a Wokingham innkeeper's daughter : The heart when half wounded is changing, It here and there leaps like a frog; But my heart can never be ranging, 'Tis so fix'd upon sweet Molly Mog.' Occasionally this born trifler was pleased to coquet with the Muse of Poetry a little more in accordance with direct |