morality infinitely more merciful, as well as more righteous, than
the one now in vogue among the poetasters, by honest faith in God.
If he be shocked by certain peculiarities of diction, and by the
fondness for perpetual antitheses, let him remember, that what seems
strange to our day was natural and habitual in Pope's; and that, in
the eyes of our grandchildren, Keats's and Shelley's peculiarities
will seem as monstrous as Pope's or Johnson's do in ours. But if,
misled by the popular contempt for Pope, be should he inclined to
answer this advice with a shrug and a smile, we entreat him and all
young poets, to consider, line by line, word by word, sound by sound,
only those once well-known lines, which many a brave and wise man of
fifty years ago would have been unable to read without honourable
tears:


In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half-hung,
The floor of plaster, and the walls of dung,
On once a flock-bed, but repaired with straw,
With tape-tied curtains never meant to draw,
The George and Garter, dangling from that bed,
Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red,
Great Villiers lies. Alas! how changed from him,
That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim!
Gallant and gay, in Cliveden's proud alcove,
The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love;
Or just as gay, at Council, in a ring
Of mimic statesmen, and their merry king,
No wit to flatter, left of all his store!
No fool to laugh at, which he valued more.
There, victor of his health, of fortune, friends,