knows he tells.  There were in that diseased sensitive cripple no vain repinings, no moon-struck howls, no impious cries against God:  “Why hast thou made me thus?” To him God is a righteous God, a God of order.  Science, philosophy, politics, criticism, poetry, are parts of His order—­they are parts of the appointed onward path for mankind; there are eternal laws for them.  There is a beautiful and fit order, in poetry, which is part of God’s order, which men have learnt ages ago, for they, too, had their teaching from above; to offend against which is absolutely wrong, an offence to be put down mildly in those who offend ignorantly; but those who offend from dulness, from the incapacity to see the beautiful, or from carelessness about it, when praise or gain tempts them the other way, have some moral defect in them; they are what Solomon calls fools:  they are the enemies of man; and he will “hate them right sore, even as though they were his own enemies”—­which indeed they were.  He knows by painful experience that they deserve no quarter; that there is no use giving them any; to spare them is to make them insolent; to fondle the reptile is to be bitten by it.  True poetry, as the messenger of heavenly beauty, is decaying; true refinement, true loftiness of thought, even true morality, are at stake.  And so he writes his “Dunciad.”  And would that he were here, to write it over again, and write it better!

For write it again he surely would.  And write it better he would also.  With the greater cleanliness of our time, with all the additional experience of history, with the greater classical, aesthetic, and theological knowledge of our day, the sins of our poets are as much less excusable than those of Eusden, Blackmore, Cibber, and the rest, as Pope’s “Dunciad” on them would be more righteously severe.  What, for instance, would the author of the “Essay on Man” say to anyone who now wrote p. 137 (for it really is not to be quoted) of the “Life Drama” as the thoughts of his hero, without any after atonement for the wanton insult it conveys toward him whom he dares in the same breath to call “Father,” simply because he wants to be something very fine and famous and self-glorifying, and Providence keeps him waiting awhile?  Has Pope not said it already?

Persist, by all divine in man unawed,
But learn, ye dunces, not to scorn your God!

And yet no; the gentle goddess would now lay no such restriction on her children, for in Pope’s day no man had discovered the new poetic plan for making the divine in man an excuse for scorning God, and finding in the dignity of “heaven-born genius” free licence to upbraid, on the very slightest grounds, the Being from whom the said genius pretends to derive his dignity.  In one of his immortal saws he has cautioned us against “making God in man’s image.”  But it never entered into his simple head that man would complain of God for being made in a lower image than even his own.  Atheism he could conceive of; the deeper absurdity of Authotheism was left for our more enlightened times and more spiritual muses.