DEATH. Why start at death? Where is he? death arrived, Ere hope, sensation fails, black boding man Man makes a death, which nature never made; And feels a thousand deaths in fearing one." For another specimen, yet more characteristic of Dr. Young's mind, refer to the chapter on Sublimity in this work. SECTION V. OF DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709–1784). [Extracted from the North American Review, 1835.} Dr. Channing has gained great celebrity for his criticism upon Milton, in which he vindicates the latter from the unjust representations of Dr. Johnson, in his "Lives of the Poets." Dr. Johnson has certainly not done justice to Mil ton; but this was owing, we think, to his political prejudices, and not, as Dr. Channing intimates, to any want of 'enthusiasm, creative imagination, or lofty sentiment." The author of Rasselas, if he had never written another word, would have amply substantiated, by that work only, his claims to the possession of all those faculties in their fullest perfection. But all his other works are marked by the same general characteristics. The Rambler is one perpetual flow of the purest wisdom, embodied in the richest language. It is, from one end to the other, as Cicero says with so much beauty of Aristotle, a river of flowing gold. Why should we find fault with the style, because its merit is not exactly the same with that which we admire in the works of some other great writers? Are there not in the gardens of letters and art, as well as in those of nature, a hundred kinds of beauty, all different, and each equally charming in its own way? For ourselves, we look on Dr. Johnson as the master-mind of the last century. We respect even what we may consider his errors, for they were generally closely connected with the highest virtues. Almost every line that he wrote has a real value. We rejoice more especially that it fell to his lot—and it was a singular distinction, reserved for him alone of all the human beings that have yet lived― to furnish, in his conversation, the materials for a copious and elaborate book-one of the most instructive and entertaining in the whole compass of literature; a work which is quaintly styled by a late writer the Johnsoniad, and which, for our own reading, we much prefer to the whole array of modern" degraded epics." Of Johnson, Dr. Channing says: "We trust we are not blind to his merits. His stately march, his pomp and power of language, his strength of thought, his reverence for virtue and religion, his vigorous logic, his practical wisdom, his insight into the springs of human action, and the solemn pathos which occasionally pervades his descriptions of life, and his references to his own history, command our willing admiration. We do not blame him for not being Milton. We love intellectual power in all its forms, and delight in the variety of mind. We blame him only that his passions, prejudices, and bigotry, engaged him in the unworthy task of obscuring the brighter glory of one of the most gifted and virtuous men. We only ask the friends of genius not to put their faith in Johnson's delineations of it. His biographical works are tinged with his notoriously strong prejudices, and of all his 'Lives,' we hold that of Milton to be the most apocryphal." (For some other remarks on Milton, see section ii.) SECTION VI. ALEXANDER POPE appeared with repute as an author about the year 1709. His principal efforts in boyhood were translations from the Roman poets, a kind of literature then much cultivated. At sixteen he wrote some pastorals, and the beginning of Windsor Castle, which, when published, a few years after, obtained high praise for melody of versification. His Essay on Criticism was written at the age of twenty-one, and was extolled for its happy illustrations. It is said to be a fair specimen of what the wits of Queen Anne's reign were most pleased with—an epigrammatic turn of thought, and a happy appropriateness of expression. The following is one of the most admired passa Les in this poem: "But most by numbers judge a poet's song; And smooth or rough, with them, is right or wrong In the bright muse, though thousand charms conspire, Who haunt Parnassus but to please the ear, In the next line it With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song, Which, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along." The dexterity with which the passages here marked in italics were made to exemplify the faults which they condemned, was greatly prized by the readers of those days; and it is allowed that these deformities were thenceforward banished from our literature. The two most beautiful poems of Pope, written when he was only twenty-three years of age, are, the Rape of the Lock, and the Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady. The former contains more fancy than any other of his poems, though it is exerted only on ludicrous and artificial objects. Its machinery consists of a set of supernatural beings, who, like the heathen deities in the Iliad and Æneid, were employed in developing the plot and bringing it to a conclusion: it consisted of the sylphs and gnomes, good and evil genii, who were supposed by the Rosicrucian philosophers to direct the proceedings of human beings; and no kind of creatures could have been better adapted to direct the proceedings of human beings, and to enter into a story compounded, as this is, of airy fashionable frivolities. The heroine of his other poem, the Elegy, is said to have destroyed herself in France, in consequence of her affections being blighted by the tyranny of an uncle, and the following are some of the more pathetic lines in which her loss is deplored : * What can atone, oh ever injured shade, No friend's complaint, no kind domestic tear, By foreign hands thy humble grave adorn'd, * * * * * * So peaceful rests, without a stone, a name, "Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be! At twenty-five Pope's reputation, as a poet, was established. His next work was a translation of the Iliad and part of the Odyssey-both fascinating and brilliant translations, though wanting the simple majesty and unaffected grandeur of the heathen poet. His principal satirical poem is the Dunciad, a work of misdirected talent, and full of sentiments inconsistent with the character of a Christian author. At the suggestion of Lord Bolingbroke, his next production was the Essay on Man, in which he embodied a series of arguments respecting the human being, in relation to the universe, to himself, to society, and to the pursuit of happiness. This was published in 1733, and displays the poet's extraordinary power of managing argument in verse, and of compressing his thoughts into clauses of the most energetic brevity, as well as of expanding them into passages glittering with every poetic ornament. Yet the work abounds in theological errors. His Letters are elegant and sprightly, but are too evidently written for parade to be agreeable. He died in 1744, at the age of fifty-six. The following fine passage is from the Essay on Man: PROVIDENCE VINDICATED IN THE PRESENT STATE OF Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate; From brutes what men, from inen what spirt know. And now a bubble burst, and now a world. Hope humbly, then; with trembling pinions soar, He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire: Go, wiser thou! and in thy scale of sense, |