rking-men, as a model of what is just in composition--fit either for
conciliating their regard to literature at first or afterwards for
sustaining it? The qualifications for such a writer are apparently these
two; first, that he should deal chiefly with the elder and elementary
affections of man, and under those relations which concern man's
grandest capacities; secondly, that he should treat his subject with
solemnity, and not with sneer--with earnestness, as one under a
prophet's burden of impassioned truth, and not with the levity of a girl
hunting a chance-started caprice. I admire Pope in the very highest
degree; but I admire him as a pyrotechnic artist for producing brilliant
and evanescent effects out of elements that have hardly a moment's life
within them. There is a flash and a startling explosion, then there is a
dazzling coruscation, all purple and gold; the eye aches under the
suddenness of a display that, springing like a burning arrow out of
darkness, rushes back into the darkness with arrowy speed, and in a
moment is all over. Like festal shows, or the hurrying music of such
shows--

It _was_, and it is not.

Untruly, therefore, was it ever fancied of Pope, that he
belonged by his classification to the family of the Drydens. Dryden had
within him a principle of continuity which was not satisfied without
lingering upon his own thoughts, brooding over them, and oftentimes
pursuing them through their unlinkings with the _sequaciousness_ (pardon
a Coleridgian word) that belongs to some process of creative nature,
such as the unfolding of a flower. But Pope was all jets and tongues of
flame; all showers of scintillation and sparkle. Dryden followed,
genially, an impulse of his healthy nature. Pope obeyed, spasmodically,
an overmastering febrile paroxysm. Even in these constitutional
differences between the two are written and are legible the
corresponding necessities of "utter falsehood in Pope, and of loyalty to
truth in Dryden." Strange it is to recall this one striking fact, that
if once in his life Dryden might reasonably have been suspected of
falsehood, it was in the capital matter of religion. He _ratted_ from
his Protestant faith; and according to the literal origin of that figure
he _ratted_; for he abjured it as rats abjure a ship in which their
instinct of divination has deciphered a destiny of ruin, and at the very
moment when Popery wore the promise of a triumph that might, at any
rate, have