travel might
produce to a "natural" poet, but also to point out one or two little
things in "Rimini," which he probably would not have placed in his
opening to that poem, if he had ever seen Ravenna;--unless, indeed,
it made "part of his system!!" I must also crave his indulgence for
having spoken of his disciples--by no means an agreeable or
self-sought subject. If they had said nothing of _Pope_, they might
have remained "alone with their glory" for aught I should have said
or thought about them or their nonsense. But if they interfere with
the "little Nightingale" of Twickenham, they may find others who will
bear it--_I_ won't. Neither time, nor distance, nor grief, nor age,
can ever diminish my veneration for him, who is the great moral poet
of all times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of all stages of
existence. The delight of my boyhood, the study of my manhood,
perhaps (if allowed to me to attain it) he may be the consolation of
my age. His poetry is the Book of Life. Without canting, and yet
without neglecting religion, he has assembled all that a good and
great man can gather together of moral wisdom clothed in consummate
beauty. Sir William Temple observes, "that of all the members of
mankind that live within the compass of a thousand years, for one man
that is born capable of making a _great poet_, there may be a
_thousand_ born capable of making as great generals and ministers of
state as any in story." Here is a statesman's opinion of poetry: it
is honourable to him and to the art. Such a "poet of a thousand
years" was _Pope_. A thousand years will roll away before such
another can be hoped for in our literature. But it can _want_
them--he himself is a literature.

One word upon his so brutally abused translation of Homer. "Dr.
Clarke, whose critical exactness is well known, has _not been_ able
to point out above three or four mistakes _in the sense_ through the
whole Iliad. The real faults of the translation are of a different
kind." So says Warton, himself a scholar. It appears by this, then,
that he avoided the chief fault of a translator. As to its other
faults, they consist in his having made a beautiful English poem of a
sublime Greek one. It will always hold. Cowper and all the rest of
the blank pretenders may do their best and their worst: they will
never wrench Pope from the hands of a single reader of sense and
feeling.

The grand distinction of the under forms of the new school of poets