Pope.—­I like her best when she smiles.  But did you never reprove your witty friend, La Fontaine, for the vicious levity that appears in many of his tales?  He was as guilty of the crime of debauching the Muses as any of our comic poets.

Boileau.—­I own he was, and bewail the prostitution of his genius, as I should that of an innocent and beautiful country girl.  He was all nature, all simplicity! yet in that simplicity there was a grace, and unaffected vivacity, with a justness of thought and easy elegance of expression that can hardly be found in any other writer.  His manner is quite original, and peculiar to himself, though all the matter of his writings is borrowed from others.

Pope.—­In that manner he has been imitated by my friend Mr. Prior.

Boileau.—­He has, very successfully.  Some of Prior’s tales have the spirit of La Fontaine’s with more judgment, but not, I think, with such an amiable and graceful simplicity.

Pope.—­Prior’s harp had more strings than La Fontaine’s.  He was a fine poet in many different ways:  La Fontaine but in one.  And, though in some of his tales he imitated that author, his “Alma” was an original, and of singular beauty.

Boileau.—­There is a writer of heroic poetry, who lived before Milton, and whom some of your countrymen place in the highest class of your poets, though he is little known in France.  I see him sometimes in company with Homer and Virgil, but oftener with Tasso, Ariosto, and Dante.

Pope.—­I understand you mean Spenser.  There is a force and beauty in some of his images and descriptions, equal to any in those writers you have seen him converse with.  But he had not the art of properly shading his pictures.  He brings the minute and disagreeable parts too much into sight; and mingles too frequently vulgar and mean ideas with noble and sublime.  Had he chosen a subject proper for epic poetry, he seems to have had a sufficient elevation and strength in his genius to make him a great epic poet:  but the allegory, which is continued throughout the whole work, fatigues the mind, and cannot interest the heart so much as those poems, the chief actors in which are supposed to have really existed.  The Syrens and Circe in the “Odyssey” are allegorical persons; but Ulysses, the hero of the poem, was a man renowned in Greece, which makes the account of his adventures affecting and delightful.  To be now and then in Fairyland, among imaginary beings, is a pleasing variety, and helps to distinguish the poet from the orator or historian, but to be always there is irksome.

Boileau.—­Is not Spenser likewise blamable for confounding the Christian with the Pagan theology in some parts of his poem?

Pope.—­Yes; he had that fault in common with Dante, with Ariosto, and with Camoens.

Boileau.—­Who is the poet that arrived soon after you in Elysium, whom I saw Spenser lead in and present to Virgil, as the author of a poem resembling the “Georgics”?  On his head was a garland of the several kinds of flowers that blow in each season, with evergreens intermixed.