of Constantine and the School of Athens are both pieces of Raffaelle: shall we censure the School of Athens as faulty, because it has not the fury and fire of the other?""There is all the silence, and composure, and tranquillity in the one, and all the warmth, hurry, and tumult in the other, which the subject of either required: both of them had been imperfect if they had not been as they are." Yet according to the rule now attempted to be established, Homer was a poet of the first order when he wrote the Iliad, and only of the second when he wrote the Odyssey. But it may be asked whether a poet or a painter, who undertakes a great subject, and executes it in a suitable and efficient manner, must not on that account be esteemed a greater artist, than he who undertakes an inferior subject, and executes it in a suitable manner. The answer is, there are no great subjects but such as are made so by the genius of the artist. The descriptions of Milton present to us objects of sublimity which exalt and dignify our feelings; we wander with Ariosto, or Spenser, through enchanted castles, and interest ourselves in the stories of adventurous knights and distressed damsels; we weep over the fate of Desdemona, or of Juliet; we enjoy with a smile the nature and wit displayed in the character of Sir Roger de Coverley; and we relax our features into a broad laugh on the appearance of Sir John Falstaff, or of Tony Lumpkin; but the preference we may give to one of these over another, is a moral preference, and has no relation whatever to their merits as works of genius and imagination. Those who perceive in themselves a sympathy with high and dignified feelings, will be most gratified with those elevated subjects which are best calculated to excite them. Those who are what is called sentimental, may indulge their tenderness in the works of Rousseau or Richardson; whilst others may prefer the bolder pictures of human life and manners exhibited in the writings of Fielding or Smollet, and willingly relinquish the ideas of grandeur and sublimity, for the accurate representations of truth and nature which they there discover. But with these distinctions poetry ⚫ has no concern. Genius can ennoble the lowest subject,✓ as the want of it may debase the highest. It would be endless to recapitulate the Epic Poems which have either been strangled in the birth, or have perished as soon as born. The Italians, alone, in the sixteenth century, produced an incredible quantity, and every nation has its limbo of poets, flentes in limine primo; whilst, on the other hand, poems on the most unfavourable and trivial subjects have, through the mere genius of their authors, been engraven on the tablets of immortality. Thus we have the Battle of the Frogs and Mice of Homer; the Georgics of Virgil; the Chess-play of Vida; the Bees of Rucellai; the Syphilis of Fracastoro; the Capitoli of Berni and his followers; the Malmantile of Lippi; the Secchia of Tassoni; the Lutrin of Boileau; the Dispensary of Garth; the Rape of the Lock, by Pope; the School-mistress of Shenstone; the Taşk, by Cowper; the Deserted Village, by Goldsmith; the Cotter's Saturday Night, by Burns; and the humorous, or ludicrous compositions of Butler and of Swift. Instances sufficient to shew, that "nothing is trifling in the hand of genius, and that importance itself becomes a bauble in that of mediocrity. The Shepherd's staff of Paris would have been an engine of death in the grasp of Achilles; the ash of Peleus could only have dropt from the effeminate fingers of the curled archer.”* We have been so often told that poetry exists in inanimate objects, that we seem to believe it, and thus become the dupes of our own phraseology. Thus we say, the mountains and the forests are poetical, and the skies are poetical, and the waves of the sea, and the winds, and the * Fuseli: Aphorisms on Art. thunder, are all poetical; forgetting that the poetry is in the mind that can conceive and express it, and not in the object of which we speak. We are finely told that there are Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, But it is only the contemplative, or in other words the poetical mind, that finds them; to the herd of mankind they are silent and useless, or if they impart an emotion, the creative energy is wanting that can alone convey the feeling to the mind of another, and give life and animation to that which would otherwise have remained inert and dead. "Wherever the appearances of the exterior world," says an elegant writer, "are expressive to us of qualities which we love or admire; wherever, from our education, our connexions, our habits, or our pursuits, its qualities are associated in our minds with affecting or interesting emotion, there the pleasures of beauty and sublimity (yes, and the feelings of joy and of sorrow, and of every sentiment and passion of the human mind) are felt, or at least are capable of being felt. Our minds, instead of being governed by the character of external objects, are enabled to bestow on them a character which does not belong to them and even with the rudest or the commonest appearances of nature, to connect feelings of a nobler, or a more interesting kind, than any that the mere influences of matter can ever convey." Alison's Essay on Taste. The question then, is not whether Pope, or any other author, has selected the most sublime, the most romantic, the most ludicrous, the most promising, or the most unfavourable subjects; whether he has drawn them from the works of nature or the works of art; but whether he has animated them with the living breath of his own genius— whether he has placed them before us in all the colours of reality—whether in unfolding the emotions of the mind, he Has made us feel each passion that he feigns, and has been enabled to associate our sensations with objects that are in themselves the most indifferent, common, or contemptible. The finest Landscape that Rubens perhaps ever painted, is the representation of a flat and uniform country in a shower of rain, and we equally participate in the feelings of the genuine poet, whether he represent to us the strife of heroes, or a game at ombre, whether he describe the launch of a ship amidst breathless crowds, or a mountain daisy turned up by the plough. In this respect he may truly be said to possess a spark of that attribute, which Pope has so beautifully described as characteristic of the divinity, and to be As full, as perfect, in a hair, as heart! It has however been the practice of those who have attempted to depreciate the talents of Pope, to admit that he occasionally exhibited powers which placed him on an equality with the loftiest sons of song. Thus we are informed by one of his critics, that, "in his Epistle from Eloisa to Abelard, he appears on the high ground of the poet of nature,” and that "in his Rape of the Lock, where he gives a more poetical employment to the more dignified order of genii, he is equal to Shakespear." ""* After such passages, and many others of the same kind, which we meet with in the works of his critics, can it be allowed them to state these acknowledged excellences by way of exception only to the general tenor of the author's productions ?+ * Mr. Bowles. + "Pope must be judged by the rank in which he stands; amongst those of the French school, not the Italian; among those whose delineations are taken more from manners than nature. When I say that this is his predominant character, I must be insensible to every thing exquisite in poetry, if I did not except instanter, the Epistle of Eloisa, &c." Bowles. "As well might we deny (as has justly been observed) the strength of Milo, because he carried an ox but once," or assert that Michelagnolo was no sculptor, except in his Moses, and Raffaelle no painter, except in his transfiguration. Surely neither man nor elephant can be an exception to himself. That the inventive powers of Pope were confined only to a few particular instances is, however, an assertion not founded on fact. Whether we apply that term to the construction of a fable, or continued narrative of imaginary and fictitious events, as in the Rape of the Lock, or the Dunciad, or to the illustration of any subject, whatever its nature may be, by the introduction of appropriate decoration, and beautiful figures of speech, as in his moral and didactic writings, it cannot be denied that Pope has displayed the powers of imagination in a degree which entitles him to rank with the most celebrated poets in any age or country. It may, indeed, be said, that as the principal Epic Poems of which the world so justly boasts, profess to be, and in some degree are founded on historical events, and are consequently a narrative of matter of fact, embellished, indeed, by the genius of the poet; so the allegorical poems of Pope, being founded chiefly on fiction, and introducing beings of a new and fanciful character in poetry, exhibit greater powers of imagination than are required for works of the former description, and entitle him to rank with those authors, who, like Shakespear and Spenser, have pictured out to us the forms of things unseen, and have given to airy nothing "A local habitation and a name." If ever any individual was born a poet it was Pope. Indications of this had manifested themselves as early as eight or nine years of age. In his early progress he refused to |