from Pope than from any two living poets, be they who they may.  To take an instance at random from a species of composition not very favourable to imagination—­Satire:  set down the character of Sporus, with all the wonderful play of fancy which is scattered over it, and place by its side an equal number of verses, from any two existing poets, of the same power and the same variety—­where will you find them?

“I merely mention one instance of many in reply to the injustice done to the memory of him who harmonised our poetical language.  The attorneys clerks, and other self-educated genii, found it easier to distort themselves to the new models than to toil after the symmetry of him who had enchanted their fathers.  They were besides smitten by being told that the new school were to revive the language of Queen Elizabeth, the true English; as every body in the reign of Queen Anne wrote no better than French, by a species of literary treason.

“Blank verse, which, unless in the drama, no one except Milton ever wrote who could rhyme, became the order of the day,—­or else such rhyme as looked still blanker than the verse without it.  I am aware that Johnson has said, after some hesitation, that he could not ‘prevail upon himself to wish that Milton had been a rhymer.’  The opinions of that truly great man, whom it is also the present fashion to decry, will ever be received by me with that deference which time will restore to him from all; but, with all humility, I am not persuaded that the Paradise Lost would not have been more nobly conveyed to posterity, not perhaps in heroic couplets, although even they could sustain the subject if well balanced, but in the stanza of Spenser, or of Tasso, or in the terza rima of Dante, which the powers of Milton could easily have grafted on our language.  The Seasons of Thomson would have been better in rhyme, although still inferior to his Castle of Indolence; and Mr. Southey’s Joan of Arc no worse, although it might have taken up six months instead of weeks in the composition.  I recommend also to the lovers of lyrics the perusal of the present laureate’s odes by the side of Dryden’s on Saint Cecilia, but let him be sure to read first those of Mr. Southey.

“To the heaven-born genii and inspired young scriveners of the day much of this will appear paradox; it will appear so even to the higher order of our critics; but it was a truism twenty years ago, and it will be a re-acknowledged truth in ten more.  In the mean time, I will conclude with two quotations, both intended for some of my old classical friends who have still enough of Cambridge about them to think themselves honoured by having had John Dryden as a predecessor in their college, and to recollect that their earliest English poetical pleasures were drawn from the ’little nightingale’ of Twickenham.

     “The first is from the notes to a Poem of the ‘Friends[5],’ pages
     181, 182.