iner
beds of flowers than the most industrious gardener; his roses, lilies,
and daffodils blow in the same season." Pope might have remembered that
in his own Pastorals he had made roses, violets, and crocuses bloom
together, which drew from George Steevens the remark, that he has rarely
mentioned flowers without some mistake of the kind. The nicest observers
of nature are not exempt from these oversights. The swine in Ivanhoe
feed on acorns under the trees in the middle of summer, and though
Walter Scott, at the end of the Monastery, alluded playfully to the
anachronism, he never cared to correct the error. A more important
charge, in which Pope is most of all open to retaliation, was that
Philip's Pastorals "gave manifest proof of his knowledge of books."
While it was admitted that "his competitor had imitated some single
thoughts of the ancients," Philips was held up as a wholesale
depredator. He does, indeed, abound in the stock ideas which had served
a hundred versifiers. He is a warbler who whistles an old tune, but he
is not without a few notes which have a semblance of originality, and
these are wanting in his accuser. Inferior to the Pastorals of Pope in
polish and versification, the Pastorals of Philips are, on the whole,
superior in their substance. The trial of skill between the musician and
the nightingale, which forms the subject of the fifth Pastoral, is
narrated with singular sweetness, and may still be read with pleasure.
In true poetic feeling it is much beyond anything in the Pastorals of
his scoffing critic. Philips owed his advantage to his maturer years,
and not to the brilliancy of his talents; he was thirty-four when
Tonson's Miscellany appeared, and Pope was but twenty-one. The powers of
Philips remained stationary, and he ranks low among the minor poets.
Pope quickly ripened into genius, and reigned without a competitor. The
exaggerated panegyrics of the Guardian could not confer a reputation
upon Philips he did not deserve, and Pope derived none of his celebrity
from the gross expedient of exalting himself, and decrying his
antagonist. There is nothing which is less affected by unjust praise and
unjust detraction than an author's works. They are there to speak for
themselves, and no amount of petty artifices can long raise them higher
or sink them lower than they merit.

Pope was a contributor to the Guardian, and on cordial terms with the
editor, but he could not ask to have a paper inserted