VIII. VESTER, CAMENAE 147

I am the more confirmed in this by having lately gone over some of our classics, particularly Pope, whom I tried in this way: I took Moore’s poems, and my own, and some others, and went over them side by side with Pope’s and I was really astonished (I ought not to have been so) and mortified, at the ineffable distance in point of sense, learning, effect, and even imagination, passion, and invention, between the little Queen Anne’s man, and us of the Lower Empire. Depend upon it, it is all Horace then, and Claudian now, among us; and if I had to begin again, I would mould myself accordingly. Crabbe’s the man; but he has got a coarse and impracticable subject, and ... is retired upon half-pay, and has done enough, unless he were to do as he did formerly.”

(1818.)“I thought of a preface, defending Lord Hervey against Pope’s attack, but Pope-quoad Pope, the poet,-against all the world, in the unjustifiable attempts begun by Warton, and carried on at this day by the new school of critics and scribblers, who think themselves poets because they do not write like Pope. I have no patience with such cursed humbug and bad taste; your whole generation are not worth a canto of the Rape of the Lock, or the Essay on Man, or the Dunciad, or ‘anything that is his.’”

171. There is nothing which needs explanation in the brevities and amenities of these two fragments, except, in the first of them, the distinctive and exhaustive enumeration of the qualities of great poetry,-and note especially the order in which he puts these.

(A.) Sense. That is to say, the first thing you have to think of is whether the would-be poet is a wise man-so also in the answer to Blackwood, “They call him (Pope) the poet of reason!-is that any reason why he should not be a poet?”

(B.) Learning. The Ayrshire ploughman¹ may have good gifts, but he is out of court with relation to Homer, or Dante, or Milton.

(C.) Effect. Has he efficiency in his verse?-does it tell on the ear and the spirit in an instant? See the “effect” on her audience of Beatrice’s “ottave,” in the story at p. 286 of Miss Alexander’s Songs of Tuscany.²

(D.) Imagination. Put thus low because many novelists and artists have this faculty, yet are not poets, or even

¹ [The reference to Burns is Ruskin’s not Byron’s; for Byron own view of Burns, see the Letters, vol. ii. pp. 320, 376.]

² [The reference is to the first edition: see now Vol. XXXII. p. 209.]

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