trine is less singular than the argument by which he supports it. He contends that the right of a poet to disfigure and dishonor the memory of a deceased contemporary by groundless libels and lampoons is of the same nature, and is held by the same tenure, as the right of a fabulist to introduce brutes, or even inanimate objects in the act of conversing and reasoning with each other; and that I, in denying most indignantly the alleged privilege of the libeller to intrude upon the sanctity of the grave by the foul scandals and falsehoods of private enmity, am precisely adopting the old crotchet of Rosseau on the danger of suffering children to read such fables. It is natural that Peregrine should recall Cowper's playful lines upon this occasion: "I shall not ask Jean Jacques Rosseau If birds confabulate, or no." Since, in fact, Cowper it was through whom this caprice of Rosseau ever became known in England; for in the unventilated pages of its originator it would have lurked undisturbed down to this hour of June, 1859. But it marks the excessive carelessness and inattention of Peregrine (faults that tell powerfully for mischief in cases like the present), that he goes on to quote some further lines from the same poet, which suddenly betray a kind of ignorance such as can be explained only out of Cowper's morbid timidity, and the feminine horror with which he shrank from the coarse or the violent in his intercourse with men. The lines, as I now remember them, are these:— "But even a child that knows no better Than to interpret by the letter A story of a Cock and Bull, Must have a most uncommon skull." These lines are forced by the mere logic of their position, which is that of reply to Rosseau, into a meaning entirely at war with their notorious vernacular acceptation. "A story of a Cock and Bull" does not mean in England, as Cowper imagines, a story in which a cock audibly converses with a respondent bull, but has come conventionally to be understood as a story of which no man can make head or tail, and from which no rational drift or purpose can be disentangled.1 - 1 One must suppose that originally the eternal feud between France and England had formed the basis of the case; since the two dramatis persona, our old obstinate friend Bull on the one side, and Chanticleer on the other - so brisk, so full of quarrel, of pugnacity, and of gallantry to his obsequious harem - could not have been selected as representatives of the alternate national interests without a distinct consciousness of the two national arenas concerned in this symbolization. Bull, as a symbol, is not so classically rooted as the Cock. For it cannot be traced higher than Swift, etc., and was never adopted or owned by the English people; so that it is a case of insufferable impertinence in Mr. Kossuth to speak of us under such a mere casual and unauthorized nickname. But the Cock, Gallus Gallinaceus, has always been the symbol chosen and consecrated by the Franco-Gallic people as their true adequate heraldic cognizAn Englishman pauses in wonder. For undoubtedly the Cock embodies some favorable features of the French character and the French demeanor; but (as a keener spirit of discrimination would suggest) viewed under an angle of mockery and exaggeration. The bluster, the arrogance, the tendency to gasconade, are all there; there also is the indomitable courage; for amongst all breathing creatures there is hardly one (unless the bull-dog) more victorious over the passion of fear than the game cock. But still men generally would not relish a mirror held up even to their noblest qualities, if this were done under a concurrent attempt to throw cross lights of ridicule upon the total ensemble of their characters. ance. But all else which I had arraigned in Pope, as wanting in truth and good sense, faded into a bagatelle by the side of the fables which he had propounded as a reasonable hypothesis on the origin of our English literature. Pope, who never at any period of his life had a vestige of patriotism, would have sacrificed without compunction all possible trophies, intellectual or martial, of our national grandeur. He was never indisposed for such a service. But what gave him a sudden and decisive impulse in that direction, was the particular task in which he had just then engaged himself. He had undertaken a poetic version of that Epistle to Augustus Cæsar in which Horace traces the relations, alternately martial and intellectual, that connected Greece and Rome. It was a case of splendid retaliation. Rome, rude and uncultured, had led captive by her arms the polished race of Greeks. But immediately Greece had powerfully reacted upon her conqueror, and might be said in her turn, by arts, by literature, and civilization, to have conquered him. Such was the picture of Horace. Pope had undertaken an adaptation to French and English circumstances of this Horatian epistle. He had pledged himself to reproduce in his translation such a parallelism between England and France, as should seem a mere echo to the case of instant retaliation recorded by the Roman poet. France had undeniably been conquered by England; so far, all was waterproof, but to complete the parallelism, it was necessary that France should, in some intellectual way, have effected a deep compensating re-agency upon England. But what re-agency? Was it by fine arts, was it by mechanic arts, or how? No; it was (replies Pope) by literature. Pope does not explain whether the particular conquest of France, which he starts from, is that of Agincourt (1415), or that of Créci and Poictiers, some two or three generations earlier. But the impossibility, in which Pope has entangled himself, is the same for either case. There was no literature for the English to carry off; so that France could not have retaliated in the way supposed; and before the invention of printing, when literature, whether Provençal, Aragonese, Italian, Breton, &c., chiefly embodied itself in music, no literature could offer a portable subject of transfer. But it is idle to waste a word on such a web of moonshine. France, having no literature for herself, could certainly give none to England. Of all this, when it was too late, Pope became painfully aware; and in his despair, he took the course of altogether shifting his reader's position. The policy of Pope was to withdraw his reader's eye, as rapidly as possible, from the revolting paradox about Créci or Agincourt. And this purpose was so far attained by the sudden shifting of the ground from an era of French barbarism 1 to the polished period of Louis XIV. It might not be true of 1670, any more than of 1415, that England owed the least fraction of her intellectual development to the influence of French models. But, if not really more true as a fact, it was a thousand times more plausible as a possibility. The main purpose, therefore, of Pope, in this sudden leap over seven or ten generations, was answered. The 1 "Barbarism: " We must not confound the comparative bright dawnings and promises of Aragon, of Provence, of Italy, of Brittany, &c., with the infantine pretensions of France, properly and strictly so called. reader no longer recoiled in disgust and alienation, when assured by Pope that Corneille, of whose uncongenial dramas not so much as one edition had ever been issued from an English press, might have raised or corrected the taste of some English generation. If such a case never had occurred, at least there was no shocking incongruity in supposing that it might have occurred in an age when books, both French and Eng-. lish, were largely multiplied. So far, that is in a chronological sense, Corneille met the momentary purpose of Pope, as well as any other of that period; otherwise, there could not have been a more unfortunate selection. Even in France, Corneille had but a ten years' reign; for Racine completely superseded him, ever after the time when the French theatres had diffused a distinct knowledge of the discriminating characteristics between the two dramatists. Racine met the national taste genially by making the passion of love as indispensable an element in a scenical picture of life, as the French make it in the actual movements of life. Corneille, with his more masculine ideal of tragedy, was soon dethroned by Racine. did he ever recover even a gleam of his original rank, until Voltaire early in the eighteenth century revived his fame, though not his popularity, by his advantageous criticisms on the separate merits of each poet. But if in France the loss of his stage rank soon clouded the splendors of Corneille, everywhere else he was entirely unknown. No name could have been cited by Pope less capable of stamping a durable impression upon the English mind. In reality, one decisive outstanding fact puts an end to all romances of this nature. It is this: If doubtfully you except Montaigne Nor |