POPE. 289 



which it betrays either in an affectation of burly contempt or in 

 a pretence of admiration equally insincere. The young lords 

 who were to make the future court of Charles II. no doubt found 

 in Paris an elegance beside which the homely bluntness of native 

 manners seemed rustic and underbred. They frequented a 

 theatre where propriety was absolute upon the stage, though 

 license had its full swing behind the scenes. They brought 

 home with them to England debauched morals and that urbane 

 discipline of manners which is so agreeable a substitute for dis 

 cipline of mind. The word genteel came back with them, an 

 outward symptom of the inward change. In the last generation, 

 the men whose great aim was success in the Other World had 

 wrought a political revolution; now, those whose ideal was pros 

 perity in This World were to have their turn and to accomplish 

 with their lighter weapons as great a change. Before the end 

 of the seventeenth century John Bull was pretty well persuaded, 

 in a bewildered kind of way, that he had been vulgar, and espe 

 cially that his efforts in literature showed marks of native vigour, 

 indeed, but of a vigour clownish and uncouth. He began to be 

 ashamed of the provincialism which had given strength, if also 

 something of limitation, to his character. 



Waller, who spent a whole summer in polishing the life out 

 of ten lines to be written in the Tasso of the Duchess of York, 

 expresses the prevailing belief as regarded poetry in the pro 

 logue to his improvement of the Maid s Tragedy of Beau 

 mont and Fletcher. He made the play reasonable, as it was 

 called, and there is a pleasant satire in the fact that it was 

 refused a license because there was an immoral king in it. 

 On the throne, to be sure but on the stage ! Forbid it, 

 decency . 



Above our neighbours our conceptions are, 

 But faultless writing is the effect of care ; 

 Our lines reformed, and not composed in haste, 

 Polished like marble, would like marble last. 



Were we but less indulgent to our fau ts, 

 And patience had to cultivate our thoughts, 

 Our Muse would flourish, and a nobler rage 

 Would honour this than did the Grecian stage. 



It is a curious comment on these verses in favour of careful 

 writing, that Waller should have failed even to express his own 

 meaning either clearly or with propriety. He talks of culti 

 vating our thoughts, when he means * pruning our style ; he 

 confounds the Muse with the laurel, or at any rate makes her a 

 rjlant. and then foes rm with nprfprr enuanimitv tn r&amp;lt;*11 IIQ that- & 



