old friend stood up and looked about him with that pleasure which a mind seasoned with humanity naturally feels in its self, at the sight of a multitude of people who seem pleased with one another, and partake of the same common entertainment. I could not but fancy to myself, as the old man stood up in the middle of the pit, that he made a very proper center to a tragick audience. Upon the entering of Pyrrhus, the knight told me, that he did not believe the King of France himself had a better strut. I was indeed very attentive to my old friend's remarks, because I looked upon them as a piece of natural criticism, and was well pleased to hear him at the conclusion of almost every scene, telling me that he could not imagine how the play would end. One while he appeared much concerned for Andromache; and a little while after as much for Hermione: and he was extremely puzzled to think what would become of Pyrrhus.

When Sir Roger saw Andromache's obstinate refusal to her lover's importunities, he whispered me in the ear, that he was sure she would never have him; to which he added with a more than ordinary vehemence, you can't imagine, sir, what 'tis to have to do with a widow Upon Pyrrhus his threatening afterwards to leave her, the knight shook his head, and muttered to himself, ay, do if you can. This part dwelt so much upon my friend's imagination, that at the close of the third act, as I was thinking of something else. he whispered in my ear, these widows, sir, are the most perverse creatures in the world. But pray, says he, you that are a critick, is this play according to your dramatick rules, as you call them? Should your people in tragedy always talk to be understood? Why, there is not a single sentence in this play that I do not know the meaning of.

The fourth act very luckily began before I had time to give the old gentleman an answer: Well, says the knight, sitting down with great satisfaction, I suppose we are now to see Hector's ghost. He then renewed his attention, and, from time to time, fell a praising the widow. He made, indeed, a little mistake as to one of her pages, whom at his first entering, he took for Astyanax; but he quickly set himself right in that particular, though, at the same time, he owned he should have been very glad to have seen the little boy, who, says he, must needs be a very fine child by the account that is given of him. Upon Hermione's going off with a menace to Pyrrhus, the audience gave a loud clap; to which Sir Roger added, On my word, a notable young baggage!

As there was a very remarkable silence and stillness in the

audience during the whole action, it was natural for them to take the opportunity of these intervals between the acts, to express their opinion of the players, and of their respective parts. Sir Roger hearing a cluster of them praise Orestes, struck in with them, and told them, that he thought his friend Pylades was a very sensible man; as they were afterwards applauding Pyrrhus, Sir Roger put in a second time; and let me tell you, says he, though he speaks but little, I like the old fellow in whiskers as well as any of them. Captain Sentry, seeing two or three wags who sat near us lean with an attentive ear towards Sir Roger, and fearing lest they should smoke the knight, plucked him by the elbow, and whispered something in his ear, that lasted till the opening of the fifth act. The knight was wonderfully attentive to the account which Orestes gives of Pyrrhus his death, and at the conclusion of it, told me it was such a bloody piece of work, that he was glad it was not done upon the stage. Seeing afterwards Orestes in his raving fit, he grew more than ordinary serious, and took occasion to moralize (in his way) upon an evil conscience, adding, that Orestes, in his madness, looked as if he saw something.

As we were the first that came into the house, so we were the last that went out of it; being resolved to have a clear passage for our old friend, whom we did not care to venture among the jostling of the crowd. Sir Roger went out fully satisfied with his entertainment, and we guarded him to his lodgings in the same manner that we brought him to the play-house; being highly pleased, for my own part, not only with the performance of the excellent piece which had been presented, but with the satisfaction which it had given to the good old man.

CHAPTER X.

POPE AND SWIFT.

IT has been shown already that although the Restoration inaugurated in England an age of prose, yet the position of poetry as the chief and natural medium for pure literature was still accepted almost without question. For that reason Pope was taken in his own day to the undisputed head and front of English letters. His contemporaries probably felt, as we feel, that Swift's was immeasurably the greater genius; but they held, and held rightly, that Pope in his work was the true representative of what has come to be called the Augustan literature. The two works in prose dating from that period which have sunk deepest into the mind of the race-Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels-were written by men who stood outside the main literary movement. Defoe never at any time attained a place in the great literary côterie of which Swift, while he kept in touch with England, was a brilliant member; and Swift wrote Gulliver when lonely and rebellious in Ireland, thinking his own thoughts. Now the distinctive characteristic of the Augustan literature is that we have no longer in a book the

mind of an individual, but the mind of a society finding expression through the mouth of one of its members. It was a natural result of that intellectual ascendency of France which cannot be too strongly insisted on; for the Frenchman is always social rather than individualist, and, at least in criticism, men had come to take their beliefs from France.

The cardinal point in these beliefs was that literature admitted of rules, which had been first formulated by Aristotle, after him by Horace, and finally by Boileau; and consequently, that the first duty of a writer was to be correct; to conform in poetry not only to the laws of grammar and of rhyme, but to certain other canons of taste hardly less definite. It is true that Milton, in no way touched by French ideas, attached importance to the Aristotelian criticism, and that in his Samson he worked on a Greek model. But then Milton knew Greek a great deal better than Pope knew any language but his own. In nothing is Pope more typical than in his constant lip-homage to the ancients whom he had scarcely read. He translated Homer, it is true, but he founded his rendering mainly on other versions; he knew Virgil somewhat, but was evidently deaf and blind to the note of lyricism which pervades Virgil as it pervades the work of all great poets. What · he did know was Horace; but all that he saw in Horace was the admirable expression of a sententious philosophy, the work of a great wit.' The word wit' wit' recurs perpetually in Pope's writings; it represents the goal of his ambitions; and he has defined it in a characteristic couplet:

True wit is nature to advantage dressed :

What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.

???

But the function of a poet is not to separate and
crystallise into compactness the common thought;
it is rather to link it to infinities of association, to
send it out trailing clouds of glory; to show the
"primrose by the river brim" or the "flower in the
crannied wall" as a single expression of forces
making for beauty that sweep through the cosmos.
Shakespeare abounds in sententious utterance; for
instance:
We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

But here, apart from the large harmony of sound,
apart from the intrinsic beauty of the words, is
their dramatic fitness in Prospero's mouth, when his
fairy masque fades suddenly, and he evokes the
solemn images of all that we take to be least
dreamlike, ending with "the great globe itself,
yea all that it inherit." We cannot separate the
aphorism and feel that we can see all around it, as
we can with any characteristic utterance of Pope's,
such as:

What can ennoble sots or fools or cowards?
Alas! not all the blood of all the Howards.

If one can assert anything positively in criticism, it is that Pope's ideal of poetry is unpoetic. But it does not follow that Pope was not a poet. That he was a great writer no one will deny. The disservice which Pope did to English literature-and it has been much exaggerated-is that he used his authority to formulate, as possessing universal validity, the rules which it suited his genius to observe. His first study was to be 'correct'; to make the expression of his thought sharply defined in form, and completely intelligible; to exhaust in each phrase the content of his own meaning. Now,