sioned minds to the contemplation of manners, and of the social affections of man as exhibited in manners. With this propensity co-operates, no doubt, some degree of despondency when looking at the great models of the literature who have usually pre-occupied the grander passions, and displayed their movements in the earlier periods of literature. Now it happens that the French, from an extraordinary defect in the higher qualities of passion, have attracted the notice of foreign nations chiefly to that field of their literature in which the taste and the unimpassioned understanding preside. But in all nations such literature is a natural growth of the mind, and would arise equally if the French literature had never existed. The wits of Queen Anne's reign, or even of Charles II.'s, were not French by their taste or their imitation. Butler and Dryden were surely not French; and of Milton we need not speak; as little was Pope French, either by his institution or by his models. Boileau he certainly admired too much; and, for the sake of a poor parallelism with a passage about Greece in Horace, he has falsified history in the most ludicrous manner, without a shadow of countenance from facts, in order to make out that we, like the Romans, received laws of taste from those whom we had conquered. these are insulated cases and accidents, not to insist on his known and most profound admiration, often expressed, for both Chaucer and Shakspeare and Milton. Secondly, that Pope is to be classed as an inferior poet, has arisen purely from a confusion between the departments of poetry which he cultivated and the merit of his culture. The first place must undoubtedly be given for ever,-it

But

cannot be refused, to the impassioned movements of the tragic, and to the majestic movements of the epic muse. We cannot alter the relations of things out of favour to an individual. But in his own department, whether higher or lower, that man is supreme who has not yet been surpassed; and such a man is Pope. As to the final notion, first started by Walsh, and propagated by Warton, it is the most absurd of all the three; it is not from superior correctness that Pope is esteemed more correct, but because the compass and sweep of his performances lie more within the range of ordinary judgments. Many questions that have been raised upon Milton or Shakspeare, questions relating to so subtle a subject as the flux and reflux of human passion, lie far above the region of ordinary capacities; and the indeterminateness or even carelessness of the judgment is transferred by a common confusion to its objects. But waiving this, let us ask what is meant by "correctness?" Correctness in what? In developing the thought? In connecting it, or effecting the transitions? In the use of words? In the grammar? In the metre? Under every one of these limitations of the idea, we maintain that Pope is not distinguished by correctness; nay, that, as compared with Shakspeare, he is eminently incorrect. Produce us from any drama of Shakspeare one of those leading passages that all men have by heart, and show us any eminent defect in the very sinews of the thought. It is impossible; defects there may be, but they will always be found irrelevant to the main central thought, or to its expression. Now turn to Pope; the first striking passage which offers itself to

our memory is the famous character of Addison, ending thus:

Who would not laugh, if such a man there be,
Who but must weep if Atticus were he?

Why must we laugh? Because we find a grotesque assembly of noble and ignoble qualities. Very well; but why, then, must we weep? Because this assemblage is found actually existing in an eminent man of genius. Well, that is a good reason for weeping; we weep for the degradation of human nature. But then revolves the question, Why must we laugh? Because, if the belonging to a man of genius were a sufficient reason for weeping so much we know from the very first. The very first line says, "Peace to all such. But were there one whose fires true genius kindles and fair fame inspires." Thus falls to the ground the whole antithesis of this famous character. We are to change our mood from laughter to tears upon a sudden discovery that the character belonged to a man of genius; and this we had already known from the beginning. Match us this prodigious oversight in Shakspeare. Again, take the "Essay on Criticism" it is a collection of independent maxims, tied together into a fasciculus by the printer, but having no natural order or logical dependency generally so vague as to mean nothing like the general rules of justice, &c., in ethics, to which every man assents; but when the question comes about any practical case, is it just? The opinions fly asunder far as the poles. And what is remarkable, many of the rules are violated by no man so often as by Pope, and by Pope nowhere so often as in

this very poem. As a single instance, he proscribes monosyllabic lines; and in no English poem of any pretensions are there so many lines of that class as in this. We have counted above a score, and the last line of all is monosyllabic.

Not, therefore, for superior ccrrectness, but for qualities the very same as belong to his most distinguished brethren, is Pope to be considered a great poet; for impassioned thinking, powerful description, pathetic reflection, brilliant narration. His characteristic difference is simply that he carried these powers into a different field, and moved chiefly amongst the social paths of men, and viewed their characters as operating through their manners. And our obligations to him arise chiefly on this ground, that having already, in the persons of earlier poets, carried off the palm in all the grander trials of intellectual strength, for the majesty of the epopee and the impassioned vehemence of the tragic drama, to Pope we owe it that we can now claim an equal pre-eminence in the sportive and aërial graces of the mock heroic and satiric muse; that in the "Dunciad" we possess a peculiar form of satire, in which (according to a plan unattempted by any other nation) we see alternately her festive smile and her gloomiest scowl; that the grave good sense of the nation has here found its brightest mirror; and, finally, that through Pope the cycle of our poetry is perfected and made orbicular, that from that day we might claim the laurel equally, whether for dignity or grace.

GOETHE.

JOHN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, a man of commanding influence in the literature of modern Germany throughout the latter half of his long life, and possessing two separate claims upon our notice: one in right of his own unquestionable talents; and another much stronger, though less direct, arising out of his position, and the extravagant partisanship put forward on his behalf for the last forty years. The literary body in all countries, and for reasons which rest upon a sounder basis than that of private jealousies, have always been disposed to a republican simplicity in all that regards the assumption of rank and personal pretensions. Valeat quantum valere potest, is the form of license to every man's ambition, coupled with its caution: let his influence and authority be commensurate with his attested value: and, because no man in the present infinity of human speculation, and the present multiformity of human power, can hope for more than a very limited superiority, there is an end at once to all absolute dictatorship. The dictatorship in any case could be only relative, and in relation to a single department of art or knowledge; and this for a reason stronger