Waverley) as ever Mr. B.'s glory was from an editor. I am, nevertheless, on horseback and lonely for some hours (one of them twilight) in the forest daily; and this, became it was my 'custom in the afternoon,' and that I believe if the tyrant cannot escape amidst his guards (should it be so written), so the humbler individual would find precautions useless."

The following just tribute to my Reverend Friend's merits as a poct I have peculiar pleasure in extracting :

"Mr. Bowles has no reason to 'succumb' but to Mr. Bowles. As a poet, the author of 'The Missionary' may compete with the foremost of his contemporaries. Let it be recollected, that all my previous opinions of Mr. Bowles's poetry were written long before the publication of his last and best poem; and that a poet's last poem should be his best, is his highest praise. But, however, he may duly and honorably rank with his living rivals," &c. &c. &c.

Among various Addenda for this pamphlet, sent at different times to Mr. Murray, I find the following curious passages :

"It is worthy of remark that, after all this outcry about 'in-door nature' and 'artificial images,' Pope was the principal inventor of that boast of the English, Modern Gardening. He divides this honour with Milton. Hear Warton :— 'It hence appears that this enchanting art of modern gardening, in which this kingdom claims a preference over every nation in Europe, chiefly owes its origin and its improvements to two great poets, Milton and Pope.'

"Walpole (no friend to Pope) asserts that Pope formed Kent's taste, and that Kent was the artist to whom the English are chiefly indebted for diffusing ‘a taste in laying out grounds.' The design of the Prince of Wales's garden was copied from Pope's at Twickenham. Warton applauds 'his singular effort of art and taste, in impressing so much variety and scenery on a spot of five acres.' Pope was the first who ridiculed the 'formal, French, Dutch, false and unnatural taste in gardening,' both in prose and verse. (See, for the former, 'The Guardian.')

"Pope has given not only some of our first but best rules and observations on Architecture and Gardening.' (See Warton's Essay, vol. ii. p. 237, &c. &c.) "Now, is it not a shame, after this, to hear our Lakers in Kendal green,' and our Bucolical Cockneys, crying out (the latter in a wilderness of bricks and mortar) about 'Nature,' and Pope's 'artificial in-door habits?' Pope had seen all of nature that England alone can supply. He was bred in Windsor Forest, and amidst the beautiful scenery of Eton; he lived familiarly and frequently at the country seats of Bathurst, Cobham, Burlington, Peterborough, Digby, and Bolingbroke; amongst whose seats was to be numbered Stowe. He made his own little 'five acres' a model to Princes, and to the first of our artists who imitated nature. Warton thinks that the most engaging of Kent's works was also planned on the model of Pope's,—at least in the opening and retiring shades of Venus' Vale.'

"It is true that Pope was infirm and deformed; but he could walk, and he could ride (he rode to Oxford from London at a stretch), and he was famous for an exquisite eye. On a tree at Lord Bathurst's is carved, 'Here Pope sang,' he composed beneath it. Bolingbroke, in one of his letters, represents them both writing in a hay-field. No poet ever admired Nature more, or used her better, than Pope has done, as I will undertake to prove from his works, prose and verse, if not anticipated in so easy and agreeable a labour. I re

member a passage in Walpole, somewhere, of a gentleman who wished to give directions about some willows to a man who had long served Pope in his grounds: I understand, sir,' he replied: 'you would have them hang down, sir, somewhat poetical. Now if nothing existed but this little anecdote, it would suffice to prove Pope's taste for Nature, and the impression which he had made on a common-minded man. But I have already quoted Warton and Walpole (both his enemies), and, were it necessary, I could amply quote Pope himself for such tributes to Nature as no poet of the present day has even approached.

"His various excellence is really wonderful: architecture, painting, gardening, all are alike subject to his genius. Be it remembered, that English gardening is the purposed perfectioning of niggard Nature, and that without it England is but a hedge-and-ditch, double-post-and-rail, Hounslow-heath and Clapham-common sort of a country, since the principal forests have been felled. It is, in general, far from a picturesque country. The case is different with Scotland, Wales, and Ireland; and I except also the lake counties and Derbyshire, together with Eton, Windsor, and my own dear Harrow on the Hill, and some spots near the coast. In the present rank fertility of 'great poets of the age,' and 'schools of poetry'-a word which, like 'schools of eloquence' and of 'philosophy,' is never introduced till the decay of the art has increased with the number of its professors-in the present day, then, there have sprung up two sorts of Naturals ;-the Lakers, who whine about Nature because they live in Cumberland; and their under-sect (which some one has maliciously called the 'Cockney School'), who are enthusiastical for the country because they live in London. It is to be observed, that the rustical founders are rather anxious to disclaim any connexion with their metropolitan followers, whom they ungraciously review, and call cockneys, atheists, foolish fellows, bad writers, and other hard names, not less ungrateful than unjust. I can understand the pretensions of the aquatic gentlemen of Windermere to what Mr. B** terms' entusymusy,' for lakes, and mountains, and daffodils, and buttercups; but I should be glad to be apprised of the foundation of the London propensities of their imitative brethren to the same 'high argument.' Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge have rambled over half Europe, and seen Nature in most of her varieties (although I think that they have occasionally not used her very well); but what on earth-of earth, and sea, and Nature-have the others seen Not a half, nor a tenth part so much as Pope. While they sneer at his Windsor Forest, have they ever seen any thing of Windsor except its brick? "When they have really seen life-when they have felt it-when they have travelled beyond the far distant boundaries of the wilds of Middlesex-when they have overpassed the Alps of Highgate, and traced to its sources the Nile of the New River-then, and not till then, can it properly be permitted to them to despise Pope; who had, if not in Wales, been near it, when he described so beautifully the 'artificial' works of the Benefactor of Nature and mankind, the 'Man of Ross,' whose picture, still suspended in the parlour of the inn, I have so often contemplated with reverence for his memory, and admiration of the poet, without whom even his own still existing good works could hardly have preserved his honest renown.

"If they had said nothing of Pope, they might have remained alone with their glory' for aught I should have said or thought about them or their nonsense. But if they interfere with the little 'Nightingale' of Twickenham, they may find others who will bear it-I won't. Neither time, nor distance, nor grief, nor age, can ever diminish my veneration for him, who is the great moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of all stages of existence.

The delight of my boyhood, the study of my manhood, perhaps (if allowed to me to attain it) he may be the consolation of my age. His poetry is the Book of Life. Without canting, and yet without neglecting, religion, he has assembled all that a good and great man can gather together of moral wisdom clothed in consummate beauty. Sir William Temple observes, "That of all the members of mankind that live within the compass of a thousand years, for one man that is born capable of making a great poet there may be a thousand born capable of making as great generals and ministers of state as any in story.' Here is a statesman's opinion of poetry: it is honourable to him and to the art. Such a 'poet of a thousand years' was Pope. A thousand years will roll away before such another can be hoped for in our literature. But it can want them-he himself is a literature.

"One word upon his so brutally abused translation of Homer. 'Dr. Clarke, whose critical exactness is well known, has not been able to point out above three or four mistakes in the sense through the whole Iliad. The real faults of the translation are of a different kind.' So says Warton, himself a scholar. It appears by this, then, that he avoided the chief fault of a translator. As to its other faults, they consist in his having made a beautiful English poem of a sublime Greek one. It will always hold. Cowper and all the rest of the blank pretenders may do their best and their worst; they will never wrench Pope from the hands of a single reader of sense and feeling.

"The grand distinction of the under forms of the new school of poets is their vulgarity. By this I do not mean that they are coarse, but 'shabby-genteel,' as it is termed. A man may be coarse and yet not vulgar, and the reverse. Burns is often coarse, but never vulgar. Chatterton is never vulgar, nor Wordsworth, nor the higher of the Lake school, though they treat of low life in all its branches. It is in their finery that the new under school are most vulgar, and they may be known by this at once; as what we called at Harrow a Sunday blood' might be easily distinguished from a gentleman, although his clothes might be better cut, and his boots the best blackened, of the two;-probably because he made the one or cleaned the other with his own hands.

**

"In the present case, I speak of writing, not of persons. Of the latter, I know nothing; of the former, I judge as it is found. They may be honourable and gentlemanly men, for what I know, but the latter quality is studiously excluded from their publications. They remind me of Mr. Smith and the Miss Broughtons at the Hampstead Assembly, in 'Evelina.' In these things (in private life, at least) I pretend to some small experience: because, in the course of my youth, I have seen a little of all sorts of society, from the Christian prince and the Mussulman sultan and pacha, and the higher ranks of their countries, down to the London boxer, the 'flash and the swell,' the Spanish muleteer, the wandering Turkish dervise, the Scotch highlander, and the Albanian robber; to say nothing of the curious varieties of Italian social life. Far be it from me to presume that there are now, or can be, such a thing as an aristocracy of poets; but there is a nobility of thought and of style, open to all stations, and derived partly from talent, and partly from education,-which is to be found in Shakspeare, and Pope, and Burns, no less than in Dante and Alfieri, but which is nowhere to be perceived in the mock birds and bards of Mr. Hunt's little chorus. If I were asked to define what this gentlemanliness is, I should say that it is only to be defined by examples-of those who have it, and those who have it not. In life, I should say that most military men have it, and few naval; that several men of rank have it, and few lawyers; that it is more frequent among authors than divines (when they are not pedants); that fencing

masters have more of it than dancing-masters, and singers than players; and that (if it be not an Irishism to say so) it is far more generally diffused among women than among men. In poetry, as well as writing in general, it will never make entirely a poet or a poem; but neither poet nor poem will ever be good for any thing without it. It is the salt of society, and the seasoning of composition. Vulgarity is far worse than downright blackguardism; for the latter comprehends wit, humour, and strong sense at times; while the former is a sad abortive attempt at all things, 'signifying nothing.' It does not depend upon low themes, or even low language, for Fielding revels in both;-but is he ever vulgar! No. You see the man of education, the gentleman, and the scholar, sporting with his subject,-its master, not its slave. Your vulgar writer is always most vulgar the higher his subject; as the man who showed the menagerie at Pidcock's was wont to say, 'This, gentlemen, is the Eagle of the Sun, from Archangel in Russia: the otterer it is, the igherer he flies.""

In a note on a passage relative to Pope's lines upon Lady Mary W. Montague, he says

"I think that I could show, if necessary, that Lady Mary W. Montague was also greatly to blame in that quarrel, not for having rejected, but for having encouraged him; but I would rather decline the task-though she should have remembered her own line,' He comes too near, that comes to be denied.' I I admire her so much-her beauty, her talents-that I should do this reluctantly. I, besides, am so attached to the very name of Mary, that as Johnson once said, 'If you called a dog Harvey, I should love him ;' so if you were to call a female of the same species 'Mary,' I should love it better than others (biped or quadruped) of the same sex with a different appellation. She was an extraordinary woman: she could translate Epictetus, and yet write a song worthy of Aristippus. The lines,

"And when the long hours of the public are past,
And we meet, with champaigne and a chicken, at last,
May every fond pleasure that moment endear!

Be banish'd afar both discretion and fear!

Forgetting er scorning the airs of the crowd,
He may cease to be formal, and I to be proud,
Till,' &c. &c.

There, Mr. Bowles!-what say you to such a supper with such a woman? and her own description too? Is not her 'champaigne and chicken' worth a forest or two? Is it not poetry? It appears to me that this stanza contains the 'purée' of the whole philosophy of Epicurus :-I mean the practical philosophy of his school, not the precepts of the master; for I have been too long at the university not to know that the philosopher was himself a moderate man. But after all, would not some of us have been as great fools as Pope? For my part, I wonder that, with his quick feelings, her coquetry, and his disappointment, he did no more, instead of writing some lines, which are to be condemned if false, and regretted if true."

LETTER 424.

TO MR. HOPPNER.

"Ravenna, May 11, 1821.

"If I had but known your notion about Switzerland before, I should have adopted it at once. As it is, I shall let the child remain in her convent, where she seems healthy and happy, for the present; but I shall feel much obliged if you will enquire, when you are in the cantons, about the usual and better modes of education there for females, and let me know the result of your opinions. It is some consolation that both Mr. and Mrs. Shelley have written to approve entirely my placing the child with the nuns for the present. I can refer to my whole conduct, as having neither spared care, kindness, nor expense, since the child was sent to me. The people may say what they please, I must content myself with not deserving (in this instance) that they should speak ill.

"The place is a country town in a good air, where there is a large establishment for education, and many children, some of considerable rank, placed in it. As a country town, it is less liable to objections of every kind. It has always appeared to me, that the moral defect in Italy does not proceed from a conventual education,—because to my certain knowledge, they come out of their convents innocent even to ignorance of moral evil,-but to the state of society into which they are directly plunged on coming out of it. It is like educating an infant on a mountain-top, and then taking him to the sea, and throwing him into it and desiring him to swim. The evil, however, though still too general, is partly wearing away, as the women are more permitted to marry from attachment: this is, I believe, the case also in France. And after all, what is the higher society of England? According to my own experience, and to all that I have seen and heard (and I have lived there in the very highest and what is called the best), no way of life can be more corrupt. In Italy, however, it is, or rather was, more systematised; but now, they themselves are ashamed of regular Serventism. In England, the only homage which they pay to virtue is hypocrisy. I speak of course of the tone of high life,—the middle ranks may be virtuous. "I have not got any copy (nor have yet had) of the of course I should be delighted to send it to you. well again, I hope. Let me know when you set out. not meet you in the Bernese Alps this summer, as intended. With my best respects to madam, "P.S. I gave to a musicianer a letter for you some time ago—has he presented himself? Perhaps you could introduce him to the Ingrams and other dilettanti. He is simple and unassuming-two strange things in his profession—and he fiddles like Orpheus himself or Amphion: 'tis a pity that he can't make Venice dance away from the brutal tyrant who tramples upon it."

I

letter on Bowles; How is Mrs. H.?

regret that I can

I

once hoped and

I am ever, &c.