Page:The Dunciad - Alexander Pope (1743).djvu/52

Rh Concanen, yet more impudent, publishes at length the Two most in this Nation, as members of the Dunciad !

This is prodigious! yet it is almost as strange, that in the midst of these invectives his greatest Enemies have (I know not how) born testimony to some merit in him.

in censuring his Shakespear, declares, "He has so great an esteem for Mr. Pope, and so high an opinion of his genius and excellencies; that, notwithstanding he professes a veneration almost rising to Idolatry for the writings of this inimitable poet, he would be very loth even to do him justice, at the expence of that other gentleman's character ."

after having violently attacked him in many pieces, at last came to wish from his heart, "That Mr. Pope would be prevailed upon to give us Ovid's Epistles by his hand, for it is certain we see the original of Sappho to Phaon with much more life and likeness in his version, than in that of Sir Car. Scrope. And this (he adds) is the more to be wished, because "in the English tongue we have scarce any thing truly and naturally written upon Love ." He also, in taxing Sir Richard Blackmore for his heterodox opinions of Homer, challengeth him to answer what Mr. Pope hath said in his preface to that poet.

calls him a great master of our tongue; declares "the purity and perfection of the English language to be found in his Homer; and, saying there are more good verses in Dryden's Virgil than in any other work, excepts this of our author only ."

says, " Pope was so good a versifier [once] that his predecessor Mr. Dryden, and his cotemporarary Mr. Prior excepted, the harmony of his numbers is equal to any body's. And, that he had all the merit that a man can have that way." And

after much blemishing our author's Homer, crieth out,