POPE. 431 



scholarship nor the critical faculty for a vigorous expo 

 sition of his own thesis. Never was wilder hitting than 

 his, and he laid himself open to dreadful punishment, espe 

 cially from Byron, whose two letters are masterpieces of 

 polemic prose. Bowles most happily exemplified in his 

 own pamphlets what was really the turning-point of the 

 whole controversy (though all the combatants more or 

 less lost sight of it or never saw it), namely, that with 

 out clearness and terseness there could be no good writ 

 ing, whether in prose or verse ; in other words that, 

 while precision of phrase presupposes lucidity of thought, 

 yet good writing is an art as well as a gift. Byron alone 

 saw clearly that here was the true knot of the question, 

 though, as his object was mainly mischief, he was not 

 careful to loosen it. The sincerity of Byron's admira 

 tion of Pope has been, it seems to me, too hastily 

 doubted. What he admired in him was that patience 

 in careful finish which he felt to be wanting in himself 

 and in most of his contemporaries. Pope's assailants 

 went so far as to make a defect of what, rightly consid 

 ered, was a distinguished merit, though the amount of 

 it was exaggerated. The weak point in the case was 

 that his nicety concerned itself wholly about the phrase, 

 leaving the thought to be as faulty as it would, and that 

 it seldom extended beyond the couplet, often not beyond 

 a single verse. His serious poetry, therefore, at its best, 

 is a succession of loosely strung epigrams, and no poet 

 more often than he makes the second line of the couplet 

 a mere trainbearer to the first. His more ambitious works 

 may be defined as careless thinking carefully versified. 

 Lessing was one of the first to see this, and accordingly 

 he tells us that " his great, I will not say greatest, merit 

 lay in what we call the mechanic of poetry." * Lessing, 



* Briefe die neueote Litterntnr betreffend, 1759,11. Brief. See nlso 

 his more elaborate criticism of the " Essay on Mail" ^ope ein Meta- 

 physiker), 1756. 



