PAKT III. ENGLISH POETEY 



As illustrating the subject of my present lecture, I find a passage 

 in Pope's Essay on Criticism which is well deserving of examination. 

 It is this: 



But soon by impious arms from Latium chased 

 The banished Muse her ancient boundaries passed. 

 Through all the northern world the arts advance, 

 But critic learning nourished most in France. 

 The rules a nation born to serve obeys, 

 And Boileau still in right of Horace sways. 

 But we brave Britons foreign laws despised, 

 And lived unconquered and uncivilized : 

 Fierce for the liberties of art, and bold, 

 We still defied the Romans as of old. 



In these linos the poet i? describing the progress from Italy to the 

 north of Europe of the groat movement known as the Classical Eenais- 

 sance. Considering that the description is in verse, the history in 

 the first six lines is surprisingly accurate. It is. of course, not true 

 that the storming of Eome by the Constable Bourbon, the feat of 

 "impious arms'"' to which Pope is alluding, was the cause of the 

 spread of the movement northwards; but it is an undoubted fact that 

 soon after that event the effects of the Renaissance begin to show them- 

 selves in the poetry of the courts, botli of Francis I. and of Henry 

 VIII. Though the sun of Italian poetry was then far declined, the 

 "critic learning' 1 grounded on the supposed authority of Aristotle, 

 and fostered in the Academies of Italy, was very influential in pre- 

 paring the way for the later Academic criticism of France. Pope 

 is fully justified in saying that the doctrines, ascribed by this tradition 

 of culture to Aristotle, ''flourished most in France"; and he is also 

 right in explaining the fact by the tendency in the French character 

 to submit to absolute authority. It is no wonder that, taking the tradi- 

 tion at second hand from the French critics, who themselves echoed 

 the opinions of Scaligor and Castelvctro, imagining too that the sci- 

 ence of the Greeks had been transmitted through Horace's Ars Poctica 

 to the poetical treatise? of Vida and Boileau. he should have believed- 

 that the " rules " he looked upon as the source of true culture were 

 derived straight from the imperial head of ancient philosophy. 



"When, however, lie comes to describe the attitude of the English 

 mind toward- these "'rules," his history becomes superficial and 



