own still existing good works could
hardly have preserved his honest renown.

"If they had said nothing of _Pope_, they might have remained 'alone
with their glory' for aught I should have said or thought about them or
their nonsense. But if they interfere with the little 'Nightingale' of
Twickenham, they may find others who will bear it--_I_ won't. Neither
time, nor distance, nor grief, nor age, can ever diminish my veneration
for him, who is the great moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all
feelings, and of all stages of existence. The delight of my boyhood, the
study of my manhood, perhaps (if allowed to me to attain it) he may be
the consolation of my age. His poetry is the Book of Life. Without
canting, and yet without neglecting, religion, he has assembled all
that a good and great man can gather together of moral wisdom clothed in
consummate beauty. Sir William Temple observes, 'That of all the members
of mankind that live within the compass of a thousand years, for one man
that is born capable of making a _great poet_ there may be a _thousand_
born capable of making as great generals and ministers of state as any
in story.' Here is a statesman's opinion of poetry: it is honourable to
him and to the art. Such a 'poet of a thousand years' was _Pope_. A
thousand years will roll away before such another can be hoped for in
our literature. But it can _want_ them--he himself is a literature.

"One word upon his so brutally abused translation of Homer. 'Dr. Clarke,
whose critical exactness is well known, has _not been_ able to point out
above three or four mistakes _in the sense_ through the whole Iliad. The
real faults of the translation are of a different kind.' So says Warton,
himself a scholar. It appears by this, then, that he avoided the chief
fault of a translator. As to its other faults, they consist in his
having made a beautiful English poem of a sublime Greek one. It will
always hold. Cowper and all the rest of the blank pretenders may do
their best and their worst; they will never wrench Pope from the hands
of a single reader of sense and feeling.

"The grand distinction of the under forms of the new school of poets is
their _vulgarity_. By this I do not mean that they are coarse, but
'shabby-genteel,' as it is termed. A man may be _coarse_ and yet not
_vulgar_, and the reverse. Burns is often coarse, but never _vulgar_.
Chatterton is never vulgar, nor Wordsworth, nor the higher of the Lake
school