Page:The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, Volume 4.djvu/279

Rh when the merit of the modern is compared, Tasso and Guarini are censured for remote thoughts and unnatural refinements; and upon the whole, the Italians and French are all excluded from rural poetry: and the pipe of the pastoral muse is transmitted by lawful inheritance from Theocritus to Virgil, from Virgil to Spenser, and from Spenser to Philips.

With this inauguration of Philips, his rival Pope was not much delighted; he therefore drew a comparison of Philips's performance with his own, in which, with an unexampled and unequalled artifice of irony, though he has himself always the advantage, he gives the preference to Philips. The design of aggrandizing himself he disguised with such dexterity, that, though Addison discover edit, Steele was deceived, and was afraid of displeasing Pope by publishing his paper, Published however it was ("Guard. 40."): and from that time. Pope and Philips lived in a perpetual reciprocation of malevolence.

In poetical powers, of either praise or satire, there was no proportion between the combatants; but Philips, though he could not prevail by wit, hoped to hurt Pope with another weapon, and charged him, as Pope thought, Rh