POPE. 341 



simultaneous diffusion of this purely cutaneous eruption. 

 It is not improbable that, in the revival of letters, men 

 whose native tongues had not yet attained the precision and 

 grace only to be acquired by long literary usage, should 

 have learned from a study of the Latin poets to value the 

 form above the substance, and to seek in mere words a 

 conjuring property which belongs to them only when they 

 catch life and meaning from profound thought or powerful 

 emotion. Yet this very devotion to expression at the 

 expense of everything else, though its excesses were fatal to 

 the innovators who preached and practised it, may not 

 have been without good results in refining language and 

 fitting it for the higher uses to which it was destined. The 

 cultists went down before the implacable good sense of 

 French criticism, but the defect of this criticism was that it 

 ignored imagination altogether, and sent Nature about her 

 business as an impertinent baggage whose household loom 

 competed unlawfully with the machine-made fabrics, so 

 exquisitely uniform in pattern, of the royal manufactories. 

 There is more than a fanciful analogy between the style 

 which Pope brought into vogue and that which for a time 

 bewitched all ears in the latter half of the sixteenth 

 century. As the master had made it an axiom to avoid 

 what was mean or low, so the disciples endeavoured to 

 escape from what was common. This they contrived by 

 the ready expedient of the periphrasis. They called 

 everything something else. A boot with them was 



&quot; The shining leather that encased the limb ;&quot; 

 coffee became 



&quot; The fragrant juice of Mocha s berry brown ; &quot; 

 and they were as liberal of epithets as a royal christening of 

 proper names. Two in every verse, one to balance the other, 

 was the smallest allowance. Here are four successive verses 

 from &quot; The Vanity of Human Wishes : &quot; 



&quot; The encumbered oar scarce leaves the dreaded coast, 



Through purple billows and a. floating host. 



The bold Bavarian in a hiclcless hour 



Tries the dread summits of Ccesarian power.&quot; 



