igherer he flies.”  But to the proofs.  It is a thing to be felt more than explained.  Let any man take up a volume of Mr. Hunt’s subordinate writers, read (if possible) a couple of pages, and pronounce for himself, if they contain not the kind of writing which may be likened to “shabby-genteel” in actual life.  When he has done this, let him take up Pope;—­and when he has laid him down, take up the cockney again—­if he can.

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Note to the passage in page 396. relative to Pope’s lines upon Lady Mary W. Montague.] I think that I could show, if necessary, that Lady Mary W. Montague was also greatly to blame in that quarrel, not for having rejected, but for having encouraged him:  but I would rather decline the task—­though she should have remembered her own line, “He comes too near, that comes to be denied.”  I admire her so much—­her beauty, her talents—­that I should do this reluctantly.  I, besides, am so attached to the very name of Mary, that as Johnson once said, “If you called a dog Harvey, I should love him;” so, if you were to call a female of the same species “Mary,” I should love it better than others (biped or quadruped) of the same sex with a different appellation.  She was an extraordinary woman:  she could translate Epictetus, and yet write a song worthy of Aristippus.  The lines,

      “And when the long hours of the public are past,
      And we meet, with champaigne and a chicken, at last,
      May every fond pleasure that moment endear! 
      Be banish’d afar both discretion and fear! 
      Forgetting or scorning the airs of the crowd,
      He may cease to be formal, and I to be proud,
      Till,” &c. &c.

There, Mr. Bowles!—­what say you to such a supper with such a woman? and her own description too?  Is not her “champaigne and chicken” worth a forest or two?  Is it not poetry?  It appears to me that this stanza contains the “puree” of the whole philosophy of Epicurus:—­I mean the practical philosophy of his school, not the precepts of the master; for I have been too long at the university not to know that the philosopher was himself a moderate man.  But, after all, would not some of us have been as great fools as Pope?  For my part, I wonder that, with his quick feelings, her coquetry, and his disappointment, he did no more,—­instead of writing some lines, which are to be condemned if false, and regretted if true.

INDEX.

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The Roman letters refer to the Volume; the Arabic figures to the Page.

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A.