of strength and grandeur; its
power was the power of indifference. He had none of the enthusiasm of
poetry: he was in poetry what the sceptic is in religion.

It cannot be denied, that his chief excellence lay more in diminishing,
than in aggrandizing objects; in checking, not in encouraging our
enthusiasm; in sneering at the extravagances of fancy or passion, instead
of giving a loose to them; in describing a row of pins and needles, rather
than the embattled spears of Greeks and Trojans; in penning a lampoon or a
compliment, and in praising Martha Blount.

Shakspeare says,

"In Fortune's ray and brightness
The herd hath more annoyance by the brize
Than by the tyger: but when the splitting wind
Makes flexible the knees of knotted oaks,
And flies fled under shade, why then
The thing of courage,
As roused with rage, with rage doth sympathise;
And with an accent tuned in the self-same key,
Replies to chiding Fortune."

There is none of this rough work in Pope. His Muse was on a
peace-establishment, and grew somewhat effeminate by long ease and
indulgence. He lived in the smiles of fortune, and basked in the favour of
the great. In his smooth and polished verse we meet with no prodigies of
nature, but with miracles of wit; the thunders of his pen are whispered
flatteries; its forked lightnings pointed sarcasms; for "the gnarled oak,"
he gives us "the soft myrtle:" for rocks, and seas, and mountains,
artificial grass-plats, gravel-walks, and tinkling rills; for earthquakes
and tempests, the breaking of a flower-pot, or the fall of a china jar;
for the tug and war of the elements, or the deadly strife of the passions,
we have

"Calm contemplation and poetic ease."

Yet within this retired and narrow circle how much, and that how
exquisite, was contained! What discrimination, what wit, what delicacy,
what fancy, what lurking spleen, what elegance of thought, what pampered
refinement of sentiment! It is like looking at the world through a
microscope, where everything assumes a new character and a new
consequence, where things are seen in their minutest circumstances and
slightest shades of difference; where the little becomes gigantic, the
deformed beautiful, and the beautiful deformed. The wrong end of the
magnifier is, to be sure, held to every thing, but still the exhibition is
highly curious, and we know not whether to be most pleased or surprised.
Such, at least, is the be