say upon criticism does not show deep thought,
it shows singular skill in putting old truths. Pope undeniably succeeded
in hitting off many phrases of marked felicity. He already showed the
power, in which he was probably unequalled, of coining aphorisms out of
commonplace. Few people read the essay now, but everybody is aware that
"fools rush in where angels fear to tread," and has heard the warning--

A little learning is a dangerous thing,
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring--

maxims which may not commend themselves as strictly accurate to a
scientific reasoner, but which have as much truth as one can demand from
an epigram. And besides many sayings which share in some degree their
merit, there are occasional passages which rise, at least, to the height
of graceful rhetoric if they are scarcely to be called poetical. One
simile was long famous, and was called by Johnson the best in the
language. It is that in which the sanguine youth, overwhelmed by a
growing perception of the boundlessness of possible attainments, is
compared to the traveller crossing the mountains, and seeing--

Hills peep o'er hills and Alps on Alps arise.

The poor simile is pretty well forgotten, but is really a good specimen
of Pope's brilliant declamation.

The essay, however, is not uniformly polished. Between the happier
passages we have to cross stretches of flat prose twisted into rhyme;
Pope seems to have intentionally pitched his style at a prosaic level as
fitter for didactic purposes; but besides this we here and there come
upon phrases which are not only elliptical and slovenly, but defy all
grammatical construction. This was a blemish to which Pope was always
strangely liable. It was perhaps due in part to over-correction, when
the context was forgotten and the subject had lost its freshness.
Critics, again, have remarked upon the poverty of the rhymes, and
observed that he makes ten rhymes to "wit" and twelve to "sense." The
frequent recurrence of the words is the more awkward because they are
curiously ambiguous. "Wit" was beginning to receive its modern meaning;
but Pope uses it vaguely as sometimes equivalent to intelligence in
general, sometimes to the poetic faculty, and sometimes to the erratic
fancy, which the true poet restrains by sense. Pope would have been
still more puzzled if asked to define precisely what he meant by the
antithesis between nature and art. They are somehow opposed, yet art
t