Pope is speaking of Alexander, Charles XII., and such heroes. He 'exaggerated the strangeness of the conqueror's purpose,' says Mr. Elwin: the making enemies is incidental to the purpose, not the end.' Is it possible that a grave critic should not see that the exaggeration was precisely the force of Pope's remark; or must it be set down in black and white, that Pope meant to bring out the fact that men, in an anxiety for an imaginary satisfaction, frequently overlook the circumstances by which it is necessarily accompanied ?

For forms of government let fools contest;

Whate'er is best administered is best: For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight;

He can't be wrong whose life is in the right.-III. 312-315.

Mr. Elwin spends more than three closely printed octavo pages in refuting these two epigrams. It would be a sufficient answer to his array of commonplaces to say that the lines have passed into proverbs. Nobody will argue that they contain complete truths; but their popularity proves that they give a very striking expression of half-truths. On the first, I will only remark that if it is plain enough that forms of government are important, the most dangerous and most prevalent error is that against which Pope's maxim is directed, namely, that they are all-important. Pope's pithy remark was frequently expanded into very good common sense by Johnson.

On the second couplet, Mr. Elwin quotes Wakefield, Guizot, and De Quincey in a note. I take M. Guizot, who puts the point most pithily. I

prefer a bad action to a bad principle, says Rousseau somewhere, and Rousseau was right. A bad action may always remain isolated; a bad principle is always prolific, because, after all, it is mind which governs, and man acts according to his thoughts much oftener than he himself imagines.' That is a very true and very wise principle. How does it affect Pope? Pope's argument, if expanded, would probably run thus: "I have known and admired the Deist Bolingbroke ; I have known and admired the High Church men Atterbury and Swift; I am myself a Catholic, and though my own belief is lax, I have loved and revered my Catholic parents. There are good men in all these hostile sects, and I infer that modes of faith are of less importance than people generally suppose.' This sounded very wicked to bigots, who agreed only in assuming that eternal pended on the particular form of happiness or eternal misery decreed which a man adopted. Mr. Elwin may think it wicked also, but mankind in general have agreed that there is a great deal of truth in it. Mr. Elwin seems inclined to meet Pope's argument by denying his facts, and declaring that all infidels are wicked, and that all except Christians are infidels. Pope infers that, as there are good men on all sides, no side can be fatally wrong. Mr. Elwin says that, as one side must be wrong, there cannot be good men on all sides. The decision may be left to my readers. Know all the good that individuals find, Or God or nature meant to move mankind, Reason's whole pleasure, all the joys of

sense

Lie in three words, health, peace, and com petence.

But health consists in competence^alone ; And peace! O Virtue! peace is all thy own. The good or bad the gifts of fortune gain; But these less taste them as they less obtain.-IV. 77-84.

I do not think much of these verses considered as a piece of poetry; and

I call attention to them merely because Mr. Elwin seems to have misrepresented Pope's argument rather more than usual. I quote from his introductory remarks:

As health, peace, and competence are necessary to happiness, they must be constant attendants on worth, or his (Pope's) paradox that happiness is proportioned to virtue falls to the ground. He accordingly affirmed in a suppressed couplet, that the blessings were only denied to error, pride, or vice.' And the language in the text must bear the same construction. But will virtue secure health? Yes, replies Pope, for 'health consists in temperance alone,' which, for the purposes of his argument, must mean that all the temperate are healthy: safe from casualties, infection, and every other disorder, they bear about with them a charmed life, and die at last in a good old age. The poet passes over competence,' and in a subsequent part of his epistle allows that virtue sometimes starves.'

In the first place, Pope does not pass over competence, as Mr. Elwin ought to have noticed. He mentions it as emphatically as peace and health in the next couplet quoted; and the way in which he mentions it is enough to upset Mr. Elwin's version of his argument, and to refute the charge of inconsistency. Mr. Elwin interprets the last line (which, it must be confessed, is clumsy enough) in a note, and explains it to mean that bad men taste the gifts of fortune less than good men, as they obtain them by worse means.' That is just Pope's position. The vicious, he says throughout, are equally subject to external misfortunes with good men. Gravitation will not cease to save a virtuous man from the fall of a mountain or keep a wall hanging till a wicked man passes under it. The rain falls alike on the just and the unjust, and the tower of Siloam crushes equally the bad and the good. Yet, he says, virtue gives more happiness, other things being equal. It gives peace of mind by its own nature. If it does not give health of body, it gives the most essential condition

of health; and if it does not give fortune, it secures that fortune shall not bring remorse.

Mr. Elwin twists this very obvious argument - chiefly by his strange neglect of the last couplet— into an assertion that external happiness is proportioned to virtue, which is the very thing that this passage denies; and then founds a charge of inconsistency upon his misinterpretation. Pope's language is unphilosophical and erroneous enough in this part of the essay, but Mr. Elwin has made his argument still feebler than it naturally is.

In the foregoing quotations I have perhaps been drawn a little too far into minute considerations. My excuse must be that, if Mr. Elwin is wrong in his theology and his metaphysics, his whole criticism falls to the ground. If he is right, it would still be a question whether he was relevant. The confusion and mistakes which undoubtedly vitiate Pope's argument do not necessarily spoil his poetry. Pope, like innumerable thinkers of greater or less eminence, looked out upon the world and was perplexed by the spectacle of misery and sin presented on all sides. How to reconcile the goodness, wisdom, and power of the Creator with the pain endured by so many of His creatures was the problem which bewildered him, as it has bewildered more powerful intellects. Mr. Elwin seems to find everything perfectly simple and intelligible; but that clearness of vision is granted to few of his fellow-mortals. Pope, in particular, was very ill-prepared for the attempt. He started with a few crumbs of philosophy caught from Bolingbroke's table; and Bolingbroke himself, though I think that Mr. Elwin rates him too low, was a flashy and superficial thinker. It is less wonder that Pope was inconsistent and confused than that Mr. Elwin has so generally blun

dered in exposing his inconsistencies. Yet the feelings with which a man of keen intellect and strong feelings looks out upon the world are interesting in themselves, and may give rise to powerful poetry, however weak may be the logical framework of his discourse. Pope did not, it is true, take the most poetical view of the situation. His moral comes nearer to Candide's il faut cultiver notre jardin than to Pascal's search for happiness in the consolations of revealed religion. He is rapt into no heights of mystical devotion, but rather considers life as a man of the world, and a companion of Bolingbroke, Swift, and Gay might be expected to do. He inhabited a villa at Twickenham, not a cell in a convent, and dressed himself in stays instead of a hair-shirt. Yet the thoughts of such a man may be interesting and forcible. If he did not solve the dark enigma of the world, nobody else has solved it; the best philosophers and divines (with the possible exception of Mr. Elwin) are as much bewildered as the weakest of us; and Pope has given expression to those truisms which lie at the very threshold of a labyrinth in which no one has proceeded much beyond the threshold. With all its incoherencies and indications of superficial knowledge, the Essay on Man contains many passages-one or two of which I have had to quote with which most of us can sympathise, and a number of aphorisms-not very original or profound-but yet illustrating what Mr. Ward, his latest editor, calls his 'incomparable talent of elevating truisms into proverbs.'

The proper way of editing such a writer would be, in my opinion, to examine the mode in which Pope's theories naturally sprang from the intellectual conditions of his time; to show where he coincided with or contradicted other speculators on the same topics in his own or other ages; to point out the strength and the limitations of his genius; to indicate his faults of argument without pressing too heavily upon them; and generally to consider him from the historical point of view as embodying certain contemporary phases of thought without being overmuch troubled by his errors or indignant at his heresies.

Nothing, on the other hand, is more vexatious than to find oneself launched in a vast philosophical and theological controversy when we expected a judicious criticism; to have a learned and laborious editor treating Pope as if he were Strauss, Renan, or Comte; to be told that his arguments are childish, and at the same time to be treated to elaborate refutations of them, as though they were likely to be dangerous to our faith; to find that the editor has forgotten the critic in the sound divine, and mixes sermons with his notes; and to be wearied out with the one question about Pope which is utterly uninteresting to every reasonable human being at the present day, namely, how far he was or was not sound in his theological views. If anything could add to the burden thus laid upon us, it would be the discovery that in three cases out of four the comment is more in error than the text.

L. S.

Tthjoyed The Ingoldsby Legends

it would be difficult, if not impossible, to convey an adequate impression of their quality. But all who have and their name is legionwill agree with us that the essential merit of these remarkable productions has been accurately defined or described by the filial pen of the biographer:

As respects the poems, remark able as they have been pronounced for the wit and humour which they display, their distinguishing attraction lies in the almost unparalleled flow and facility of the versification. Popular phrases, sentences the most prosaic, even the cramped technicalities of legal diction, and snatches from various languages, are wrought in with an apparent absence of all art and effort that surprises, pleases, and convulses the reader at every turn; the author triumphs with a master's hand over every sort of stanza, however complicated or exacting; not a word seems out of place, not an expression forced; syllables the most intractable find the only partners fitted for them throughout the range of language, and couple together as naturally as those kindred spirits which poets tell us were created pairs, and dispersed in space to seek out their particular mates. A harmony pervades the whole, a modulation of numbers never perhaps surpassed and rarely equalled in compositions of this class. This was the forte of Thomas Ingoldsby; a harsh line or untrue rhyme grated painfully upon his ear; no inviting point or alluring pun would induce him to enter. tain either for an instant; sacrifice or circumlocution were the only alternatives.'

The unshackled metre in which

for circumlocution; but the paren

thesis, or digression, employed to bring in the required rhyme has hardly ever the appearance of being forced or superfluous; and his delicacy of ear is shown not less by the rhythm of his idiomatic language than by the truth of his rhymes-the double rhymes particularly, in which he is only excelled by Butler. As a specimen of the mosaic construction of his verse, take the justice-scene in 'The Witches' Frolic.'

And the Squire is there In his large arm-chair, Leaning back with a grave magisterial air;

In the front of a seat a Huge volume, called Fleta, And Bracton, a tome of an old-fashion'd look,

And Coke upon Lyttleton, then a new book; And he moistens his lips

With occasional sips From a luscious sack-posset that smiles in a tankard

Close by on a side-table-not that he drank hard,

But because at that day,
I hardly need say,

The Hong Merchants had not yet invented
How Qua,

tea

Nor as yet would you see Souchong or Bohea
At the tables of persons of any degree:
How our ancestors managed to do without
I must fairly confess is a mystery to me;
Yet your Lydgates and Chaucers
Had no cups and saucers;
breakfast, in fact, and the best they
sort of a déjeuner à la fourchette ;

Their Was a

could get,

Instead of our slops

They had cutlets and chops, sack-possets, and ale in stoups, tankards, and pots;

And And they wound up the meal with rumpsteaks and 'schalots.

The Cardinal rose with a dignified look, He called for his candle, his bell, and his book!

In holy anger, and pious grief,

He solemnly cursed that rascally thief! He cursed him at board, he cursed him in bed;

From the sole of his foot to the crown of his head;

He cursed him in sleeping, that every night

He should dream of the devil, and wake in a fright;

He cursed him in eating, he cursed him in drinking,

He cursed him in coughing, in sneezing, in winking;

He cursed him in sitting, in standing, in lying;

He cursed him in walking, in riding, in flying,

He cursed him in living, he cursed him dying!

Never was heard such a terrible curse!!
But what gave rise

To no little surprise,

Nobody seemed one penny the worse!

The real thief turning out to be the jackdaw

Then the great Lord Cardinal called for his book,

And off that terrible curse he took;

The mute expression Served in lieu of confession, And, being thus coupled with full restitution,

The Jackdaw got plenary absolution!

The lurking satire at the rival faith which the reverend author hated with what his friend the Canon would call a forty-parson

VOL. III.-NO. XV. NEW SERIES.

When, as words were too faint
His merits to paint,

The Conclave determined to make him a
Saint;

And on newly-made Saints and Popes, as you know,

It's the custom, at Rome, new names to bestow,

So they canonised him by the name of Jem Crow!

Lord Brougham is celebrated in a characteristic passage and with an inimitable double rhyme :

Then Law?-'tis the same;
It's a very fine game,

But the fees and delays of the Courts' are a shame,

As Lord Brougham says himself—who's a very great name,

Though the Times made it clear he was perfectly lost in his

Classic attempt at translating Demosthenes, And don't know his particles.'Who wrote the articles,

Showing his Greek up so, is not known very well;

Many thought Barnes, others Mitchell

some Merivale.

So is the Black Mousquetaire' resolving to tempt the fortune of

war:

When a man is like me,
Sans six sous, sans souci,
A bankrupt in purse,

And in character worse,

With a shocking bad hat, and his credit at Zero,

What on earth can he hope to become,but a Hero?

What a famous thought this is !
I'll go as Ulysses

Of old did-like him I'll see manners, and know countries;

Cut Paris, and gaming,-and throats in the Low Countries.

Wit may exist without feelinghumour never. The pathos of Barham, like the pathos of Hood, welled up from the depths of the heart, was always appropriate, and always blended most effectively with his fun. The verses in which

Y