.
We must all of us allow, that were an ancient Briton, habited, or rather
unhabited, as above, to bounce into a modern drawing-room full of
ladies, whether in rouge and diamonds, hoops and hair-powder, or not,
the effect of such _entree_ would be prodigious on the fair and
fluttered Volscians. Our imagination, "absorbing the anachronism,"
ensconces us professionally behind a sofa, to witness and to record the
scene. How different in nature Christopher North and R.H. Horne! While
he would be commiserating "the injury thus done to the ancient Briton,"
we should be imploring our savage ancestor to spare the ladies.
"Innocent of all intention to offend" might be Caractacus, but to the
terrified bevy he would seem the king of the Cannibal Islands at least.
What protection against the assault of a savage, almost _in puris
naturalibus_, could be hoped for in their hoops! Yet who knows but that,
on looking round and about, he might himself be frightened out of his
senses? An ancient Briton, with his long rough hair and painted body,
may laugh and sing by himself, half-naked under a tree, and in his own
conceit be a match for any amount of women. But shorn of his falling
hair, and without a streak of paint on his cheeks, verily his heart
might be found to die within him, before furies with faces fiery with
rouge, and heads horrent with pomatum--till instinctively he strove to
roll himself up in the Persian carpet, and there prayed for deliverance
to his tutelary gods.

Our imagination having thus "absorbed the anachronism," let us now leave
Caractacus in the carpet--while our reason has recourse to the
philosophy of criticism. Mr Horne asserts, that in "Mr Pope's"
highly-finished paraphrase of the "Wife of Bath's Prologue," and the
"Merchant's Tale," "the licentious humour of the original is divested of
its quaintness and obscurity, and becomes yet more licentious in
proportion to the fine touches of skill with which it is brought into
the light." Quaintness and _obscurity_!! Why, everything in those tales
is as plain as a pike-staff, and clearer than mud. "The hazy appearance
of the original" indeed! What! of the couple in the Pear-Tree? Mr Horne
spitefully and perversely misrepresents the character of Pope's
translations. They are remarkably free from the vice he charges them
withal--and have been admitted to be so by the most captious critics.
Many of the very strong things in Chaucer, which you may call coarse and
gross if