the transparency of their style, and their freedom from affection. If
I may trust my understanding of your meaning, our modern versifiers
have only made the simple discovery, that an appearance of antiquity
is the cheapest passport to respect. But the cheapest which we
purchase with subservience is too dear. You yourself have no such
prejudice against the Augustan age of English literature. I have
caught you more than once with the _Tatler_ in your hand, and have
heard you praising Dryden's prefaces.

"_Philip._--You and I have very different notions of what poetry is,
and of what its object should be. You may claim for Pope the merit of
an envious eye, which could turn the least scratch upon the character
of a friend into a fester, of a nimble and adroit fancy, and of an
ear so niggardly that it could afford but one invariable caesura to
his verse; but, when you call him poet, you insult the buried majesty
of all earth's noblest and choicest spirits. Nature should lead the
true poet by the hand, and he has far better things to do than to
busy himself in counting the warts upon it, as Pope did. A cup of
water from Hippocrene, tasting, as it must, of innocent pastoral
sights and sounds, of the bleat of lambs, of the shadows of leaves
and flowers that have leaned over it, of the rosy hands of children
whose privilege it ever is to paddle in it, of the low words of
lovers who have walked by its side in the moonlight, of the tears of
the poor Hagars of the world who have drunk from it, would choke a
satirist. His thoughts of the country must have a savour of Jack
Ketch, and see no beauty but in a hemp field. Poetry is something to
make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of
beauty and truth which God has set in all men's souls; not by picking
out the petty faults of our neighbours to make a mock of. Shall that
divine instinct, which has in all ages concerned itself only with
what is holiest and fairest in life and nature, degrade itself to go
about seeking for the scabs and ulcers of the putridest spirits, to
grin over with a derision more hideous even than the pitiful quarry
it has moused at? Asmodeus's gift, of unroofing the dwellings of his
neighbours at will, would be the rarest outfit for a satirist, but it
would be of no wor