ong,
Cheer'd the rough road, we wish'd the rough road long.
The rough road then, returning in a round,
Mock'd our impatient steps, for all was fairy ground.

We have now, surely, lost much of the delay, and much of the rapidity.

But, to show how little the greatest master of numbers can fix the
principles of representative harmony, it will be sufficient to remark
that the poet, who tells us, that

When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labours, and the words move slow:
Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o'er th' unbending corn, and skims along the main;

when he had enjoyed, for about thirty years, the praise of Camilla's
lightness of foot, tried another experiment upon _sound_ and _time_, and
produced this memorable triplet:

Waller was smooth; but Dryden taught to join
The varying verse, the full resounding line,
The long majestick march, and energy divine.

Here are the swiftness of the rapid race, and the march of slow-paced
majesty, exhibited by the same poet in the same sequence of syllables,
except that the exact prosodist will find the line of _swiftness_ by one
time longer than that of _tardiness_.

Beauties of this kind are commonly fancied; and, when real, are
technical and nugatory, not to be rejected, and not to be solicited.

To the praises which have been accumulated on the Rape of the Lock by
readers of every class, from the critick to the waiting-maid, it is
difficult to make any addition. Of that which is universally allowed to
be the most attractive of all ludicrous compositions, let it rather be
now inquired from what sources the power of pleasing is derived.

Dr. Warburton, who excelled in critical perspicacity, has remarked that
the preternatural agents are very happily adapted to the purposes of the
poem. The heathen deities can no longer gain attention: we should have
turned away from a contest between Venus and Diana. The employment of
allegorical persons always excites conviction of its own absurdity; they
may produce effects, but cannot conduct actions; when the phantom is put
in motion, it dissolves; thus Discord may raise a mutiny, but Discord
cannot conduct a march, or besiege a town. Pope brought into view a new
race of beings, with powers and passions proportionate to their
operation. The sylphs and gnomes act, at the toilet and the tea-table,
what more terrifick and more powerful phantoms perform on the stormy
ocean, or the field of b