since thoughts are not always the true reflection of outward
realities, poetasters, and even poets, have concluded that they might
represent things neither as they are nor as they appear, might neglect
nature altogether, and be unfaithful alike to the world of intelligence,
and the world of matter. To this spurious class of invention belong the
notions that a river, which had flowed for ages, was the tears of the
river-god lamenting the newly-deceased Cowley, and that all the swans on
the Thames died with grief on the day of his funeral. The mind refuses
to admit such jejune and monstrous fictions among the illusions of
imagination. The compound of mythological and biblical ideas in the
fourth line has converted a pathetic incident in the Psalms into a cold
and miserable conceit. The harp of the Jew was a reality; and when he
wept over his captivity by the rivers of Babylon he hung up his harp in
very truth because his broken spirit would not permit him to sing the
Lord's song in a strange land. There is, on the contrary, only hollow
pedantry in the pretence that non-existent muses hung up non-existent
lyres on the willows of the Thames because Cowley was dead. The passage
goes on in the same empty artificial strain:

Who now shall charm the shades, where Cowley strung
His living harp, and lofty Denham sung?
But hark! the groves rejoice, the forest rings!
Are these revived?--or is it Granville sings?

It is an excellent remark of Bowles that there are some ideas which will
only just bear touching. The earliest poems were sung, and singing
became synonymous with poetical composition, but when a phrase, which is
now a mere figure of speech, is expanded, and the groves are said to
rejoice, and the forests to ring with the singing of Granville, the
predominant effect produced by the metaphor is a sense of its falsity
and grotesqueness. The picture called up is not that of a poet, but of a
half-crazed opera singer. This sickly vein of counterfeit pastoral is
continued, and we are told that the groves of Windsor are filled with
the name of Mira, the subject of Lord Lansdowne's amatory verses, and
that the Cupids tuned the lover's lyre in the shades.

The lines on Lord Lansdowne offend the more from the fulsomeness of the
adulation. Pope said that "flattery turned his stomach,"[24] which meant
that he could not endure his own vices in other people. He had
emphatically satirised the sycophancy which estimated