irable judgment, and must have been well
aware of the truth of the friendly prediction, could never forgive it.
He has indulged the utmost licentiousness of personal rancour; he even
puns miserably on his name to degrade him as the _emptiest_ of
writers. His spirited translation of Virgil, which was admired even by
Pope, he levels by the most grotesque sarcastic images to mark the
poet's diminutive genius--he says this version-maker is so lost in
Virgil, that he is like "the lady in a lobster; a mouse under a canopy
of state; a shrivelled beau within the penthouse of a full-bottomed
perriwig." He never was generous enough to contradict his opinion, and
persisted in it to the last. Some critic, about Swift's own time,
astonished at his treatment of Dryden, declares he must have been
biassed by some prejudice--the anecdote here recorded, not then
probably known, discovers it.

What happened to Pope on the publication of his Homer shows all the
anxious temper of the author. Being in company with Bentley, the poet
was very desirous of obtaining the doctor's opinion of it, which
Bentley contrived to parry as well as he could; but in these matters
an author who calculates on a compliment, will risk everything to
obtain it. The question was more plainly put, and the answer was as
plainly given. Bentley declared that "the verses were good verses, but
the work is not Homer--it is Spondanus!" From this interview posterity
derives from the mortified poet the full-length figure of "_the
slashing_ Bentley," in the fourth book of the Dunciad:

The mighty Scholiast, whose unwearied pains
Made Horace dull, and humbled Milton's strains.

When Bentley was told by some officious friend that Pope had abused
him, he only replied, "Ay, like enough! I spoke against his Homer, and
the _portentous cub_ never forgives!" Part of Pope's severe criticism
only is true; but to give full effect to their severity, poets always
infuse a certain quantity of fiction. This is an artifice absolutely
necessary to practise; so I collect from a great master in the arts of
satire, and who once honestly avowed that no satire could be composed
unless it was _personal_; and no personalities would sufficiently
adorn a poem without _lies_. This great satirist was Rochester. Burnet
details a curious conversation between himself and his lordship on
this subject. The bishop tells us that "he would often go into the
country, and be for some months wholly employed