in making Aristarchus (Bentley) abuse himself, and laugh at his own labours.

"The mighty scholiast, whose unweary'd pains

Made Horace dull, and humbled Maro's strains,
Turn what they will to verse, their toil is vain,
Critics like me shall make it prose again.
For Attic phrase in Plato let them seek,
I poach in Suidas for unlicens'd Greek.
For thee we dim the eyes, and stuff the head
With all such reading as was never read:
For thee explain a thing till all men doubt it,
And write about it, Goddess, and about it."

If Bentley has turned Horace and Milton (Warton blunderingly reads Maro) into prose by his emendations (Milton assuredly he has-Pope may be wrong about Horace), he has rendered vast service to the empire of Dullness; and it would be quite unreasonable that he should not claim of the goddess all merited reward and honour, by announcing exactly this achievement. With what face could he pretend to her favour by telling her that he had restored the text of two great poets to its original purity and lustre? She would have ordered him to instant execution or to a perpetual dungeon.

Finally, how happened it that such perspicacious personages as Lord Kames and Dr. Warton, to say nothing of their hoodwinked followers, should have thus objected to the passages and speeches singled out for condemnation, as if they alone deserved it, without perceiving that the whole poem, from the first line to the last, was, on their principle, liable to the same fatal objection? And what, on their principle, would they have thought, had they ever read it, of MacFlecnoe?

Pope takes the name of Dullness largely, for the offuscation of heart and head. He said, long before,

"Want of decency is want of sense;"

and he now seems to think himself warranted in attributing vices and corruptions to a clouded understanding-so to Dullness. At least, the darkness and weakness of the moral reason came under the protection of the mighty mother-the daughter of Chaos and of Night. She fosters the disorder and the darkness of the soul. Mere bluntness and inertness of intellect, which the name would suggest, he never confines himself to. Of sharp misused power of mind, too, she is

the tutelary goddess. Errors which mind arrives at by too much subtlety, by self-binding activity, serve her purpose and the poet's; and so some names of powerful intellects are included, which, on a question of their merits, indeed, had better been left out. So the science of mathematics, far overstepping, as the poet conceives, the boundary of its legitimate activity

"Mad Mathesis alone

Now running round the circle, finds it square."

The real foe of Dullness, then, is Truth-not simply wit or genius. The night of mind is all that Dullness labours to produce. Misdirected wit and genius help on this consummation, and therefore deserve her smile-all the more that they are her born enemies, turned traitors to their native cause; and most formidable enemies too, had they remained faithful. Needs must she load them with dignity and emoluments. Trace the thought. The poem begins from the real dull Dunces, and their goddess is Dullness, inevitably: nothing can be gainsaid there. This is the central origin. Ğo on. Pert or lively dunces, who are not real dull, will come in of due course. And from that first foundation the poet may lawfully go on to bring in perverted intelligence and moral vitiation of the soul. Reclining on our swing-chairand waiting for the devil-with the Eneid in the one hand and the Dunciad in the other, we have this moment made a remarkable discovery in ancient and in modern classic poetry. Virgil, in his eighth book, tells us that the pious neas, handling and examining with delight the glorious shield which the Sire of the Forge has fabricated for him, wonders to peruse, storied there in prophetical sculptures, the fates, and exploits, and renown, of his earth-subduing descendants. In one of these fore-shadowing representations-that of the decisive sea-fight off the promontory of Actium-you might believe that, under the similitude of the conflict and victory which delivered the sovereignty of the Roman world into the hand of Augustus, the sly Father of the Fire has willed by hints to prefigure an everlasting war of light and darkness, the irreconcilable hostility of the Wits and dunces, and the sudden interposition of some divine poet, clothed with preternatural power, for the "foul dissipation and forced rout" of the miscreated multitude.

The foe, whose pretensions to the empire of the world are

to be signally defeated, advances to the combat-"ope barbarica"--helped with a confederacy of barbarians. Queen Dullness herself is characteristically described as heartening and harking forward her legions with pure noise.

"REGINA in mediis patrio vocat agmina sistro,"

that is, rather with her father Chaos's drum, or the drum native to the land of Dullness. Either interpretation forcibly marks out the most turbulent and unintellectual of all musical instruments; and we think at once of her mandate on a later day,

""Tis yours to shake the soul

With thunder rumbling from the mustard-bowl."

The contending powers are presented under a bold allegory. Omnigenumque Deum MONSTRA et LATRATOR Anubis,

66

Contra NEPTUNUM et Venerem, contraque Minervam,
Tela tenent."

Neptune prefigures this island, the confessed ruler of the waves, and the precise spot of the globe vindicated, as we have seen, by two great poets from the reign of Dullness. Venus is here understood in her noblest character, as the Alma Venus of Lucretius's invocation, as the Power of Love and the Beautiful in the Universe. The Goddess of Wisdom speaks for herself. Against them a heterogeneous rabble of monsters direct their artillery, under a dog-headed barking protagonist (what a chosen symbol of an impudent, wide-mouthed, yelping Bayes!) the ring-leader of the Cry of Dunces.

Behold the striking and principal figure of the poet himself, armed and ready to loose from his hand his unerring shafts.

"Actius hæc cernens arcum intendebat Apollo
Desuper."

The poet, impersonated in the patron god of all true poets, is high Virgilian; and the proud station and posture, and the godlike annihilating menace of that "DESUPER" is equally picturesque and sublime.

The same verse continued brings out the effect of the god's, or of the poet's interposition, in the instantaneous consternation and utter scattering of the rascal rout.

66

".. Omnis eo terrore Egyptus et Indus,

Omnis Arabs, omnes vertebant terga Saboei."

The entire progeny of barbarism are off, in full precipitation, for a place of refuge, if harbour or haven may be had. Or, as the same inspired bard elsewhere has it—“fugêre feræ"-the wild beasts have fled.

The triumph is complete. The panic seizes their imperial mistress herself, who, turning her prow, sweeps with all sails set from the lost battle.

"Ipse videbatur ventis REGINA Vocatis

Vela dare et laxos jam jamque immittere funes;
Illam inter cædes, pallentem morte futurâ,
Fecerat Ignipotens undis et Iapyge ferri."

Is an

And why is Augustus made Victor? Does not his name stand, to all time, as the emperor of good letters? Augustan age a less precise and potential phrase for a golden age of the arts, than a Saturnian age for the same of the virtues? And why is Antony beaten? Surely because he represents the collective Antony-Lumpkinism of literature. And what has the dear Cleopatra to do in the fight? The meretricious gipsy--the word is Virgil's own-by her illicit attractions and by the dusk grain of her complexion, doubly -expresses to the life the foul daughter of Night, whom the Dunces obey and worship.

Vulcan, says Virgil, made the shield, like a god, knowing the future. But here Virgil makes Vulcan. And we have now seen enough fully to justify the later popular tradition of his country in steadfastly attributing to him the fame of an arch-wizard. Looking at the thing in this light, we derive extreme consolation from the final augurous words of our last citation" pallentem morte futurâ" which we oppose with confidence to the appalling final prophecy of Pope, and believe that the goddess is, as the nymphs were said to be, exceedingly long-lived, but not immortal.

SUPPLEMENT TO MAC-FLECNOE AND THE

DUNCIAD.

[Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1845.]

WELL, then, we have once more-to wit, a month ago— wheeled round and encountered face to face our two great masters, with whom we at first set out-John Dryden and Alexander Pope. We found them under a peculiar character, that of Avengers to be imaged by the Pythean quelling with his divine and igneous arrows the Python, foul mudengendered monster, burthening the earth and loathed by the light of heaven.

Dryden and Pope! Father and son-master and scholar —founder and improver. Who can make up his election, which of the two he prefers?-the free composition of Dryden that streams on and on, full of vigour and splendour, of reason and wit, as if verse were a mother tongue to him, or some special gift of the universal Mother-or the perfected art of Pope? Your choice changes as your own humour or the weathercock turns. If jolly Boreas, the son of the clear sky, as Homer calls him, career scattering the clouds, and stirring up life over all the face of the waters, grown riotous with exuberant power, you are a Drydenite. But if brightness and stillness fall together upon wood and valley, upon hill and lake, then the spirit of beauty possesses you, and you lean your ear towards Pope. For the spirit of beauty reigns in his musical style; and if he sting and kill, it is with an air and grace that quite win and charm the lookers-on ; and a sweetness persuades them that he is more concerned about embalming his victims to a perennial pulchritude after death, than intent upon ravishing from them the breath of a short-lived existence.

Dryden is all power-and he knows it. He soars at ease -he sails at ease-he swoops at ease-and he trusses at ease. In his own verse, not another approaches him for