what pieces to receive or reject, to exclude or to revive.1

Such an institution would, in Dick's opinion spread the fame of English literature over Europe, and make London the metropolis of elegance and politeness, the place to which the learned and ingenious of all countries would repair for instruction and improvement, where nothing would any longer be applauded or endured that was not conformed to the nicest rules, and finished with the highest elegance.

Till some happy conjunction of the planets shall dispose our princes or ministers to make themselves immortal by such an academy, Minim contents himself to preside four nights in a week in a critical society selected by himself, where he is heard without contradiction, and whence his judgment is disseminated through the great vulgar and the small,2

When he is placed in the chair of criticism, he declares loudly for the noble simplicity of our ancestors, in opposition to the petty refinements, and ornamental luxuriance. Sometimes he is sunk in despair, and perceives false delicacy daily gaining ground, and sometimes brightens his countenance with a gleam of hope, and predicts the revival of the true sublime. He then

1 So Roscommon, Prior, Swift, and Tickell had each planned a Society or an Academy for “refining our language and fixing its standard."-Johnson's Works, v. 49; vii. 167; viii. 4, 202.

2 "Hence ye prophane; I hate ye all,

Both the Great Vulgar, and the Small."

-Cowley, Imitations of Horace, Odes iii. 1.

fulminates his loudest censures against the monkish barbarity of rhyme1; wonders how beings that pretend to reason can be pleased with one line always ending like another; tells how unjustly and unnaturally sense is sacrificed to sound; how often the best thoughts are mangled by the necessity of confining or extending them to the dimensions of a couplet; and rejoices that genius has, in our days, shaken off the shackles which had encumbered it so long. Yet he allows that rhyme may sometimes be borne, if the lines be often broken, and the pauses judiciously diversified.

1 "Rhyme is the invention of a barbarous age to set off wretched matter and lame metre; graced indeed since by the use of some famous modern poets, carried away by custom, but much to their own vexation, hindrance and constraint, to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse than else they would have expressed them."Preface to Paradise Lost.

"Rise, rise, Roscommon, see the Blenheim muse

The dull constraint of monkish rhyme refuse."

-Edmund Smith, quoted in Johnson's Dictionary. Dryden says that "Hannibal Caro freed himself from the shackles of modern rhyme....What rhyme adds to sweetness, it takes away from sense."-Dryden's Works, ed. 1821, xiv. 206. Warton, in his Essay on Pope, i. 192, speaks of “daring to throw off the bondage of rhyme."

2 Goldsmith, writing in this same year, 1759, differed from the great Minim. "From a desire in the critic of grafting the spirit of ancient languages upon the English have proceeded of late several disagreeable instances of pedantry. Among the number, I think, we may reckon blank We now see it used upon the most trivial occasions."-Present State of Polite Learning, ch. xi. Among the poets who had lately written in blank verse were Thomson, Watts, Dyer, Shenstone, Young, Akenside, and Lyttelton.

verse.

From blank verse he makes an easy transition to Milton, whom he produces as an example of the slow advance of lasting reputation. Milton is the only writer in whose books Minim can read for ever without weariness. What cause it is that exempts this pleasure from satiety he has long and diligently inquired, and believes it to consist in the perpetual variation of the numbers, by which the ear is gratified and the attention awakened. The lines that are commonly thought rugged and unmusical, he conceives to have been written to temper the melodious luxury of the rest, or to express things by a proper cadence: for he scarcely finds a verse that has not this favourite beauty; he declares that he could shiver in a hot-house when he reads that

"the ground

"Burns frore, and cold performs th' effect of fire3; and that, when Milton bewails his blindness, the verse,

"So thick a drop serene has quench'd these orbs,"4 has, he knows not how, something that strikes him with an obscure sensation like that which he fancies would be felt from the sound of darkness.

1 Johnson differed from Minim in this. "None ever wished Paradise Lost longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure."-Johnson's Works, vii. 135.

2 Perhaps borrowed from The Rambler, No. 86, ante vol. i., p. 169.

Burns frore," etc.-Paradise Lost, ii. 594. 4 "So thick a drop serene hath quenched their orbs."

Johnson did not "verify his quotations."

See

Ib., iii. 25.

Minim is not so confident of his rules of judgment as not very eagerly to catch new light from the name of the author. He is commonly so prudent as to spare those whom he cannot resist, unless, as will sometimes happen, he finds the public combined against them. But a fresh pretender to fame he is strongly inclined to censure, till his own honour requires that he commend him, Till he knows the success of a composition, he intrenches himself in general terms; there are some new thoughts and beautiful passages, but there is likewise much which he would have advised the author to expunge. He has several favourite epithets, of which he has never settled the meaning, but which are very commodiously applied to books which he has not read, or cannot understand. One is manly, another is dry, another stiff, and another flimsyl; sometimes he discovers delicacy of style, and sometimes meets with strange expressions.

He is never so great, or so happy, as when a youth of promising parts is brought to receive his directions for the prosecution of his studies. He then puts on a very serious air; he advises the pupil to read none but the best authors, and, when he finds one congenial to his own mind, to study his beauties, but avoid his faults; and, when he sits down to write, to consider how his favourite author would think at the present time on the present occasion. He exhorts him to catch those moments when he finds his thoughts expanded

1 "Proud of a vast extent of flimsy lines."

Pope, Prologue to the Satires, 1. 96.

and his genius exalted, but to take care lest imagination hurry him beyond the bounds of nature. He holds diligence the mother of success; yet enjoins him, with great earnestness, not to read more than he can digest, and not to confuse his mind by pursuing studies of contrary tendencies. He tells him, that every man has his genius, and that Cicero could never be a poet. The boy retires illuminated, resolves to follow his genius, and to think how Milton would have thought and Minim feasts upon his own beneficence till another day brings another pupil.

:

No. 65. SATURDAY, JULY 14, 1759. HE sequel of Clarendon's history, at last happily published, is an accession to English literature equally agreeable to the admirers of elegance and the lovers of truth; many doubtful facts may now be ascertained, and many questions, after long debate, may be determined by decisive authority. He that records transactions in which himself was engaged, has not only an opportunity of knowing innumerable particulars which escape spectators, but has his natural powers exalted by that ardour which always rises at the remembrance of our own

"The

1 Johnson always maintained the opposite of this. true genius," he says in the beginning of his Life of Cowley, "is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction."

2 "The general precept of consulting the genius is of little use, unless we are told how the genius can be known."Rambler No. 19.