sible, the
concetti as fanciful and far-fetched as possible. If Marino and Cowley
be greater poets than Ariosto and Milton, let young poets imitate the
former with might and main, and avoid spoiling their style by any
perusal of the too-intelligible common sense of the latter. If Byron's
moral (which used to be thought execrable) be really his great
excellence, his style (which used to be thought almost perfect) unworthy
of this age of progress, then let us have his moral without his style,
his matter without his form; or--that we may be sure of never falling
for a moment into his besetting sin of terseness, grace, and
completeness--without any form at all. If poetry, in order to be worthy
of the nineteenth century, ought to be as unlike as possible to Homer or
Sophocles, Virgil or Horace, Shakespeare or Spenser, Dante or Tasso, let
those too idolised names be rased henceforth from the calendar; let the
_Ars Poetica_, be consigned to flames by Mr. Calcraft, and Bartinus
Scriblerus's _Art of Sinking_ placed forthwith on the list of the
Committee of the Council for Education, that not a working man in
England may be ignorant that, whatsoever superstitions about art may
have haunted the benighted heathens who built the Parthenon, _nous avons
changes tout cela_. In one word, if it be best and most fitting to write
poetry in the style in which almost everyone has been trying to write it
since Pope and plain sense went out, and Shelley and the seventh heaven
came in; let it be so written: and let him who most perfectly so "sets
the age to music," be presented by the assembled guild of critics, not
with the obsolete and too classical laurel, but with an electro-plated
brass medal, bearing the due inscription, _Ars est nescire artem_. And
when, in twelve months' time, he finds himself forgotten, perhaps
descried, for the sake of the next aspirant, let him reconsider himself,
try whether, after all, the common sense of the many will not prove a
juster and a firmer standing-ground than the sentimentality and bad
taste of the few, and read Alexander Pope.

In Pope's writings, whatsoever he may not find, he will find the very
excellences after which our young poets strive in vain, produced by
their seeming opposites, which are now despised and discarded;
naturalness produced by studious art; daring sublimity by strict
self-restraint; depth by clear simplicity; pathos by easy grace; and a
morality infinitely more merciful, as well a