but regret that your talents were thus
employed. A great poet so tied down to a tedious translation is a
Columbus chained to an oar. What new regions of fancy, full of treasures
yet untouched, might you have explored, if you had been at liberty to
have boldly expanded your sails, and steered your own course, under the
conduct and direction of your own genius! But I am still more angry with
you for your edition of Shakespeare. The office of an editor was below
you, and your mind was unfit for the drudgery it requires. Would anybody
think of employing a Raphael to clean an old picture?

_Pope_.--The principal cause of my undertaking that task was zeal for the
honour of Shakespeare; and, if you knew all his beauties as well as I,
you would not wonder at this zeal. No other author had ever so copious,
so bold, so creative an imagination, with so perfect a knowledge of the
passions, the humours, and sentiments of mankind. He painted all
characters, from kings down to peasants, with equal truth and equal
force. If human nature were destroyed, and no monument were left of it
except his works, other beings might know what man was from those
writings.

_Boileau_.--You say he painted all characters, from kings down to
peasants, with equal truth and equal force. I can't deny that he did so;
but I wish he had not jumbled those characters together in the
composition of his pictures as he has frequently done.

_Pope_.--The strange mixture of tragedy, comedy, and farce in the same
play, nay, sometimes in the same scene, I acknowledge to be quite
inexcusable. But this was the taste of the times when Shakespeare wrote.

_Boileau_.--A great genius ought to guide, not servilely follow, the
taste of his contemporaries.

_Pope_.--Consider from how thick a darkness of barbarism the genius of
Shakespeare broke forth! What were the English, and what, let me ask
you, were the French dramatic performances, in the age when he nourished?
The advances he made towards the highest perfection, both of tragedy and
comedy, are amazing! In the principal points, in the power of exciting
terror and pity, or raising laughter in an audience, none yet has
excelled him, and very few have equalled.

_Boileau_.--Do you think that he was equal in comedy to Moliere?

_Pope_.--In comic force I do; but in the fine and delicate strokes of
satire, and what is called genteel comedy, he was greatly inferior to
that admirable writer. There is nothing