the model in an exaggerated degree. Pope could not disguise
from himself that his verses were the echo of an echo; and in a letter
of July 2, 1706, he begged Walsh to tell him sincerely whether he had
not stretched the license of borrowing too far. Walsh admitted in his
answer, that some persons to whom he had shown the manuscript had made
this objection, but he professed not to share it, and comforted his
friend by the assurance, "that in all the common subjects of poetry the
thoughts are so obvious that whoever writes last must write things like
what have been said before." Roscoe has repeated the plea, and speaks of
"the unreasonableness" of expecting new images on a topic which "has
been the general theme of poetry in every country, period, and
language." He forgot that rural scenery and life had furnished abundant
novelty to Thomson, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Crabbe, whose pictures are
as fresh and unhacknied as if Theocritus and Virgil had never lived. "He
that walks behind," said Michael Angelo "can never go before;" and
originality was impossible when Pope's only notion of legitimate
pastoral was a slavish mimicry of classical remains. Had he drawn his
materials from the English landscape before his eyes, from the English
characters about his doors, and from the English usages and modes of
thought in his own day, he would have discovered a thousand particulars
in which he had not been anticipated by Greeks and Romans. He neglected
this inexhaustible territory, and bestowed so little attention upon the
realities around him, that though his descriptions are confined to the
barest generalities, they are not unfrequently false.

After contending that the triteness of the Pastorals was inevitable,
Roscoe puts forth a second defence to save the precocity of their
author. "The observation," he says, "of Johnson, that no invention was
intended, is, as far as the remark of Warton affects the genius and
character of Pope, a decisive answer." This must mean that he copied
from choice, and not from necessity, which is contradicted by the
confession of Pope himself, who acknowledges that he leant upon his
masters because he was unable to go alone.[12] Without his testimony we
should have been driven to the same conclusion, since every great poet
whose youthful verses have been preserved, began by imitating his
predecessors, and it would be absurd, in defiance of a general law, to
assume that Pope was gifted with a juvenile ori