ing a horse,
and may be learned by any human being who has sense enough to learn
anything. But, like other mechanical arts, it was gradually improved by
means of many experiments and many failures. It was reserved for Pope
to discover the trick, to make himself complete master of it, and to
teach it to everybody else. From the time when his Pastorals appeared,
heroic versification became matter of rule and compass; and, before
long, all artists were on a level. Hundreds of dunces who never
blundered on one happy thought or expression were able to write reams of
couplets which, as far as euphony was concerned, could not be
distinguished from those of Pope himself, and which very clever writers
of the reign of Charles the Second, Rochester, for example, or Marvel,
or Oldham, would have contemplated with admiring despair.

Ben Jonson was a great man, Hoole a very small man. But Hoole, coming
after Pope, had learned how to manufacture decasyllable verses, and
poured them forth by thousands and tens of thousands, all as well
turned, as smooth, and as like each other as the blocks which have
passed through Mr. Brunel's mill, in the dockyard at Portsmouth. Ben's
heroic couplets resemble blocks rudely hewn out by an unpractised hand,
with a blunt hatchet. Take as a specimen his translation of a celebrated
passage in the Aeneid:--

"This child our parent earth, stirr'd up with spite
Of all the gods, brought forth, and, as some write,
She was last sister of that giant race
That sought to scale Jove's court, right swift of pace,
And swifter far of wing, a monster vast
And dreadful. Look, how many plumes are placed
On her huge corpse, so many waking eyes
Stick underneath, and, which may stranger rise
In the report, as many tongues she wears."

Compare with these jagged misshapen distichs the neat fabric which
Hoole's machine produces in unlimited abundance. We take the first lines
on which we open in his version of Tasso. They are neither better nor
worse than the rest:--

"O thou, whoe'er thou art, whose steps are led.
By choice or fate, these lonely shores to tread,
No greater wonders east or west can boast
Than yon small island on the pleasing coast.
If e'er thy sight would blissful scenes explore,
The current pass, and seek the further shore."

Ever since the time of Pope there has been a glut of lines of this sort;
and we are now as little disposed to admire