ly is the gift of heaven,
And though no science, fairly worth the seven.

Good sense is one of the excellent qualities to which we are scarcely
inclined to do justice at the present day; it is the guide of a time of
equilibrium, stirred by no vehement gales of passion, and we lose sight
of it just when it might give us some useful advice. A man in a passion
is never more irritated than when advised to be sensible; and at the
present day we are permanently in a passion, and therefore apt to assert
that, not only for a moment, but as a general rule, men do well to be
angry. Our art critics, for example, are never satisfied with their
frame of mind till they have lashed themselves into a fit of rhetoric.
Nothing more is wanted to explain why we are apt to be dissatisfied with
Pope, both as a critic and a moralist. In both capacities, however, Pope
is really admirable. Nobody, for example, has ridiculed more happily the
absurdities of which we sometimes take him to be a representative. The
recipe for making an epic poem is a perfect burlesque upon the
pseudo-classicism of his time. He sees the absurdity of the contemporary
statues, whose grotesque medley of ancient and modern costume is
recalled in the lines--

That livelong wig, which Gorgon's self might own,
Eternal buckle takes in Parian stone.

The painters and musicians come in for their share of ridicule, as in
the description of Timon's Chapel, where

Light quirks of music, broken and uneven,
Make the soul dance upon a jig to heaven;
On painted ceilings you devoutly stare,
Where sprawl the saints of Verrio and Laguerre.

Pope, again, was one of the first, by practice and precept, to break
through the old formal school of gardening, in which

No pleasing intricacies intervene,
No artful wildness to perplex the scene;
Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother,
And half the platform just reflects the other.
The suffering eye inverted Nature sees,
Trees cut to statues, statues thick as trees,
With here a fountain never to be played,
And there a summer-house that knows no shade;
Here Amphitrite sails through myrtle bowers,
There gladiators fight or die in flowers;
Unwatered see the drooping sea-horse mourn,
And swallows roost in Nilus' dusty urn.

It would be impossible to hit off more happily the queer formality which
annoys us, unless its quaintness makes us smile, in the days of