That is to say, a poet should never call upon the gods for their assistance but when he is in great perplexity.

For the Descriptions.-For a Tempest.-Take Eurus, Zephyr, Auster, and Boreas, and cast them together in one verse: add to these, of rain, lightning, and of thunder (the loudest you can), quantum sufficit. Mix your clouds and billows well together till they foam, and thicken your description here and there with a quicksand. Brew your tempest well in your head before you set it a-blowing.

For a Battle.—Pick a large quantity of images and descriptions from Homer's Iliads, with a spice or two of Virgil; and if there remain any overplus, you may lay them by for a skirmish. Season it well with similes, and it will make an excellent battle.

For a Burning Town.-If such a description be necessary, because it is certain there is one in Virgil, Old Troy is ready burnt to your hands. But if you fear that would be thought borrowed, a chapter or two of the Theory of the Conflagration, well circumstanced, and done into verse, will be a good succedaneum.

As for Similes and Metaphors, they may be found all over the creation; the most ignorant may gather them; but the danger is in applying them. For this, advise with your bookseller.

For the Language.-(I mean the diction.) Here it will do well to be an imitator of Milton, for you will find it easier to imitate him in this than anything else. Hebraisms and Grecisms are to be found in him, without the trouble of learning the languages. I knew a painter, who, like our poet, had no genius, make his daubings be thought originals by setting them in the smoke. You may, in the same manner, give the venerable air of antiquity to your piece, by darkening it up and down with Old English. With this you may be easily furnished upon any occasion by the dictionary commonly printed at the end of Chaucer.

I must not conclude without cautioning all writers without genius in one material point; which is, never to be afraid of having too much fire in their works. I should advise rather to take their warmest thoughts, and spread them abroad upon paper, for they are observed to cool before they are read.

The first edition of Pope (1751), by his friend Bishop Warburton, was an answer to Bolingbroke's attack on Pope's memory. Warton's (1797) was virtually a reply to Warburton's; Bowles and Roscoe each published an edition of his works; but all other editions have been superseded by that of Elwin and Courthope, with a Life of the poet by Courthope in the last volume (10 vols. 1871-89).

John Dennis (1657–1734) was known as 'the critic,' and some of his critical disquisitions show an acute but narrow and coarse mind. The son of a prosperous London saddler, he had received a learned education at Harrow and Cambridge, and was well read in ancient and modern literature. He took his place among the men of wit and fashion, and brought a rancorous pen to the assistance of the Whigs. But his intolerable vanity, irritable temper, intemperance, and failure to attain literary success led him into feuds which rendered his whole life a scene of warfare. His critiques on Addison's Cato and Pope's Homer are well known. He wrote nine plays, for one of which-a tragedy called Appius and Virginia (1708)-he invented a

new species of thunder, which was approved of in the theatres. The play was not successful; and being afterwards present at a representation of Macbeth, and hearing his own thunder made use of, he growled, 'See how these rascals use me; they will not let my play run, and yet they steal my thunder!' Many ludicrous stories are told of his self-importance, which amounted to a disease. Southey has praised his critical powers, and Mr Gosse, who speaks highly of his earlier work, has noted his fervent and judicious eulogy of Milton;' but Dennis is remembered mainly for his bitter attacks on the new school of poetry in his time, and for his quarrels with Pope, whom he assailed as a 'stupid and impudent hunch-backed toad.' Pope took ample vengeance.

Charles Gildon (1665–1724), born at Gillingham in Dorsetshire, was a Catholic bred at Douay who became a deist, and was converted back to Protestant orthodoxy. He was an industrious hack-writer, wrote unsuccessful plays, occasional poems, a Life of Defoe, and some critical books, including one on The Laws of Poetry. As he preferred Tickell as a translator, and Ambrose Philips as a pastoral poet, to Pope, he was severely handled in the Dunciad and Moral Essays.

Edmund Smith (1672–1710) was, according to Dr Johnson, 'one of those lucky writers who have without much labour attained high reputation, and who are mentioned with reverence rather for the possession than the exertion of uncommon abilities; but the reputation and the reverence have vanished, and little is remembered but his name and the fact that he wrote an artificial play, Phædra and Hippolytus, on Racine's model, which had the honour of a prologue by Addison and an epilogue by Prior, but was 'hardly heard the third night.' Johnson sympathised with the public rather than with Addison, but highly praised Smith's Latin ode on the death of the orientalist, Dr Pococke, and his (English) elegy on John Philips. Handsome, slovenly ‘Rag' Smith (for so he was known to his contemporaries) was the son of a London merchant called Neale, but assumed the name of a relative by whom he was brought up; he was expelled from Christ Church, Oxford, for his irregular life, and died of a dose of physic taken in defiance of the doctor.

Marl

John Hughes (1677-1720), born at borough, and educated at the same Dissenting academy as Dr Isaac Watts, is best known as author of a successful tragedy, The Siege of Damascus, and as a contributor to the Tatler, the Spectator, the Guardian, and other serials. Pope and Swift thought more highly of his character than of his poetry. But he is one of Johnson's poets, having written a number of Poems on Several Occasions, odes, &c., as well as the libretto for an English opera, Calypso and Telemachus, a masque, and several cantatas set to music by Handel and other eminent musicians.

He wrote two volumes of a History of England, completed by another hand, and translated from French and Italian.

William King (1663 – 1712) was admitted among Johnson's poets on the strength of Mully of Mountown, in honour of a cow at a friend's house near Dublin; The Art of Cookery, in imitation of Horace's 'Art of Poetry;' The Art of Love, after Ovid; and one or two other poems, mostly humorous. But he was better known as a miscellaneous and controversial writer, an indolent and inefficient place-holder, and a ‘starving wit.' The son of a well-connected London family, he studied at Westminster and Christ Church, became D.C.L. and advocate at Doctors' Commons, and was for a time Judge of the Admiralty Court in Ireland. succeeded Steele as Gazetteer, but could keep the post only a year and a half. He took part in the controversy with Bayle against Bentley, supported the Tory and High Church interest in the Sacheverell and other cases, and wrote against Marlborough. His best-known works are Dialogues of the Dead (against Bentley), and a travesty, A Journey to London, in the character of a Frenchman, in which the vein of jocularity is very thin. Thus he tediously enumerates trifling facts:

He

I found the houses some of them stone entire, some of brick with free-stone; as the Crown-Tavern upon Ludgate Hill and the corner house of Birchen lane and several others. Divers of the citizens houses have portcochers to drive in a coach or a cart either, and consequently have courts within and mostly remises to set them up. Such persons as have no port-cochers, and consequently no courts or remises, set up their coaches at other places and let their horses stand at livery. The cellar windows of most houses are grated with strong bars of iron to keep thieves out, and Newgate is grated up to the top to keep them in. Which must be a vast expence. . . . There are beggars in London and people whose necessities force them to ask relief from such as they think able to afford it. . . . There is a great deal of noise in this city, of public cries of things to be sold, and great disturbance from pamphlets and hawkers. ...

...

Orpheus and Euridice is a burlesque overflowing with 'modernity,' and runs on in this fashion :

This Orpheus was a jolly boy,
Born long before the siege of Troy ;
His parents found the lad was sharp,
And taught him on the Irish harp;
And when grown fit for marriage life,
Gave him Euridice for wife,

And they, as soon as match was made,
Set up the ballad-singing trade.
The cunning varlet cou'd devise,
For country folks ten thousand lies;
Affirming all those monstrous things
Were done by force of harp and strings;
Cou'd make a tyger in a trice
Tame as a cat, and catch your mice;
Cou'd make a lyon's courage flag,

And straight cou'd animate a stag,

And by the help of pleasing ditties,
Make mill-stones run, and build up cities;
Each had the use of fluent tongue,
If Dice scolded, Orpheus sung.
And so by discord without strife,
Compos'd one harmony of life;
And thus, as all their matters stood,
They got an honest livelihood.

Happy were mortals could they be
From any sudden danger free ;
Happy were poets could their song,
The feeble thread of life prolong.
But as these two went strouling on,
Poor Dice's scene of life was done;
Away her fleeting breath must fly,
Yet no one knows wherefore, or why.
This caus'd the general lamentation,
To all that knew her in her station;
How brisk she was still to advance
The harper's gain, and lead the dance,
In every tune observe her trill,

Sing on, yet change the money still.

Another contemporary William King (1650–1729) was-though born in Aberdeenshire-Archbishop of Dublin, and a writer on divinity; a third (1685– 1763), born at Stepney, and Principal of St Mary Hall, Oxford, was author of The Toast, a mockheroic satire levelled against his opponents in a troublesome lawsuit about a property in Galway.

Aaron Hill (1685-1750), the son of a Wiltshire squire, was bred at Barnstaple and Westminster, and travelled with a tutor to Constantinople and the Levant. He wrote numerous poems and a dozen plays, and cut a considerable figure among the literary men of the first half of the eighteenth century, not a few of whom were his debtors for encouragement and help; but he is best remembered for his controversy with Pope, the allusion to him in the Dunciad, for the spirit with which he met Pope's attack, and the victory he obtained in the ensuing correspondence. Only one of Hill's dramas, the tragedy of Zara, after Voltaire, can be said to have been popular. He was an ingenious, speculative man, projected a new way of making potash, extracted oil from beech-mast, manufactured wine from a vineyard in Essex, and tried to develop the rafting of timber down the Spey for the navy, but was seldom successful in any of his schemes.

Hill is not the contemptible poetaster he is often taken for, though in the eighty-two closely printed, double-columned pages occupied by his poetical works in Anderson's British Poets there is much wearisome commonplace, as well as some felicity of diction and real poetry, and much of no little interest, in a form old-fashioned enough to seem ungraceful, yet not archaic enough to be quaint. He praised Pope, encouraged Thomson with sound advice excellently versified, and enthusiastically greeted 'the unknown author of the beautiful new piece called Pamela.' He intervened warmly in prose and verse on behalf of Savage. He wrote

the famous translation of Crashaw's lines on the miracle of Cana. In a panegyric of Peter the Great he laments British suspicion of Russia, foresees the Black Sea covered by the Russian navy, the East and West united and under Russian sway, Siberia occupied, and China and the Porte humiliated. And before Ossian Macpherson was born we find Hill translating from (non-extant?) Gaelic poems and praising the Scuirs of Skye.

Ronald and Dorna-By a Highlander, to his
Mistress.

From a Literal Translation of the Original.
Come, let us climb Skorr-urran's snowy top;
Cold as it seems, it is less cold than you:

Thin through its snow these lambs its heath-twigs crop ;
Your snow, more hostile, starves and freezes too.

What though I loved of late in Skie's fair isle;

And blushed, and bowed, and shrunk from Kenza's eye? All she had power to hurt with was her smile; But 'tis a frown of your's for which I die.

Ask why these herds beneath us rush so fast

On the brown sea-ware's stranded heaps to feed? Winter, like you, withholds their wished repast,

And, robbed of genial grass, they browse on weed.

Mark with what tuneful haste Sheleila flows,

To mix its widening stream in Donnan's lake; Yet should some dam the current's course oppose, It must perforce a less loved passage take.

Born like your body for a spirit's claim,

Trembling I wait, unsouled till you inspire: God has prepared the lamp, and bids it flame; But you, fair Dorna, have withheld the fire. High as yon pine, when you begin to speak,

My lightening heart leaps hopeful at the sound; But fainting at the sense, falls, void and weak, And sinks and saddens like yon mossy ground.

All that I taste, or touch, or see, or hear,

Nature's whole breadth reminds me but of you; Ev'n heaven itself would your sweet likeness wear, If with its power you had its mercy too.

To Mrs L-r, playing on a Bass Viol. While o'er the dancing chords your fingers fly, And bid them live, till they have made us die; Trembling in transport at your touch they spring, As if there dwelt a heart in every string.

Your voice soft rising through the lengthened notes,
The married harmony united floats;
Two charms so join'd that they compose but one;
Like heat and brightness from the self-same sun.
The wishful viol would its wealth retain,
And, sweetly conscious, hugs the pleasing pain,
Envious forbids the warbling joys to roll,
And, murmuring inward, swells its sounding soul.
Proud of its charming power, your tuneful bow
Floats o'er the chords majestically slow;
Careless and soft, calls out a tide of art,
And in a storm of music drowns the heart.

So when that god, who gave you all your skill,
To angel forms like yours intrusts his will,
Calm they descend some new-meant world to found,
And smiling see creation rising round!

A Song.

Oh forbear to bid me slight her,
Soul and senses take her part;
Could my death itself delight her,

Life should leap to leave my heart. Strong though soft a lover's chain, Charm'd with woe and pleas'd with pain.

Though the tender flame were dying,
Love would light it at her eyes;
Or, her tuneful voice applying,
Through my ear my soul surprise.
Deaf, I see the fate I shun;
Blind, I hear I am undone.

The Messenger.

Go, happy paper, gently steal,

And soft beneath her pillow lie: There in a dream my love reveal, A love that awe must else conceal, In silent doubt to die.

Should she to flames thy hope consign, Thy suffering moment soon expires, A longer pain, alas, is mine, Condemned in endless woe to pine, And feel unslackening fires.

But if inclined to hear and bless,

While in her heart soft pity stirs ; Tell her her beauties might compel A hermit to forsake his cell,

And change his heaven for her's. Oh tell her were her treasures mine, Nature and art would court my aid; The painter's colours want her shine; The rainbow's brow not half so fine As her sweet eyelids shade! By day the sun might spare his rays; No star make evening bright; Her opening eyes, with sweeter blaze, Should measure all my smiling days, And if she slept, 'twere night.

Verses Written on Windows in Scotland.
Scotland, thy weather's like a modish wife,
Thy winds and rains forever are at strife:
So termagant a while her thunder tries,
And, when she can no longer scold—she cries.

Tender-handed stroke a nettle,
And it stings you for your pains;
Grasp it like a man of mettle,
And it soft as silk remains.

'Tis the same with common naturesUse 'em kindly, they rebel :

But be rough as nutmeg graters,
And the rogues obey you well.

On Peter the Great.

Perish the pride, in poor distinction shown, That makes man blind to blessings not his own: Briton and Russian differ but in name:

In nature's sense all nations are the same.
One world, divided, distant brothers share,
And man is reason's subject every where.

Not so of old when, stern in horrid arms, The needy north poured forth her Gothic swarms; Roughly they warred, on arts they could not taste, And blindly laid the tracks of learning waste. This heaven remembered, and with kind command, Called for atonement from the barbarous land. The prince, disdainful of his country's crime, Guiltless springs forward to uncurse the clime: And, nobly just, has taught the nations more, Than the world's empire ruined lost before!

Thy catching lustre fires the north's wide soul, And thaws the icy influence of the pole. The shaggy Samo.d, shaking off the snow, Warms his cold breast with new desire to know. The rugged Tartar, from whose swarthy bands A gloom of horror used to shade thy lands, Charmed by thy generous daring, checks his own, Assumes new nature, and adorns thy throne. Beams of young learning, active as the wind, Radiant flame out, and light up half mankind : Stern superstition's misty cloud dispelled,

Quits her chief throne, through long dark ages held :
And Russian arms a glittering terror cast,

O'er realms where scarce the Russian name had past!

From nameless outlets, endless naval hosts,
Blackening still more the sable Euxine's coasts,
Shall teach the Porte's imperial walls to shake,
And the fell sultan's iron sceptre break.
Grecia's lost soul shall be restored by thee,
Great saver! setting empire's genius free.
Then Hellespont, whose stream indignant glides,
And a subjected world's two bounds divides,

Shall feel, while reaching both thy thunder roars,
Europe and Asia trembling to her shores. . .

So spring the seeds of pow'r, when wisely sown!
So pregnant genius plans the future throne !
Meanwhile, great founder! gathering strength from blows,
They spread thy glory who thy arms oppose.
The self-prized lords of China's boastful land
Feel their pride shrink beneath thy bordering band:
The trackless wilds, which both vast states disjoin,
Are, even when arm'd with shivering winter, thine.
O'er realms of snow thy furry squadrons fly,
And bring at ease the dreadful distance nigh,
In vain opposed, the enormous wall they see ;
Proclaimed defiance can but quicken thee.

Zembla's white cliffs, eternal hoards of frost,
Where proud discov'ry has so oft been lost,
Through every period of the world till now,

Have checked all keels that would those oceans plow.
Nature's last barrier, they all search withstood,
And bound ambition up in freezing blood;
Reserv'd by heav'n and for thy reign design'd,
Thy piercing eye shall that dark passage find,
Or, east's and west's embracing confines shown,
Join two emerging worlds; and both thy own.

Shall then at last, beneath propitious skies,
The cross triumphant o'er the crescent rise?
Shall we behold earth's long-sustained disgrace
Revenged in arms on Osman's haughty race?
Shall Christian Greece shake off a captive shame,
And look unblushing at her Pagan fame?
Twill be.-Prophetic Delphos claims her own :
Hails her new Cæsars on a Russian throne.

Athens shall teach once more, once more aspire,
And Spartan breasts reglow with martial fire:
Still, still Byzantium's brightening domes shall shine,
And rear the ruined name of Constantine.

So when young time its first great birth-day kept, And huddled nature yet in chaos slept ; The eternal Word, to set distinction free, But spoke the almighty fiat-Let there be. Millions of ways the starting atoms flew ; Like clung to like, and sudden order grew : Struggling in clouds a while confusion lay, Then died at once and lost itself in day.

Leonard Welsted (1688-1747), born at Abington in Northamptonshire, and bred at Westminster and Cambridge, became clerk in ordinary to the Ordnance and a commissioner of State lotteries. He was an accomplished scholar and a fashionable poet, author of a play and a number of epistles, odes, and other poems, as well as of a translation of Longinus.

Elijah Fenton (1683–1730), reckoned by Johnson 'an excellent versifier and a good poet,' may still be held entitled to the first characterisation, inasmuch as it would hardly be possible to distinguish his share from Pope's in the translation of the Odyssey did we not know that Pope had assigned him the first, fourth, nineteenth, and twentieth books in the joint enterprise. Fenton was the son of an attorney at Shelton near Newcastle-under-Lyne, and studied at Jesus College, Cambridge. A very estimable man, he was for a time headmaster of the grammar-school at Sevenoaks in Kent, and from 1714 till his death was usually a tutor or secretary in wealthy houses. His odes to the Sun and to Life, his epistles, complimentary odes, elegies, and tales, are rather verse than poetry. But his tragedy of Mariamne was acted with great success. He translated and 'imitated' from Isaiah, Horace, Ovid, Catullus, Propertius, and Chaucer (the latter exercitation in bogus-antique English).

William Broome (1689–1745), born at Haslington, Cheshire, from Eton passed to St John's College, Cambridge, held four livings in Suffolk and Norfolk, and wrote six books of Pope's Odyssey -the eighth, eleventh, twelfth, sixteenth, eighteenth, and twenty-third-in a style of verse even less distinguishable from Pope's own than Fenton's. Broome was a much better Greek scholar than Pope, who was greatly annoyed when he found that popular rumour exaggerated his debt to his collaborator; and the master-spirit was not above taking revenge on society by pillorying Broome in a line of the Dunciad. Broome's own verses have no merits save those of sound sense, appropriate illustration, and correct rhythm and rhyme. He is specially copious on the 'pompous misery of being great,' repeating with tedious iteration the sentiment that 'none are completely wretched but the great.'

Lewis Theobald (1688-1744) was one of the many contemporaries whom the satire of Pope invested with literary interest; but for their sorrows at Pope's hand some of their names would have long since passed into oblivion. The bad poets outwitted him, as Swift predicted, and provoked him to transmit their names to posterity. Theobald, the first hero of the Dunciad, procured the enmity of Pope by criticising his edition of Shakespeare, and editing a better edition himself (1733). Well versed in the Elizabethan writers, and in dramatic literature generally, he decidedly excelled Pope as a commentator. He is acknowledged to have made many most brilliant emendations of the folio text of Shakespeare-notably the famous and a babbled of green fields' in the Hostess's account of Falstaff's death in Henry V. He also wrote some poetical and dramatic pieces, but they are feeble performances. He was born at Sittingbourne, and bred an attorney.

Thomas Yalden (1670-1736) was a poet commended by Johnson, whose verses fill over thirty closely printed, double-columned pages in Anderson's British Poets. His father was a groom of the chamber to Prince Charles, and after the Restoration an exciseman at Oxford. The son, admitted as a demy to Magdalen College, took orders; held cures in Warwickshire, Wiltshire, Devonshire, and Hampshire successively or together; and in 1713 was appointed chaplain to Bridewell Hospital. He was imprisoned for a short time on suspicion of being concerned in Atterbury's schemes. He wrote translations, imitations, paraphrases or pieces 'in allusion to' Homer, Horace, Ovid, Isaiah, and others, 'Pindaric' odes on a variety of subjects, a collection of neatly turned fables with political reference, odes and hymns. How the High Churchman of that day judged Milton may be seen from the verses, quoted below, which he wrote in his copy of Paradise Lost:

These sacred lines with wonder we peruse,
And praise the flights of a seraphic muse,
Till thy seditious prose provokes our rage,
And soils the beauties of thy brightest page.
Thus here we see transporting scenes arise,
Heaven's radiant host, and opening paradise ;
Then trembling view the dread abyss beneath,
Hell's horrid mansions, and the realms of death.
Whilst here thy bold majestic numbers rise,
And range th' embattled legions of the skies,
With armies fill the azure plains of light,
And paint the lively terrors of the fight,
We own the poet worthy to rehearse
Heaven's lasting triumphs in immortal verse :
But when thy impious mercenary pen
Insults the best of princes, best of men,
Our admiration turns to just disdain,
And we revoke the fond applause again.

Like the fall'n angels in their happy state,
Thou shar'dst their nature, insolence and fate:
To harps divine, immortal hymns they sung,
As sweet thy voice, as sweet thy lyre was strung.

As they did rebels to th' Almighty grow,
So thou profan'st his image here below.
Apostate bard! may not thy guilty ghost,
Discover to its own eternal cost,

That as they heaven, thou paradise hast lost!
His 'Hymn to Darkness,' obviously written in
rivalry of Cowley's Hymn to Light,' begins thus:
Darkness, thou first great parent of us all,

Thou art our great original:

Since from thy universal womb

Does all thou shad'st below, thy numerous offspring come.
Thy wondrous birth is ev'n to time unknown,
Or, like eternity, thou'dst none;
Whilst light did its first being owe
Unto that awful shade it dares to rival now.

Say, in what distant region dost thou dwell,
To reason inaccessible?

From form and duller matter free,
Thou soar'st above the reach of man's philosophy.
Involv'd in thee, we first receive our breath,

Thou art our refuge too in death:
Great monarch of the grave and womb,
Where'er our souls shall go, to thee our bodies come.

Johnson says the first seven verses are good, but the third, fourth, and seventh are the best of them; the tenth he pronounces 'exquisitely beautiful ’— a judgment more significant for Johnson than for Yalden! The seventh and tenth are:

Though solid bodies do exclude the light,

Nor will the brightest ray admit:
No substance can thy force repel,

Thou reign'st in depths below, dost in the centre dwell....
Thou dost thy smiles impartially bestow,

And know'st no difference here below: All things appear the same by thee, Though light distinction makes, thou giv'st equality. Johnson evidently valued the sense more than the manner; modern critics would find it difficult to see wherein the verses selected by Johnson for special commendation are less commonplace and antipoetic than the rest of the eighteen.

Bernard de Mandeville (1670-1733), a vigorous and graphic writer, who squandered exceptional powers largely on paradoxical and antimoral speculations, was born at Dort in Holland, and, having studied at Leyden, came over to England, and settled in London as a medical practitioner. His first publications were in rhyme. In 1705 he published a string of sarcastic verses entitled The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves Turned Honest, which he reprinted in 1714 with the addition of long explanatory notes, and an Inquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue, giving to the whole the title afterwards so well known, The Fabie of the Bees, or Private Vices Public Benefits. To a later edition were added An Essay on Charity Schools and A Search into the Origin of Society. The Grumbling Hive is the only part where there is semblance of a fable; and from its first paragraph