Page:Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron (1824).djvu/213

 critics, and had occasion to study him when I was writing to Bowles.

“Of all the disgraces that attach to England in the eye of foreigners, who admire Pope more than any of our poets, (though it is the fashion to under-rate him among ourselves,) the greatest perhaps is, that there should be no place assigned to him in Poets’ Corner. I have often thought of erecting a monument to him at my own expense, in Westminster Abbey; and hope to do so yet. But he was a Catholic, and, what was worse, puzzled Tillotson and the Divines. That accounts for his not having any national monument. Milton, too, had very nearly been without a stone; and the mention of his name on the tomb of another was at one time considered a profanation to a church. The French, I am told, lock up Voltaire’s tomb. Will there never be an end to this bigotry? Will men never learn that every great poet is necessarily a religious man?—so at least Coleridge says.”

“Yes,” replied Shelley; “and he might maintain the converse,—that every truly religious man is a poet; meaning by poetry the power of communicating intense and impassioned impressions respecting man and Nature.”