294 POPE. 



Good taste is an excellent thing when it confines itself to its 

 own rightful province of the proprieties, but when it attempts to 

 correct those profound instincts out of whose judgments the 

 higher principles of aesthetics have been formulated, its success 

 is a disaster. During the era when the French theory of poetry 

 was supreme, we notice a decline from imagination to fancy, 

 from passion to wit, from metaphor, which fuses image and 

 thought in one, to simile, which sets one beside the other, from 

 the supreme code of the natural sympathies to the parochial by 

 laws of etiquette. The imagination instinctively Platonizes, and 

 it is the essence of poetry that it should be unconventional, that 

 the soul of it should subordinate the outward parts ; while the 

 artificial method proceeds from a principle the reverse of this, 

 making the spirit lackey the form. 



Waller preaches up this new doctrine in the epilogue to the 

 &amp;lt; Maid s Tragedy: 



Nor is t less strange such mighty wits as those 

 Should use a style in tragedy like prose ; 

 Well-sounding verse, where princes tread the stage, 

 Should speak their virtue and describe their rage. 



That it should be beneath the dignity of princes to speak in 

 anything but rhyme can only be paralleled by Mr. Puff s law 

 that a heroine can go decorously mad only in white satin. 

 Waller, I suppose, though with so loose a thinker one cannot be 

 positive, uses describe in its Latin sense of limitation. Fancy 

 Othello or Lear confined to this go-cart ! Phillips touches 

 the true point when he says, And the truth is, the use of 

 measure alone, without any rime at all, would give more 

 scope and liberty both to style and fancy than can possibly 

 be observed in rime/ * But let us test Waller s method by 

 an example or two. His monarch made reasonable, thus dis 

 courses : 



Courage our greatest failings does supply. 



And makes all good, or handsomely we die. 



Life is a thing of common use ; by heaven 



As well to insects as to monarchs given ; 



But for the crown, tis a more sacred thing ; 



I ll dying lose it, or I ll live a king. 



Come, Diphilus, we must together walk 



And of a matter of importance talk. [Exeunt. 



Blank verse, where the sentiment is trivial as here, merely 

 removes prose to a proper ideal distance, where it is in keeping 

 with more impassioned parts, but commonplace set to this 

 rocking-horse jog irritates the nerves. There is nothing here to 



* Preface to the TJicatrum. 



