more monotonous will be the accents of the poet. Shakspeare wrote for all mankind; and every human being, whatever his age and country, will find in Shakspeare's works matter of interest, of instruction and delight. Pope and Swift wrote for an artificial and conventional society-not exclusively, it is true, for a court, but for what was then emphatically called the Town; and their writings speak the language not of the world, but of the city. The reader will find in them incessant strokes of worldly good sense and acuteness, a delicate and polished irony, a consummate neatness and distinctness of diction; but he will look in vain for any of the higher attributes of creative intellect: he will find a good deal of wit and ridicule; but he will find neither true passion, true humanity, true pathos, nor true humour; for humour is to wit what the pertinent, genial, and creative power of the galvanic pile is to the momentary and destructive shock of electricity; it is not the ray which dazzles, but the heat which glows and animates. Thus wit is a quality immeasurably inferior to humour: indeed, humour is itself the fulfilment and completion of wit, and the possession of the former quality necessarily implies the existence of the latter. Of mere wit, a single scene of Shakspeare often contains as much, scattered with a profuse and apparently unconscious hand, as would furnish forth whole libraries of the neat and antithetic literature of this period of Queen Anne: but in Shakspeare we remark not the wit, for its brilliancy is eclipsed by the much higher quality of humour; while in Pope or Swift or Addison the intellectual ingenuity appeals the more directly to our attention because it is unaccompanied by the higher quality.

At the head of this artificial school in poetry long remained Alexander Pope, born in 1688, and sprung, like so many of the most illustrious men of England, from the middle or citizen class. His constitutional ill health, and the weakness and deformity of his frame, precluded him from pursuing any of the usual paths to distinction, and in a manner assisted in giving to his mind its poetical direction. A great part of his youth was spent in the green shades of Windsor Forest, where his father possessed a country-house. Under circumstances so favourable to the development of the intellect-solitude, forced sedentariness, and that delicacy of organisation which so often accompanies physical weakness-Pope very early gave earnest of his future poetical powers. Self-educated, of immense literary industry, and of a character singularly reflective and sensitive, he had obtained literary reputation of no mean value at a period of life when boys in general are thinking of little else than robbing orchards and playing truant from school. Of this precocity of poetical development he often speaks himself:

"As yet a child, and all unknown to fame,

I lisp'd in numbers, for the numbers came."

At the age of sixteen Pope had already tried his strength in

various attempts of different kinds of verse, among the rest in the drama-a species of writing for which his genius so little qualified him, that we have probably no reason to regret that his good sense induced him to destroy these youthful essays in scenic composition. Unsuccessful as he probably felt them to be, such attempts could not fail to strengthen and practise him in the art of expression, to educate his ear, and to give delicacy and variety to his versification. Like the young swallow, whose instinct informs it of the period of migration, Pope had already felt the mysterious call of genius; and these uncertain efforts were but the hovering of the bird before it darts away upon its annual course-the balancing of the unpractised pinion, and the fixing of the yet untried flight. His first publication was a small collection of Pastorals, which, as well as a number of imitations and translations of Chaucer, plainly indicated to the public that a new, great, and original author was about to rise upon the literary horizon. A profound and venerating admirer of the genius of his great predecessor, Dryden, it is not surprising that Pope's first literary efforts should have been made in the same direction: his boyish admiration had been gratified by the approbation of the patriarch of poetry, and by his prediction of the young acolyte's future glory; and it is no less natural that Pope's versification and style should be in some degree founded upon the practice of his illustrious predecessor. But there were essential differences between the manner of these two admirable writers-differences which must be accurately appreciated ere we can hope to form a just idea of their respective merits. In Dryden, a vigorous, careless, self-assured dexterity is perceptible, not accompanied with much passion, it is true, nor with much depth of sentiment, appealing only te the more obvious and direct sympathies of the human character, but imposing from the conscious ease which it indicates. In Pope we observe a greater degree of thought and reflection, a more refined acuteness of remark, and an almost fastidious neatness and polish of expression. Both poets are remarkable for the quality of good sense, and both are admirable for perfect clearness and distinctness of meaning; and if they sometimes fall into truisms and commonplaces, these are generally such as in themselves involve principles whose importance will excuse their frequent repetition, and are so adorned by happiness of illustration, that we forget the insipidity of the precept in the beauty of the language in which it is clothed.

Both poets are greater in the delineation of artificial life, in the analysis of human passions, human motives, and human conduct, than in the delineation of external nature, or the sympathy with unsophisticated humanity; but the force of Dryden rather consists in a kind of brave neglect of minuter shades of character, and a broad and manly touch of intellectual portrait-painting, while the figures of Pope are elaborated with the neat and discriminating

delicacy of a pencil accurate without timidity, and distinct without coldness. Dryden is a Rubens, and Pope a Greuze or a Watteau. The peculiar species of versification the rhymed couplet, so exquisitely adapted for satire and for moral declamation-which Dryden had carried to so high a pitch of harmony, variety, and power, was destined to receive from his successor the last finish of which its structure was capable: in the hands of the former poet it is an instrument of infinite compass, energy, and strength; beneath the touch of the latter it became much more limited, it is true, in variety of music, but exquisitely sensitive and delicate. Dryden frequently introduces the triplet, and occasionally the Alexandrine of twelve syllables, in order to wind up the period with a burst of rolling and sonorous music. This is an artifice much more sparingly employed by Pope. Indeed it may be said that this poet gave such perfection to the species of verse which he generally employed, and which became the popular and fashionable measure of his day, that the anatomy and prosodiacal structure of that kind of rhythm became at last familiar to the lowest class of writers, and the very excellence of Pope's verses furnished his rivals with the means of equalling him, at least as far as concerns the mechanical harmony of his metre. The rhymed couplet was balanced and polished and melodised, until its construction became a mere matter of dexterity; and it has been very justly observed that it is not always easy to distinguish that is, in point of mere versification between the productions of Pope and the meanest effusions of the most contemptible scribblers of his day. couplet had been refined and elaborated into a feeble and timid propriety; the sense almost invariably ended with the second line; and the antithesis of sound and meaning between the two portions separated by the cæsura, which was considered so great an ornament, frequently degenerated into a mere verbal opposition—a distinction without a difference. From falling into these defects Pope was admirably secured by the acuteness and sagacity of his mind; he is eminently the poet of good sense and reason: and though it is perhaps hardly fair to charge upon him the faults of his incompetent imitators, our conclusion will be that, in communicating an exquisite and almost effeminate grace to the measure which he used so well, he somewhat impaired its vigour and its flexibility.

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In 1711 Pope published his Essay on Criticism,' a poem which was received with a universal burst of admiration; a feeling rendered stronger by the contrast between the author's age and the character of his production. Though the work of a young man of not much more than twenty-one, this composition is no less remarkable for the finish of its style than for the ripe judgment which it displays, and the extent of reading and reflection which it indicates. It cannot be denied that the principles of art to be gathered from this well

thought and brilliantly-expressed work have little of that depth and comprehensiveness which the modern study of æsthetic science has communicated to criticism: they hardly, in short, penetrate to the "root of the matter;" but, as far as they go (which is, indeed, farther than criticism had gone before Pope wrote), they leave nothing to be desired as true and sparkling thoughts dressed in the most appropriate language.

But as a noble production of Pope's genius, and perhaps the most happy example of a new and original idea executed in a perfectly felicitous manner, we must cite the mock-heroic narrative poem entitled 'The Rape of the Lock.' The occasion of its being written was the somewhat unjustifiable frolic of Lord Petre in stealing a lock of hair from Miss Arabella Fermor, one of the ornaments of the beau monde of the day. This rather familiar and cavalier piece of pleasantry produced a quarrel between the two families, and Pope composed his charming little poem "to laugh them together again,' as he phrases it. In this object he was unsuccessful, it is said; but the little mock-heroic epic, though it did not appease the disagreement to which it owed its origin, will secure for its author an immortality among his country's poets, so long as the language in which it is written shall endure. The poem is, as Addison justly characterised it, "merum sal-a delicious little thing." Like the 'Secchia Rapita' of Tassoni, which has preserved from oblivion the war whose insignificant origin it describes, 'The Rape of the Lock' will immortalise, by the mere force of grace and invention, .things and persons otherwise entirely devoid of interest. The work, like the poem of Tassoni, or rather like the 'Lutrin' of Boileau, is written in that species of mock-heroic which describes trifling or contemptible events with the pompous elaboration of epic language. It is, in fact, a dwarf epic, with its involution of interest, its supernatural machinery of beings respectively favourable and adverse to the various personages, its episodes, and its catastrophe. This species of poetry has been most cultivated among the Italians, a people whose intense enjoyment of the ludicrous renders them peculiarly sensitive to burlesque and discordant ideas, while the flexibility and richness of their languageand particularly of some of its provincial dialects, as the Genoese, the Neapolitan, and the Venetian-gives them a singular power of comic expression. Thus in the older Italian comedy, to which Molière owed so much, there is a species of unconscious and almost infantine simplicity of language and dialect, which forms the most admirable and appropriate vehicle for the ludicrous extravagance of the characters, and the sly shrewdness of the drollery. In comparing together the 'Lutrin' and 'The Rape of the Lock,' we think no critic could hesitate to give a most decided preference to the latter. In the first place, the sluggish sensuality, ignorance, and squabbling of a parcel of gorbellied priests, forms a much less attractive sub

ject for the comic poet than the elegant frivolities of aristocratic society; and in the second, the species of machinery (supernatural interference) employed by Pope-the exquisite fairy mythology of the sylphs and gnome which he found in the writings of Paracelsus and the Rosicrucian philosophers-is infinitely more attractive, more elegant, more varied, more accordant with the character of the action, than the unreal impersonations of abstract qualities-as, for instance, in the celebrated episode of Sloth-adopted by Boileau in the 'Lutrin.' In reading the Frenchman's mock-heroic, we are struck with the propriety, polish, and neatness of the language; but we feel that the author is perpetually trenching upon the domain of satire a territory which, though bordering upon the mock-heroic, "for thin partitions do their bounds divide," can never be entered by the mock-heroic poet without a loss of effect; for satire in its essence is tragic, and the moment the comic author forgets to smile he quits his appropriate character. The Rape of the Lock' is divided into five short books or cantos, with a delightful mimicry of epic regularity. In the first, after an appropriate invocation, the poet describes the breaking of day, the awaking of his fair heroine, and the various offices and powers of the sylphs-being the protectors of the fair. We have next an enumeration of the omens which presage the catastrophe; and a speech from Ariel, the guardian spirit of Belinda, warning her to admit into her breast no thoughts of beaux. toilet is then described with a grace and refined elegance absolutely unequalled, we think, in comic poetry. In the second canto, the fair Belinda goes upon the water; and occasion is taken to describe the "adventurous Baron's" determination to carry off the fatal lock or perish in the essay, with an account of the sacrificial ceremonies by which he propitiates the powers to aid his bold emprise. Next follows an exquisite description of the sylphs, and their desponding councils; among them Ariel distributes the guard of the various parts of Belinda's dress, and menaces them with severe and appropriate punishment in case they abandon or neglect their charge. The reader's expectation being now wound up to the true epic state of suspense, the main action begins. The party land at Hampton Court, where, after a game of ombre, described with consummate grace and airy ingenuity, they take coffee, and the Baron executes his fatal purpose; and the canto closes with an admirable picture of the respective despair and triumph of the different parties. In the fourth book the action quits "this visible diurnal sphere," and the gnome Umbriel betakes himself to the enchanted empire of the goddess Spleen, from whom he obtains "a wondrous bag"

'Like that where once Ulysses held the winds;

There she collects the force of female lungs,
Sighs, sobs, and passions, and the war of tongues;
A vial next she fills with fainting fears,

Soft sorrows, melting griefs, and flowing tears."

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