phic discourse of the
bird is not inconsistent with the wild imaginings of a dream. "Fantastic
matter" is here the most natural, and keeps up an illusion which
disappears in the formal composition of Pope. The advantage of modern
language and versification would have rendered it easy for a man less
gifted than him to improve on isolated passages, but the free fancy and
picturesqueness of Chaucer are wanting. The romance which constitutes
the truth and charm of the original dream is replaced by a scene of
frigid tameness; and Johnson, while declaring that every part of the
remodelled piece was splendid, is compelled to admit that it is turned
silently over and takes no hold on the mind. Dullness is a fatal
innovation which is poorly compensated by the greater polish of the
style, and harmony of the verse.

The Temple of Fame suffered from a cause which deteriorated much of
Pope's early poetry,--the notion that the noblest exercise of mind was
to magnify the ancients, and reproduce their ideas. The epic poem he
commenced at thirteen was naturally a school-boy's "slavish imitation"
of Greek and Latin authors.[6] A magnificent modern literature, marked
by the strongest lines of native vigour and masculine independence,
might have been expected, as he grew acquainted with it, to expand his
taste. This effect did not ensue. Led astray by the false conventional
canons of hacknied criticism, he clung to his early prejudices, and,
regardless of the splendid names which gave the lie to his theory, he
could say, at the age of thirty, in the preface to his works, "All that
is left us is to recommend our productions by the imitation of the
ancients." He told Spence that he should certainly have tried his hand
upon a second epic if he had not translated the Iliad, and this epic, in
its main characteristics, would not have differed much from his
translation. "I should have sat down to it," he said, "with this
advantage, that I had been nursed up in Homer and Virgil."[7] He once
intended to take the Corinthian Timoleon for his hero; and scene,
manners, personages, machinery, and sentiments would all have been as
Greek as they could be made by an imitator who had not entered deeply
into the spirit of classic writers and times. The everlasting interest
attached to the Iliad,--to a poem original and national, reflecting the
institutions, customs, feelings, and beliefs of its era,--would, he
thought, be extended to a modern duplicate, in w