Or bid the furious Gaul be rude no more? | Some Athens perishes, some Tully bleeds.

H

ODE ON SOLITUDE'.

Quiet by day,

APPY the man whose wish and care In health of body, peace of mind,
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.

Whose herds with milk, whose fields
with bread,

Whose flocks supply him with attire, Whose trees in summer yield him shade, In winter fire.

5

Sound sleep by night; study and ease,
And Innocence, which most does please
Together mixt; sweet recreation; 14

With meditation.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown,
Thus unlamented let me die,
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie. 20

production, yet Dodsley, who was honoured with his intimacy, had seen several pieces of a still earlier date. Roscoe.

THE DYING CHRISTIAN TO HIS SOUL.

[WRITTEN 1712.]

THIS Ode was written, we find, at the desire of Steele; and our Poet, in a letter to him on that occasion, says,—‘You have it, as Cowley calls it, just warm from the brain; it came to me the first moment I waked this morning; yet you'll see, it was not so absolutely inspiration, but that I had in my head, not only the verses of Hadrian, but the fine fragment of Sappho.' It is possible, however, that our Author might have had another composition in his head, besides those he here refers to: for there is a close and surprising resemblance between this Ode of Pope, and one of an obscure and forgotten rhymer of the age of Charles the Second, Thomas Flatman. Warton. [The following was Pope's first 'notion of the last words to Adrian,' sent to Steele for insertion in the Spectator:

Ah fleeting Spirit! wand'ring fire,

That long hast warm'd my tender breast,
Must thou no more this frame inspire
No more a pleasing, cheerful guest?
Whither, ah whither art thou flying!
To what dark, undiscover'd shore?
Thou see'st all trembling, shiv'ring, dying,
And Wit and Humour are no more!]

Prior also translated this little Ode, but with manifest inferiority to Pope. Bowles. [Mrs Piozzi, in a letter to Sir James Fellowes (Hayward's Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs Piozzi, II. 287) declares it odd that her correspondent should prefer her version of Hadrian's lines to those of better poets.]

AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM/

WRITTEN IN THE YEAR MDCCIX

[CONSIDERED Solely as a phenomenon in literary history, the Essay on Criticism is doubtless one of the most remarkable instances of precocious genius which the annals of English or of any other literature afford. Pope was in his twentieth year when he produced this work, one of the masterpieces of a class of poetry associated rather with the ripeness of experience than with the eager productivity of youth. The Ars Poetica of Horace with which it is naturally common to compare Pope's Essay, was, if not the last, at all events one of the last works of the Roman poet; and even the Art Poétique of Boileau was at least composed in manhood, being published in the writer's 33rd year (1674). But in the case of Pope, nothing beyond imitative attempts (among which we are justified in including the Pastorals) and a few trifling original pieces, had preceded a production which was at once hailed by the most judicious and cool-headed of contemporary critics, by Addison (in the Spectator, No. 253), as a masterpiece of its kind, and worthy to rank as an equal with its few distinguished predecessors in the same department, predecessors whose reputation has long been obscured by the fame of their panegyrist and rival. Of this phenomenon the secondary causes are no doubt to be sought in the facts that from his earliest days the studies of Pope had by preference as well as circumstance been directed to the best classical models; that his chief delights when a mere boy had been Homer and Ovid; and that among the English poets whom he read Spenser and Dryden and Waller were at once the earliest and the most favoured. Thus a correct and discriminating taste was from the first formed in a youth whose mind, moreover, was not distracted by the influences of any particular calling or profession; and the singleness of purpose with which he devoted himself to the cultivation of an art which even as a boy he had already made the business of his life, enabled him to be a critic in that art at an age when few men are enabled to class themselves even as its professed votaries.

The Essay on Criticism, written in 1709, was first advertised for publication in 1711. In the concluding lines of the poem in which Pope sums up the claims of his predecessors to the 'critic's ivy,' we have if not a complete and satisfactory view of what before him had been actually done for poetic criticism, at all events a summary of what in his opinion had been accomplished, in other words, a survey of the authors and works to whom he thought it right to make his acknowledg ments. He justly connects the revival of criticism with that second revival of learning which is known as the Renaissance, and which though originally fostered by Popes, soon intimately united itself with, and powerfully invigorated itself by, the movement of the Reformation. Vida is perhaps scarcely entitled to be selected as the representative at once of the critical and the literary Renaissance and to be coupled with Raphael. As the movement passed the Alps and spread from Italy into France and Germany and England, the fashion of socalled critical discourses accompanied it. English literature abounds in well-meant attempts, from Puttenham downwards through Sidney and Spenser and King James I. himself, to discuss the rationale as well as to exemplify the particular forms of the poetic art. Little valuable criticism was, however, to be expected in a strongly creative age. 'In the England of Shakspere,' as Mr Matthew Arnold has observed, 'the poet lived in a current of ideas in the highest degree animating

and nourishing to the creative power; society was, in the fullest measure, permeated by fresh thought, intelligent and active; and this state of things is the true basis for the creative power's exercise; in this it finds its data, its materials, truly ready for its hand; all the books and reading in the world are only valuable as they are helps to this.' Bacon recognised the existence of this current when he wrote in the second Book of his Advancement of Learning: ‘In this part of learning, which is poesy, I can report no deficiency. For being as a plant that cometh of the lust of the earth, without a formal seed, it hath sprung up and spread abroad more than any kind.' English literature ran its vigorous course through the reign of Elizabeth and the first part of that of James, accompanying and illustrating the national development. But then, as the great separation of the nation into two camps became more and more broadly marked, literature too ceased to be a common possession of the whole nation; and as the Court party after its final victory in the Restoration sold England to an antinational policy and system of government, so literature swerved aside from its onward course to coquet with foreign developments and to neglect its own. The elevation to which Milton had carried English poetry was obscured by the clouds of prejudice and fashion; and instead of progressing from the point at which it had arrived it deviated into paths whence it was not to return for a century in order to resume its onward course. It is at such a period, when a nation has lost its true creative enthusiasm, that uncertain of itself it turns its eyes to foreign developments or supposed developments. The influence of French upon English literature in the 18th century is accounted for by our weakness rather than our neighbours' strength. It was not that French rules prevailed over English love for the 'liberties of wit;' but that in the absence of creative genius our writers naturally and necessarily resorted to imitation of models rather than adoption of rules. Boileau was as little as Pope an apostle of the pseudo-classicism of the co-called Augustan age of French literature; he as well as Pope knew that nothing will make a man a poet 'si son astre en naissant ne l'a formé poète;' and the classical simplicity which he preached was not in his opinion attained by the sham revival of stock subjects of ancient poetry, Hectors and Andromaches and Iliums, in which as he says the actors unfortunately drop the antique mask while the fiddle plays the chorus. In England, amidst the chaos of imitations of foreign models, among the reckless or helpless follies to which even a Dryden prostituted his muse in her many weaker hours, criticism would have been best employed in recalling what English poetry had already achieved and shewing to what extent even in the midst of its present deviations it still held to the pursuit of a legitimate onward movement. The Earl of Roscommon, in his Essay on Translated Verse, at all events did good service in dwelling upon the merits of Milton, an endeavour in which he was afterwards more elaborately seconded by Addison himself. No such merit however attaches to the efforts of Walsh and the Duke of Buckinghamshire; and the praise which Pope thinks fit to bestow upon them must be attributed in the one case to the influence of grateful friendship, and in the other to that of courtly obsequiousness. Such being Pope's modern predecessors in poetic criticism, it is easy to perceive that his chief obligations lie to the ancients whom he enumerates in this Essay, rather than to the moderns, to whom at the most he owes particular felicitous thoughts and expressions.

The Essay on Criticism is beyond a doubt constructed on a fixed plan, of which the main features are clearly enough marked by the author, while we are by no means obliged to accept its evolution as stated by Warburton in his lengthy Commentary. The latter effort is indeed rather a monument of piety than a marvel of ingenuity. Pope's Essay is not an Art of Poetry, but, what it professes to be, a connected discourse on Criticism, in which, however, it was neither intended nor