tation of those passages which we should only regard
as the rank offal of a great feast in the olden time. The better taste
and feeling of Pope should have imitated the noble _poetry_ of Chaucer.
He avoided this 'for sundry weighty reasons.' But if this so-called
imitation by Pope was 'done in his youth' he should have burnt it in his
age. Its publication at the present day among his elegant works, is a
disgrace to modern times, and to his high reputation." Not so fast and
strong, good Mister Horne. The six-and-twenty octosyllabic lines thus
magisterially denounced by our stern moralist in the middle of the
nineteenth century, have had a place in Pope's works for a hundred
years, and it is too late now to seek to delete them. They were written
by Pope in his fourteenth or fifteenth year, and gross as they are, are
pardonable in a boy of precocious genius, giving way for a laughing hour
to his sense of the grotesque. Joe Warton (not Tom) pompously calls them
"a gross and _dull_ caricature of the Father of English Poetry." And Mr
Bowles says, "he might have added, it is disgusting as it is dull, and
no more like Chaucer than a _Billingsgate_ is like an Oberea." It is
_not_ dull, but exceedingly clever; and Father Geoffrey himself would
have laughed at it--patted Pope on the head--and enjoined him for the
future to be more discreet. Roscoe, like a wise man, regards it without
horror--remarking of it, and the boyish imitation of Spenser, that "why
these sportive and characteristic sketches should be brought to so
severe an ordeal, and pointed out to the reprehension of the reader as
gross and disagreeable, dull and disgusting, it is not easy to
perceive." Old Joe maunders when he says, "he that was unacquainted with
Spenser, and was to form his ideas of the turn and manner of his genius
from this piece, would undoubtedly suppose that he abounded in filthy
images, and excelled in describing the lower scenes of life." Let all
such blockheads suppose what they choose. Pope--says Roscoe--"was well
aware as any one of the superlative beauties and merits of Spenser,
whose works he assiduously studied, both in his early and riper years;
but it was not his intention in these few lines to give a _serious_
imitation of him. All that he attempted was to show how exactly he could
apply the language and manner of Spenser to low and burlesque subjects;
and in this he has completely succeeded. To compare these lines, as Dr
Warton has done,