In admitting that Pope followed the impulse of a more powerful mind, Mr. Pattison asserts as much perhaps as can be known with certainty as to Bolingbroke's influence, but it is reasonable to believe that the close intercourse of the two men did immensely sway the more impressionable, and, so far as philosophy is concerned, the more ignorant of the two. Mr. Pattison also overlooks the fact that Pope confessed to Warburton that he had never read a line of Leibnitz in his life. That the poet acknowledges his large debt to Bolingbroke, and that Bolingbroke confesses it was due, is all that can be declared with certainty. That which makes the Essay worthy the reading is the fruit, not of the argument but of the poetry, and for that Pope trusted to his own genius.

His attempt to 'vindicate the ways of God to man' is confused and contradictory, and no modern reader, perplexed with the mystery of existence, is likely to gain aid from Pope. Nominally a Roman Catholic, and in reality a deist, apart from poetry he does not seem to have had strong convictions on any subject, and was content to be swayed by the opinions current in society. In undertaking to write an ethical work like the Essay his ambition was greater than his strength, yet if Pope's philosophy does not 'find' us, to use Coleridge's phrase, it did appeal to a large number of minds in his own day, and had not lost its popularity at a later period. The poem has been frequently translated into French, into Italian, and into German; it was pronounced by Voltaire to be the most useful and sublime didactic poem ever written in any language; it was admired by Kant and quoted in his lectures; and it received high praise from the Scotch philosopher, Dugald Stewart. The charm of poetical expression is lost or nearly lost in translations, and while the sense may be retained the aroma of the verse is gone. The popularity of the Essay abroad is therefore not easily to be accounted for, unless we accept the theory that the shallow creed on which it is based suited an age less earnest than our own.[22]

Pope has no strong convictions in this poem, but he has many moods. On one page he is a pantheist, on another he says what he probably did not mean, that God inspires men to do evil, and on a third that 'all our knowledge is ourselves to know.' Nowhere in the argument does Pope seem to have a firm standing, and De Quincey is not far wrong in saying that it is 'the realization of anarchy.'

Read the poem for its poetical merits and you will forget its defects. Pope was a superficial teacher, but direct teaching is not the end of poetry. The Essay on Man is not a poem which can be read and re-read with ever-growing delight, but there are passages in it of as fine an order as any that he has composed on more familiar subjects. Pope was, as Sir William Hamilton said, a curious reader, and the ideas versified in the poem may be traced to a variety of sources. Students who wish to follow this track will find all the help they need in Mr. Pattison's instructive notes, and in the comments attached to the poem in Elwin and Courthope's edition. In his Introduction Mr. Pattison observes that 'the subject of the Essay on Man is not, considered in itself, one unfit for poetry. Had Pope had a genius for philosophy there was no reason why he should not have selected a philosophical subject. Didactic poetry is a mistake if not a contradiction in terms. But poetry is not necessarily didactic because its subject is philosophical.'

It is always difficult to define the themes suitable for poetry. Many theories have been formed as to the scope of the art, and poets have been amply instructed by critics as to what they ought to do, and what they should avoid doing. The theories may appear sound, the arguments convincing, until a great poet arises and knocks them on the head. In a sense every poet of the highest order is also a philosopher and a prophet who sees into 'the life of things.' Whether a philosophical subject can be fitly represented in the imaginative light of poetry is a matter for discussion rather than for decision. In the case of Pope, however, it will be evident to all studious readers that he was incapable of the continuous thought needed for the argument of the Essay.

'Anything like sustained reasoning,' says Mr. Leslie Stephen,' was beyond his reach. Pope felt and thought by shocks and electric flashes.... The defect was aggravated or caused by the physical infirmities which put sustained intellectual labour out of the question.'[23]

Crousaz, a Swiss pastor and professor, who appears to have competed with Berkeley for a prize and won it, attacked Pope's Essay for its want of orthodoxy, and his work was translated into English. The poet became alarmed, but had the good fortune to find a champion in Warburton, who for the rest of his life did Pope much service, not always of a reputable kind. We shall have more to say of him later on, and it will suffice to observe here that Warburton, who through Pope's friendship obtained a good wife, a fortune, and a bishopric, was not a man of high character. His sole object was to advance in life, and he succeeded.

The Moral Essays as they are called, and the Imitations from Horace are the final and crowning efforts of the poet's genius. They contain his finest workmanship as a satirist, and will be read, I think, with more pleasure than the Dunciad, despite Mr. Ruskin's judgment of that poem as 'the most absolutely chiselled and monumental work "exacted" in our country.'[24] It is impossible to concur in this estimate. The imagery of the poem serves only to disgust, and the spiteful attacks made in it on forgotten men want the largeness of purpose that lifts satire above what is of temporary interest, making it a lesson for all time.

Pope's venom, and the personal animosities which give the sharpest sting, and in some instances a zest, to his verse, are also amply displayed in the Moral Essays and in the Imitations, but the scope is wider in these poems, and the subjects allow of more versatile treatment. They should be read with the help of notes, a help generally needed for satirical poetry, but it should be remembered always that editorial judgments are to be received with discretion and not servilely followed. There is perhaps no danger more carefully to be shunned by the student of literature than the habit of resting satisfied with opinions at second-hand. Better a wrong estimate formed after due reading and thought, than a right estimate gleaned from critics, without any thought at all.

According to Warburton, who is as tricky as Pope himself when it suits his purpose to be so, the Essay on Man was intended to form four books, in which, as part of the general design, the Moral Essays would have been included, as well as Book IV. of the Dunciad, but to have welded these Essays, which were published separately, into one continuous poem would neither have suited Pope's genius nor the character of the poems; and how the last book of the Dunciad could have been included in such an olla podrida it is difficult to conceive. The poet was fond of projects, and this, happily for his readers, remained one. The dates of the four Essays, which are really Epistles, and appeared in folio pamphlets, run over several years, but were afterwards re-arranged by Pope. That to Lord Burlington, Of the Use of Riches (Epistle IV.), was published in 1731, under the title, Of False Taste; that to Lord Bathurst, Of the Use of Riches (Epistle III), in 1732; the epistle to Lord Cobham (Epistle I.), Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men, bears the date of 1733; and that To a Lady (Epistle II.), Of the Characters of Women, in 1735. Pope wrote other Epistles, some at a much earlier period of his career, which follow the Moral Essays but are not connected with them. Of these one is addressed to Addison, two are to Martha Blount, for whom the second of the Moral Essays was written; one to the painter Jervas, originally printed in 1717; while another, a few lines only in length, was addressed to Craggs when Secretary of State. Space will not allow of examining each of the Essays minutely, but there are portions of them which call for comment.

The first Moral Essay, Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men, in which Pope enlarges on his theory of a ruling passion, affords a significant example of his incapacity for sustaining an argument, since Warburton, to use his own words, entirely changed and reversed the order and disposition of the several parts to make the composition more coherent. That he has succeeded is doubtful, that he should have ventured upon such a task shows where Pope's weakness lay as a philosophical poet. It is the least interesting of the Essays, but is not without lines that none but Pope could have written. The Characters of Women, the subject of the second Essay, was not one which the satirist could treat with justice. He saw little in the sex save their foibles, and the lines with which it opens show the spirit that animates the poem:

'Nothing so true as what you once let fall; "Most women have no character at all," Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear, And best distinguished by black, brown, or fair.'

The satire contains one of Pope's offensive allusions to Lady Mary, and the celebrated portrait drawn from two notable women, the Duchess of Buckingham and Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, from the latter of whom the poet, at one time, despite his unquestionable love of independence, received L1,000. The story, like many another in the career of Pope, is wrapt in mystery.

Pope took great pains with the Epistle Of the Use of Riches. It was altered from the original conception by the advice of Warburton, who cared more for the argument of a poem than for its poetry. The thought and purpose of the Essay are defective, notwithstanding Warburton's effort to clear them, but these defects are of slight moment when compared with the brilliant passages with which the poem is studded. Among them is the famous description of the Duke of Buckingham's death-bed which should be compared with Dryden's equally famous lines on the same nobleman's character.

'In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half-hung, The floors of plaster, and the walls of dung, On once a flock-heel, but repaired with straw, With tape-tied curtains never meant to draw, The George and Garter dangling from that bed Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red, Great Villiers lies—alas! how changed from him, That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim! Gallant and gay, in Cliveden's proud alcove, The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love; Or just as gay at council, in a ring Of mimic statesmen and their merry King. No wit to flatter left of all his store! No fool to laugh at, which he valued more. There, victor of his health, of fortune, friends, And fame, this lord of useless thousands ends.'

There is also a covert attack in this Epistle upon the moneyed interest represented by Walpole, and on the political corruption which he sanctioned and promoted. Yet Pope knew how to praise the great Whig statesman for his social qualities:

'Seen him I have, but in his happier hour Of social pleasure, ill exchanged for power; Seen him uncumbered with the venal tribe, Smile without art and win without a bribe.'

Epistle IV. pursues the same subject as the third, and deals mainly with false taste in the expenditure of wealth, and with the necessity of following 'sense, of every art the soul.' In this poem there is the far-famed description of Timon's Villa, and by Timon Pope was accused of representing the Duke of Chandos, whose estate at Canons he is supposed to have held in scorn after having been, as he acknowledges, 'distinguished' by its master. That would not have deterred Pope from producing a brilliant picture, and his equivocations did but serve to increase suspicion. Probably he found it convenient to use some features of what he may have seen at Canons while composing a general sketch with no special application. The Moral Essays, it may be added, are not especially moral, but they are full of fine things, and form a portion of Pope's verse second only to the Imitations from Horace.

These Imitations are introduced by the Prologue addressed to Dr. Arbuthnot, a poem of more than common brilliancy, and also more than commonly venomous. Nowhere, perhaps, is there in Pope's works so powerful and bitter an attack as the twenty-five lines in the Prologue devoted to the vivisection of Lord Hervey, which we are forced to admire while feeling their malevolence; nowhere is there a more consummate piece of satire than the twenty-two lines that contain the poet's masterpiece, the character of Atticus; and nowhere, I may add, are there lines more personally interesting. Portions of the poem were written long before the date of publication, and this is Pope's excuse, a rather lame one perhaps, for printing the character of Atticus and the lines on his mother after the death of Addison and of Mrs. Pope.

'When I had a fever one winter in town,' Pope said to his friend Spence, 'that confined me to my room for some days, Lord Bolingbroke came to see me, happened to take up a Horace that lay on the table, and in turning it over dipt on the first satire of the second book. He observed how well that would hit my case if I were to imitate it in English. After he was gone I read it over, translated it in a morning or two, and sent it to press in a week or fortnight after. And this was the occasion of my imitating some other of the satires and epistles afterwards.'

Bolingbroke did his friend a better service in giving this advice than he had done with regard to the Essay on Man; and the six Imitations, with the Prologue and Epilogue, which are among the latest fruits of Pope's genius as a satirist, are also the ripest.

Warburton, writing of the Imitations of Horace, says: 'Whoever expects a paraphrase of Horace or a faithful copy of his genius or his manner of writing in these Imitations will be much disappointed. Our author uses the Roman poet for little more than his canvas; and if the old design or colouring chance to suit his purpose, it is well; if not, he employs his own without scruple or ceremony.'

This is true. Pope makes use of Horace when it suits his convenience, but never follows him servilely, and quits him altogether when his design carries him another way.

It was inevitable that he should exercise this freedom, since, as Johnson has pointed out, there will always be an irreconcilable dissimilitude between Roman images and English manners. Moreover, the aim of the two poets was different, Pope's main object being to express personal enmities and to give an exalted notion of his own virtue.

In the opening lines of his First Satire Pope follows Horace pretty closely. Both poets complain that some persons think them too severe, and others too complaisant; both take the advice of a lawyer, Horace of C. Trebatius Testa, who gives him the pithiest replies; and Pope of Fortescue. Both complain that they cannot sleep, the prescription of a wife and cowslip wine being given by the English adviser, while Testa advises Horace to swim thrice across the Tiber and moisten his lips with wine. Throughout the rest of the satire Pope takes only casual glances at the Roman original, and if in the Second Satire the English poet follows Horace in the first few verses in recommending frugality, and in the advice to keep the middle state, and neither to lean on this side or on that, the resemblance between the poets is seldom striking, and the spirit which animates them is different,—Horace being classical, and therefore open to the apprehension of all educated readers, while Pope is in a sense provincial, and, as I have already said with reference to the Dunciad, cannot be fully enjoyed or even understood without some knowledge of the time and of the men whom he lashes in his satire. The Sixth Epistle of the First Book of Horace, which Pope attempts to imitate, is, as Mr. Courthope observes, 'incapable of imitation. Its humour, no less than its philosophy, belongs entirely to the Pagan World.' In a general sense it is also true that Horace's style, whether of language or of thought, will not bear transplanting. Indeed, whatever is most characteristic and most exquisite in a poet's work is precisely the portion which cannot be clothed in a foreign dress.

'Life,' said Pope, 'when the first heats are over is all down hill,' and with him the downward progress began at a time when most men are still standing on the summit. Never was there a more fiery spirit in so weak a body. He suffered frequently from headaches, which he relieved by inhaling the steam of coffee. Unfortunately he pampered his appetite and paid a heavy penalty for doing so. Every change of weather affected him; and at the time when most people indulge in company, he tells Swift that he hid himself in bed. Although he sneers at Lord Hervey for taking asses' milk he tried that remedy himself, and he frequently needed medical aid. In his early days he was strong enough to ride on horseback, but in later life his weakness was so great that he was in constant need of help. M. Taine, whose criticism of Pope needs to be read with caution, indulges in an exaggerated description of his bodily condition, observing that when arrived at maturity he appeared no longer capable of existing, and styling him 'a nervous abortion.' The poet's condition was sad enough as told by Dr. Johnson, without amplifying it as M. Taine has done. 'One side was contracted. His legs were so slender that he enlarged their bulk with three pairs of stockings, which were drawn on and off by the maid; for he was not able to dress or undress himself, and neither went to bed nor rose without help. His weakness made it very difficult for him to be clean.' After this forlorn description of the poet's state it is a little grotesque to read that his dress of ceremony was black, with a tie-wig and a little sword. A distorted body often holds a generous and untainted soul. This was not the case with Pope, and the sympathy he stood in so large a need of himself, was seldom given to others.

In the spring of 1744 it became evident that the end was approaching. Three weeks before his death he distributed the Moral Epistles among his friends, saying: 'Here I am, like Socrates, dispensing my morality amongst my friends just as I am dying.' He died peacefully on May 30th, 1744, and was buried in Twickenham Church near the monument erected to his parents.

Pope's standing among his country's poets has been the source of much controversy. There have been critics who deny to him the name of a poet, while others place him in the first rank. In his own century there was comparatively little difference of opinion with regard to his merits. Chesterfield gave him the warmest praise; Swift, Addison, and Warburton ranked him with the peers of song; Johnson, whose discriminative criticism reaches perhaps its highest level in his Life of Pope, in reply to the question which had been asked, even in his day, whether Pope was a poet? asks in return, 'If Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found?' and adds that 'to circumscribe poetry by a definition will only show the narrowness of the definer, though a definition which shall exclude Pope will not readily be made.' Joseph Warton, too, Johnson's contemporary and friend, while preferring the Romantic School to the Classical, allows that in that species of poetry wherein Pope excelled he is superior to all mankind.

In our century Bowles, whose edition of his works provoked prolonged discussion, in which Campbell, Byron, and the Quarterly Review took part, places Pope above Dryden. Byron, with more enthusiasm than judgment, regarded him as the greatest name in our poetry; Scott, with generous appreciation of a genius so alien to his own, called him a 'true Deacon of the craft,' and at one time proposed editing his works, a task projected also by Mr. Ruskin, who, putting Shakespeare aside as rather the world's than ours, holds Pope 'to be the most perfect representative we have since Chaucer of the true English mind.' 'Matched on his own ground,' says Mr. Swinburne, 'he never has been nor can be.' And Mr. Lowell in the same strain observes that 'in his own province he still stands unapproachably alone.'

What then is Pope's ground? What is this province of which he is the sole ruler? To a considerable extent the question has been answered in these pages, but it may be well to sum up with more definiteness what has been already stated.

In poetry Pope takes a first place in the second order of poets. The deficiencies which forbid his entrance into the first rank are obvious. He cannot sing, he has no ear for the subtlest melodies of verse, he is not a creative poet, and has few of the spirit-stirring thoughts which the noblest poets scatter through their pages with apparent unconsciousness. There are no depths in Pope and there are no heights; he has neither eye for the beauties of Nature, nor ear for her harmonies, and a primrose was no more to him than it was to Peter Bell.

These are defects indeed, but nothing is more unfair says a great French critic than to judge notable minds solely by their defects, and in spite of them Pope's position is so unassailable that the critic must take a contracted view of the poet's art who questions his right to the title.

His merits are of a kind not likely to be affected by time; a lively fancy, a power of satire almost unrivalled, and a skill in using words so consummate that there is no poet, excepting Shakespeare, who has left his mark upon the language so strongly. The loss to us if Pope's verse were to become extinct cannot readily be measured. He has said in the best words what we all know and feel, but cannot express, and has made that classical which in weaker hands would be commonplace. His sensibility to the claims of his art is exquisite, the adaptation of his style to his subject shows the hand of a master, and if these are not the highest gifts of a poet, they are gifts to which none but a poet can lay claim.

FOOTNOTES:

[11] Some qualification may be made to these statements. Pope took pleasure in landscape gardening on the English plan, as opposed to the formality of the French and Dutch systems, and the design of the Prince of Wales's garden is said to have been copied from the poet's at Twickenham.

[12] Elwin and Courthope's Pope, vol. ii. p. 160.

[13] See the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.

[14] Elwin and Courthope's Pope, vol. v., p. 195.

[15] 'Lady Mary,' says Byron, 'was greatly to blame in that quarrel for having encouraged Pope.... She should have remembered her own line,

'"He comes too near who comes to be denied."'

[16] Studies in English Literature, p. 47.—Stanford.

[17] Quin (1693-1766) was the famous actor, and Patterson was Thomson's deputy in the surveyor-generalship of the Leeward Isles, and ultimately his successor.

[18] The Earl of Peterborough, the meteor-like brilliancy of whose actions forms one of the most striking chapters in the history of his time.

[19] Life of Pope, p. 216.

[20] 'Pope and Swift,' says Dr. Johnson, 'had an unnatural delight in ideas physically impure, such as every other tongue utters with unwillingness, and of which every ear shrinks from the mention.'

[21] Clarendon Press, Oxford.

[22] No doubt many distinguished foreigners who appreciated the beauty of the poem had read it in the original.

[23] Stephen's Pope, p. 163.

[24] Lectures on Art, p. 70, Oxford.



CHAPTER II.

PRIOR, GAY, YOUNG, BLAIR, THOMSON.

[Sidenote: Matthew Prior (1664-1721).]

The ease with which the Queen Anne wits obtained office and rose to posts of high trust through the pleasant art of verse-making, is conspicuous in the career of Prior. His parents are unknown, the place of his birth is somewhat doubtful, although he is claimed by Wimborne-Minster, in Dorsetshire, and the first trustworthy facts recorded of his early career are that he was a Westminster scholar when the famous Dr. Busby, whose discipline was physical as well as mental, presided over the school. His father died, and his mother being no longer able to pay the school fees, Prior was placed with an uncle who kept the Rhenish Wine Tavern in Westminster. His seat was in the bar, and there the Earl of Dorset (1637-1705-6), a small poet, but a generous patron of poets, found the youth reading Horace, and, pleased with his 'parts,' sent him back to Westminster, whence he went up to Cambridge as a scholar at St. John's, the college destined a century later to receive one of the greatest of English poets.

Charles Montague, afterwards Earl of Halifax (1661-1715), the son of a younger son of a nobleman, was also a Westminster scholar. He entered Trinity College in 1679, and like Prior appears to have owed his good fortune to the rhymer's craft. 'At thirty,' writes Lord Macaulay, 'he would gladly have given all his chances in life for a comfortable vicarage and a chaplain's scarf. At thirty-seven he was First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a Regent of the Kingdom.' The literary history of the Queen Anne age has many associations with his name. He proved a liberal patron of the wits, and of Pope among them, by subscribing largely to his Homer; but the poet's memory was stronger for imaginary injuries than for real benefits, and because Halifax had patronized Tickell, he figures in the Prologue to the Satires as 'full-blown Bufo, puffed by every quill.'

Prior and Montague began their rhyming career early, and a partnership production, entitled the Hind and Panther, transversed to the story of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse (1687), a parody of Dryden's famous poem published in the same year, brought both authors into notice. At the age of twenty-six Prior, who had previously obtained a fellowship, was appointed Secretary to the Embassy at the Hague. After that he rose steadily to eminence, became Secretary of State in Ireland, and was finally appointed Ambassador at the French Court. High office brings its troubles, and in those days was not without its perils. In 1711 Prior was sent secretly to Paris to negotiate a peace, for which, when the Whigs came again into power, he was imprisoned and expected to lose his head. While in prison, where he remained for two years (1715-1717), the poet wrote Alma, a humorous and speculative poem on the relations of the soul and body, and when released published his Poems by subscription in a noble folio, said to be the largest-sized volume in the whole range of English poetry. He gained 4,000 guineas by the publication, and with that sum and an estate purchased for him by Lord Harley, Prior was able to live in comfort. He died in September, 1721, in his fifty-eighth year, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, under a monument for which he had had the vanity to pay five hundred pounds.

The peculiar merit of Prior is better understood in our day than it was in his own. We read his poems solely for the sake of the 'lighter pieces,' which Johnson despised. The poet thought Solomon his best work, but no one who toils through the three books which form that poem is likely to agree with this estimate. Dulness pervades the work like an atmosphere, but it had its admirers in the last century, and among them was John Wesley, who, in reply to Johnson's complaint of its tediousness, said he should as soon think of calling the Second or Sixth AEneid tedious. In the preface to the poem Prior declares that he "had rather be thought a good Englishman than the best poet or greatest scholar that ever wrote," a passage which does more honour to the poet than any in the text. A far more popular piece was Henry and Emma, which even so fine a judge of poetry as Cowper called 'inimitable.' Tastes change, let us hope for the better, and possibly none but the greatest poets remain unaffected by time. Assuredly Prior does not, and Henry and Emma affords a striking illustration of the contrast between the poetical spirit of Prior's age and that which influences ours. The poem is founded on the fine ballad of the Nut-Browne Maide. The story, as originally told, is homely and quaint, written without apparent effort and told in 360 lines. Prior requires considerably more than twice that number, and his maid and her lover, instead of using the simple language befitting the theme, employ the conventional machinery of the age, and bring Jove and Mars, Cupid and Venus upon the scene, with allusions to Marlborough's victories and to 'Anna's wondrous reign.'

Alma, a poem written in Hudibrastic verse, which shows that Prior had in a measure caught the vein of Butler, has some couplets familiar in quotations. He won, too, not a little contemporary reputation for his tales in verse, which are singularly coarse; but an age that tolerated Mrs. Manley and read the plays and novels of Aphra Behn was not likely to object to the grossness of Prior. Dr. Johnson would not admit that his poems were unfit for a lady's table, and Wesley, who appears to have been strangely oblivious to Prior's moral delinquencies, observes that his tales are the best told of any in the English tongue. Cowper praised him for his 'charming ease,' and this gift enabled him to write some of the most delightful occasional verses produced in the century. There is nothing more exquisite of its kind than his address, To a Child of Quality, written when the child was five years old and the poet forty, and one is not surprised to learn that Prior was admired by Thomas Moore, who more than once caught his note. A reader familiar with Moore and ignorant of Prior would without hesitation attribute the following stanzas, from the Answer to Chloe Jealous, to the Irish poet:

'The god of us versemen (you know, Child), the sun, How after his journeys he sets up his rest; If at morning o'er earth 'tis his fancy to run, At night he declines on his Thetis's breast.

'So when I am wearied with wandering all day, To thee, my delight, in the evening I come; No matter what beauties I saw in my way; They were but my visits, but thou art my home.

'Then finish, dear Cloe, this pastoral war, And let us, like Horace and Lydia, agree; For thou art a girl as much brighter than her As he was a poet sublimer than me.'

"The grammatical lapse in these last two lines," says Mr. Austin Dobson, "perhaps calls for correction, but many readers will probably agree with Moore (Diary, November, 1818), 'that it is far prettier as it is.' 'Nothing,' he says truly, 'can be more gracefully light and gallant than this little poem.'"

It was fancy and not imagination which conceived the following lines, but how charming is the fancy! The poem, which is given in a slightly abridged form, is addressed

'TO A LADY: SHE REFUSING TO CONTINUE A DISPUTE WITH ME, AND LEAVING ME IN THE ARGUMENT.

'In the dispute whate'er I said, My heart was by my tongue belied; And in my looks you might have read How much I argued on your side.

'You, far from danger as from fear, Might have sustained an open fight; For seldom your opinions err; Your eyes are always in the right.

'Alas! not hoping to subdue, I only to the fight aspired; To keep the beauteous foe in view Was all the glory I desired.

'But she, howe'er of victory sure, Contemns the wreath too long delayed; And, armed with more immediate power, Calls cruel silence to her aid.

'Deeper to wound, she shuns the fight: She drops her arms, to gain the field; Secures her conquest by her flight; And triumphs, when she seems to yield.

'So when the Parthian turned his steed, And from the hostile camp withdrew; With cruel skill the backward reed He sent; and as he fled, he slew.'

Wit and a ready command of verse are the characteristics of Prior's poetry. Both of these gifts are to be seen in his lively English ballad on the Taking of Namur by the King of Great Britain, in which he travesties Boileau's Ode sur la prise de Namur. As an epigrammatist he reaped his advantage from a study of Martial, and in this department of verse Prior is often successful. If brevity be a prominent merit in an epigram, he sometimes excels his master, as, for example, in this stanza:

'To John I owed great obligation; But John unhappily thought fit To publish it to all the nation; Sure John and I are more than quit.'[25]

This is half the length of the original Latin, and what it loses in elegance it gains in point.

It may be hoped that the next quotation is a libel on Bishop Atterbury; if so, the lines have every merit but truth. The epigram is on the funeral of the Duke of Buckingham, who died in 1721.

'I have no hopes,' the duke he says, and dies; 'In sure and certain hopes,' the prelate cries: Of these two learned peers, I prithee say, man, Who is the lying knave, the priest or layman? The duke he stands an infidel confest; 'He's our dear brother,' quoth the lordly priest. The duke, though knave, still 'brother dear,' he cries; And who can say the reverend prelate lies?

Prior, it may be observed here, could say pointed things in prose as well as in verse, and nothing can be happier than his reply to the Frenchman's inquiry whether the King of England had anything to show in his palace equal to the paintings at Versailles illustrating the victories of Louis XIV: 'The monuments of my master's actions,' said the poet, 'are to be seen everywhere except in his own house.'

It is always interesting to link poet with poet, and in relation to Prior many readers will recall the pathetic incident related of Sir Walter Scott when the wonderful intellect which had entranced the world was giving indications of decay. Lockhart relates how, as they were travelling together, a quotation from Prior led Scott to make another, slightly altered for the occasion, and he adds:

'This seemed to put him into the train of Prior, and he repeated several striking passages both of the Alma and the Solomon. He was still at this when we reached a longish hill, and he got out to walk a little. As we climbed the ascent, he leaning heavily on my shoulder, we were met by a couple of beggars, who were, or professed to be, old soldiers both of Egypt and the Peninsula. One of them wanted a leg, which circumstance alone would have opened Scott's purse-strings, though, ex facie, a sad old blackguard; but the fellow had recognized his person as it happened, and in asking an alms bade God bless him fervently by his name. The mendicants went on their way, and we stood breathing on the knoll. Sir Walter followed them with his eye, and planting his stick firmly on the sod, repeated, without break or hesitation Prior's verses to the historian Mezeray. That he applied them to himself was touchingly obvious, and therefore I must quote them.

'"Whate'er thy countrymen have done, By law and wit, by sword and gun, In thee is faithfully recited; And all the living world that view Thy work, give thee the praises due, At once instructed and delighted.

'"Yet for the fame of all these deeds, What beggar in the Invalides, With lameness broke, with blindness smitten, Wished ever decently to die, To have been either Mezeray, Or any monarch he has written?

'"It strange, dear author, yet it true is, That down from Pharamond to Louis All covet life, yet call it pain: All feel the ill, yet shun the cure; Can sense this paradox endure? Resolve me Cambray[26] or Fontaine.

'"The man in graver tragic known (Though his best part long since was done), Still on the stage desires to tarry; And he who played the Harlequin, After the jest still loads the scene, Unwilling to retire, though weary."'

[Sidenote: John Gay (1685-1732).]

Gay, who enjoyed an unbroken friendship with the brotherhood of wits, and was treated by them like a spoilt child, was born at Barnstaple in 1685, and left an orphan at the age of ten. He was educated at the free grammar school in the town, and was afterwards, to his discontent, apprenticed to a mercer in London. He escaped from this uncongenial employment to be dependent on an uncle, and thus early exhibited his life-long disposition to rely upon others for support. 'Providence,' Swift writes, 'never designed Gay to be above two-and-twenty by his thoughtlessness and gullibility. He has as little foresight of age, sickness, poverty, or loss of admirers as a girl of fifteen.' His weakness, it has been said, appealed to Swift's strength, and Swift, Pope, and Arbuthnot were Gay's most faithful friends. They found something in him to laugh at and to love. Ladies, too, treated him with the kind of friendliness which has a touch of commiseration. In 1714 Gay was appointed secretary to Lord Clarendon, a post which he owed to Swift, but the death of Queen Anne in that year brought the Whigs into office, and destroyed the poet's prospects. Prior to this he had been secretary to the imperious Duchess of Monmouth. He was now left without money or employment, and owed much to the generosity of Pope. It was Gay's lot 'in suing long to bide,' to be always hoping, and nearly always disappointed. 'He seems,' says his latest biographer, 'to have begun his career under the impression that it was somebody's duty to provide for him in the world, and this impression clung to him through nearly the whole of a lifetime.'[27] Ten years before his death he was eagerly looking to others for support. Writing to Swift, he says: 'I lodge at present in Burlington House, and have received many civilities from many great men, but very few real benefits. They wonder at each other for not providing for me, and I wonder at them all.'

Gay's first poem of any mark was The Shepherd's Week (1714), six burlesque pastorals, a subject proposed to him by Pope, who was then smarting from the praise Philips had received in The Guardian. But if Pope meant Gay to poke his fun at Philips in The Shepherd's Week, he must have been disappointed, for the poems were accepted as genuine bucolics, and although humorously absurd, are, to say the least, more true to rustic life than the pastorals either of Philips or of Pope. The Shepherd's Week was followed by Trivia (1715), a piece suggested by Swift's City Shower. It is one of Gay's most notable productions, not as a poem, but as a vivid description of the streets of London nearly two hundred years ago. The great reputation he obtained as the author of The Fables (1727), and still more of The Beggar's Opera (1728), the idea of which was suggested to Gay by Swift, survived him for some years. The Fables were written for and dedicated to the youthful Duke of Cumberland, who is asked to "accept the moral lay, and in these tales mankind survey." There is skill and ingenuity in the poems, but higher merit they cannot boast, and young readers are likely to prefer the illustrations which generally accompany The Fables to the letterpress. Many of Gay's allusions are beyond the apprehension of the young, and have a political flavour. The Beggar's Opera was intended as a burlesque of the Italian opera, which had been long the laughing-stock of men of letters, and as the play was thought to have political significance, and the character of Macheath to be a portrait of Walpole, it was received with enthusiasm, and acted in London for about sixty nights. So popular did the opera become, that ladies carried about the songs on their fans.

Eight years before, Gay had published his poems by subscription, and in those happy days for versemen had gained L1,000 by the venture. He put the money into South Sea stock, and lost it all. For The Beggar's Opera he received about L800. It was followed by Polly, a play of the same coarse character, which, for political reasons, was not allowed to be acted. The result was that it had a large sale, and put money in Gay's purse. Ten thousand five hundred copies are said to have been printed in one year, and the L1,200 realized by the sale were very wisely retained for the poet's use by the Duke of Queensberry, under whose roof he had at length found a warm nest. To the student Gay is chiefly interesting as the only noteworthy poet of the period, south of the Tweed, gifted with a lyrical capacity. Two or three of his songs and ballads, and especially Black-Eyed Susan, have a charm beyond the reach of the mechanical versifier. But the art of song is at a low level even in the hands of Gay. The lyric which the Elizabethan and Jacobean poets loved so well, and of which the present century has produced specimens to be matched only by Shakespeare, may be said to have been lost to English poetry for the first half of the last century, since neither Prior's verse, delightful though it be, nor the songs of Gay, have enough of the poetical element to form exceptions to this statement.

In his Tales he follows Prior in grossness, while inferior to him in art. Like the greater number of the Queen Anne poets, Gay flatters with a free hand. In an epistle addressed to Lintot, the bookseller, he declares that Anacreon lives once more in Sheffield, and Waller in Granville, that Buckingham's verse will last to distant time; while Ovid sings again in Addison, and 'Homer's Iliad shines in his Campaign.'

One of the liveliest and most graceful of Gay's poems is addressed to Pope 'On his having finished his translation of Homer's Iliad.' It is called A Welcome from Greece, and describes the friends who assembled to greet the poet on his return to England.

Three stanzas from the Epistle shall be quoted:

'Oh, what a concourse swarms on yonder quay! The sky re-echoes with new shouts of joy; By all this show, I ween 'tis Lord Mayor's day; I hear the voice of trumpet and hautboy— No, now I see them near.—Oh, these are they Who come in crowds to welcome thee from Troy. Hail to the bard, whom long as lost we mourned From siege, from battle, and from storm returned!

'What lady's that to whom he gently bends? Who knows not her? Ah! those are Wortley's eyes: How art thou honoured, numbered with her friends! For she distinguishes the good and wise. The sweet-tongued Murray near her side attends; Now to my heart the glance of Howard flies; Now Hervey, fair of face, I mark full well, With thee Youth's youngest daughter, sweet Lepell.

'I see two lovely sisters hand in hand, The fair-haired Martha and Teresa brown; Madge Bellenden, the tallest of the land; And smiling Mary, soft and fair as down. Yonder I see the cheerful Duchess stand, For friendship, zeal, and blithesome humours known; Whence that loud shout in such a hearty strain? Why, all the Hamiltons are in her train!'

Gay's love of good living was known to all his friends. 'As the French philosopher,' Congreve wrote, 'used to prove his existence by cogito ergo sum, the greatest proof of Gay's existence is edit ergo est.' For a long time his health compelled him to give up wine, and he tells Swift that he had also left off verse-making, 'for I really think that man must be a bold writer who trusts to wit without it.' He was dispirited, he told Swift not long before his death, for want of a pursuit, and found 'indolence and idleness the most tiresome things in the world.'

Gay died in 1732 at the Duke of Queensberry's house, and Pope grieved that one of his nearest and longest ties was broken. He was interred, to quote Arbuthnot's words, 'as a peer of the realm,' in Westminster Abbey. The superficial character of the poet may be seen in his couplet transcribed upon the monument:

'Life is a jest, and all things show it; I thought so once, and now I know it.'

[Sidenote: Edward Young (1684-1765).]

Gay's moderate gift of song was withheld from the famous author of the Night Thoughts. Yet Young was vain enough to think that he possessed it, and wrote a patriotic ode called Ocean, preceded by an elaborate essay on lyric poetry. He also produced Imperium Pelagi (1729), A Naval Lyric written in Imitation of Pindar's spirit. The lyric, which was travestied by Fielding in his Tom Thumb,[28] reads like a burlesque, and badly treated though Pindar was by the versemen of the last century, there is perhaps not one of them who mocks him more outrageously than Young. He says that this ode is an original, and no critic is likely to dispute the assertion.

Young was born in 1684 at Upham, near Winchester, his father, who was afterwards Dean of Sarum, being at that time the rector of the village. Edward was placed upon the foundation at Winchester College, and remained there until he was eighteen. He was then sent up to New College, and afterwards removed to Corpus. At the age of twenty-seven he was nominated to a law fellowship at All Souls, and took his degree of B.C.L. and his doctor's degree some years later. Characteristically enough he began his poetical career by An Epistle to Lord Lansdowne (1712), who is praised for his heavenly numbers, and is said to have been born "to make the muse immortal." His next poem of any consequence, The Last Day, written in heroic couplets, and filling three books, is correct, or fairly so, in versification, and execrable in taste. Young, it may be supposed, wished to produce a sense of solemnity in the treatment of his theme, and he does so by lamenting that the very land 'where the Stuarts filled an awful throne' will in that day be forgotten. The want of taste which so often deforms Young's verse is also seen in the imagery he employs to illustrate the fear which even good men may have on appearing before that 'dread tribunal.'

'Thus the chaste bridegroom, when the priest draws nigh, Beholds his blessing with a trembling eye; Feels doubtful passions throb in every vein, And in his cheeks are mingled joy and pain, Lest still some intervening chance should rise, Leap forth at once, and snatch the golden prize, Inflame his woe, by bringing it so late, And stab him in the crisis of his fate.'

His next poem, The Force of Religion, or Vanquished Love, was suggested by the execution of Lady Jane Grey and Lord Guildford, a subject chosen for a tragedy by John Banks (1694), by Rowe in 1715, and treated with considerable dramatic power in our own day by Ross Neil. In Young's hands this fine theme becomes a rhetorical exercise without poetry and without pathos. A few lines will suffice to show the style of the poem. Jane and Dudley, it must be premised, are imprisoned in a gloomy hall:

'What can they do? They fix their mournful eyes— Then Guildford, thus abruptly: "I despise An empire lost; I fling away the crown; Numbers have laid that bright delusion down; But where's the Charles, or Dioclesian, where, Could quit the blooming, wedded, weeping fair? Oh! to dwell ever on thy lip! to stand In full possession of thy snowy hand! And thro' the unclouded crystal of thine eye The heavenly treasures of thy mind to spy! Till rapture reason happily destroys, And my soul wanders through immortal joys! Give me the world, and ask me, where's my bliss? I clasp thee to my breast and answer, this."'

Verse of this quality, which might be amply quoted, is of interest to the student of literature, since in Young's day it passed current for poetry. But in accepting his claims as a poet the faith of the age must have been often strained.

Walpole, who despised the whole tribe of poets, and cared nothing for literature, had by some strange chance awarded to Young a pension of L200 a-year, whereupon in a piece called The Instalment, addressed to Sir Robert, Britain is called upon to behold

'His azure ribbon and his radiant star,'

and the poet's breast 'glows with grateful fire' as he exclaims:

'The streams of royal bounty turned by thee Refresh the dry domains of poesy. My fortune shows, when arts are Walpole's care, What slender worth forbids us to despair: Be this thy partial smile from censure free, 'Twas meant for merit, though it fell on me.'

Following in the steps of George Sandys, but with inferior power, and in a less racy diction, Young performed the vain task of paraphrasing part of the Book of Job, one of the noblest poems the world possesses, and translated in our authorized version in language not to be surpassed for dignity and simplicity.

In 1719 his Busiris was performed. The Revenge, a better known tragedy, written on the French model, followed in 1721, and kept the stage for some time. Seven years later The Brothers, his third and last tragedy, was in rehearsal, but the poet, who had lately taken holy orders, withdrew it at the last moment. These tragedies, which are full of sound and fury, are destitute of tragic power. The Revenge, in which Zanga acts the part of an Iago, has some forcible scenes, and so, despite much rant and fustian, has Busiris. Plenty of blood is shed, of course, and the heroines of the plays die by their own hands. Tragedy is supposed to exercise an elevating influence, but to counteract this happy result, Busiris and The Revenge are followed by indecent epilogues, in which the speakers jest at the feelings which the plays may have excited. For The Brothers Young wrote his own epilogue. It is decent and dull. His genius was better fitted for satire than for the drama, and The Universal Passion, which consists of seven satires published in a collected form in 1728, brought him reputation and money. The poet Crabbe was never more surprised in his life than when John Murray (the famous 'My Murray' of Byron) gave him L3,000 for the copyright of his poems; Young received the same sum for work immeasurably inferior in value, and in a less legitimate way. Two thousand pounds, it is stated, was a gift from the Duke of Grafton, who said it was the best bargain he ever made, as the satires were worth L4,000. Young, it will be seen, preceded Pope as a satirist. He is more generous and humane, and has none of the venomous attacks on living persons by which Pope added piquancy to his verse. But he is a careless writer, and for the most part lacks the exquisite precision, the subtle wit, the rhythmical felicity, which make the couplets of Pope so memorable. The Dunciad, the Moral Essays, and the Imitations are read by all lovers of literature, but The Universal Passion is forgotten. Of the six satires, the two on women are the most spirited, and may be compared with Pope's on the same subject. The different foibles, and faults worse than foibles of the women of that day are exhibited with a satirist's licence, and occasionally with a Pope-like terseness. Take the following, for example:

'There is no woman where there's no reserve, And 'tis on plenty your poor lovers starve.'

'Few to good breeding make a just pretence; Good breeding is the blossom of good sense.'

'A shameless woman is the worst of men.'

'Naked in nothing should a woman be, But veil her very wit with modesty.'

It was not until he was nearly fifty that Young, disappointed of the preferment he sought, took holy orders, and in 1730 accepted the college living of Welwyn, in Herts, which he held till his death.

In the following year the poet married Lady Elizabeth Lee, a daughter of the Earl of Lichfield, a union that lasted ten years. One son was the offspring of this marriage. Lady Elizabeth had a daughter by a former marriage, who was married to Mr. Temple, a son of Lord Palmerston, and shortly before her own death she lost both daughter and son-in-law, who, there can be little doubt, are the Philander and Narcissa of the Night Thoughts, the earlier books of which were published in 1742. This once celebrated poem, written in his old age, is the one effort of Young's genius that has enjoyed a great popularity. It suited well an age which, while far from moral, delighted in moral treatises and in didactic verse. In the Night Thoughts Young remembers that he is a clergyman, and puts on his gown and bands. He puts on also his singing robes, and shows the reader what none of his earlier poems prove, that he is in the presence of a poet.

The Night Thoughts is remarkable in its finest passages for a strong, but sombre imagination, and for a command of his instrument that puts Young at times nearly on a level with the greatest masters of blank verse. On this height, however, he does not stay long. He is rich in great thoughts, but they do not fall unconsciously, as it were, while the poet pursues his argument. They are aphorisms uttered generally in single lines which are apt to break the continuity of the poem and to injure the harmony of its versification. The theme of Life, Death, and Immortality is not a narrow one, and affords ample space for imaginative treatment. Young's treatment of it is too often declamatory; he drops the poet in the rhetorician and the wit. There is much of the false sublime in the poem, and much that reveals the hollow character of the writer. The first book is the finest, sparkling with felicitous expressions and rising frequently to true poetry. The poetical quality of that book, however, is lessened by the author's passion for antithesis. The merit of the following passage, for example, is not due to poetical inspiration:

'How poor, how rich, how abject, how august, How complicate, how wonderful is man! How passing wonder He, who made him such! Who centered in our make such strange extremes From different natures, marvellously mixed, Connexion exquisite of distant worlds! Distinguished link in being's endless chain! Midway from nothing to the Deity; A beam etherial, sullied, and absorbt! Though sullied and dishonoured still divine! Dim miniature of greatness absolute! An heir of glory! a frail child of dust! Helpless immortal! insect infinite! A worm! a god!—I tremble at myself, And in myself am lost. At home a stranger, Thought wanders up and down, surprised, aghast, And wondering at her own: How reason reels! O what a miracle to man is man! Triumphantly distressed! what joy! what dread! Alternately transported and alarmed! What can preserve my life? or what destroy? An angel's arm can't snatch me from the grave: Legions of angels can't confine me there.'

The opening of the ninth and last book will give a more favourable illustration of Young's style:

'As when a traveller, a long day past In painful search of what he cannot find, At night's approach, content with the next cot, There ruminates awhile, his labour lost; Then cheers his heart with what his fate affords, And chants his sonnet to deceive the time, Till the due season calls him to repose; Thus I, long-travelled in the ways of men, And dancing with the rest the giddy maze Where Disappointment smiles at Hope's career; Warned by the languor of life's evening ray, At length have housed me in an humble shed, Where, future wandering banished from my thought, And waiting, patient, the sweet hour of rest, I chase the moments with a serious song. Song soothes our pains, and age has pains to soothe.'

While moralizing on man's mortality Young is seldom a cheerful monitor, he dwells with too great persistence on the incidents of death and of bodily corruption, too little on life with which we have more to do than with death. Thus with a strange perversion he exclaims:

'This is the desart, this the solitude, How populous, how vital, is the grave! This is creation's melancholy vault, The vale funereal, the sad cypress gloom, The land of apparitions, empty shades! All, all on earth is shadow, all beyond Is substance; the reverse is folly's creed.'

and harping on the same theme in the ninth book, says:

'What is the world itself? Thy world—a grave. Where is the dust that has not been alive? The spade, the plough, disturb our ancestors; From human mould we reap our daily bread; The globe around earth's hollow surface shakes, And is the ceiling of her sleeping sons. O'er devastation we blind revels keep; Whole buried towns support the dancer's heel.'

[Sidenote: Robert Blair (1699-1746).]

On laying down the Night Thoughts the student may be advised to read Blair's Grave, a poem in less than 800 lines of blank verse, composed in a fresher and more rigorous style than the far larger work of Young, and rather moulded, as Mr. Saintsbury has observed, 'upon dramatic than upon purely poetical models.' The Grave, which was written before the publication of the Night Thoughts,[29] abounds with poetical felicities, and is pregnant with suggestions that seize the imagination, and appeal alike to the intellect and the heart. The brevity of the piece is in its favour; there is not a line that flags.

'Tell us, ye dead! will none of you, in pity To those you left behind, disclose the secret? Oh! that some courteous ghost would blab it out,— What 'tis you are and we must shortly be. I've heard that souls departed have sometimes Forewarned men of their death. 'Twas kindly done To knock and give the alarm. But what means This stinted charity? 'Tis but lame kindness That does its work by halves. Why might you not Tell us what 'tis to die? Do the strict laws Of your society forbid your speaking Upon a point so nice?—I'll ask no more: Sullen, like lamps in sepulchres, your shine Enlightens but yourselves. Well, 'tis no matter; A very little time will clear up all, And make us learn'd as you are, and as close.'

Blair, who was a Scotch clergyman, wrote also an Elegy in Memory of William Law, a Professor of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh, whose daughter he married. He writes in a masculine and homely style. His imagery is often more powerful than pleasing, but some of his similes win attention by their beauty. For example:

"Look how the fair one weeps! the conscious tears Stand thick as dewdrops on the bells of flowers."

Among the victims claimed by the grave is

'The long demurring maid, Whose lonely unappropriated sweets Smiled, like yon knot of cowslips on the cliff, Not to be come at by the willing hand.'

And the death of a good man is pictured in this musical couplet:

'Night dews fall not more gently to the ground Nor weary worn out winds expire so soft.'

Cowper, referring to the poets of his century, said that every warbler had Pope's tune by heart. But if they had the tune by heart, many of them did not make it a vehicle for their verse, and among these are poets of the weight and worth of Thomson and Young, of Gray and Collins. Poets of a minor order, too, such as Somerville, Armstrong, Glover, Shenstone, Akenside, and John Dyer, either did not use the heroic distich which Pope crowned with such honour, or used it in their least significant poems.

[Sidenote: James Thomson (1700-1748).]

Thomson's influence, though less visible than Pope's, was probably as great. It was felt by the poets who loved Nature, and had no turn for satire. To pass to him from Prior, Gay, and Young is to leave the town for the country. English poetry owes much to the author of The Seasons, who was the first among the poets of his century to bring men back to 'Nature, the Vicar of the Almighty Lord.' He could not, indeed, shake off altogether the fetters of the conventional diction current in his day, and his style is often turgid and verbose. But Thomson had, to use a phrase of his own, 'a fine flame of imagination,' and when brought face to face with Nature he has the inspiration of a poet who discerns the lessons which Nature is ready to teach.

James Thomson was born at Ednam, on the banks of the Tweed, on September 11th, 1700, but his father removed to Jedburgh shortly afterwards, and there the future poet gained his first impression of rural scenes. He began to rhyme in boyhood, but, unlike most young poets, had the good sense to make an annual bonfire of his youthful effusions. At the early age of fifteen he was sent to the university at Edinburgh, his father, who was a Presbyterian minister, wishing that his son should follow the same vocation. But Thomson was not destined to 'wag his head in a pulpit.' He had a friend at this time in David Mallet, a minor poet of more prudence than principle, and when Mallet had the good fortune to gain a tutorship in London, his companion also started for the metropolis in search of money and fame. It was a desperate venture, and the young poet's difficulties were increased by the loss of his letters of introduction. Scotchmen however have always countrymen willing to help them, and Thomson whose pedigree on the mother's side connected him with the famous house of Home, found temporary employment as tutor to a child of Lord Binning who belonged by marriage to the same family. Afterwards he resided with Millan, a bookseller at Charing Cross, and then having finished Winter (1726), on which he had been at work for some time, he sold it to the publisher for three guineas. Before long it was read and warmly praised by Aaron Hill, then a man of mark in the world of letters. Sir Spencer Compton, the Speaker, to whom the poem was dedicated, gave the poet twenty guineas for the compliment; Rundle, the Bishop of Derry, and several ladies of rank cheered him with their praise, and Thomson's success was assured. It was the age of patrons, and he practised without shame and without discrimination the art of flattery. Each book of The Seasons had a dedication, and the honour was one for which some kind of payment was expected. Summer appeared in 1727 and Spring in the year following. In 1729 the appearance of Britannia showed the popularity of the poet and of his theme, for three editions were sold. It is a distinctly party poem, and contains an attack upon Walpole—whom he had previously praised as the 'most illustrious of patriots'—for submitting to indignities from Spain. The British Lion roars loudly in it, but there is more of fustian in the piece than of true patriotism. 'How dares,' the poet exclaims, 'the proud Iberian rouse to wrath the masters of the main:'

'Who told him that the big incumbent war Would not ere this have rolled his trembling ports In smoky ruin? and his guilty stores, Won by the ravage of a butchered world, Yet unatoned, sunk in the swallowing deep, Or led the glittering prize into the Thames?'

In February, 1729-30, Thomson's tragedy of Sophonisba, a subject previously chosen by Marston (1606), and by Lee (1676), was acted at Drury Lane. The play was dedicated to the queen, and on the opening night the house was crowded, but the success of the piece was slight. Thomson's genius was not dramatic, and while his characters declaim, they do not act. His next play, Agamemnon (1738), was not lost for want of labour or of friends. Pope appeared in the theatre on the first night, and was greeted with applause. The Prince and Princess of Wales were present on another occasion, but the play did not live long. His third attempt, Edward and Eleanora, was prohibited by the Lord Chamberlain, since it was supposed to praise the Prince of Wales at the expense of the Court. In 1740 the Masque of Alfred, by Thomson and Mallet, was performed. Tancred and Sigismunda followed in 1745, and this tragedy, in which Garrick played the leading part, had at the time a considerable measure of success. The plot is more interesting than that of Sophonisba, and the characters are more life-like. Despite its effusive sentiment, Garrick's splendid acting would, no doubt, make the tragedy effective on the stage, but it does not add to the literary reputation of the poet. Coriolanus, Thomson's last drama, was not performed upon the stage until the year after his death.

Voltaire, who had met Thomson and liked him—the liking, indeed, seemed to be universal—praised his tragedies for being 'elegantly writ.' 'It may be,' he says, 'that his heroes are neither moving nor busy enough, but taking him all in all, methinks he has the highest claim to the greatest esteem.' The value of Voltaire's criticism of an English dramatist is best appreciated by remembering his ignorant judgment of Shakespeare.

Thomson's laurels were gained in another field of poetry. On the production of Autumn in 1730, The Seasons in its complete form was published by subscription in quarto. The four books, as we have already said, appeared at different times, Winter being the first in order and Autumn the latest. The Hymn with which the poem concludes may be compared, and will not greatly suffer in the comparison, with Adam's morning hymn in the fifth book of Paradise Lost, and with Coleridge's Hymn in the Valley of Chamouni. Like them it is raised, to use the poet's own words, to an 'Almighty Father.' A brief extract shall be given:

'His praise, ye brooks, attune, ye trembling rills; And let me catch it as I muse along. Ye headlong torrents, rapid, and profound; Ye softer floods, that lead the humid maze Along the vale; and thou, majestic main, A secret world of wonders in thyself, Sound His stupendous praise, whose greater voice Or bids you roar, or bids your roarings fall. Soft roll your incense, herbs, and fruits, and flowers, In mingled clouds to Him, whose sun exalts, Whose breath perfumes you, and whose pencil paints. Ye forests bend, ye harvests wave, to Him; Breathe your still song into the reaper's heart, As home he goes beneath the joyous moon.

* * * * *

Great source of day! best image here below Of thy Creator, ever pouring wide, From world to world, the vital ocean round, On Nature write with every beam His praise. The thunder rolls: be hushed the prostrate world; While cloud to cloud returns the solemn hymn. Bleat out afresh, ye hills; ye mossy rocks Retain the sound: the broad responsive low, Ye valleys, raise; for the Great Shepherd reigns, And His unsuffering kingdom yet will come.'

Swift complains that the Seasons, being all descriptive, nothing is doing, a defect inseparable from the subject. But the work has a poet's best gift—imagination—and a poet's instinct for apprehending the charm of what is minute in Nature, as well as of what is grand.

Thomson has been called the naturalist's poet, and Hartley Coleridge observes that he is 'a perfect reservoir of natural images.' In his account of what he had learnt only by report he depends sometimes on the ignorant traditions of the country people; but in describing what he observes with the bodily eye, and with the eye of the mind, he is faithful to what he sees, and to what he perceives. No Dutch painter can be more exact and accurate than Thomson in the delineation of familiar scenes, and of animal life. In illustration of this gift, which Cowper shares with him, a scene, not to be surpassed for truthfulness of description, shall be quoted from Winter:

'Through the hushed air the whitening shower descends, At first thin-wavering; till at last the flakes Fall broad and wide and fast, dimming the day With a continual flow. The cherished fields Put on their winter robe of purest white. 'Tis brightness all; save where the new snow melts Along the mazy current. Low the woods Bow their hoar head; and ere the languid sun, Faint from the west, emits his evening ray, Earth's universal face, deep-hid and chill, Is one wild dazzling waste, that buries wide The works of man. Drooping, the labourer-ox Stands covered o'er with snow, and then demands The fruit of all his toil. The fowls of heaven, Tamed by the cruel season, crowd around The winnowing store, and claim the little boon Which Providence assigns them. One alone, The redbreast, sacred to the household gods, Wisely regardful of th' embroiling sky, In joyless fields and thorny thickets, leaves His shivering mates, and pays to trusted man His annual visit. Half afraid, he first Against the window beats; then brisk, alights On the warm hearth; then, hopping o'er the floor, Eyes all the smiling family askance, And pecks, and starts, and wonders where he is— Till more familiar grown, the table-crumbs Attract his slender feet. The foodless wilds Pour forth their brown inhabitants. The hare, Though timorous of heart and hard beset By death in various forms, dark snares, and dogs, And more unpitying men, the garden seeks Urged on by fearless want. The bleating kind Eye the bleak heaven, and next the glistening earth, With looks of dumb despair; then, sad-dispersed Dig for the withered herb through heaps of snow.'

Thomson loves also to paint the landscape on a broad scale, and though his diction is sometimes too florid, he generally satisfies the imagination, as, for instance, in the splendid description in Summer of a sand-storm in the desert.

'Breathed hot From all the boundless furnace of the sky, And the wide, glittering waste of burning sand, A suffocating wind the pilgrim smites With instant death. Patient of thirst and toil, Son of the desert! even the camel feels, Shot through his withered heart, the fiery blast. Or from the black-red ether, bursting broad, Sallies the sudden whirlwind. Straight the sands, Commoved around, in gathering eddies play; Nearer and nearer still they darkening come; Till with the general all-involving storm Swept up, the whole continuous wilds arise; And by their noonday fount dejected thrown, Or sunk at night in sad disastrous sleep, Beneath descending hills, the caravan Is buried deep. In Cairo's crowded streets The impatient merchant, wondering, waits in vain, And Mecca saddens at the long delay.'

The Seasons was at one time, and for many years the most popular volume of poetry in the country. It was to be found in every cottage, and passages from the poem were familiar to every school-boy. The appreciation of the work was more affectionate than critical, and Thomson's faults were sometimes mistaken for beauties; but the popularity of the Seasons was a healthy sign, and the poem, a forerunner of Cowper's Task, brought into vigorous life, feelings and sympathies that had been long dormant.

Pope, who is twice mentioned in the poem, took a great interest in its progress through the press. Thomson consulted him frequently, and accepted many of his suggestions, while apparently retaining at all times an independent judgment. To the familiar episode of 'the lovely young Lavinia' the following graceful passage is said, but on very doubtful authority to have been added by Pope.[30] The first line, given for the sake of the context, is from Thomson's pen:

'Thoughtless of beauty, she was Beauty's self, Recluse amid the close-embowering woods; As in the hollow breast of Apennine, Beneath the shelter of encircling hills, A myrtle rises, far from human eye, And breathes its balmy fragrance o'er the wild; So flourished, blooming and unseen by all, The sweet Lavinia; till, at length, compelled By strong necessity's supreme command With smiling patience in her looks she went To glean Palemon's fields.'

Thomson had now gained the highest mark of his fame, and, like Pope, had won it in a few years. Nearly two years of foreign travel followed, the poet having obtained the post of governor to a son of the Solicitor-General. The fruit of this tour was a long poem in blank verse on Liberty, which probably gave him infinite labour, but his ascent upon this occasion of what he calls 'the barren, but delightful mountain of Parnassus,' was labour lost. It is enough to say of Liberty, that it contains more than three thousand lines of unreadable blank verse. Sinecures were the rewards of genius in Thomson's day, and he was made Secretary of Briefs in the Court of Chancery. He took a cottage at Richmond, within an easy walk of Pope, and the two poets met often and lived amicably.

Thomson did not enjoy his official fortune long, for his patron died, and though he might have kept his post had he applied to the Lord Chancellor, in whose gift it was, he appears to have been too lazy to do so. His friend Lyttelton in this emergency introduced him to the Prince of Wales, who, on learning that his affairs 'were in a more poetical posture than formerly,' gave him a pension of L100 a year. There was no certainty in a gift of this nature, and in about ten years it was withdrawn.

The Castle of Indolence (1748) was the latest labour of Thomson's life, and in the judgment of many critics takes precedence of The Seasons in poetical merit. This verdict may be questioned, but the poem, written in the Spenserian stanza, has a soothing beauty and an enchanting felicity of expression which show the poet's genius in a new light. It is unlike any poetry of that age, and when compared with The Seasons, the verse, as Wordsworth justly says, 'is more harmonious and the diction more pure.' All the imagery of the poem is adopted to the vague and sleepy action of the characters represented in it. It is a veritable poet's dream, which carries the reader in its earliest stanzas into 'a pleasing land of drowsy-head:'

'In lowly dale, fast by a river's side, With woody hill o'er hill encompassed round, A most enchanting wizard did abide, Than whom a fiend more fell is nowhere found. It was, I ween, a lovely spot of ground; And there a season atween June and May Half prankt with Spring, with Summer half embrowned, A listless climate made, where, sooth to say, No living wight could work, ne cared even for play.'

There are verbal inspirations in a great poet which satisfy the ear, capture the imagination, and live in the memory for ever. Milton's pages are studded with them like stars; Gray has a few, Wordsworth many, and Keats some not to be surpassed for witchery. Of such poetically suggestive lines Thomson has his share, and although it seems unfair to remove them from their context, the excision may be made in a few cases, since they show not only that a new poet had appeared in an age of prose, but a poet of a new order, whose inspiration was felt by his successors. How poetically imaginative is Thomson's imagery of the 'meek-eyed morn, mother of dews;' of

'Ships dim discovered dropping from the clouds;'

of

'Autumn nodding o'er the yellow plain;'

of the summer wind

'Sweeping with shadowy gust the fields of corn;'

and of the Hebrid-Isles

'Placed far amid the melancholy main,'

a line which may have suggested the lovelier verse of Wordsworth descriptive of the cuckoo:

'Breaking the silence of the seas Among the farthest Hebrides.'

Thomson did not live long after the publication of The Castle of Indolence. A cold caught upon the river led to a fever, which ended fatally on August 27th, 1748. He had for some years been in love with a Miss Young, the 'Amanda' of his very feeble love lyrics, and her marriage is said to have hastened his death. Men, however, do not die for love at the mature age of forty-nine, and as Thomson was 'more fat than bard beseems,' and was not always temperate in his habits, constitutional causes are more likely to have led to the poet's death than Amanda's cruelty.

Dr. Johnson says somewhere that the further authors keep apart from each other the better, and the literary squabbles of the last century afforded him good ground for the remark. It is to Thomson's credit that, like Goldsmith twenty-six years later, he died, leaving behind him many friends and not a single enemy. His fame rests upon two poems, The Seasons and The Castle of Indolence, and on a song which has gained a national reputation. Apart from Rule Britannia, which appeared originally in the Masque of Alfred and is spirited rather than poetical, his attempts to write lyrical poetry resulted in failure; but from his own niche in the Temple of Fame time is not likely to dislodge Thomson.

FOOTNOTES:

[25] See Martialis Epigrammata, book v. lii.

[26] Fenelon was Archbishop of Cambray.

[27] The Poetical Works of Gay, edited, with Life and Notes, by John Underhill, 2 vols.

[28]

'I'll swim through seas; I'll ride upon the clouds; I'll dig the earth; I'll blow out every fire; I'll rave; I'll rant; I'll rise; I'll rush; I'll war; Fierce as the man whom smiling dolphins bore From the prosaic to poetic shore. I'll tear the scoundrel into twenty pieces.'

'The reader,' Fielding adds in a note, 'may see all the beauties of this speech in a late ode called a Naval Lyric.'

[29] Written but not published. The earlier books of the Night Thoughts appeared in 1742, the Grave in 1743, but in a letter dated Feb. 25th, 1741-2, Blair in transmitting the MS. of the poem to a friend states that the greater portion of it was composed several years before his ordination ten years previously. Southey states that Blair's Grave is the only poem he could call to mind composed in imitation of the Night Thoughts, but the style as well as the date contradicts this judgment.

[30] The tradition is founded on a volume in the British Museum containing MS. corrections supposed to be in Pope's handwriting. It is now, however, the opinion of experts that the writing is not Pope's. If he be the author, it is the only example of blank verse which we have from his pen.



CHAPTER III.

MINOR POETS.

Sir Samuel Garth—Ambrose Philips—John Philips—Nicholas Rowe—Aaron Hill—Thomas Parnell—Thomas Tickell—William Somerville—John Dyer—William Shenstone—Mark Akenside—David Mallet—Scottish Song-Writers.

[Sidenote: Sir Samuel Garth (1660-1717-18).]

In Pope's day even the medical profession was influenced by party feeling, and Samuel Garth became known as the most famous Whig physician, but his friendships were not confined to one side, and he appears to have been universally beloved.

Garth came of a Yorkshire family, and was born in 1660. He was admitted a Fellow of the College of Physicians in 1693, gained a large practice, and is said to have been very benevolent to the poor. The Dispensary (1699) is a satire called forth by the opposition of the Society of Apothecaries, to an edict of the College, and is a mock-heroic poem, which the quarrel made so effective at the time that it passed through several editions. The merit of achieving what the satirist intended may therefore be granted to the Dispensary. Few modern readers, however, will appreciate the welcome it received, and it is ludicrous to read in Anderson's edition of the poet that the poem 'is only inferior in humour, discrimination of character, and poetical ardour to the Rape of the Lock.' It would be far more accurate to say that the Dispensary has not a single merit in common with that poem, and but slight merit of any kind.

The following passage upon death is the most vigorous, and is interesting as having supplied Cowper with a line in the poem on his Mother's Picture:[31]

''Tis to the vulgar Death too harsh appears, The ill we feel is only in our fears; To die is landing on some silent shore Where billows never break, nor tempests roar; Ere well we feel th' friendly stroke 'tis o'er. The wise through thought th' insults of death defy, The fools through blest insensibility. 'Tis what the guilty fear, the pious crave; Sought by the wretch and vanquished by the brave. It eases lovers, sets the captive free, And though a tyrant, offers liberty.'

Addison in defending Garth in the Whig-Examiner from the criticisms of Prior in the Examiner, the organ of the Tory party, says he does not question but the author 'who has endeavoured to prove that he who wrote the Dispensary was no poet, will very suddenly undertake to show that he who gained the battle of Blenheim is no general.' The comparison was an unfortunate one. Marlborough's military reputation has grown brighter with time, Garth's fame as a poet has long ago ceased to exist.

A literary although not a poetical interest is associated with the name of "well-natured Garth," who, as Pope acknowledges, was one of his earliest friends; like Arbuthnot, he lived among the wits, and as a member of the famous Kit-cat Club he wrote verses upon the Whig beauties toasted by its members. His name is linked with Dryden's as well as with that of his illustrious successor. It will be remembered how, on the death of Dryden, the poet's body lay in state in the College of Physicians, and how, before the great procession started for Westminster Abbey, Sir Samuel, who was then President, delivered a Latin oration.

Garth died in January, 1717-18, and, according to Pope, was a good Christian without knowing it. Addison, however, who visited Garth in his last illness, told Dr. Berkeley that he rejected Christianity on the assurance of his friend Halley that its doctrines were incomprehensible, and the religion itself an imposture. According to another report which comes through Pope, he actually 'died a papist.'

[Sidenote: Ambrose Philips (1671-1749).]

Ambrose Philips, who belonged, like Tickell, to Addison's 'little senate,' was born in 1671, and educated at St. John's, Cambridge. His Pastorals were published in Tonson's Miscellany (1709), and the same volume contained the Pastorals of Pope. Log-rolling was understood in those days, and Philips's verses received warm praise in more than one number of the Guardian, the writer in one place declaring that there have been only four masters of the art in above two thousand years: 'Theocritus, who left his dominions to Virgil; Virgil, who left his to his son Spenser; and Spenser, who was succeeded by his eldest born, Philips.'

Pope's Pastorals were not mentioned, and in revenge he devised the consummate artifice of sending an anonymous paper to the Guardian, in which, while appearing to praise Philips, he exalted himself. Steele took the bait, and considering that the essay depreciated Pope would not publish it without his permission, which was of course readily granted. 'From that time,' says Johnson, 'Pope and Philips lived in a perpetual reciprocation of malevolence.'

Philips's tragedy, The Distrest Mother (1712), a translation, or nearly so, of Racine's Andromaque, was puffed in the Spectator. It is the play to which Sir Roger de Coverley was taken by his friends, and the representation supplied the good knight with an opportunity for much humorous comment.

'When Sir Roger saw Andromache's obstinate refusal to her lover's importunities, he whispered me in the ear that he was sure she would never have him; to which he added with a more than ordinary vehemence, "You cannot imagine, sir, what it is to have to do with a widow." Upon Pyrrhus his threatening afterwards to leave her, the knight shook his head, and muttered to himself, "Ay, do if you can." This part dwelt so much upon my friend's imagination that at the close of the third Act, as I was thinking of something else, he whispered in my ear, "These widows, sir, are the most perverse creatures in the world. But pray," says he, "you that are a critic, is this play according to your dramatic rules, as you call them? Should your people in tragedy always talk to be understood? Why, there is not a single sentence in this play that I do not know the meaning of."'[32] Addison also inserted and praised in the Spectator Philips's translations from Sappho (Nos. 223, 229).

His odes to babes and children earned for him the sobriquet of 'Namby Pamby,' 'a term which has been incorporated into the English language to designate mawkish sentiment. Namby was the infantine pronunciation of Ambrose, and Pamby was formed by the first letter of Philips's surname and that reduplication of sound which is natural to lisping children.'[33]

Between simplicity and absurdity the line is a narrow one, and Philips stepped over it when he wrote to a child in the nursery—

'Dimply damsel, sweetly smiling, All caressing, none beguiling; Bud of beauty, fairly blowing, Every charm to nature owing.'

The longest of his baby songs is addressed to the Hon. Miss Carteret, in which he pictures the child's progress to womanhood, and anticipates her future loveliness and maiden reign:

'Then the taper-moulded waist With a span of ribbon braced; And the swell of either breast, And the wide high-vaulted chest; And the neck so white and round, Little neck with brilliants bound; And the store of charms which shine Above, in lineaments divine, Crowded in a narrow space To complete the desperate face; These alluring powers, and more, Shall enamoured youths adore; These and more in courtly lays Many an aching heart shall praise.'

The inventory of the maiden's physical charms which follows includes veiny temples, sloping shoulders, a hazely lucid eye, and cheek of health; but in the category the only allusion to the attractions of intellect and heart is in a couplet foretelling her

'Gentleness of mind, Gentle from a gentle kind.'

That Philips translated The Persian Tales is indelibly recorded by Pope:

'The bard whom pilfered Pastorals renown, Who turns a Persian tale for half-a-crown, Just writes to make his barrenness appear, And strains from hard-bound brains eight lines a year.'

But even Pope could award praise to Philips. In a letter to Henry Cromwell, in 1710, he observes that he was capable of writing very nobly, 'as I guess by a small copy of his, published in the Tatler, on the Danish winter;' and two years later he says to his friend Caryll: 'Mr. Philips has two lines which seem to me what the French call very picturesque, that I cannot omit to you:

'All hid in snow in bright confusion lie, And with one dazzling waste fatigue the eye!'

The lines, not quite accurately quoted by Pope, are from an epistle, addressed to Lord Dorset from Copenhagen, which contains a few striking couplets, two of which may be transcribed before bidding adieu to Ambrose Philips:

'The vast leviathan wants room to play, And spout his waters in the face of day. The starving wolves along the main sea prowl, And to the moon in icy valleys howl.'