Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 | Page 8

English lyre of him who made it most tunable, and
the great improvements of their own variazioni.
"The writer of this is a tadpole of the Lakes, a young disciple of the six
or seven new schools, in which he has learnt to write such lines and
such sentiments as the above. He says, 'easy was the task' of imitating
Pope, or it may be of equalling him, I presume. I recommend him to try
before he is so positive on the subject, and then compare what he will
have then written and what he has now written with the humblest and
earliest compositions of Pope, produced in years still more youthful
than those of Mr. K. when he invented his new 'Essay on Criticism,'
entitled 'Sleep and Poetry' (an ominous title), from whence the above
canons are taken. Pope's was written at nineteen, and published at
twenty-two.
"Such are the triumphs of the new schools, and such their scholars. The
disciples of Pope were Johnson, Goldsmith, Rogers, Campbell, Crabbe,
Gifford, Matthias, Hayley, and the author of the Paradise of Coquettes;
to whom may be added Richards, Heber, Wrangham, Bland, Hodgson,
Merivale, and others who have not had their full fame, because 'the race
is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,' and because there
is a fortune in fame as in all other things. Now of all the new schools--I
say all, for, 'like Legion, they are many'--has there appeared a single

scholar who has not made his master ashamed of him? unless it be * *,
who has imitated every body, and occasionally surpassed his models.
Scott found peculiar favour and imitation among the fair sex: there was
Miss Holford, and Miss Mitford, and Miss Francis; but with the
greatest respect be it spoken, none of his imitators did much honour to
the original except Hogg, the Ettrick shepherd, until the appearance of
'The Bridal of Triermain,' and 'Harold the Dauntless,' which in the
opinion of some equalled if not surpassed him; and lo! after three or
four years they turned out to be the Master's own compositions. Have
Southey, or Coleridge, or Wordsworth, made a follower of renown?
Wilson never did well till he set up for himself in the 'City of the
Plague.' Has Moore, or any other living writer of reputation, had a
tolerable imitator, or rather disciple? Now it is remarkable that almost
all the followers of Pope, whom I have named, have produced beautiful
and standard works, and it was not the number of his imitators who
finally hurt his fame, but the despair of imitation, and the ease of not
imitating him sufficiently. This, and the same reason which induced the
Athenian burgher to vote for the banishment of Aristides, 'because he
was tired of always hearing him called the Just,' have produced the
temporary exile of Pope from the State of Literature. But the term of
his ostracism will expire, and the sooner the better; not for him, but for
those who banished him, and for the coming generation, who
"Will blush to find their fathers were his foes."
[Footnote 3: As far as regards the poets of ancient times, this assertion
is, perhaps, right; though, if there be any truth in what Ælian and
Seneca have left on record, of the obscurity, during their lifetime, of
such men as Socrates and Epicurus, it would seem to prove that, among
the ancients, contemporary fame was a far more rare reward of literary
or philosophical eminence than among us moderns. When the "Clouds"
of Aristophanes was exhibited before the assembled deputies of the
towns of Attica, these personages, as Ælian tells us, were unanimously
of opinion, that the character of an unknown person, called Socrates,
was uninteresting upon the stage; and Seneca has given the substance
of an authentic letter of Epicurus, in which that philosopher declares
that nothing hurt him so much, in the midst of all his happiness, as to

think that Greece,--"illa nobilis Græcia,"--so far from knowing him,
had scarcely even heard of his existence.--Epist. 79.]
[Footnote 4: I certainly ventured to differ from the judgment of my
noble friend, no less in his attempts to depreciate that peculiar walk of
the art in which he himself so grandly trod, than in the inconsistency of
which I thought him guilty, in condemning all those who stood up for
particular "schools" of poetry, and yet, at the same time, maintaining so
exclusive a theory of the art himself. How little, however, he attended
to either the grounds or degrees of my dissent from him, will appear by
the following wholesale report of my opinion, in his "Detached
Thoughts:"
"One of my notions different from those of my contemporaries, is, that
the present is not a high age of