This is ethical poetry, the highest of all poetry, 'because it does that in verse which the greatest of men have wished to accomplish in prose. You hurry yourself, my Lord, into a very seasonable but not a very classical fury, in order to pronounce the Georgics a finer poem than the Eneid. The same doctrine is most religiously inculcated in the "Lime-street sermons," but begging your Lordship's pardon, and also that of the Lime-street sermon-makers, the world will ever think the Eneid the finer poem. Indulge ordinibus: nec secius omnis in unguem 66 C May I translate the first two words in these your favourite lines? Pray permit the privileged orders to have their own way." But even your Lordship's privileged judgment will not take Milton's comparative estimate of his Paradise Regained, or Cowper's comparative estimate of his translation of Homer; why then should you cite the idle tale of Virgil's preference of the Georgics as authentic and decisive? Let me honestly confess my suspicions that your Lordship never read any part of the Georgics, save the episodes, more than once, and that you dart at the refreshing poetry of the episodes as eagerly as the traveller in the sandy deserts of Arabia at the green islands of palm trees and bounding waters. The episodes in the Georgics are too splendid for any feeble epithets of praise, but will your Lordship stake your credit as a critic that the tale of Euridice is finer in its execution, or more affecting in its sentiments, than the glowing story of Nisus and Euryalus? It is not necessary for my purpose even to glance at the grossness of several passages in the Georgics. The desperate effort to place the Georgics above the Eneid---imponere Pelio Ossam---is a plain avowal of the relative rank of Pope. Most strange, however, is the flight of your Lordship from the Georgics to the line of your ethical versifier, The proper study of mankind is man." Is man a clod, an ox, or an asp? But thus even the genius of Lord Byron flounders in shallow water. In the next paragraph we are assured that 'imagination" and "invention," are the two commonest of qualities. My Lord, this looks like bitter irony of Pope. Had your "illustrious and unrivalled poet" no imagination or invention? The Irish peasant feels mighty inspiration from whiskey, but is the Scotch peasant a stranger to its inventive influence? The rank of Burns is the very first of his art." Yet he would" taste the barley-bree." Here, whiskey must suffer for the sake of Pope's ethics; elsewhere ethical and candid negus must be anathematized to save Pope's poetry. He is but "a soi-disant poet of this day," who is fed with bread and butter during the operation of dictating verses. It is but an Irish peasant that drinks whiskey. Ethical poetry, the highest of all poetry, is inspired by something half-way between butter and whiskey. Lucretius has indeed given us a very superior poem; his "imagination," his "invention," his allusions, digressions, and illustrations are passionate, poetical, and powerful; as far superior to Pope's "ethics," as the storm that convulses the forest to the blasts of a pair of bellows. The moral of Lucretius is at least as true and as practical and as ethical as Pope's. How can you, my Lord, charge Lucretius with having ruined his poetry by his ethics? His system of cosmogony may be as unphilosophical as Pope's optimism is puerile, but surely he enforces all the Pagreat duties of morality with as much orthodoxy as Pope. Here I must break in upon the natural order of the subject, in order to offer a remark or two upon some suspicious propositions of your Lordship. Milton is charged with absurdity and blasphemy for his use of cannons, lightnings, and thunders. I am afraid this too is for the sake of Pope. The truth is, that Milton is ravishingly poetical, on earth or in |