POPE. 347 



written reasonable tragedy. And in spite of the growling 

 of poor old Dennis, whose sandy pedantry was not without 

 an oasis of refreshing sound judgment here and there, this 

 was the opinion of most persons at that day, except, it may 

 be suspected, the judicious and modest Mr. Addison him 

 self. Voltaire says of the English tragedians and it will 

 be noticed that he is only putting, in another way, the 

 opinion of Dryden &quot; Their productions, almost all barbar 

 ous, without polish, order, or probability, have astonishing 

 gleams in the midst of their night ; ... is seems sometimes 

 that nature is not made in England as it is elsewhere.&quot; Eh 

 bien, the inference is that we must try and make it so ! 

 The world must be uniform in order to be comfortable, and 

 what fashion so becoming as the one we have invented in 

 Paris ? It is not a little amusing that when Voltaire played 

 master of ceremonies to introduce the bizarre Shakespeare 

 among his countrymen, that other kind of nature made a 

 profounder impression on them than quite pleased him. So 

 he turned about presently and called his whilome protege a 

 buffoon. 



The condition of the English mind at the close of the 

 seventeenth century was such as to make it particularly 

 sensitive to the magnetism which streamed to it from Paris. 

 The loyalty of everybody, both in politics and religion, had 

 been put out of joint. A generation of materialists, by the 

 natural rebound which inevitably follows over-tension, was 

 to balance the ultra-spiritualism of the Puritans. As always 

 when a political revolution has been wrought by moral 

 agencies, the plunder had fallen mainly to the share of the 

 greedy, selfish, and unscrupulous, whose disgusting cant had 

 given a taint of hypocrisy to piety itself. Religion, from a 

 burning conviction of the soul, had grown to be with both 

 parties a political badge, as little typical of the inward man 

 as the scallop of a pilgrim. Sincerity is impossible, unless it 

 pervade the whole being, and the pretence of it saps the 

 very foundation of character. There seems to have been an 

 universal scepticism, and in its worst form, that is, with 

 an outward conformity in the interest of decorum and 



