who lie, rob, and drink with the
most unaffected sincerity. Vice loses all its grossness, and becomes
intensely entertaining. The tone of the confessions is at once subtle
and naive, tragic and trivial, comic and pathetic. The humour is
absolutely colossal: many English books, alleged to be humorous, do not
contain, in their entire bulk, as much humour as a single chapter of
this great work. For brilliancy of style it stands very high, and few
authors, either in France or elsewhere, have attained such admirable
clearness, precision, and pith. Read _Gil Bias_, say I, if you wish to
appreciate the possibilities of the French tongue, and taste all the
delicate flavour of its racy idiom.

ROMANCE AND AUGUSTANISM.

There is a well-known text of Scripture, "In my father's house are many
mansions" which, with a slight turn, might be applied to the House of
Literature. There is room there for every pure and beautiful expression
of human thought and emotion. Romance and Augustanism have both the
right of entry.

I am glad to see that Alexander Pope, the cleverest of our English
bards, is still a popular favourite wherever I go. It would be a pity if
this were not so, for he is head of the guild of Queen Anne wits, and
no one of them can rival his instinctive delicacy, careful workmanship,
and crystalline lucidity. His skill in the coining of impressive
aphoristic couplets is unrivalled: it is almost as good as a novel
addition to truth to find an old maxim supplied with the winged words of
such a consummate verbal artist. Pope is a writer who appeals directly
to all readers, for he never hides poverty of thought in a cloud of
vague words.

In Pope and his fellows we miss the lavish magnificence and unchartered
freedom of the spacious times of great Elizabeth. Instead of Spenser's
amazing luxuriance of matter and metre, we have a neat uniformity and
trim array of couplets, which suggest the constant supervision of the
pruning craftsman. Compared with the Elizabethans, Pope's time has less
wealth but more careful mintage, less power but more husbanding of
strength, fewer flights of imagination but finer flutterings of fancy,
little humour but abundance of clear and sparkling wit. _It is not a
difficult task, by means of suitable selections, to bring home to an
audience of crofters the salient differences between the poetry of Pope
and of Spenser._

It is also easy to show to any audience that the quality which pleases
to