Commend me to the Irish architect who took out the foundation-stone to repair the roof.
Knox and the other reformers were _Scopæ viarum_--that is, highway besoms.
The Pine Tree blasted at the top was applied by Swift to himself as a prophetic emblem of his own decay. The Chestnut is a fine shady tree, and its wood excellent, were it not that it dies away at the _heart_ first. Alas! poor me!
Modern poetry is characterised by the poets' _anxiety_ to be always striking. There is the same march in the Greek and Latin poets. Claudian, who had powers to have been anything--observe in him this anxious, craving vanity! Every line, nay, every word, stops, looks full in your face, and asks and _begs_ for praise! As in a Chinese painting, there are no distances, no perspective, but all is in the foreground; and this is nothing but vanity. I am pleased to think that, when a mere stripling, I had formed the opinion that true taste was virtue, and that bad writing was bad feeling.
The desire of carrying things to a greater height of pleasure and admiration than, _omnibus trutinatis_, they are susceptible of, is one great cause of the corruption of poetry. Both to understand my own reasoning and to communicate it, ponder on Catullus' hexameters and pentameters, his "_numine abusum homines_" [Carmen, lxxvi. 4] [and similar harsh expressions]. It is not whether or no the very same ideas expressed with the very same force and the very same naturalness and simplicity in the versification of Ovid and Tibullus, would not be still more delightful (though even that, for any number of poems, may well admit a doubt), but whether it is _possible_ so to express them and whether, in every attempt, the result has not been to substitute manner for matter, and point that will not bear reflection (so fine that it breaks the moment you try it) for genuine sense and true feeling, and, lastly, to confine both the subjects, thoughts, and even words of poetry within a most beggarly cordon. _N.B._--The same criticism applies to Metastasio, and, in Pope, to his quaintness, perversion, unnatural metaphors, and, still more, the cold-blooded use, for artifice or connection, of language justifiable only by enthusiasm and passion.