may find others who will bear it-I won't.
Neither time, nor distance, nor grief, nor age,
can ever diminish my veneration for him, who
is the great moral poet of all times, of all climes,
of all feelings, and of all stages of existence.
The delight of my boyhood, the study of my man-
hood, perhaps (if allowed to me to attain it), he
may be the consolation of my age. His poetry
is the Book of Life. Without canting, and yet
without neglecting religion, he has assembled all
that a good and great man can gather together
of moral wisdom clothed in consummate beauty.
Sir William Temple observes, "that of all the
members of mankind that live within the com-
pass of a thousand years, for one man that is
born capable of making a great poet, there may
be a thousand born capable of making as great
generals and ministers of state as any in story.'
Here is a statesman's opinion of poetry: it is
honourable to him, and to the art. Such a
poet of a thousand years" was Pope. A thou-
sand years will roll away before such another
can be hoped for in our literature.
But it can

66

want them he himself is a literature.

One word upon his so brutally abused translation of Homer. "Dr. Clarke, whose critical exactness is well known, has not been able to point out above three or four mistakes in the sense through the whole Iliad. The real faults of the translation are of a different kind." So says Warton, himself a scholar. It appears by this, then, that he avoided the chief fault of a translator. As to its other faults, they consist in his having made a beautiful English poem of a sublime Greek one. It will always hold. Cowper and all the rest of the blank pretenders may do their best and their worst: they will never wrench Pope from the hands of a single reader of sense and feeling.

The grand distinction of the vulgar forms of the new school of poets is their vulgarity. By this I do not mean that they are coarse, but "shabby-genteel," as it is termed. A man may be coarse and yet not vulgar, and the reverse. Burns is often coarse, but never vulgar. Chatterton is never vulgar, nor Wordsworth, nor the higher of the Lake school, though they treat of low life in all its branches. It is in their finery that the new under school are most vulgar, and they may be known by this at once; as what we called at Harrow "a Sunday blood" might be easily distinguished from a gentleman, although his clothes might be the better cut, and his boots the best blackened, of the two: probably be cause he made the one, or cleaned the other, with his own hands.

If there be force in virtue or in song!
O injured Bard! accept the grateful strain
That I, the humblest of the tuneful train,
With glowing heart, yet trembling hand repay,
For many a pensive, many a sprightly lay!
So may thy varied verse, from age to age,
Inform the simple, and delight the sage !

In the present case, I speak of writing, not of persons. Of the latter I know nothing; of the former, I judge as it is found. Of my friend Hunt, I have already said, that he is any thing but vulgar in his manners; and of his disciples, therefore, I will not judge of their manners from their verses. They may be honourable and gentlemanly men, for what I know; but the latter quality is studiously excluded from their publications. They remind me of Mr. Smith and the Miss Broughtons at the Hampstead Assembly, in "Evelina." In these things (in private life, at least,) I pretend to some small experience; because, in the course of my youth, I have seen a little of all sorts of society, from the Christian prince and the Mussulman sultan and pacha, and the higher ranks of their countries, down to the London boxer, the "flash and the swell," the Spanish muleteer, the wandering Turkish dervise, the Scotch highlander, and the Albanian robber; -to say nothing of the curious varieties of Italian social life. Far be it from me to presume that there ever was, or can be, such a thing as an aristocracy of poets; but there is a nobility of thought and of style, open to all stations, and derived partly from talent, and partly from education, which is to be found in Shakspeare, and Pope, and Burns, no less than in Dante and Alfieri, but which is nowhere to be perceived in the mock birds and bards of Mr. Hunt's little chorus. If I were asked to define what this gentlemanliness is, I should say that it is only to be defined by examples — of those who have it, and those who have it not. In life, I should say that most military men have it, and few naval; that several men of rank have it, and few lawyers; that it is more frequent among authors than divines (when they are not pedants); that fencing-masters have more of it than dancing-masters, and singers than players; and that (if it be not an Irishism to say so) it is far more generally diffused among women than among men. In poetry, as well as writing in general, it will never make entirely a poet or a poem; but neither poet nor poem will ever be good for any thing without it. It is the salt of society, and the seasoning of composition. garity is far worse than downright blackguardiss ; for the latter comprehends wit, humour, and strong sense at times; while the former is a sad abortive attempt at all things," signifying nothing." It does not depend upon low themes, or even low language, for Fielding revels in both; but is he ever vulgar? No. the man of education, the gentleman, and the You see scholar, sporting with his subject, -its master,

Ful

While canker'd Weston, and his loathsome rhymes
Stink in the nose of all succeeding times."
GIFFORD, Bariad]

A scribbler who, for a series of years, had been attacking the moral character of Pope, in the Gentleman's Magazine, "with all the virulence of Gildon, all the impudence of Smedley, and all the ignorance of Curl and his associates."

MISCELLANEOUS PIECES.

Academical studies, effect of, on the ima- Algarotti, Francesco, 378.

His conversation, 690. His Drummer,' Alvanley (William Arden), second Lord,