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'Si paulum a summo decessit, vergit ad imum.'

In a word, it requires the most exalted genius and industry with which human nature is endowed. Are similar talents and accomplishments demanded to make a good composer of ballads? Are there similar impediments to his success? And where success is so much easier, is it equally glorious? Certainly not; and it seems to us that a good epic or dramatic writer is as far above the best of ballad-grinders, as the architect of St Peter's is superior to a first rate house-carpenter.

But lord Byron, after all, is not so well satisfied with his own theory, as to rest Pope's reputation wholly upon his genius and his skill, but proceeds by a very curious train of induction, to show that his subjects were also of the highest order, and the most poetical. Ethics,' he tells us, no less than miracles, proved our Saviour to be the Son of God.' Ethics, also, made Socrates the greatest of men; therefore, 'ethics are the most poetical subject in the world!' We really do not perceive the immediate connexion between the conclusion and the premises; nor do we altogether understand why ethics, which confirmed the claims of our Saviour to divinity and founded the reputation of Socrates, are for these reasons any fitter subjects for poetry than mathematics, which founded the reputation of Newton, or political economy, which established that of Adam Smith; and we doubt whether his Lordship would recommend as poetical subjects either a disquisition on weights and measures, or a new method of extracting the cube root. Neither do we think that ethics are the fittest or the highest theme of poetical composition; for however instructive a disquisition on them may be, it is not likely to communicate the greatest degree of pleasure; it may mend the heart, but not warm it, and whatever other quality it may possess, plain ethics, unassociated with religion, can have little in it either of sublimity or pathos. But we have detained our readers too long on these unprofitable topics, and we will now proceed with his Lordship's eloquent panegyric upon Pope.

The attempt of the poetical populace of the present day to obtain an ostracism against Pope, is as easily accounted for as the Athenian's shell against Aristides; they are tired of hearing him always called "the Just." They are also fighting for life; for if he maintains his station, they will reach their own by falling. They

have raised a mosque by the side of a Grecian temple of the pur-
est architecture; and, more barbarous than the barbarians from
whose practice I have borrowed the figure, they are not content-
ed with their own grotesque edifice, unless they destroy the prior
and purely beautiful fabric which preceded, and which shames
them and theirs forever and ever. I shall be told that amongst
those I have been (or it may be, still am) conspicuous-true, and I
am ashamed of it. I have been amongst the builders of this Babel,
attended by a confusion of tongues, but never amongst the envious
destroyers of the classic temple of our predecessor. I have
loved and honored the fame and name of that illustrious and un-
rivalled man, far more than my own paltry renown, and the trashy
jingle of the crowd of "Schools" and upstarts, who pretend to
rival, or even surpass him. Sooner than a single leaf should be
torn from his laurel, it were better that all which these men, and
that I, as one of their set, have ever written should

"Line trunks, clothe spice, or, fluttering in a row,
Befringe the rails of Bedlam, or Soho!"

There are those who will believe this, and those who will not.
You, sir, know how far I am sincere, and whether my opinion, not
only in the short work intended for publication, but in private
letters which can never be published, has or has not been the
same. I look upon this as the declining age of English poetry;
no regard for others, no selfish feeling, can prevent me from see-
ing this, and expressing the truth. There can be no worse sign
for the taste of the times than the depreciation of Pope. It
would be better to receive for proof Mr Cobbett's rough but
strong attack upon Shakspeare and Milton, than to allow this
smooth and candid" undermining of the reputation of the most
perfect of our poets, and the purest of our moralists. Of his pow-
er in the passions, in description, in the mock heroic, I leave others
to descant. I take him on his strong ground, as an ethical poet:
in the former, none excel; in the mock heroic and the ethical, none
equal him; and in my mind, the latter is the highest of all poetry,
because it does that in verse, which the greatest of men have wish-
ed to accomplish in prose. If the essence of poetry must be a lie,
throw it to the dogs, or banish it from your republic, as Plato would
have done. He who can reconcile poetry with truth and wisdom,
is the only true " poet" in its real sense," the maker," " the crea-
tor." Why must this mean the "liar," the "feigner," the "tale
teller " A man may make and create better things than these.

I shall not presume to say that Pope is as high a poet as Shakspeare and Milton, though his enemy, Warton, places him immediately under them. I would no more say this than I would asşert in the mosque (once St Sophia's), that Socrates was a greater

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"To rival all but Shakspeare's name below."

'I say nothing against this opinion. But of what "order,” according to the poetical aristocracy, are Burns' poems? There are his opus magnum, "Tam O'Shanter," a tale, the Cotter's Saturday Night, a descriptive sketch; some others in the same style; the rest are songs. So much for the rank of his productions; the rank of Burns is the very first of his art. Of Pope I have expressed my opinion elsewhere, as also of the effect, which the present attempts at poetry have had upon our literature. If any great national or natural convulsion could or should overwhelm your country in such sort, as to sweep Great Britain from the kingdoms of the earth, and leave only that, after all the most living of human things, a dead language, to be studied and read, and imitated by the wise of future and far generations, upon foreign shores; if your literature should become the learning of mankind, divested of party cabals, temporary fashions, and national pride and prejudice; an Englishman, anxious that the posterity of strangers should know that there had been such a thing as a British epic and tragedy, might wish for the preservation of Shakspeare and Milton; but the surviving world would snatch Pope from the wreck, and let the rest sink with the people. He is the moral poet of all civilization; and as such, let us hope that he will one day be the national poet of mankind. He is the only poet that never shocks; the only poet whose faultlessness has been made his reproach. Cast your eye over his productions; consider their extent, and contemplate their variety:-pastoral, passion, mock heroic, translation, satire, ethics,-all excellent, and often perfect. If his great charm be his melody, how comes it that foreigners adore him even in their diluted translations ?

This is indeed an apotheosis; and if his Lordship has done more than any other to bring into disrepute the classic temple of his predecessor,' he has at least made ample amends. for it to the architect by thus placing him among the gods. To say the truth, we have been a long time concerned at the prevalence of certain false principles in poetry, which have been gaining ground in England the last ten years; and the more so, as we have been somewhat apprehensive of its influence on our own; which yet in the bud is doubly sensitive to every unwholesome vapour. We have been particularly disgusted by the puling affectations of that city tribe of songsters, so aptly ycleped the Cockney School; nor have we

been altogether satisfied with that mysticism, that unintelligi ble, and we may add unmeaning strain of sentiment which too often pervades the composition of the lake poets (who by the bye have not sufficient common resemblance to justify the epithet); and we regret that the influence of both has been to discredit the perspicuous, direct, and manly flow of thought and expression, which distinguishes the writings of Pope and his contemporaries.

But although we sympathise with his Lordship in these grievances, and are happy that by precept at least he has thrown his influence into the opposite scale, yet we doubt if he has taken the best method to redress them. Extremes in the intellectual world are seldom corrected by extremes. The extravagant opinions on one side are not to be set right by opinions equally extravagant on the other; and with all deference to his Lordship's sincerity, we think he would have done more for Pope, if he had said less. Much as we admire Pope, we cannot look upon him as the polar star of a literature in which Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Cowper, and Lord Byron (humbly as he thinks of himself) have written; we say Cowper, for although we are told he is no poet,' and that 'Pope is the moral poet of all civilization,' (a phrase somewhat unintelligible,) yet we are of opinion that there is more unaffected feeling, more truly sublime morality_condensed in two hundred pages of the Task, than in all that Pope has ever written.

Since we cannot concur in the unqualified extent of Lord Byron's panegyric, we will state why and upon what grounds we are at issue. It really seems to us absurd, and somewhat conceited to inquire at this time of day, if Pope be really a poet. If the wise men of Europe have not been grossly deceived for the last hundred years, (a pretty fair term of time to settle the pretensions of an author), he is one of the most eminent. It, after all, amounts to a mere verbal dispute; whether our definition of a poet is the same that it was a century ago; as relates to ourselves, we see no reason to doubt it. We study and admire the same great models that were then admired; we acknowledge in Pope the sprightliness of an elegant fancy, graceful dignity of sentiment, a wit unceasing yet never tiring, satire playful yet severe, an accurate taste, a scntentiousness of expression neither weakened by affectation, nor clouded by ambiguity, and an uniform polish of Fanguage never rivalled; in fine, to quote the well known crit

icism of

are form tion, whi cidents what the

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of nature.

Or he shows tender mora placid lake'.

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icism of Johnson, Invention, by which new trains of events are formed and new scenes of imagery displayed; imagination, which conveys to the reader the forms of nature and incidents of life; judgment, which selects from life or nature what the present purpose requires.' We acknowledge and admire all these splendid attributes of genius in Pope; but we still think him wanting in that power of awakening the most sublime and tender emotions so requisite to the perfection of poetry. What has he ever written, which for lofty feeling and description can compare with the six first books, we may justly say any part of Paradise Lost?-the march of Satan over the burning lake; the description of his prison; the speeches of the fallen angels in Pandemonium; the voyage of Satan through Chaos; and contrasted with these, what so touching as the pictures of Adam and Eve, their innocent occupations, and the joys of paradise? What has he written that shows such keen sensibility to the charms of nature, as the smaller though hardly inferior poems of Milton, Comus, Lycidas, Penseroso? &c.

We think nothing Pope has written can compare in force or grandeur (although no religion is mingled with it), or in exquisite tone of feeling, with the greater portion of the second and third cantos of Childe Harold. The poet there carries us back through the mist of years' to the days of the glory of Greece

'Till the sense aches with gazing to behold

The scenes our earliest dreams have dwelt upon.'

We walk with him over her prostrate columns, and sympathise in his eloquent lamentation. Or he transports us to the summit of the Alps, to witness in those high solitudes, the convulsions of nature. We become with him

A portion of the tempest,'
A sharer in its fierce and far delights.'

Or he shows us nature in her loveliest trim, imbued with some tender moral feeling that calms our ruffled spirits; some 'clear placid lake', whose

Soft murmuring

Sounds, sweet as if a sister's voice reproved,

That we with stern delights should ere have been so mov'd.'

This is poetry, and of the very highest order, which thrills