d change her usual
smile into a frown of just indignation.

_Pope_.--I like her best when she smiles. But did you never reprove your
witty friend, La Fontaine, for the vicious levity that appears in many of
his tales? He was as guilty of the crime of debauching the Muses as any
of our comic poets.

_Boileau_.--I own he was, and bewail the prostitution of his genius, as I
should that of an innocent and beautiful country girl. He was all
nature, all simplicity! yet in that simplicity there was a grace, and
unaffected vivacity, with a justness of thought and easy elegance of
expression that can hardly be found in any other writer. His manner is
quite original, and peculiar to himself, though all the matter of his
writings is borrowed from others.

_Pope_.--In that manner he has been imitated by my friend Mr. Prior.

_Boileau_.--He has, very successfully. Some of Prior's tales have the
spirit of La Fontaine's with more judgment, but not, I think, with such
an amiable and graceful simplicity.

_Pope_.--Prior's harp had more strings than La Fontaine's. He was a fine
poet in many different ways: La Fontaine but in one. And, though in some
of his tales he imitated that author, his "Alma" was an original, and of
singular beauty.

_Boileau_.--There is a writer of heroic poetry, who lived before Milton,
and whom some of your countrymen place in the highest class of your
poets, though he is little known in France. I see him sometimes in
company with Homer and Virgil, but oftener with Tasso, Ariosto, and
Dante.

_Pope_.--I understand you mean Spenser. There is a force and beauty in
some of his images and descriptions, equal to any in those writers you
have seen him converse with. But he had not the art of properly shading
his pictures. He brings the minute and disagreeable parts too much into
sight; and mingles too frequently vulgar and mean ideas with noble and
sublime. Had he chosen a subject proper for epic poetry, he seems to
have had a sufficient elevation and strength in his genius to make him a
great epic poet: but the allegory, which is continued throughout the
whole work, fatigues the mind, and cannot interest the heart so much as
those poems, the chief actors in which are supposed to have really
existed. The Syrens and Circe in the "Odyssey" are allegorical persons;
but Ulysses, the hero of the poem, was a man renowned in Greece, which
makes the account of his adventures affecting and delightful. To b