Pleased to look forward, pleased to look behind,
And count each birthday with a grateful mind?
Has life no sourness, drawn so near its end?
Canst thou endure a foe, forgive a friend?
Has age but melted the rough parts away,
As winter-fruits grow mild ere they decay?
Or will you think, my friend, your business done,
When of a hundred thorns you pull out one?

Learn to live well, or fairly make your will;
You've play'd, and loved, and eat, and drunk your fill:
Walk sober off, before a sprightlier age

Comes tittering on, and shoves you from the stage:
Leave such to trifle with more grace and ease,
Whom folly pleases, and whose follies please.'

1 It, perhaps, might have been better to have omitted these two last lines, the second of which has a quaint

315

320

325

and modern turn, and the humour consists in being driven off the stage "potum largius æquo."-WARTon.

IMITATIONS OF HORACE.

BOOK I., EPISTLE VII.

IMITATED IN THE MANNER OF DR. SWIFT.

"THE colloquial and burlesque style and measure of Swift here adopted did not suit the genius and manner of our author, who frequently falls back, as was natural, from the familiar into his own more laboured, high, and pompous manner. See particularly line 125, and also 189:

Tell how the moon beams, &c.

And this difference of style is more striking and perceivable, from the circumstance of their being immediately subjoined to the lighter and less ornamental verses of Swift.

"The four epistles which Mr. Pitt translated; namely, the 19th, 4th, 10th, and 18th of the first book, and which are inserted in the 43rd volume of the Works of English Poets, if they were carefully and candidly inspected, will be found really equal to any of Pope's Imitations, and are executed with a dignified familiarity and ease, in the very manner of Horace.

"After all that has been said of Horace by so many critics, ancient and modern, perhaps no words can describe him so exactly and justly as the following of Tully, spoken on another subject (Lib. 1, de Oratore) Accedit lepos quidam, facetiæque, et eruditio libero digna, celeritasque et brevitas respondendi et lacessendi, subtili venustate et urbanitate conjuncta.'"-WARTON.

"Dr. Warton observes, 'That the colloquial and burlesque style and measure of Swift, here adopted, did not suit the genius and manner of our Author, who frequently falls back, as was natural, from the familiar into his own more laboured, high, and pompous manner.'

“The observation is so far just, that Pope certainly does not display, in his Imitations of Horace, the ease and familiarity of Swift; but this does not detract from their merit any farther than as professed Imitations of Swift. Neither, are the least like Horace. Dr. Warton's description of Horace's character, as a writer of Epistles and Satires (for it does not at all apply to him in his lyric capacity), is, from Cicero de Oratore, lib. i., appropriate and accurate."BOWLES.

Swift's Imitation first appears in the Miscellanies of 1727. Pope's completion of this Imitation, and his Imitation of the Seventh Epistle of the First Book, were first published in the 8vo edition of his works, printed for Dodsley and Cooper in 1738.

Warton's remarks are just. The octosyllabic metre, which suited Swift's colloquial style, was too facile for Pope's pointed and polished composition. But the Imitations are for this very reason interesting, from the characteristic contrast they afford between the manners of the two poets.