when we find, as we lately did, a writer in the Times newspaper, in the course of a not very discriminating review of Mr. Froude's recent volumes, casually remarking, as if it admitted of no more doubt than the day's price of consols, that Carlyle was a greater man than Johnson. It is a good thing to be positive. To be positive in your opinions and selfish in your habits is the best recipe, if not for happiness, at all events for that far more attainable commodity, comfort, with which we are acquainted. 'A noisy man,' sang poor Cowper, who could not bear anything louder than the hissing of a tea-urn, 'a noisy man is always in the right,' and a positive man can seldom be proved wrong. Still, in literature it is very desirable to preserve a moderate measure of independence, and we, therefore, make bold to ask whether it is as plain as the 'old hill of Howth,' that Carlyle was a greater man than Johnson? Is not the precise contrary the truth? No abuse of Carlyle need be looked for here or from me. When a man of genius and of letters happens to have any striking virtues, such as purity, tem and who begged Pope whenever he thought of the world to give it another lash on his (the Dean's) account, saw clearly the danger of Pope's method, and wrote to him: Take care the bad poets do not outwit you as they have done the good ones in every age; whom they have provoked to transmit their names to posterity. Mævius is as well known as Virgil, and Gildon will be as well known as you if his name gets into your verses; and as for the difference between good and bad fame, it is a mere trifle.' The advice was far too good to be taken. But what has happened? The petty would-be Popes but for the real Pope would have been entirely forgotten. As it is, only their names survive in the index to the Dunciad; their indecencies and dastardly blockheadisms are as dead as Queen Anne; and if the historian or the moralist seeks an illustration of the coarseness and brutality of their style, he finds it only too easily, not in the works of the dead dunces, but in the pages of their persecutor. Pope had none of the grave purpose which makes us, at all events, partially sympathise with Ben Jonson in his quarrels with -- the poetasters of his day. It is a mere toss-up whose name you may find in the Dunciad a miserable scribbler's or a resplendent scholar's; a tasteless critic's or an immortal wit's. A satirist who places Richard Bentley and Daniel Defoe amongst the dunces must be content to abate his pretensions to be regarded as a social purge. Men and women, we can well believe, went in terror of little Mr. Pope. Well they might, for he made small concealment of their names, and even such as had the luck to escape obvious recognition have been hoisted into infamy by the untiring labours of subsequent commentators. It may, perhaps, be still open to doubt, who was the Florid Youth referred to in the Epilogue to the Satires, 'And how did, pray, the Florid Youth offend Whose speech you took and gave it to a friend?' Bowles said it was Lord Hervey, and that the adjective is due to his lordship's wellknown practice of painting himself; but Mr. Croker, who knew everything, and was in the habit of contradicting the Duke of Wellington about the battle of Waterloo, says, 'Certainly not. The Florid Youth was young Henry Fox.' Sometimes, indeed, in our hours of languor and dejection, when 'The heart is sick, And all the wheels of being slow,' the question forces itself upon us, What can it matter who the Florid Youth was, and who cares how he offended? But this questioning spirit must be checked. 'The proper study of mankind is man,' and that title cannot be denied even to a florid youth. Still, as I was saying, people did not like it at the time, and the then Duke of Argyll said, in his place in the House of Lords, that if anybody so much as named him in an invective, he would first run him through the body, and then throw himself - not out of the window, as one was charitably hoping-but on a much softer place the consideration of their Lordships' House. Some persons of quality, of less truculent aspect than McCallum More, thought to enlist the poet's services, and the Duchess of Buckingham got him to write an epitaph on her deceased son a feeble lad, to which transaction the - poet is thought to allude in the pleasing lines, ‘But random praise — the task can ne'er be done, Each mother asks it for her booby son.' Mr. Alderman Barber asked it for himself, and was willing-so at least it was reported to pay for it at the handsome figure of £4,000 for a single couplet. Pope, however, who was not mercenary, declined to gratify the alderman, who by his will left the poet a legacy of £100, possibly hoping by this benefaction, if he could not be praised in his lifetime, at all events to escape posthumous abuse. If this were his wish it was gratified, and the alderman sleeps unsung. Pope greatly enjoyed the fear he excited. With something of exultation he sings: 'Yes, I am proud, I must be proud to see Safe from the bar, the pulpit, and the throne, To all but heaven-directed hands denied, The Muse may give thee, but the gods must guide: |