Scaliger.—­Bless me! with what persons have I been discoursing?  With Virgil and Horace!  How could I venture to open my lips in their presence?  Good Mercury, I beseech you let me retire from a company for which I am very unfit.  Let me go and hide my head in the deepest shade of that grove which I see in the valley.  After I have performed a penance there, I will crawl on my knees to the feet of those illustrious shades, and beg them to see me burn my impertinent books of criticism in the fiery billows of Phlegethon with my own hands.

Mercury.—­They will both receive thee into favour.  This mortification of truly knowing thyself is a sufficient atonement for thy former presumption.

DIALOGUE XIV.

BOILEAU—­POPE.

Boileau.—­Mr. Pope, you have done me great honour.  I am told that you made me your model in poetry, and walked on Parnassus in the same paths which I had trod.

Pope.—­We both followed Horace, but in our manner of imitation, and in the turn of our natural genius, there was, I believe, much resemblance.  We both were too irritable and too easily hurt by offences, even from the lowest of men.  The keen edge of our wit was frequently turned against those whom it was more a shame to contend with than an honour to vanquish.

Boileau.—­Yes.  But in general we were the champions of good morals, good sense, and good learning.  If our love of these was sometimes heated into anger against those who offended them no less than us, is that anger to be blamed?

Pope.—­It would have been nobler if we had not been parties in the quarrel.  Our enemies observe that neither our censure nor our praise was always impartial.

Boileau.—­It might perhaps have been better if in some instances we had not praised or blamed so much.  But in panegyric and satire moderation is insipid.

Pope.—­Moderation is a cold unpoetical virtue.  Mere historical truth is better written in prose.  And, therefore, I think you did judiciously when you threw into the fire your history of Louis le Grand, and trusted his fame to your poems.

Boileau.—­When those poems were published that monarch was the idol of the French nation.  If you and I had not known, in our occasional compositions, how to speak to the passions, as well as to the sober reason of mankind, we should not have acquired that despotic authority in the empire of wit which made us so formidable to all the inferior tribe of poets in England and France.  Besides, sharp satirists want great patrons.

Pope.—­All the praise which my friends received from me was unbought.  In this, at least, I may boast a superiority over the pensioned Boileau.

Boileau.—­A pension in France was an honourable distinction.  Had you been a Frenchman you would have ambitiously sought it; had I been an Englishman I should have proudly declined it.  If our merit in other respects be not unequal, this difference will not set me much below you in the temple of virtue or of fame.