Pope.—­Your description points out Thomson.  He painted nature exactly, and with great strength of pencil.  His imagination was rich, extensive, and sublime:  his diction bold and glowing, but sometimes obscure and affected.  Nor did he always know when to stop, or what to reject.

Boileau.—­I should suppose that he wrote tragedies upon the Greek model.  For he is often admitted into the grove of Euripides.

Pope.—­He enjoys that distinction both as a tragedian and as a moralist.  For not only in his plays, but all his other works, there is the purest morality, animated by piety, and rendered more touching by the fine and delicate sentiments of a most tender and benevolent heart.

Boileau.—­St. Evremond has brought me acquainted with Waller.  I was surprised to find in his writings a politeness and gallantry which the French suppose to be appropriated only to theirs.  His genius was a composition which is seldom to be met with, of the sublime and the agreeable.  In his comparison between himself and Apollo, as the lover of Daphne, and in that between Amoret and Sacharissa, there is a finesse and delicacy of wit which the most elegant of our writers have never exceeded.  Nor had Sarrazin or Voiture the art of praising more genteelly the ladies they admired.  But his epistle to Cromwell, and his poem on the death of that extraordinary man, are written with a force and greatness of manner which give him a rank among the poets of the first class.

Pope.—­Mr. Waller was unquestionably a very fine writer.  His Muse was as well qualified as the Graces themselves to dress out a Venus; and he could even adorn the brows of a conqueror with fragrant and beautiful wreaths.  But he had some puerile and low thoughts, which unaccountably mixed with the elegant and the noble, like schoolboys or a mob admitted into a palace.  There was also an intemperance and a luxuriancy in his wit which he did not enough restrain.  He wrote little to the understanding, and less to the heart; but he frequently delights the imagination, and sometimes strikes it with flashes of the highest sublime.  We had another poet of the age of Charles I., extremely admired by all his contemporaries, in whose works there is still more affectation of wit, a greater redundancy of imagination, a worse taste, and less judgment; but he touched the heart more, and had finer feelings than Waller.  I mean Cowley.

Boileau.—­I have been often solicited to admire his writings by his learned friend, Dr. Spratt.  He seems to me a great wit, and a very amiable man, but not a good poet.

Pope.—­The spirit of poetry is strong in some of his odes, but in the art of poetry he is always extremely deficient.

Boileau.—­I hear that of late his reputation is much lowered in the opinion of the English.  Yet I cannot but think that, if a moderate portion of the superfluities of his wit were given by Apollo to some of their modern bards, who write commonplace morals in very smooth verse, without any absurdity, but without a single new thought, or one enlivening spark of imagination, it would be a great favour to them, and do them more service than all the rules laid down in my “Art of Poetry” and yours of “Criticism.”