402 POPE. 



eral, for true style, the joint result of culture and natu- 

 ral aptitude, is always in fashion, as line manners always 

 are, in whatever clothes. Perhaps some reform was 

 needed when Quarles, who had no mean gift of poesy, 

 could write, 



" My passion has no April in her eyes: 

 I cannot spend in mists ; I cannot mizzle ; 

 My fluent brains are too severe to drizzle 

 Slight drops." * 



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 pas- 

 sion 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 arti- 

 ficial 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 " Maid's Tragedy " : - 



44 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." 



* Elegie on Doctor Wilson. But if Quarles had been led astray by 

 the vices of Donne's manner, he had good company in Herbert and 

 Vaughan. In common with them, too, he had that luck of simpleness 

 Which is even more delightful than wit. In the same poem he says, 

 44 Go, glorious soul, and lay thy temples down 

 In Abram's bosom, in the sacred down 

 Qf soft eternity " 



