to wit, separation from her husband and two and twenty years of banishment from England; Wycherley lived a dissolute life, and married to ease his conscience when life was despaired of; Bolingbroke was an utter profligate, and destroyed the happiness of a good wife by his unblushing licentiousness; but Warburton, who owed to Pope his wife and his bishopric, appears to have been happy in both possessions. It would be curious to collect some of the contradictory opinions with regard to Pope, asserted frequently as if they bore the authority of facts. He has been called the most modest and laborious of all our poets, and he has been called the most lazy. The Quarterly gives him credit for an intense eagerness after knowledge; Mr. De Quincey dwells upon his luxurious indolence, and intimates that reading so desultory as his cannot be called study; Mrs. Oliphant, again, considers and she is quite safe in making the observation - that we cannot tell whether he would have made a greater poet if he had tossed his books aside, renounced his "unintermitting study,' and lived more under the eye of nature. That he did study at Binfield, as Milton studied at Horton, is, we think, evident from the prescription of Dr. Radcliffe, that the young man was to study less, and ride on horseback every day. His time, says Dr. Johnson, was wholly spent in reading and writing, and he observes that he improved the benefits of nature by incessant and unwearied diligence. Again he adds in a genuine bit of Johnsonese: He was one of the few whose labour is their pleasure; he was never elevated to negligence, nor wearied to impatience; he never passed a fault unamended by indifference, nor quitted it by despair. He laboured his works, first to gain reputation, and afterwards to keep it. We may add that, considering what Pope accomplished in a life which was one "long disease," it is impossible to doubt that he possessed the power of work, as well as the creative faculty. In truth, a man of real genius who is also incapable of steady application is comparatively a rare phenome non. IV. ONE of Pope's innumerable panegyrists has the folly to term him a "sacred bard." He could not have hit upon a less appropriate designation. It is possible to admire Pope keenly, but he is not the man to claim our veneration, and nothing he has done entitles him to rank among the divine poets who have brought heaven nearer to earth. There are a few sublime passages in Pope, but he is not a sublime poet; a few religious passages, but he is not a religious poet; and his high reputation is due to his inimitable work as the poet of satire and society. No man ever had his genius more entirely under control; no man ever used his powers with more consummate ability, no poet ever discerned more clearly the limitation of his art. We may frankly acknowledge that his excellence is supreme of its kind. His biographers are many, his commentators abound, and learned labour is devoted to obscure passages; to edit Pope well is to earn a literary reputation, and many a small poetaster has gained a temporary fame by catching the twang of his verse and the monotonous harmony of his periods. In his Pope's poetry never excites within us a tempest of enthusiasm. It calls forth admiration, not passion; a vivid interest, but not a profound delight. With the exception of some of the very early pieces, everything he has done is of its kind excellent. poems, we have the finest wit, the keenest irony, the most brilliant satire. He stabs a reputation or confers one with a word. To be praised by Pope, as Arbuthnot, Bolingbroke, and Bethel are praised, is to gain a literary immortality; to be laughed at by him is to be laughed at by the world for evermore. In intellectual force he was probably inferior to John Dryden; but Pope has what Dryden had not an exquisitely delicate fancy, a perfect sense of fitness and proportion, and that charming felicity of language which marks the skill of a consummate artist. Leigh Hunt complains somewhere that Pope's versification is a veritable seesaw, and there is a certain reasonableness in his complaint. Take a single instance of this here-we-go-up and here-we-go-down style: See the same man, in vigour, in the gout, Such lines remind us of a couplet in Pope's satire of Lord Hervey, which it is possible Hunt may have had in his mind in making the assertion to which we have just alluded. His wit all see-saw between that and this, Yet this is true only of Pope at his worst, and is true but rarely. The greatness of height, Than what more humble mountains offer here, Where, in their blessings, all those gods appear. See Pan with flocks, with fruits Pomona crown'd, Here Ceres' gifts in waving prospect stand, Here blushing Flora paints th' enamell'd ground, And nodding tempt the joyful reaper's hand. These lines will suffice for a sample of a poem in which, besides Ceres, Pomona, and Pan, we find allusions to Diana, Jove, Phobus, and other personages, whose connection with Windsor it is difficult to surmise. This, however, was the vice of the period, and a vice that outlasted it, witness the odes of Gray, and we mention it only to show that Pope was incompetent to describe the natural beauty which all of us may behold, or that beauty more wondrous still which great poets such as Spencer and Wordsworth see with the eye of faith. Pope is seen in his immeasurable superiority | Not proud Olympus yields a nobler sight, to all his imitators, and they are legion; his Though gods assembled grace his towering inferiority is manifest when brought into competition with great imaginative poets like Keats or Shelley or Wordsworth. These men moved altogether in another sphere. They were interpreters of nature, and of nature Pope knew even less than they knew of society. There is no clash between poets of such different orders, for there is no point of contact; and it speaks little for a reader's sympathy or intellectual grasp if he cannot enter into the spiritual beauty of Wordsworth, the luxurious imagination of Keats, the perfect music of Shelley, and yet enjoy at the same time with keenest relish such poems as the Moral Essays or the Rape of the Lock. Indeed, whether it be from indolence of mind, or from some other less obvious cause, it is certain that high art is not always that which affords us the highest pleasure. In certain moods (they are perhaps the most frequent) we prefer Hogarth to Raffael and Goldsmith to Milton, we like a farce better than a tragedy, and a domestic tale than a great historical romance. It is possible that the even mediocrity of Pope may have enhanced his reputation. He never rises above he apprehension of his readers; his imagination never soars into a region too lofty for their wings to follow him. This, indeed, is a characteristic of the Queen Anne men. We see it in Addison and Swift and Steele; we see it strikingly in Defoe; we see it in the theological and political writings of the period. In an age in which Pope was the most perfect artist, in which he and Addison and Swift ruled in the domain of letters, in which theologians found their spokesman in Atterbury and polemists in Sacheverell, the splendid heroes of an earlier and greater century would have found no resting-place. Milton, fierce dispu ant though he was, would have scorned the peddling animosities and petty jealousies which occupied the Twickenham poet; Atterbury's courtly genius, of the earth earthy, would have had no attractions for Jeremy Taylor, the Chrysostom of English divines. We are accustomed to call Pope the poet of artifical life, and the remark is not to be gainsayed. If there had been no cities there would have been no Pope. He sings of men and women, not of nature; or when he does make an attempt, as in his Windsor Forest, to describe natural objects, his heart is not in the work. That poem is full of the conventional phraseology now happily rejected by poets. Take a single and brief speci men: 66 When Pope had attained the summit of his fame, a Scotchman came to London with scarce a penny in his pocket, but with strong hope in his heart. He had not money enough to buy himself pair of boots, but he had written a poem called Winter, and this poem was not only destined to make the poet's fortune, but to effect a revolution in English poetry. We are apt to forget how much we owe to Thomson, whose landscape, as Mr. Palgrave has well observed, seems conventional to us, although it startled his contemporaries like a heresy." He led our poets back to the nature which they had long deserted, and in spite of his affectation may be regarded as the poetic ancestor of Cowper. Thomson, who flourished on his genius, and became "more fat than bard beseems," was a near neighbour of the Twickenham poet; and Thomson's hairdresser relates that when Pope called on his brother bard he usually wore a light coloured great coat, which he kept on in the house. "He was " (we quote the barber's opinion) " a strange, ill-formed little figure of a man, but I have heard him and Quin and Patterson talk so together at Thomson's that I could have listened to them forever." One of the most interesting points in connection with the intimacy that existed between Pope and Thomson is the fact that the elder poet revised the Seasons, and that his alterations were adopted by the author. In this instance alone did Pope try his hand at blank verse, and certainly, in the passage quoted by Mr. Carruthers, in which Lavinia is compared to a myrtle blooming in the hollow breast of the mountains, "beneath the shelter of encircling hills," Pope has not only produced a beautiful simile, but has proved that he From The Pall Mall Gazette. THE DISTURBANCES IN ITALY. THE recent outbreaks in so many different parts of Italy betoken a very uneasy state of things in that country. More, indeed, have taken place than have found their way into Reuter's telegrams, which, with an occasional extract from some Ministerial organ, form the sole source of information to most English readers. Besides the movements in the garrison towns of the north, which were chiefly serious as showing the defection of part of the army, there was some weeks ago a not inconsiderable rising at Massa Carrara, in which the Carabineers on the spot were overpowered, and were only rescued by reinforcements summoned by telegraph. Discoveries of arms and ammunition are said to have been made by the police both in Milan and Florence, and in the former town the muskets of the national might have been occasionally successful in blank verse. We say occasionally, for Pope's poetical instrument was as indubitably the heroic couplet as Paganini's musical instrument was the fiddle. "On the whole," says Mr. Pattison, the rhythm of the heroic couplet, as settled by Pope, must ever remain the classical model of English versification. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, when the reaction against the poetry of good sense set in, it was not thought enough to depart from the style of Pope unless his metre was rejected also. The return to nature in the poetical revolution, was attempted by throwing off law. The aspiration to reach a higher melody' by means of lawless rhythms has led us back to the barbarous versification of the seventeenth century, and much is written as poetry which can only deserve to be so called because it is not prose." To this we may add, that no poet of these later days who has ap-guards have been removed from the charge peared before the world as a revolutionist in metre has permanently won the ear of the public. Pope, it may be worth observing, is one of the few great English poets, three or four at most, who never produced a sonnet; and he shows little if any trace of lyrical power. Again, he has written none of the verses which children love, nor any lines which grown-up people care to croon over in moments of weakness or sorrow. In his works the wit o'ertops the poetry, the intellect gets the better of the heart, and thus he wins admiration from his readers rather than affection. It is this deficiency which sometimes prevents men of imaginative power and large culture from appreciating Pope at all. Thus, Southey told Rogers that he had read Spenser through about thirty times, and that he could not read Pope through once. On the other hand, some minds of a very high order, but more remarkable for breadth of intellect than for emotional susceptibilities, have found the fullest satisfaction in the poetry of Pope, and we are reminded by Mr. Pattison that he was the favourite poet of Immanuel Kant. J. D. Nature reports the discovery at Hautevillesur-Mer, France, near to a rock called Maulieu, of a bed of vegetable mould, in which repose trunks of trees, still holding by their roots, along with a layer of turf. At high tide this bed is covered to the depth of about twelve inches. The oak alone has preserved its hardness, the other woods having become quite soft, but still preserving their colour and even their bark. It is believed that the immersion occurred about the eighth century. Pall Mall Gazette. of the municipality to that of the royal forces. The outbreak of the students in the University of Florence, which the telegraph has reported, was preceded by one among the students at Naples, in which cries of Republican character were loud. In the Calabrian provinces the risings have been serious, no less than a thousand men having been reported as in arms, and every available soldier has been despatched from Naples to the scene. On the borders of the Tuscan Maremma also there is a band on foot, which Signor Lanza described in the Chamber as of small size, but which has been joined by a number of the coastguard officers, and at Leghorn there have been a large number of preventive arrests effected. These movements are all avowedly Republican, yet we do not think they form part of a general scheme of rising, for they are isolated and consecutive rather than combined, and they have not been supported as yet by any sign from Lombardy, where Republicanism is at once strongest, most determined, and probably best organized. More likely they are only the outbursts of local impatience, an explanation which is helped by the fact that they are stated to be generally set on foot by bands of young men, who suddenly take the field, and on the failure of the first blow seem to sink out of sight among the population of the neighbourhood. But it is an exceedingly ugly symptom when, even conceding there is no organization, armed revolt bursts out sporadically over the whole country, from Parma to Palermo, and when the North seems to be quietly biding its time till the moment for a decisive movement arrives. That the young peasants in the fields, the young artizans | sentation is a farce, arbitrary police interin the cities, the young students in the uni-ference prevents every legitimate agitation versities, without concert or connection, for improvement in the institutions, and seem ready to take arms into their hands there is a wide-spread conviction that from for the purpose of proclaiming the Republic, the highest quarters of Government to the certainly betokens anything but stability lowest, corruption is universal. These misof affection for existing institutions. Yet chiefs are attributed to the influence of a those of our readers who have followed the party called the " consorteria," to whose remarks we have from time to time made on acts, much more than to the instigation of the misgovernment of the country will be the "codini," the evil situation of Italy is little surprised that the impatience should due. The "consorteria" is composed of take even so extreme a form. A prodigious such of the supporters of the old régime as land tax, an income tax of 12 per cent., and have externally accepted the new order of a weighty octroi on every article of food things, of those so-called Liberals who had and drink, and a flour tax which seems to the astuteness to perceive that liberalism take even the bread out of the mouth, are was the winning card of the Court favourites, sources of discontent which it may be con- and of the rich local magnates. They are ceded would make even an Englishman re- supported by a few men of real liberalism bel. A correspondent who has lived in but of somewhat advanced age, who scarcely Italy has lately indeed reproved us for re- keep pace with the new needs of the counferring to these fiscal burdens, which, he try, and by a not inconsiderable number of argues, are essential to the formation of a public men whose nominal liberalism has new kingdom, and which, he tells us, are really been based on a hope of their own only urged by the "codini," or the friends advancement. This party has the majority of the banished Sovereigns, as a ground for in the Chambers; it divides the good things present dissatisfaction. But it is the mis- among its own adherents; it resists every fortune of Italy that the acts of the Govern-reform which would diminish their value or ment are such as to unite both the reaction- endanger its own pre-eminence; it misleads ary and the progressive party in opposition. the King and misgoverns the State. The former, indeed, is gradually dying out, and even in Naples the Bourbonists make But the ground they lose is more than won by the Republicans, and for this the folly of the governing classes is answerable. Even the enormous taxation would be endured in the name of a united Italy, if the results of the union were visible in the shape of real independence and liberty. But the people see the successive Ministries abjectly servile to France, and they naturally grudge an expenditure on military purposes which furnishes no results. The course of justice is oppressive, centralization are not seen and remedied. destroys local energy, the national repre no way. To this party it is then that Republicanism owes its present growth, and Italy the present and impending troubles. Five years ago Republicanism was a sentiment, and even its chiefs offered loyal acceptance of the monarchy if the monarchy would only frankly accept the support and fairly recognize the rights of the people. The bargain was refused; the monarchy has leaned on a faction, and the faction has betrayed it to serve its own ends. It is against this system that Italy is now protesting by revolt, and the revolt will be universal if its causes END OF VOL. CV. |