No More Learning

As to my own part I found This impulse very soon, and shal
continue to feel it as long as I can think, I can remember nothing further in
my life than that I made Verses. But, he continues, 'I had Two Accidents
in Youth which hindered me from ing quite possessed with the Muse :
I was bred in a College where Prose was more in fashion than Verse, and as
soon as I had taken my first Degree was sent the King's Secretary to the
Hague. . . . So that Poetry which by the bent of my Mind might have become
the Business of my life, was by the happyness of my Education only the
Amusement of it. . . '
Here, in a nutshell, we have the history both of his poetry and,
more especially, that of his versification. The metres which he
chose, because they were congenial to him and to his easy,
familiar style of poetic composition, were the octosyllabic couplet
and various forms of couplet or stanza in which a large use was
made of the anapaest. As to the former, both Swift and Prior, of
course, originally modelled their verse on that of Hudibras ;
but they avoided (Prior perhaps not quite at the outset) what
Saintsbury calls “the roughness, the curvets, the extravagances'
intentionally introduced by Butler, and aimed at ease and natural-
ness-a verse as near prose as good verse can be rather than at
sudden and surprising effects. The frequent use of the anapaest
in light measures and familiar verse was, apparently, an innovation
1 Over his attempt to imitate Chaucer, it is better to draw a veil. It may be worth
noting that his Translation of an Epitaph upon Glanville, Bishop of Rochester (ibid.
vol. II, p. 356) is an amusing effort in English hexameters.


## p. 159 (#183) ############################################

Prior's Prose
159
of Prior's own designing ; certainly, he domesticated it in English
verse, and thus definitely enriched English poetry by providing its
metrical instrument with a new variety of effect. Prior's use of
this variety was virtually confined to occasions
When a man's in a humour too merry for prose,
but not in an exaltation of spirit very far above it. English
poetry, however, dealt freely with the gift, and the use of the
apapaestic measure, which he had admirably fitted to his de-
scription of the secretary's délassements, the tribulations of Cloe
and the golden mediocrity of Jinny the just, was employed for
strains of a very different intensity by the poets of the romantic
school. But, though it might be diverted from the use to which
he had put it, the best examples of light and inspiriting versifica-
tion which he produced with its aid must continue to be acknow-
ledged as masterpieces of their kind,
As a prose writer, Prior might have attained to a high rank,
had he cared to cultivate a form of composition which he reserved
for the service of the state and for familiar correspondence with
his friends. Apart from his share in The Hind and Panther
Transvers’d, of which mention has been made above, he is now
known to have been the author of prose compositions which,
though few in number, are of high merit. They include, besides
An Essay upon Learning already cited—which contains some
sensible remarks on misapplied and superfluous learning, and
some apt remarks on the art of quotation and on conversational
wit—a more striking companion Essay upon Opinion. The tone
of this essay, half gay, half cynical, is very characteristic of its
author : most men, he argues, have no opinion of their own, but,
as childless fathers did in ancient Rome, adopt that of the first
man they like; others use the simple criterion of success or failure,
as in the case (which might be illustrated from Prior's own verse)
of Orange and Monmouth. Together with these essays are pre-
served Four Dialogues of the Dead, which deserve to be reckoned
among the brightest examples of a device which maintained its
popularity from Lucian down to Lyttelton, and from Lyttelton
up to Landor. The first, between Charles the Emperor and
Clenard the Grammarian, is a novel treatment of the old theme
that greatness—and happiness with it—is relative only; the second,
between Mr John Lock and Seigneur de Montaigne, is an amusing
and extremely voluble reproduction of Montaigne's concrete
though discursive way of thinking, but can hardly have been


## p. 160 (#184) ############################################

160
Lesser Verse Writers
intended as a serious criticism! In the third Dialogue, between
the Vicar of Bray and Sir Thomas Moor, Prior, as he had done
in the first, displays considerable historical knowledge; but the
talk of More, though it displays the main features of his noble
character, lacks playfulness of touch. The fourth, between Oliver
Cromwell and his Porter, which turns on the prophet-porter's
contention that the master was ten times madder than the man,
is hardly equal to its predecessors.
6
The spoiled child of the queen Anne fraternity of poets was
the pliant fabulist John Gay. The younger son of William Gay,
John was baptised at Barnstaple old church on 16 September
1685. The family was impoverished, and, when his mother and
father died, respectively, in 1694 and 1695, the boy was left to the
care of his uncle Thomas Gay of Barnstaple, by whom, after being
educated at the free grammar school of the town, the lad was
apprenticed to a silk mercer in London. In London, after leaving
the shop and spending some months in lounging unprofitably in
his old home, Gay found an abettor in his old school-mate Aaron
Hill, and another in a Westminster hall bookseller, who, in May
1708, brought out his first experiment in verse, an indifferent
poem, in blank verse, with the title Wine, suggested by the Cyder
of John Philips. This was followed by A Tragical Comical Farce,
said (rather doubtfully) to have been acted in 1712 near the watch
house in Covent garden, and detecting the dudes' or 'nuts' of the
time in those dread aversions of Swift's, the Mohocks. In May 1712,
Gay contributed a translation of the story of Arachne in Ovid's
Metamorphoses to The Rape of the Lock volume of Lintot's Miscel-
laneous Poems and Translations; and, five months later, he be-
came secretary or domestic steward in the house of the highminded
widow of the duke of Monmouth beheaded in 1685. In January 1713,
he inscribed to Pope, as the first of contemporary poets, his trim
georgic called Rural Sports. It is a smooth reflection of Pope's
own pastoral, saturated with the false sentiment and poetic diction,
so-called, of the period, and replete with 'feather'd choirs' and 'finny
broods' (it contains, indeed, a minute and rather grotesque descrip-
tion of fly-fishing). Swift laughed at the modern Theocritus, who
knew more about kine than Pope did, but yet could not distinguish
rye from barley. In poetic taste, Pope was accepted by Gay as an
1 The first Lord Lyttelton, as to whose History of the Life of Henry the Second see
vol. x, chap. XII, post, published the first series of Dialogues of the Dead in 1760, and
the second in 1765.


## p. 161 (#185) ############################################

161
>
John Gay
unfailing mentor, and it was by Pope's express encouragement
that, in December, he went on to supply the world with another
heroic poem in three books on that 'agreeable machine' The Fan.
After a poor and unsuccessful comedy, The Wife of Bath, Gay's
next work of any importance was his pleasing poem The Shepherd's
Week (15 April 1714), in six pastorals, with a prologue addressed
to Bolingbroke, containing familiar flattering allusions to some
of the greatest ladies of the day who might be tempted into
becoming his patronesses. These pastorals of actual, as opposed
to fashionable, rusticity, were written originally to cast ridicule
upon those of Ambrose (“Namby-Pamby ’) Philips; for Gay was a
born parodist. But they were so full of comic humour and droll
portraiture of country life that they were soon popular on their
own merits as rural poems. The grotesque passages (like those of
Greene's pastorals-) helped to conceal the flimsiness of the texture,
and the scheme thus serves as a link between the Calender of
Spenser and The Gentle Shepherd of Allan Ramsay, while the
historical method adopted specially approved itself to Crabbe.
Gay was an occasional contributor to Steele's Guardian; but his
versatility in letters did not make up to the duchess of Monmouth
for his deficiencies as domestic steward : in the summer of 1714
his position in her household came to an end, and he would have
been in a bad case but for the kindness of literary friends. Swift
procured him a secretaryship to Lord Clarendon, envoy extra-
ordinary at Hanover; and there is a curious rhymed petition to
Lord Oxford, in which Gay solicits funds to enable him to set out on
his journey. When, a few months later, queen Anne died, the em-
bassage was at an end, and Gay was called to find a brief anchorage
with Pope at Binfield. While there, he wrote, with a hint or two
from Pope and Arbuthnot, a satirical tragi-comi-pastoral farce
The What D’ye Call it, which gives us a distinct foretaste of his
clever light librettist vein, and of his happy knack for a ballad
(Black-eyed Susan and 'Twas when the Seas were roaring were
both his). It ridiculed, after the manner of The Rehearsal, a
number of plays in vogue; and, in one of the offended dramatists,
Steele, Gay lost a friend. His profits amounted to £100. In the
following year, he composed, what is probably his best remembered
poem, Trivia, or The Art of Walking the Streets of London, in
three books, an elaborate imitation and expansion of Swift's Tatler
poems The City Shower and the photographic Morning. The
1 Cf. ante, vol. II, pp. 356–7; as to the general characteristics of Elizabethan
pastoral, cf. ante, vol. iv, pp. 121–2.
11
E. L. IX.
CH. VI.


## p. 162 (#186) ############################################

162
Lesser Verse Writers
idea is good, the versification neat, and the mock heroic style
admirable, while nearly every couplet is of historic interest to the
antiquary and the student of eighteenth century street humours.
This was published by Lintot 26 January 1716, during part of
which year Gay found a temporary home with Lord Burlington in
Devonshire. A year later, Pulteney took him in his train to Aix,
and, in 1718, he was at Nuneham with Lord Harcourt. The
number of his patrons justified his collecting and publishing his
poems in 1720 in two large quarto subscription volumes, brought
out jointly by Lintot and Tonson. He realized £1000 by the
venture, which he invested in South Sea stock. For the moment,
he was the nominal holder of £20,000 worth ; but it vanished in
the crash, while he was deliberating what to do with it. Soon
afterwards, his hopes of advancement in the new reign were
dashed, while his dignity was offended by his nomination as gentle-
man usher to the princess Louisa, a child under three. In the
meantime, he had brought out his Fables (1727) in octosyllabic
verse, wherein he surveys mankind for the benefit of the
youthful duke of Cumberland. Gay had now become a more
or less regular inmate in the household of the duchess of
Queensberry, Bolingbroke's 'Sa Singularité' and Prior’s Kitty,
younger sister of Lady Jane Hyde, the “ blooming Hyde with
Eyes so Rare” of his own prologue to The Shepherd's Week. Gay
had spent a great deal of time in polishing his Fables, elaborate
trifles, the publication of which by Tonson had been still further
delayed by costly expenditure on plates after Kent and Wootton.
Ambling, colloquial and, occasionally, slipshod, like the bard
himself, it cannot be said Gay's Fables maintain an inordinately
high standard ; yet their novelty and glossy ease won them an
assured success which lasted for a hundred years before it began
to wane. Apart from one or two later fables by Cowper and by
Northcote, they are still, probably, the best that have been written
in English verse : nor would it be easy for any fabulist to better
the narrative of
The hare who in a civil way
Complied with everything like Gay,
a charming fabliau with a touch of personal application—disil-
lusion, for the most part-quite in the manner of the early masters.
Gay’s Fables suffer, it is true, from juxtaposition with the
terse masterpieces of La Fontaine. Compared with the immortal
bonhomme, Gay took but little trouble with his work. The fables


## p. 163 (#187) ############################################

The Beggar's Opera
163
were applauded; but the draftsman of the illustrations, it is said,
had the lion's share of the profit. A second set, adding sixteen to
the original fifty, appeared in 1738.
Whenever he was off duty with the Queensberrys, Gay-
always 'inoffensive'-sought the society of Congreve, Prior,
Arbuthnot and, above all, of Swift. To Swift's visit to England in
1736 was, in part, due Gay's next venture The Beggar's Opera,
which-unless an exception be made in favour of Lillo's London
Merchant (1731)-may be described as the first popular success of
the modern English stage? It ran for the unprecedented, though
not uninterrupted, space of sixty-two days, beginning 29 January
1728, and continued a triumphant career in Bath, Bristol and
other towns in the country, and even in the colonies. Like not a
few jeux d'esprit of the day, it sprang from a saying of Swift, who
observed to Gay that a Newgate pastoral might make an odd
pretty sort of thing'; and Gay wrote most of it at Twickenham
when in the same house with Pope and Swift, whose opinion was
that it was either very bad or very good. As often in comic opera,
it was one of the numbers,
O ponder well! be not severe
that turned the scale and made the play an irresistible success, out
of which Gay gleaned about £800.
Polly became the town darling, her songs were painted on fans
and the actress who performed the part captured a duke for life.
The factions of the day recognised Walpole (who led the applause
on the first night) and Townshend in Peachum and Lockit.
The Beggar's Opera, it was said, made Gay rich, and Rich (the
manager) gay. Its literary value is very small, except historically
as a link between the masque and the vaudeville. For the time,
it superseded French and Italian opera, and made a new opening
for English lyric on the stage. A sequel was prohibited by the
lord chamberlain, and was promptly printed, the fortunate author
making £1200 by Polly (as it was called), to which the duchess of
Marlborough contributed £100 for a single copy.
Gay's later years were uneventfully spent in the house of his
faithful patrons the duke and duchess of Queensberry, at Amesbury
and at Burlington gardens. The duchess and Gay wrote some
amusing joint letters to Swift, who entered into the correspondence
with zest, beginning his reply low on the page as a mark of respect
-receiving her grace, as it were, at the bottom of the stairs. Yet
1 For a retrospective account of the progress of the drama in England, and the
place occupied in it by The Beggar's Opera, see vol, xi, post.
11--2


## p. 164 (#188) ############################################

164
Lesser Verse Writers
Swift's fondness for Gay himself was genuine, as may be discerned
in more than one touching letter. The duchess looked after the
gentle parasite's little comforts, and kept his money under lock
and key, while the duke invested his savings for him, so that when
he died, intestate, about £6000, or thereabouts, was left to be
divided between his sisters. After an idle life which, on the
whole, notwithstanding his unmanly repining, was one in which
good fortune preponderated, Gay died suddenly, of inflammatory
fever, on 4 December 1732. He was interred with much pomp
in Westminster abbey, where an imposing monument, erected by
the unwearying duke and duchess, bears, together with Pope's,
the light-minded poet's own characteristic epitaph
Life is a jest, and all things show it;
I thought so once, and now I know it.
His easy-going, affectionate disposition made Gay a general
favourite, even though, as Johnson observed, the wits regarded
him rather as a playfellow than a partner. He was utterly devoid
of energy ; and though, in complaining of his treatment by the
court, he laments ‘My hard fate! I must get nothing, write for or
against,' it is very far from clear what duties he would have been
fit to discharge, had they been imposed upon him. He was, in
truth, predestined on every account, in Pope's phrase, to 'die
unpension’d with a hundred friends. '
Gay's longer poems, with the exception of The Shepherd's
Week and Trivia, are dead. Of the shorter, some of the eclogues,
such as The Birth of the Squire, The Toilette, The Tea-Table and
The Funeral, contain many witty passages; and the epistles are
all interesting, especially Mr Pope's Welcome from Greece, the
ottava rima of which has a spontaneous flash and felicity. Written
on the completion of Pope's translation of The Iliad, it represents
all the poet's friends as gathering to meet him on his return to
town, each being characterised in one or two apt lines, or by a brief
pert epithet, in the happiest possible manner. Among the mis-
cellaneous pieces which deserve to escape neglect is the sprightly
Ladies' Petition to the Honourable the House of Commons, in
which the maids of Exeter protest against their loss of the chance
of marriage through the interloping competition of widows? .
6
&
1 G. F. Underhill calls this poem 'the least doubtful piece' in the collection known
as Gay’s Chair, a little volume published in 1820, with a life of Gay, by his nephew,
Joseph Baller. There seems good reason to doubt the authenticity of some of the
pieces there attributed to Gay; though the chair, in whose secret drawer they were
found, has & well-authenticated history.


## p. 165 (#189) ############################################

6
Ambrose Philips
165
Gay's parodies of Ambrose Philips in The Shepherd's Week
(which pleased by the very quality they were intended to ridicule)
were suborned by Pope, and the quarrel was accentuated by the
fact that Ambrose not only belonged to the rival or whig faction
(he was secretary of the Hanover club in 1714) but was also a friend
and adherent of Addison. A native of the midlands, Ambrose
Philips (born in 1675) was educated at Shrewsbury and St John's
college, Cambridge (1693–6), of which he was fellow from 1699 to
1708. At Cambridge, he began writing English verse. In 1709,
he abridged Hacket's wellknown Life of Archbishop Williams.
On 9 March of the same year, he addressed, from Copenhagen, his
Epistle to the Earl of Dorset, Prior's early patron. It was published
by Steele in The Tatler and praised as a great 'winter-piece. '
His Pastorals appeared in the following autumn in Tonson's
Miscellany, his being the first, and Pope's the last, in this same
volume. In The Guardian", Ambrose was thoughtlessly praised by
Thomas Tickell as the only worthy successor of Spenser, Pope being
completely ignored. Philips had also been cordially applauded in
The Spectator for his artless type of eclogue. Pretending to criticise
the rival pastorals and compare them, Pope, in an anonymous con-
tribution to The Guardian”, gave the preference to Philips, but
quoted all his worst passages as his best, and placed by the side of
them his own finest lines, which, he says, want rusticity, and often
deviate into downright poetry. The satire stung, as was intended,
and Philips bought a rod and hung it up at a popular coffeehouse
(Button's) in order to carry out his threatened chastisement of
Pope in public. The encounter was averted by Pope's prudence.
To keep up the reciprocation of malevolence, Pope scoffed at
Philips in The Dunciad and elsewhere as one of Curll's authors,
'a Pindaric writer in red stockings. ' Philips played his cards
sufficiently well to extract some very fair Irish sinecures from the
dominant whig party, but he did not live to enjoy them. The
poems of Philips which please best, says Johnson, are those
which from Pope or Pope's adherents procured him the name of
Namby-Pamby, the poems of short lines by which he paid his
court to all ages and characters, from Walpole, the steerer of the
realm, to Miss Pulteney in the nursery. ' Henry Carey, the
author of Sally in our Ally, mocked Philips under this name, and
Swift called his pretty waxworks 'little flams. ' But the machina-
tions of Pope managed to raise a perfect storm of ridicule, which,
6
· Nos. 22, 23, 30, and 32.
2 No. 40.


## p. 166 (#190) ############################################

166
Lesser Verse Writers
in numberless parodies and broadsides, broke over the new
versification, as it was called. The line generally consists of three
trochees, followed by an extra-stressed monosyllabic foot. Many
critics have pronounced these sweetmeats delightful, though
cloying; and, it must be granted, in spite of ridicule, that Philips
had a genuine sensibility and a kindness for the elder music in
English poetry which is to his credit and which his age, for the
most part, ignored. In 1723, he brought out A Collection of old
Ballads, including Robin Hood, Johnny Armstrong and the famous
Children in the Wood, much belauded by Addison. The ballads
are, in the main, bad versions derived from current broadsides ;
but the collection, such as it was, was one of the earliest of its kind.
His only play of any note, The Distressed Mother, was derived
immediately from Racine's Andromaque. He died in Hanson
street, London, on 18 June 1749. His poems, with a dedication
to the duke of Newcastle, had been published in the year before
his death.
Thomas Parnell is, probably, now less remembered for his verse
than because of the fact that his life was written by Goldsmith
and Johnson, and that from his younger brother was descended
Charles Stewart Parnell. The son of a commonwealth's man, who,
at the restoration, left Congleton in Cheshire, where the family
had been long established and, settling in Ireland, purchased an
estate which, together with his land in Cheshire, was afterwards
owned by the poet, Thomas Parnell was born at Dublin in 1679.
In 1693, he was admitted at Trinity college, Dublin, where in 1700
he proceeded M. A. , and was ordained deacon under an episcopal
dispensation on the score of age. Swift's friend Ashe, bishop of
Clogher, named him archdeacon of that see in 1706, an appointment
followed by his marriage to Anne, daughter of Thomas Minchin of
Tipperary. Her death in 1711 seems to have unsteadied the young
archdeacon's mind. Swift and Stella conceived a friendliness for
the bereaved poet, who was taken to sup with Bolingbroke and was
introduced to the lord treasurer (Oxford). By this time, he had
changed his political vesture, and, in April 1713, he wrote a Poem
on Queen Anne's Peace. About this time, he became an intimate
of the Scriblerus club and of Pope, who designed him to be one
of 'the children of Homer. ' Swift whipped up his Irish friends
to procure Parnell a prebend. In May 1716, archbishop King
presented the poet with the vicarage of Finglass, worth over
£100 a year. Meanwhile, he had become inseparable from Pope


## p. 167 (#191) ############################################

Thomas. Parnell
167
at Binfield and the Bath, and he retained his position in the
Scriblerus circle to the last. He died suddenly at Chester (his
end being hastened by habitual intemperance)' on his way to
Ireland in October 1718. His publications during his lifetime
had been in periodicals; but he left many unprinted compositions,
of which those which Pope thought best were selected by him
and dedicated to the earl of Oxford, who wrote appreciatively
of the Noctes he had spent in the company of Pope, Swift,
Parnell and the doctor. Johnson, in conversation, deplored that
Goldsmith's Life of the poet was so thin; but he made his own
sketch an opportunity for a most splendid eulogy of Goldsmith's
ease and versatility. Goldsmith wrote a fair epitaph, which was
eclipsed by Johnson’s? .
Goldsmith, Collins and Blair show signs of having studied
Parnell, whose own work, apart from the manifest impress of Pope
and Swift, was influenced, it is thought, to some extent, by Milton.
Apart from his contribution to Pope's Homer, which took the
form of a learned essay in the taste of the time on 'The Life,
Writings and Learnings of Homer,' and a few imitative poems,
Parnell did not write anything of importance. Pope was glad of
his aid at the time, but, after Parnell's death, expressed a hope
that his essay might be made 'less defective. ' His poems, gene-
rally in heroic measure, run smoothly. The Flies, an Eclogue,
has merit as a picture. An Elegy to an old Beauty enjoys an
adventitious fame. After ridiculing the lady's strenuous efforts at
resisting the ravages of time, Parnell goes on to explain how the
daughter Fanny has acquired her mother's old artifices, with
interest:
And all that's madly wild, or oddly gay
We call it only pretty Fanny's way.
A Nightpiece on Death is an early example of a convention which
reached its acme with Gray's Elegy: A Hymn to Contentment
is another fashionable exercise on the theme of Plantin, Desportes,
Wotton and Pomfret, written in easy flowing octosyllabics. All
these copies of verse—the last and most meritorious of which as
a model, and greatly admired during the age of Johnson, is The
Hermit-were published posthumously in Poems on Several
1 Hearne says he was undoubtedly killed by the immoderate drinking of 'mild
ale. '
? Qui sacerdos pariter et poeta, utrasque partes ita implevit, ut neque sacerdoti
suavitas poetae, nec poetae sacerdotis sanctitas, deesset.
3 Prompted by contrariness of his own or by Johnson's dislike of Gray, Goldsmith
used to say that he preferred Parnell's Nightpiece greatly to the Elegy.


## p. 168 (#192) ############################################

168
Lesser Verse Writers
! !
1
Occasions, issued by the poet's friend, corrector and patron
Pope, in December 1721. The only separate volume issued
previously by Parnell was his Homer's Battle of the Frogs and
Mice with the Remarks of Zoilus (May 1717), satirising two
objects of Pope's aversion, Theobald and Dennis. His scholar-
ship had been of material service to Pope as translator, apart
from his Introductory Essay on Homer (1715), which Pope, as
usual, exalted in public and deplored in private.
a
Anne, daughter of Sir William Kingsmill of Sidmonton, was born
in April 1661, became maid of honour to queen Mary of Modena
and was a friend of Anne Killigrew, who had kindred tastes; but,
in 1684, she abandoned her court position and married colonel
Heneage Finch, afterwards earl of Winchilsea. In 1690, Ardelia
(her name as authoress) settled at beautiful Eastwell and began
to write verses for circulation among her friends, the Thynnes,
Tuftons, Twysdens and other Kentish people of distinction. She
died in Cleveland row and was buried at Eastwell in August
1720. She had adopted the practice of writing,
Betray'd by solitude to try
Amusements which the prosperous fly,
and soon showed that she had an eye for observing country scenes
and that she loved them for their own sake. She began by trans-
lations from French and Italian, and went on with blank verse
dramas after the model of the virtuous and matchless Orinda;
she wrote songs after Prior, pindarics after Cowley and fables
after La Fontaine. In 1713, she was persuaded to publish a
selection of her poems. She left a large number of further
poems in two manuscript volumes, one folio, the other octavo;
these were edited by Myra Reynolds in 1903 and cannot fairly
be said to have enhanced Lady Winchilsea's reputation. It had
hitherto mainly depended on the discovery by Wordsworth that
there were affinities with his own predominant mood in a few of
her poems of 1713, especially the sentimental and meditative
soliloquy entitled A Nocturnal Reverie, an enunciation of rural
charms in which almost every other line begins with the word
'when, while the last fifty verses conclude with the following
two couplets :
In such a Night let Me abroad remain,
Till Morning breaks, and All's confus'd again;
Our Cares, our Toils, our Clamours are renew'd,
Or Pleasures, seldom reach'd, again pursu'd.


## p. 169 (#193) ############################################

Lady Winchilsea
169
a
in
A few other poems, such as an ode To the Nightingale, sustain
the same kind of impression, which gained indefinitely from the
twilight of Eastwell as well as from the rarity of Ardelia's slim
volume. Wordsworth's discovery was taken up with enthusiasm by
Matthew Arnold, Edmund Gosse and others, and Lady Winchilsea
was cited as a rara avis, a woodlark among those town sparrows,
the best accredited poets of the days of queen Anne. To Pope, Gray
and Prior, she had just seemed a female wit, with a stray predilection,
and some genuine taste, for riming. The appearance of her poems
in bulk certainly strengthens the idea that her forte was gay and
complimentary verse of the occasional order, and that she ought to
rank not as a rival of Dyer and Collins, but as an imitator of Prior
and a precursor of Gay, Cowper and Northcote. Her light verse,
upon which she bestowed much pains, was based upon the miscel-
lany poems of Dorset, Sedley and their queen Anne successors.
Her verses To Mr F now Earl of w, written in 1689, in an
886886 stanza, are among the best of their kind at that date.
Her
Fanscombe Barn, with its jolly beggars, is a tolerable parody of
the Miltonic (written a few years after The Splendid Shilling);
but her 'Pindaricks, including The Spleen, issued separately
in a miscellany of 1701, as well as in the volume of 1713, are
unbearable. The Spleen contains the lines
Now the jonquille o’ercomes the feeble brain,
We faint beneath the Aromatick Pain.
The adjective was borrowed from Dryden's Annus Mirabilis ; the
phrase was appropriated by Pope in his Essay on Man, and the
association of the odour of the jonquil with delicious pain by
Shelley (Epipsychidion). Two of Lady Winchilsea's poems, The
Sigh and To Mr Jervas (the famous portrait painter and translator
of Don Quixote), were printed in Steele’s Miscellany (1714), her
Lines to Prior in Prior's Miscellaneous Works; To Mr Pope in
the early collected editions of Pope.
A writer similar in calibre to Lady Winchilsea and, like her,
destined to be raised too high by disproportioned praise, is John
Pomfret, son of a vicar of Luton, whose studies were carried on at
Bedford and at Queens' college, Cambridge (where he graduated
M. A. in 1688). His elegy upon the death of queen Mary was the
prelude to his taking orders and was soon rewarded by two con-
siderable Bedfordshire rectories. He was a good early example of
the cultivated, poetizing, archaeologizing, chess-playing divines of
the eighteenth century. In 1699, he gave to the world his Poems


## p. 170 (#194) ############################################

170
Lesser Verse Writers
on Several Occasions, the sale of which was stimulated next year
when he issued anonymously The Choice: A Poem written by a
Person of Quality. The poem obtained adventitious fame. At first,
it was held to have been composed by a personage of distinction.
Then, it was said to have been modelled upon a study of Sir William
Temple's philosophic retirement among his peaches at Sheen. And
the public was still more interested when it learned that the poet's
frankly expressed aspiration to have no wife' had displeased the
bishop of London (Compton), to whom he had been recommended for
preferment. As a matter of fact, he married and had a son, shortly
before his death, at thirty-five, in 1702. The Choice was no more and
no less than a familiar exercise, adapted to the taste of the time, of
the old Bonheur de ce Monde theme, sung to death by the French
poets, and best known to us in the poems of Wotton and Samuel
Rogers (‘Mine be a cot'). The versification will strike no one today as
being (that which the theme demands) exceptionally neat; and the
best modern anthologists ignore the poem. But, when the scheme for
the Lives of the Poets was submitted by the booksellers to Johnson,
the name of Pomfret (together with three others) was added by his
advice, chiefly, it seems, on the ground of Pomfret's ineradicable
popularity (half a century later, Robert Southey is found solemnly
asking 'Why is Pomfret's “ Choice” the most popular poem in the
language? '). Johnson said that probably no composition in our
language had been so often perused and that it was the favourite
of readers who, without vanity or criticism, seek only their own
amusement. That Pomfret pleased many, surely argued some merit.
Now, however, he pleases few, or is quite forgotten.
>
>
>
Thomas Tickell was born in 1688, at his father's vicarage,
Bridekirk, in Cumberland, and, in April 1701, entered Queen's
college, Oxford, of which he became a fellow in November 1700—
a poetaster preferred over better men, according to the relentless
tory, Thomas Hearne. In 1711, he acted as deputy professor at
Oxford, where, according to the same authority, he delivered a “silly'
course on bucolics, in which what was good was taken from Scaliger.
Tickell, who was not 'one of these scholars who wear away their
lives in closets,' found a stepping-stone into the outer world through
the patronage of Addison. While still at Oxford, he had expressed
his admiration of Addison (To Mr Addison on his Opera of
Rosamond) in extravagant terms. On arriving in London, he
made Addison's acquaintance. Tickell was an accomplished
poetizer and man of letters, and a graceful, though not profound,


## p. 171 (#195) ############################################

Thomas Tickell
171
scholar, by no means the vain conceited coxcomb of Hearne's
imagining. Addison was pleased with a homage that was worth
accepting. In October 1712, Tickell published his Poem to his
Excellency the Lord Privy Seal on the Prospect of Peace, and,
though the piece supported the tory peace of Utrecht, Addison,
in The Spectator), spoke warmly of its ‘noble performance. ' Pope
praised its poetical images and fine painting—now undecipherable.
Tickell repaid these compliments with compound interest. Verses
by him were prefixed to Addison's Cato, and, as Addison rose, his
admirer rose with him. Addison, as is well known, incurred Pope's
enmity mainly in his protégé's behalf. In October 1714, he asked
to be excused reading the first two books of Pope's Iliad, on the
ground that his interest in an English version of The Iliad had
been forestalled by Tickell, whose first book he had 'corrected. '
(He consented, however, according to Pope, to read the second
book. ) In June 1715, Pope's first volume and Tickell's first book
of The Iliad in English appeared almost simultaneously. Addison
described Tickell's version as the best ever done in any language.
Pope wrote bitterly of Cato's 'little senate' at Button's coffee-
house. Meanwhile, Pope's own like senate unmasked their
batteries. Parnell and Arbuthnot criticised the scholarship,
Jervas and Berkeley the verse, of Tickell’s translation. Pope
himself, in his Art of Sinking in Poetry, cites illustrative pas-
sages from Tickell's version. Apart from this quarrel, the chief
interest attaching to Tickell in literary history is in his character
as satellite, executor and panegyrist of Addison, and as supplanter
of Steele in Addison's estimation. In 1717, upon his appointment
as chief secretary in Ireland, Addison took Tickell with him. When
he became secretary of state, he appointed Tickell under-secretary;
and, shortly before his death, made him his literary executor, in-
structing him to collect his writings in a final and authentic edition.
Tickell addressed himself to this most difficult and delicate task
with so much loyalty and assiduity that, by 3 October 1721, the
collective edition of Addison's works was ready for the public, in
four sumptuous quarto volumes. It was prefaced by an unpretend-
ing notice, to which was appended the noble and pathetic elegy
(characterised by Johnson as “sublime and elegant') To the Earl of
Warwick on the Death of Mr Addison, which furnishes Tickell's
i No. 523.
· Who, when two wits on rival themes contest,
Approves them both, but likes the worst the best. '
Pope's Epistle to Arbuthnot (Longleat Version), see Elwin and Courthope's. edn. ,
vol. II, p. 537.
a
2


## p. 172 (#196) ############################################

172
Lesser Verse Writers
1
1
>
sole but sufficient title-deed to the poetical estate. Of its thirty-
two lines, the most familiar, though not entirely the best, are,
perhaps, the following:
Can I forget the dismal night that gave
My soul's best part for ever to the grave!
How silent did his old companions tread
By midnight lamps, the mansions of the dead
Through breathing statues, then unheeded things,
Through rows of warriors, and through walks of kings!
What awe did the slow solemn knell inspire;
The pealing organ, and the pausing choir;
The duties by the lawn-rob'd prelate paid;
And the last words, that dust to dust conveyed !
Tickell did fair and, some think, ample justice to Steele in his
references to him. There can, however, be little doubt that
Steele had been distressed and grievously hurt by the rupture;
while the fact that Tickell should have taken his place in Addison's
affections must have been inexpressibly galling. His natural irrita-
tion had, no doubt, been intensified by Addison appointing Tickell
under-secretary, and, still more, by his making Tickell his literary
executor, offices which Steele might, naturally, have expected, had
all gone well, to fill himself. The omission of The Drummer from
Addison's works gave him the opening he desired. Steele objected
to Addison's essays being separately printed, while some of their
joint work was ignored. It seems certain that Addison contem-
plated a collective edition of his, writings, in which his own
personal contributions could be identified. Steele's ambition,
we must infer, was that he and his friend should go down to
posterity together. This hope was dashed to the ground by
the appointment, in his place, of Tickell as `Addison's literary
executor.
Tickell followed up the Irish career which Addison had opened
for him. In May 1724, he was appointed secretary to the lord
justices, and Carteret testifies to the ability with which he performed
the duties of his office. "Whiggissimus' though he was, he managed
,
to conciliate Swift. He seems to have retained no ill-feeling
against his detractors, and he died at peace at Bath on St George's
day, 1740. Johnson described his poem The Prospect of Peace,
beginning · The Haughty Gaul in ten campaigns o'erthrown,' as a
poem to be approved rather than admired; and this distinction
applies to all his verses, more or less (with the exception of the
elegy on Addison), including those in his favourite heroic measure,
On Queen Caroline's rebuilding of the Lodgings of the Black Prince
and Henry V at Queen's College, The Royal Progress, An Epistle


## p. 173 (#197) ############################################

Tickell and Addison
173
from a Lady in England to a Gentleman in Avignon (an anti-
jacobite piece, which ran to a fifth edition), a Fragment of a Poem
on Hunting, Part of the Fourth Book of Lucan, complimentary
poems To Mr Addison and To Sir Godfrey Kneller, two formal
poems entitled Oxford, and Kensington Gardens, and The First
Book of the Iliad.
Johnson denounced him for confusing Grecian deities and Gothic
fairies; both species were regarded by the critic as contemptible
even when apart, but, in conjunction, positively ridiculous. Outside
the range of his correct pentameters, Tickell essayed a wooden
ballad in eight and six, entitled Colin and Lucy, which was
translated into Latin by Vincent Bourne, and pronounced by
Gray and Goldsmith (himself an offender in this respect) to be
one of the best ballads in English. Gray, at any rate, ought to
have known better. Tickell had very few poetical notes at his
command, and none of them were 'wood-notes wild' suitable to
ballad or octosyllabic measure. His elegy rings true, as a sincere
commemoration of a notable literary friendship.
)
II
The minor versifiers of the eighteenth century, among whom
may be included some of the younger of Dryden's contemporaries,
cannot be said to enjoy, or to have enjoyed for some generations,
anything that approaches, even in the furthest degree, to what may
be called popularity. From circumstances which, to avoid repeti-
tion, will be more fully noticed in dealing with the second group of
them, they obtained a certain hold not merely on the standard
'collections, but on books of anthology with an educational
purpose. This lasted far into the nineteenth, and has not been
entirely relaxed in the twentieth, century. They, and their some-
what more interesting successors, furnished mottos and quotations
to at least three generations of prose writers greater than them-
selves, and even to the vague, floating treasury from which common
speech borrows things that, when the actual authors are read for
the first time, strike the reader if not with a wild surprise' at any
rate with an amused one. Very few are those who, except for a
special purpose, read many or any of these poets now; and fewer
still those who derive much enjoyment from the reading. Yet
they cannot be wholly neglected in such a work as this, though


## p. 174 (#198) ############################################

174
Lesser Verse Writers
it would be an exceedingly rash critic who entered upon the task
of dealing with them unconscious of its difficulties and dangers.
Even in the separation of the two groups, there must be something
that may well seem arbitrary; and there is the further difficulty
that, while the treatment accorded to a few-rather in the later
group than in this, but here, perhaps, also, in some cases—may seem
inadequate, objection may be taken in others to what may appear
too like a mere catalogue with ticket-comments. But no possible
arrangement could satisfy everybody: and, in the present case, the
adventure has been undertaken not lightly, and assisted at least by
an old familiarity with the subjects.
We must, of course, begin with the group which, as has been
said—though all its members lived into Pope's time, and two of
them were specially singled out by him as patrons, and, in a
way, patterns-represent, in actual historic relation, the younger
contemporaries of Dryden'. First come the pair just referred to,
and known now chiefly, if not wholly, by Pope's own words,
'Granville the polite [George Granville, first baron Lansdowne) and
knowing Walsh [William Walsh]. ' With them may be grouped
four others less known to even second-hand fame: Richard Duke,
George Stepney, William King (1663—1712) and Thomas Yalden,
who linger, mummy fashion, in the collections of British poets,
while two of them enjoy certain adventitious aids to personal
remembrance. For Stepney, a notable diplomatist in his day,
represented Marlborough in the taking-over of the principality of
Mindelheim, and King is constantly confused with his twenty years
younger namesake (1685-1763), the clever but venomous jacobite
principal of St Mary hall.
Granville, Lord Lansdowne, does not quite deserve, even from
a literary point of view, the neglect which has betaken him, and,
to all who can appreciate the genealogy of poetry-a thing which
has attractions far other than those affecting Dryasdust—is by no
means negligible. In him, we have, perhaps, the last remnant,
though only an imperfect one, of Caroline character, before we come
to the wholly, or almost wholly, 'Augustan’ lyric. That strange
fire which still burns, and occasionally even blazes, in Sedley and
Rochester and Aphra Behn, only glimmers in him; but it has not
quite gone out. It was, possibly, the presence of it, joined, as
an acute reader aware of the circumstances may suspect, to the
disapprobation, which he not obscurely hints, of the later character
of 'Myra,' which makes Johnson unjust to Lansdowne. This
1 As to Dryden's relations with Granville, see ante, vol. VIII, p. 55.


## p. 175 (#199) ############################################

6
George Granville (Lord Lansdowne) 175
grandson of Sir Bevil Granville, a descendant of the hero
of the Azores, could not, so far as he was personally con-
cerned, have been distasteful to the censor. He 'endeavoured
to be true at once to the King [James II] and the Church,'
which exceedingly difficult task Johnson would himself certainly
have essayed. He was the author of a sentence which has
frequently expressed the wishes of good Englishmen before and
since, 'Everybody wishes well to the King: but they would be
glad if his ministers were hanged. ' He abstained from public life
during the whole reign of William, but was an active tory member
of parliament under Anne, became one of the two famous 'panel
of peers, and was sent to the Tower by the Hanoverian govern-
ment; though afterwards, like others, he was, in a way, reconciled
by the good manners and good judgment of queen Caroline. But
Johnson thought him 'profane,' which, perhaps, he was sometimes,
and decided that his verses to ‘Myra' were commonly feeble and
unaffecting or forced and extravagant,' while his other little pieces
were ‘seldom either sprightly or elegant, either keen or weighty. '
They were 'trifles written in idleness and published by vanity. '
These are neat antitheses; but, if any one will look dispassionately
at the song 'Love is by Fancy led about' or at 'Thoughtful nights
and restless waking,' he will, with due historic allowance, hardly
think the judgment just in the present case. Granville came at an
unfortunate time in the history of the evolution of poetic species.
His wings had dwindled, and he could not quite fly; nor was he con-
tent merely to walk gracefully. But his lyre has not forgotten that,
in Joubert's famous phrase, it ought to be a 'winged instrument. '
Walsh was somewhat luckier: for his inheritance of the older
time was in the lighter vein, and, perhaps, the critical power
attributed to him, both by Dryden and by Pope, told him what not
to attempt, and not to attempt too much. His work in verse (to
which Johnson is somewhat kinder than he is to Lansdowne's) is
very small, but there are several pieces in it which are not any-
body's work. His couplets are distinctly good; except Garth's,
they are, perhaps, the best between Dryden and Pope. The poem
entitled Jealousy, in a rather elaborate stanza not ineffectively
composed of a decasyllabic quatrain, an octosyllabic couplet and
two 'fourteeners,' is far from contemptible. 'Caelia, too late you
would repent,' in Caroline common measure, has kept much of
the soar and swoop of that extraordinary example of anything
'common'; and, what is perhaps his best known and most praised
thing, The Despairing Lover, deserves all the praise and much
.
6


## p. 176 (#200) ############################################

176
Lesser Verse Writers
wider knowledge. The quaintness of its expression and of its
metre-a sort of regularised Skeltonic—is as crisp as it is quaint.
And when it is remembered that The Antidote, which begins
When I see the bright nymph who my heart does enthrall,
was probably written as early as anything by Prior, and, perhaps,
earlier still, it is difficult to be chary of applause. Walsh, a
country squire, a county member and, for a time, a placeman at
court-a man, too, who died in no very advanced middle age-can
only have written for his amusement; but he might have amused
himself very much worse.
A single paragraph must suffice for the quartette whom we
subjoin to these two. In Duke, Johnson found little to be praised,
.
and, in searches made at different times, the present writer has
found still less. The bulk of his work is translation, in which, as
elsewhere, he shows a certain ease. The absurd and, in fact,
almost meaningless commendation of Stepney, that his work 'made
grey authors blush'—which Johnson quotes without assigning its
author, but which he had printed elsewhere in its original context-
is the chief thing memorable about him. Yalden, as stout a tory as
Lansdowne, and a suspect about the time of Atterbury's fall, wrote
pindarics which are not the worst of that too generally bad kind,
and fables which, though unequal, are sometimes quite light and
good. Luckily for him, he did not, like Lansdowne, lay himself
open to the charge of “profanity,' and Lansdowne's censor has
given him high and detailed praise for a Hymn to Darkness,
apparently written in emulation of Cowley's Hymn to Light. It
is, fortunately, not in pindarics; though its stanza-a decasyllable,
two octosyllables and an alexandrine—is not very graceful. But
the present writer is quite unable to discover how and why
Thou dost thy smiles impartially bestow,
And knowest no difference here below;
All things appear the same by thee;
Though Light distinction makes, thou giv'st equality
is 'exquisitely beautiful. ' The last of the four, Dr William King,
though a rambling and unequal writer, is, perhaps, the most readable.
He wrote, in mixed verse and prose, The Art of Cookery, which is
,
quite interesting; one piece of his Orpheus and Eurydice, beginning
A roasted ant that's nicely done,
is familiar to all who were brought up on the old-fashioned
Speakers and Readers; humour and goodhumour abound in his


## p. 177 (#201) ############################################

The Later Group
177
work; he could turn little songs with a great deal of neatness;
and he contrives almost everywhere neither to offend nor to bore.
A second, and very much larger, division, which may, indeed,
perhaps with some sub-groupings, be made to include all the rest
of the poets to be dealt with in this section, consists of those verse-
writers who, though older than Pope, did not, for the most part,
publish poetry before the close of the seventeenth century, and who
represent the direct influence of Dryden, felt and exercised in
parallel measure with that felt by Pope himself; so that, in their
most characteristic work, they are of the queen Anne, or of the
earliest Georgian, division. These, for the most part, though they
may sometimes write pindarics, gravitate towards the couplet, and
occasionally towards blank verse; confine themselves, though they
do not abstain from lyric, to a few rather conventional forms of it;
and, when they are not attempting large, and generally ill-selected,
themes, approach very nearly to that 'paper of verses' which had
been contemptuously described in the generation before them.
Not a few of the later born of them, as well as many of those who
will be noticed in a subsequent chapter', make their appearance, if
not their first or only appearance, in that remarkable collection of
Dodsley, to which, accordingly, we must devote some direct atten-
tion as a whole. Some, such as Watts, have an abiding memory
for parts of their work, while the rest is absolutely forgotten.
Some, like Garth, have a place in the formal history of poetry
which ought to preserve them long after their theme has lost
whatever interest it may once have possessed. Others, like Black-
,
more, live in those ‘singing flames' of satire which at least ensure
an uncomfortable immortality. With the three just named, we
may begin.
The batch of writers previously reviewed, more or less, deserve
the politely contemptuous French epithet 'canary'; they seldom
attempted major themes, and, when they did, still more seldom
attacked them with the ‘horse, foot and artillery' of the long
poem. With the trio just mentioned, the case is altered. The
individual scale of Watts's pieces is, indeed, generally small; but
their tone is always serious. Garth's best known, or singly known,
work is, in design, burlesque; but the scale is considerable and the
plan involves stretches of treatment which are not burlesque at
all. Whatever may be said about Blackmore, two charges could
i See vol. x, chap. VII, post.
E. L. IX.
CH, VI.
12


## p. 178 (#202) ############################################

178
Lesser Verse Writers
>
never be brought against him: that the manner of his versifications
was frivolous or that their bulk was insignificant.
Sir Richard Blackmore, though his exact birth year does not
seem to be known, took his M. A. degree at Oxford in 1676, and,
therefore-at the very earliest age of matriculation likely, even at
that time—must have been born nearer 1650 than 1660; so that he
may have been ten years older than Sir Samuel Garth, who was
born in 1661, and can hardly have been much less than twenty the
senior of Isaac Watts, the date of whose birth was 1674. But the
order of their poetical merit must, on almost any conceivable
system of criticism, be reversed.
Very few people, it may be suspected, are nowadays in a
position to give offhand any opinion based on knowledge of
Watts's actual quality as a poet. Watts's Hymns' (as Divine
Songs for Children and Moral Songs are commonly, but in-
correctly, called) early excluded his other work from notice, in
accordance with the curious doom which literary reputations
often have to undergo: and, while they themselves are probably
little known now, their old familiarity has left behind it a sort of
good humoured contempt to rest on the sluggard, and the little
busy bee and the everlastingly misquoted 'Let dogs delight. '
But, though there are some very pretty things among these
faded immortelles, and though Watts's quite exceptional command
of flexible and original metre is often shown in them, they are by
no means the only or the chief poetical documents of his pro-
ductivity. Whether against them, as against nearly all Watts's
work, Johnson's wellknown objection to sacred poetry will lie, must
be left to individual opinion. It might, perhaps, be argued, without
much danger of refutation, that the paucity of successes ought to
be set against the extravagant multitude of attempts by quite un-
qualified hands, and that the existence of any successes at all-
hardly to be denied in the face of a chain of verse from Dies Irae
to not a few of Christina Rossetti's pieces—bars too sweeping a
condemnation. Undoubtedly, the bulk, if not the whole body, of
Watts's Horae Lyricae comes under the censure, whether it be
just or unjust. Too much of this collection is in the perilous form
of 'pindaric,' and too much of this, again, succumbs to the special
dangers of turgidity and frigidity which beset that form. For strictly
impertinent and hopelessly disproportionate bombast, Watts’s
Elegy on Mr Thomas Gouge, which Southey has justly ridiculed,
is hardly outstripped by anything in the English language. Yet,
even here, amid the bombast and the bathos, occur phrases, and


## p. 179 (#203) ############################################

Isaac Watts. Sir Samuel Garth 179
a
6
a
even passages, which, by themselves, dissociated from their
subject, are unquestionable poetry.
Elsewhere, the faults are less and the merits more continuous.
The sapphics ‘When the fierce north wind with his airy forces,'
like nearly all English attempts at the metre before the last half
century, balance and pivot the rhythm wrongly; but there is, at
least, something grandiose about them, and, like Watts's other
things, they show a healthy reaction against the chilling uniformity
of the couplet. Watts was one of the earliest to try blank verse;
and few will think his essays without rhyme,' as he himself called
them, an item on the wrong side of his account. He was sometimes
very happy in the dangerous ‘short measure'-the old ‘poulters’
measure' split into four; and, in whatever form he writes, we shall
not accompany him far without (though, perhaps, in a rather different
sense) agreeing with Johnson himself that ‘his ear was well tuned
and his diction elegant and copious. ' Inferior as he may be to
Collins, he shows the same combat of time and man: while the
time is even more against him. And one cannot help speculating
on what he might have done if his floruit had coincided, not with
the junction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but with
that of the eighteenth and nineteenth.
There need be no such speculation in considering the cheerful,
craftsmanlike and, on its own schemes, almost fully adequate,
verse of Garth—during the whole of his life, it would seem, a
'prosperous gentleman,' in the full meaning of both adjective and
noun, though, perhaps, a little unlucky after his death. For Pope's
wellknown compliment of his being the best good Christian
without knowing it'shows the risk of having an epigrammatist for
a friend. His few minor pieces, Claremont, a poem of a place in
the Cooper's Hill style, some prologues, epilogues, dedications,
Kit-cat glass-pieces, and so forth, are well enough, but unimportant.
The Dispensary, Garth’s magnum opus (or opusculum majus)
obtains for him the description above awarded to his muse. It is
a burlesque, not so much in the manner of Macflecknoe (to which
Garth could not rise) as in the manner of Boileau's Lutrin; and its
subject is a quarrel between members of the college of physicians
about the supply of medicines to a dispensary established some years
before. The poem was very popular, and was frequently reprinted
during the author's life, always in a revised and enlarged form; the
alterations, as is not always the case, being, almost invariably, im-
provements. Like all pieces of the kind, it requires, perhaps, on the
i See vol. 1, chap. vii, post.
1242


## p. 180 (#204) ############################################

180
Lesser Verse Writers
part of posterity, a rather trying effort to understand its personal and
temporal allusions, situations and parodies. But, even as supply-
ing a sidelight on the ways of so exceptionally interesting a time as
that of William III and Anne may surely be called, it is valuable.
To the student of English literature and English poetry, however,
it has a far more cogent appeal. It represents, as a sort of practical
Ars Poetica or object lesson, the stage between Dryden and Pope,
and, without exaggeration, may be said to be the first draft-and
not a very rough first draft—of the couplet versification and the
poetic diction which were to dominate the whole eighteenth
century. There was nothing in Garth even distantly approaching
the genius of Dryden or the genius of Pope; but he had learnt from
Dryden all that Dryden could teach to a younger contemporary of
more than ordinary talent, and he anticipated Pope in most things
that did not require Pope's special gifts. The smooth running
couplets with a clinching stamp at the close; the well marked
pause in the centre of each line; the balanced epithets in the
respective halves, sometimes achieving epigram, but too frequently
tempting to‘pad'-all these things appear. And, in some passages,
such as Horoscope's flight to Teneriffe and the descent of Hygeia
to the shades, the method is shown almost within reach of its best,
though its defects, too, already appear.
There is, thus, no need of the courage or the callousness of a
'Swiss of Heaven' in making out a case for Watts or for Garth;
but what shall be said of Blackmore? The present writer has read
a great deal of Blackmore at different times, has recently re-read
some and believes that his knowledge, if not exhaustive, is, at least,
adequate. So far as it goes (and it extends even to Eliza, in part),
it certainly does not support Johnson's contention that Blackmore
has been exposed to worse treatment than he deserved; nor does it
-and, on this head, it is pretty complete-enable him to accept the
other dictum that Creation, if the poet had written nothing else,
would have transmitted him to posterity among the first favourites
of the English muse. Dismiss (most readers will not have much
difficulty in doing so) all thoughts of Arthur ('Prince' and 'King'),
Eliza, Alfred and the rest; allow nothing on the score that Black-
more's diploma-piece, which the respectable Mr Molyneux and the
great Mr Locke esteemed highly, consists of verses like
He spread the airy ocean without shores
Where birds are wafted by their feathered oars;
let Creation, which is easily accessible, count alone, with no bias,
for or against it, from the fact that the praises of Addison and


## p. 181 (#205) ############################################

Blackmore. The Spectator Division
181
Johnson, if not those of Molyneux and Locke, were evidently
secured by its decent orthodoxy—and in this work will be noticed
an absence of the positive absurdities with which Blackmore's other
poems abound; so that it will seem as if there were some foundation
for the curious story that Blackmore submitted the piece to a club
of wits, surely more complacent and more patient than wits usually
are, who corrected it almost line by line. It displays some argu-
mentative power : and the verse is not entirely devoid of vigour.
But the whole is a flat expanse of bare didactic; while its constant
attempt to cope directly with Lucretius adds exasperation to the
disappointed expectance of something even distantly approaching
the furor arduus of the enemy. The conclusion is that one must
alter Johnson's final verdict slightly. He says that 'whoever judges
of this by any other of Blackmore's performances will do it injury.