half, and is at this day as much admired as ever, Mr. Elwin's invectives should be directed rather against the fatuity of the English mind than against the shortcomings of the poet.

A great deal of verbal shall dismiss very briefly. it seems, ten times, which --for our part, considering that the poem is 744 lines long, and that the intellectual faculty which Pope called 'sense' is to a large extent the subject of it, we find nothing incredible in the fact mentioned. But 'wit' is used as a rhyme twelve times. Too often certainly; here, we admit, is a slight blemish. But 'wit' is used at random, and in all kinds of senses; it means a witty man, a learned man, the intellect, judgment, and the antithesis to judgment. This, if true, would be a serious fault; but we shall show that Mr. Elwin is either censuring the English language, or that he misunderstands Pope and misrepresents him. That the same word represents a witty person and a faculty of the mind, if an imperfection, is an imperfection with which the English language, not Pope, is chargeable. He found the ambiguous use of the word firmly established, and is not blameable for having so employed it. Again, that a further ambiguity besets the word, that it means intelligence generally, and specially that form of intelligence which rapidly combines separate ideas in virtue of some not obvious resemblance, this also is true; but the ambiguity was sanctioned by the universal usage of the educated class of that day; it is again the English language, not Pope, which is to blame. But that Pope used

criticism follows which we
'Sense' is used as a rhyme,
'appears almost incredible';

'wit' in the sense of 'judgment' distinctively, is not The charge is founded on the following

true. lines :

Some to whom heaven in wit has been profuse,
Want as much more to turn it to its use.

Essay, 1. 80.

It is alleged that in the second line wit means 'judgment.' But that this is not the case may easily be proved by reading the word 'judgment' after 'much more,' the effect of which will be to make nonsense of the whole passage. The double use of wit is not entirely defensible; but it is certain that in both lines it nearly corresponds to 'intellectual power' generally. With a difference, however; for in the first line that branch of intellectual power is more particularly intended which we usually call wit; in the second, that branch which we call judgment. It is evident therefore that Pope does not really confound wit with judgment, as alleged by Mr. Elwin.

Johnson, Addison, Warton, and Hazlitt, all warm admirers of the Essay, are against Mr. Elwin; but he congratulates himself on having found an ally in Mr. De Quincey. That De Quincey, though a man of ability, was unfit for the task of criticizing Pope, a single illustration, borrowed from Mr. Elwin, will suffice to prove. Referring to the well-known lines at the end of Pope's satirical character of Addison,— Who but must laugh, if such a man there be? Who would not weep, if Atticus were he?

De Quincey says that the whole antithesis falls to the ground, because our reason for laughing was, that

we found the strange mixture of qualities previously described in a man of genius, and that our reason for weeping is, that the subject of the same qualities is a man of genius; which is a kind of tautology. De Quincey must have beclouded his brain with opium when he wrote thus, and Mr. Elwin, without that excuse, adopts and defends the misrepresentation. We are asked to laugh at the sight of a man of genius subject to these little inconsistencies and aberrations; but we are invited to change our laughter into mourning, when we reflect that the subject of this strange assemblage of qualities is a man of virtue (not genius); that it is Atticus-Addison-whose character, noble and elevated though all the world knew it to be, was yet not exempt from these pitiable imperfections. In this way, we imagine, nine out of ten readers instinctively understand the lines, though they may not bring out the reasoning which pervades them into clear consciousness.

Another charge brought against Pope by Mr. Elwin is, that he ungratefully attacked and libelled his old friend and patron, Wycherley, in the following passage :

What crowds of these, impenitently bold,
In sounds and jingling syllables grown old,
Still run on poets in a raging vein,

Ev'n to the dregs and squeezing of the brain,
Strain out the last dull droppings of their sense,
And rhyme with all the rage of impotence !
Such shameless bards we have ;—

Essay, 1. 604.

Warton says, 'It has been suggested that the lines refer to Wycherley;' Bowles,--dreadless of the casti

gation that he was one day to receive from Byron,'decides that at that period' they could not suit any one else. Mr. Elwin boldly assumes that the lines refer to Wycherley without a shadow of doubt. The application,' he says, 'was too obvious for Pope to have ventured on the lines unless he had designed to expose his former ally.' Now it seems to us, that the assumption of an intended application of these lines to Wycherley is utterly gratuitous and unreasonable. A single word, it is hardly too much to say, demolishes the theory. These poets who rhyme on to the last have been before described as 'the dull ;'

'Tis best sometimes your censure to restrain,
And charitably let the dull be vain.

But Wycherley's bitterest enemy would never have called him dull; his audacious style, though full of faults, certainly had not that of dulness. He himself, as Mr. Elwin admits, never supposed that the lines referred to him, and praised the Essay on Criticism in a letter to Pope's friend Cromwell. Again, if it was Pope's object to 'expose his former ally,' it is not easy to explain why, in the sumptuous folio edition of his works published only six years afterwards, in 1717, some laudatory lines from Wycherley occupy a prominent place among the friendly testimonials which, according to the custom of those days, form the introduction and credentials to the poems. The satire seems to us too severe to have been intended even for Blackmore, were the supposition otherwise admis

1 In the English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.

sible.' 'Fulsome dedicators' (1. 593) are the class of poets indicated to us, and we think of such writers as Sprat, and Stepney, and Samuel Wesley, and perhaps Oldmixon, of some of whom there are Pindaric Poems preserved in a volume in the Bodleian Library, in which hollow elegies on Queen Mary are prefaced by fulsome dedications to her husband William.

It seems worth while to probe this question yet more deeply. A careful study of the correspondence between Pope on one side, and Wycherley and Cromwell on the other, may convince any one that Mr. Elwin's theory (that the lines above quoted refer to Wycherley) is wholly preposterous and untenable. Commencing in 1704, Pope's correspondence with Wycherley extends to May 1710. In 1704 Wycherley had published a folio volume entitled Miscellany Poems it contained Satires, Madrigals, Songs, &c. This publication certainly did not lay him open to the charge of being a 'fulsome dedicator,' like the poets whom Pope was thinking of when he wrote the lines already quoted; the Preface was addressed 'to his Criticks,' and the Dedication 'to Vanity.' Frequent repetitions, and an inexcusable carelessness of versification (to say nothing of moral blemishes of a far graver kind), disfigured this work. Amazed by the genius of the boy poet to whom his friend Sir William Trumball had introduced him, Wycherley, whose

1 It is not admissible, because the first of Blackmore's longwinded epics, which he certainly continued to write 'ev'n to the dregs and squeezing of the brain,' was first published in 1712, the year after the publication of the Essay.