392 POPE. 



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 w^ho 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 des- 

 tined. The culfists 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 bag- 

 gage whose household loom competed unlawfully with 

 the machine-made fabrics, so exquisitely uniform in pat- 

 tern, 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 mas- 

 ter had made it an axiom to avoid what was mean or 

 low, so the disciples endeavored 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 



" The shining leather that encased the limb " ; 

 coffee became 



" The fragrant juice of Mocha's berry brown"; 



and they were as liberal of epithets as a royal christen- 

 ing of proper names. Two in every verse, one to bal- 

 ance the other, was the smallest allowance. Here are 

 four successive verses from " The Vanity of Human 

 Wishes " : — 



" The encumbered oar scarce leaves the dreaded coast 

 ThroTigli purple, billows and ^ flonti'ng host. 

 The bold Bavarian in a luckless hour 

 Tries the dread summits of Ccesarian power.'* 



