had sealed his despair, he humbled himself into a petty schoolmaster. These facts are interesting, because they suggest at once the motive for the merciless punishment inflicted upon Pope. His own father was a Papist like Bromley, but a sincere and honest Papist, who had borne double taxes, legal stigmas, and public hatred for conscience' sake. His contempt was habitually pointed at those who tampered with religion for interested purposes. His son inherited these upright feelings. And we may easily guess what would be the bitter sting of any satire he would write on Bromley. Such a topic was too true to be forgiven, and too keenly barbed by Bromley's conscience. By the way, this writer, like ourselves, reads in this juvenile adventure a prefiguration of Pope's satirical destiny.

POPE AS A SCHOLAR.-Page 250.

Meantime, the felicities of this translation are at times perfectly astonishing; and it would be scarcely possible to express more nervously or amply the words,—

than this child of fourteen has done in the following couplet, which, most judiciously, by reversing the two clauses, gains the power of fusing them into connexion :

"And impotent desire to reign alone,

That scorns the dull reversion of a throne."

But the passage for which, beyond all others, we must make room, is a series of eight lines, corresponding to six in the original, and this for two reasons :-First, because Dr. Joseph Warton has deliberately asserted that in our whole literature "we have scarcely eight more beautiful lines than these"; and, though few readers will subscribe to so sweeping a judgment, yet certainly these must be wonderful lines for a boy which could challenge such commendation from an experienced polyhistor of infinite reading. Secondly, because the lines contain a night-scene. Now, it must be well known to many readers that the famous night-scene in the "Iliad," so familiar to every school-boy, has been made the subject, for the last thirty years, of severe, and in many respects, of just criticisms. This description will therefore have a double interest by comparison; whilst, whatever may be thought of either taken separately for itself, considered as a translation, this which we now quote is as true to Statius as the other is undoubtedly faithless to Homer :

"Jamque per emeriti surgens confinia Phabi
Titanis, late mundo subvecta silenti

Rorifera gelidum tenuaverat aera biga.

Jam pecudes volucresque tacent: jam somnus avaris
Inserpit curis, pronusque per aera nutat,

Grata laboratæ referens oblivia vitæ."

Theb. i. 336-341.

"'Twas now the time when Phoebus yields to night,
And rising Cynthia shed her silver light;
Wide o'er the world in solemn pomp she drew
Her airy chariot hung with pearly dew.

All birds and beasts lie hushed. Sleep steals away
The wild desires of men and toils of day;

And brings, descending through the silent air,
A sweet forgetfulness of human care."

POPE'S RETORT UPON ADDISON.-Pages 279-280.

[The following, though not one of De Quincey's original notes to his Encyclopædia Britannica article, has its proper place here. It is a portion of a very short subsequent paper of his, in which, while giving other specimens of literary bulls or blunders, he recurs to what he maintains to be Pope's blunder in his famous lines on Addison, and repeats and expands his criticism of those lines in the text of the present article. The rest of the short paper is reserved for a fitter occasion; but all that relates to Pope is extracted here.-M.]

There is nothing extraordinary, or that could merit a special notice, in a simple case of oversight, or in a blunder, though emanating from the greatest of poets. But such a case challenges and forces our attention when we know that the particular passage in which it occurs was wrought and burnished with excessive pains, or (which in this case is also known) when that particular passage is pushed into singular prominence as having obtained a singular success. In no part of his poetic mission did Pope so fascinate the gaze of his contemporaries as in his functions of satirist; which functions, in his latter years, absorbed all other functions. And one reason, I believe, why it was that the interest about Pope decayed so rapidly after his death (an accident somewhere noticed by Wordsworth) must be sought in the fact that the most stinging of his personal allusions, by which he had given salt to his later writings, were continually losing their edge, and sometimes their intelligibility, as Pope's own contemporary generation was dying off. Pope alleges it as a palliation of his satiric malice that it had been forced from him in the way of retaliation; forgetting that such a plea wilfully abjures the grandest justification of a satirist, viz. the deliberate assumption of the character as something corresponding to the prophet's mission amongst the Hebrews. It is no longer the facit indignatio versum. Pope's satire, wherever it was most effective, was personal and vindictive, and upon that argument alone could not be philosophic. Foremost in the order of his fulminations stood, and yet stands, the bloody castigation by which, according to his own pretence, he warned and menaced (but by which, in simple truth, he executed judgment upon) his false friend, Addison. To say that this drew vast rounds of applause upon its author, and frightened its object into deep silence for the rest of his life, like the Quos ego of angry Neptune, sufficiently argues that the verses must have ploughed as deeply as the Russian knout. Vitriol could not scorch more fiercely. And yet the whole passage rests upon

a blunder; and the blunder is so broad and palpable that it implies
instant forgetfulness both in the writer and the reader. The idea
which furnishes the basis of the passage is this: that the conduct
ascribed to Addison is in its own nature so despicable as to extort
laughter by its primary impulse, but that this laughter changes into
weeping when we come to understand that the person concerned in
this delinquency is Addison. The change, the transfiguration, in our
mood of contemplating the offence is charged upon the discovery which
we are supposed to make as to the person of the offender; that which
by its baseness had been simply comic when imputed to some corre-
sponding author passes into a tragic coup-de-théatre when it is suddenly
traced back to a man of original genius. The whole, therefore, of this
effect is made to depend upon the sudden scenical transition from a
supposed petty criminal to one of high distinction. And, meantime,
no such stage effect had been possible, since the knowledge that a man
of genius was the offender had been what we started with from the
beginning. "Our laughter is changed to tears," says Pope,
as we discover that the base act had a noble author." And, behold!
the initial feature in the whole description of the case is, that the
libeller was one whom "true genius fired":

"Peace to all such! But, were there one whose mind
True genius fires," etc.

as soon

Before the offence is described, the perpetrator is already characterised as a man of genius: and, in spite of that knowledge, we laugh. But suddenly our mood changes, and we weep. But why? I beseech you. Simply because we have ascertained the author to be a man of genius.

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

The sole reason for weeping is something that we knew already before we began to laugh.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH 1

THIS book accomplishes a retribution which the world has waited for through more than seventy years. Welcome at any rate by its purpose, it is trebly welcome by its execution, to all hearts that linger indulgently over the frailties of a national favourite, long systematically exaggerated, -to all hearts that brood indignantly over the genial powers of that favourite, too often maliciously undervalued.

A man of original genius, shown to us as revolving through the leisurely stages of a biographical memoir, lays open, to readers prepared for such revelations, two separate theatres of interest: one in his personal career; the other in his works and his intellectual development. Both unfold concurrently and each borrows a secondary interest from the other: the life from the recollection of the works-the works from the joy and sorrow of the life. There have, indeed, been authors whose great creations, severely preconceived in a region of thought transcendent to all impulses of earth, would have been pretty nearly what they are under any possible changes in the dramatic arrangement of their lives. Happy or not happy, these - gay or sad,authors would equally have fulfilled a mission too solemn

1 First published in the North British Review for May 1848, and revised by De Quincey in 1857 for the collective edition of his works, with some verbal changes (e.g. "we" into "I," "our" into "my"). The book reviewed was "The Life and Adventures of Goldsmith: a Biography. In four books. By John Forster. London, 1848."

and too stern in its obligations to suffer any warping from chance, or to bend before the accidents of life, whether dressed in sunshine or in wintry gloom. But generally this is otherwise. Children of Paradise,

like the Miltons of our planet, have the privilege of stars to "dwell apart." But the children of flesh, whose pulses beat too sympathetically with the agitations of mother earth, cannot sequester themselves in that way. They walk in no such altitudes, but at elevations easily reached by ground-winds of humble calamity. And from that cup of sorrow which upon all lips is pressed in some proportion they must submit, by the very tenure on which they hold their gifts, to drink, if not more profoundly than others, yet more perilously as regards the fulfilment of their intellectual mission.

Amongst this household of children, too sympathetically linked to the trembling impulses of earth, stands forward conspicuously Oliver Goldsmith. And there is a belief current that he was conspicuous, not only in the sense of being constitutionally more flexible than others to the impressions of calamity, in case they had happened to occur, but also that he really met with more than his share of those afflictions. I am disposed to think that this was not so. My trust is that Goldsmith lived upon the whole a life which, though troubled, was one of average enjoyment. Unquestionably, when reading at midnight, in the middle watch of a century which he never reached by one whole generation, this record of one so guileless, so upright, or seeming to be otherwise only in the eyes of those who did not know his difficulties, nor could have understood them,-when recurring also to his admirable genius, to the sweet natural gaiety of his oftentimes pathetic humour, and to the varied accomplishments, from talent or erudition, by which he gave effect to endowments so fascinating,—one cannot but sorrow over the strife which he sustained, and over the wrong by which he suffered. A few natural tears fall from every eye at the rehearsal of so much contumely from fools, which he faced unresistingly as one bareheaded under a hailstorm1; and

1 I do not allude chiefly to his experience in childhood, when he is reported to have been a general butt of ridicule for his ugliness and

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