POPE. 401 



The French mind, always stronger in perceptive and 

 analytic than in imaginative qualities, loving precision, 

 grace, and finesse, prone to attribute an almost magical 

 power to the scientific regulation whether of politics or 

 religion, had brought wit and fancy and the elegant arts 

 of society to as great perfection as was possible by the 

 a priori method. Its ideal in literature was to conjure 

 passion within the magic circle of courtliness, or to 

 combine the appearance of careless ease and gayety of 

 thought with intellectual exactness of statement. The 

 eternal watchfulness of a wit that never slept had made 

 it distrustful of the natural emotions and the uncon 

 ventional expression of them, and its first question about 

 a sentiment was, Will it be safe ? about a phrase, Will 

 it pass with the Academy 1 The effect of its example 

 on English literature would appear chiefly in neatness 

 and facility of turn, in point and epigrammatic compact 

 ness of phrase, and these in conveying conventional 

 sentiments and emotions, in appealing to good society 

 rather than to human nature. Its influence would be 

 greatest where its success had been most marked, in 

 what was called moral poetry, whose chosen province 

 was manners, and in which satire, with its avenging 

 scourge, took the place of that profounder art whose 

 office it was to purify, not the manners, but the source 

 of them in the soul, by pity and terror. The mistake 

 of the whole school of French criticism, it seems to me, 

 lay in its tendency to confound what was common with 

 what was vulgar, in a too exclusive deference to authority 

 at the expense of all free movement of the mind. 



There are certain defects of taste which correct them 

 selves by their own extravagance. Language, I suspect, 

 is more apt to be reformed by the charm of some master 

 of it, like Milton, than by any amount of precept. The 

 influence of second-rate writers for evil is at best ephem- 



