LESSING

ROUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS

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DRYDEN.[1]


Benvenuto Cellini tells us that when, in his boyhood, he saw a salamander
come out of the fire, his grandfather forthwith gave him a sound beating,
that he might the better remember so unique a prodigy. Though perhaps in
this case the rod had another application than the autobiographer chooses
to disclose, and was intended to fix in the pupil's mind a lesson of
veracity rather than of science, the testimony to its mnemonic virtue
remains. Nay, so universally was it once believed that the senses, and
through them the faculties of observation and retention, were quickened
by an irritation of the cuticle, that in France it was customary to whip
the children annually at the boundaries of the parish, lest the true
place of them might ever be lost through neglect of so inexpensive a
mordant for the memory. From this practice the older school of critics
would seem to have taken a hint for keeping fixed the limits of good
taste, and what was somewhat vaguely called _classical_ English. To mark
these limits in poetry, they set up as Hermae the images they had made to
them of Dryden, of Pope, and later of Goldsmith. Here they solemnly
castigated every new aspirant in verse, who in turn performed the same
function for the next generation, thus helping to keep always sacred and
immovable the _ne plus ultra_ alike of inspiration and of the vocabulary.
Though no two natures were ever much more unlike than those of Dryden and
Pope, and again of Pope and Goldsmith, and no two styles, except in such