the same delicate sensibility that we might have looked for in Brennus, if
consulted on the picturesque, or in Attila the Hun, if adjured to decide
aesthetically, between two rival cameos. Attila is said (though no doubt
falsely) to have described himself as not properly a man so much as the
Divine wrath incarnate. This would be fine in a melodrama, with Bengal
lights burning on the stage. But, if ever he said such a naughty thing, he
forgot to tell us what it was that had made him angry; by what
_title_ did _he_ come into alliance with the Divine wrath, which
was not likely to consult a savage? And why did his wrath hurry, by forced
marches, to the Adriatic? Now so much do people differ in opinion, that,
to us, who look at him through a telescope from an eminence, fourteen
centuries distant, he takes the shape rather of a Mahratta trooper,
painfully gathering _chout_, or a cateran levying black-mail, or a
decent tax-gatherer with an inkhorn at his button-hole, and supported by a
select party of constabulary friends. The very natural instinct which
Attila always showed for following the trail of the wealthiest footsteps,
seems to argue a most commercial coolness in the dispensation of his
wrath. Mr. Schlosser burns with the wrath of Attila against all
aristocracies, and especially that of England. He governs his fury, also,
with an Attila discretion in many cases; but not here. Imagine this Hun
coming down, sword in hand, upon Pope and his Rosicrucian light troops,
levying _chout_ upon Sir Plume, and fluttering the dove-cot of the
Sylphs. Pope's 'duty it was,' says this demoniac, to 'scourge the follies
of good society,' and also 'to break with the aristocracy.' No, surely?
something short of a total rupture would have satisfied the claims of
duty? Possibly; but it would not have satisfied Schlosser. And Pope's
guilt consists in having made his poem an idol or succession of pictures
representing the gayer aspects of society as it really was, and supported
by a comic interest of the mock-heroic derived from a playful machinery,
instead of converting it into a bloody satire. Pope, however, did not