In any case, Pope’s argument proceeds, the people are prone to unthinking and unreliable judgements. ‘All this may be; the people’s voice is odd, / It is, and it is not, the voice of God’ (lines 89–90). Such an observation does seem, prima facie, to point in the direction of an irresolvable scepticism, putting into question the possibility of arriving at any kind of conclusion, however notional. Pope, however, at once probes such nihilism. It is possible to meet between the trenches if the public would admit that the old writers were giants of literature in their own way but are not above critical scrutiny.

Lines 95–102

But let them own, that greater faults than we

They had, and greater virtues, I’ll agree.

Spenser himself affects the obsolete,

And Sidney’s verse halts ill on Roman feet:

Milton’s strong pinion now not Heav’n can bound,

Now serpent-like, in prose he sweeps the ground,

In quibbles, angel and archangel join,

And God the Father turns a school divine.

These are not just Pope’s judgements. His assertion about Spenser’s language echoes the Ben Jonson he has cited as himself a victim of standard evaluations: ‘Spenser, in affecting the ancients, writ no language’ (Johnson, Timber: or Discoveries (1640), ed. by Parfitt 1975, p. 428, lines 2237–38). His reservations about Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) follow on from Dryden’s preface to Sylvae (1685): ‘Milton’s Paradise Lost is admirable; but am I therefore bound to maintain that there are no flats amongst his elevations, when ’tis evident he creeps along sometimes for above an hundred lines together? Cannot I admire the height of his invention, and the strength of his expression, without defending his antiquated words, and the perpetual harshness of their sounds? ‘Tis as much commendation as a man can bear to own him excellent; all beyond it is idolatry’ (Watson 1962, I, p. 32). In a passage which is carefully looking for a via media between extremes of absolute judgement, between ancient and modern, between popular and tempered views, Pope is linking his present ideas to those of his predecessors. Reconciliation and tradition are locked within a vibrant poem; the contemporary shakes hands with the past.

Pope’s lines absorb the language and metaphors of past judgement (‘affect’; ‘sweeps the ground’), but refresh them into his own distinctive style. Thus, the balance of ‘now … Now’ in the third couplet introduces the strongest of antitheses in ‘heaven … serpent-like’ within a clear and economical metaphor of height and depth. The whole couplet is, meanwhile, harmonized by the ‘s’ and ‘p’ reiterations. In a stylistic variation, the fourth couplet is structured by a chiasmus of bathos. A ‘school divine’ engages in scholastic theology, a study which had accrued connotations of dogmatic, tediously meticulous scrutiny; while ‘quibbles’ imply legalistic and pedantic attention to purely verbal ambiguities and arguments. Proficients of both activities really belong not in an epic poem but in the mock-epic world of The Dunciad. In Pope’s couplet, these demeaning terms trap within them the notional personae of Milton’s heroic poem. These are sharp, even acerbic, but witty and snappy judgements within an overall poised syntax and couplet form. It is possible, the verse tells us, to be critical without losing sight of the value of measured commentary. It is not the least of poetry’s achievements to conduct itself in a civilized manner.

Lines 107–14

But for the wits of either Charles’s days,

The mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease;

Sprat, Carew, Sedley, and a hundred more,

(Like twinkling stars the miscellanies o’er)

One simile, that solitary shines

In the dry desert of a thousand lines,

Or lengthened thought that gleams through many a page,

Has sanctified whole poems for an age.

Literary history, like any other category, can produce its own golden-age mythologies. One such is that of the ‘cavalier’ poet, penning his (it is always ‘his’) lyrics with spontaneity and nonchalance, whether in reaction to puritan sclerosis or loss of authority during the ‘commonwealth’, or in response to Restoration liberty. Here is another subset of the meanings of ‘wit’: not so much the sharp thrusts of informed opinion (‘wit’ as deriving from witan, the Old English verb ‘to know’) as the self-appointed clowns of lightly-worn ignorance. Pope spears them in a single line: ‘The mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease’. The OED cites the line under its definition of ‘mob’ (sb. 1. 4), as signifying a ‘promiscuous assemblage of people; a multitude or aggregation of persons regarded as not individually important’. The implied lack of discrimination is apposite: compare the goddess Dulness’s welcome to the unthinking use of images in writing, ‘She sees a mob of metaphors advance’ (The Dunciad, 1729, book 1, line 65; 1743, book 1, line 67). But ‘mob’—a late seventeenth-century coinage of an abbreviated ‘mobile vulgus’—also carries the sense of ‘lower orders; the uncultured or illiterate as a class’ (OED, ‘mob’, sb., sense 1. 2). That tends to be the general ‘cavalier’ view of the rest of the population, whether the base illiterates or the solemn professionals as disparaged by the true ‘amateur’ who has no vulgar need to think of money when putting pen to paper. Pope reverses the terms: the ‘gentlemen’ constitute the real ‘mob’, all equally indistinguishable and undistinguished. They write ‘with ease’, with ‘facility as opposed to difficulty’ (OED ‘ease’, sb. 4.b, under the general definition of ‘comfort’, ‘absence of pain or trouble’: Pope’s line is again included as a citation). But ‘with ease’ also implies ‘in comfort’, unrestrained by any need to work for a living. These are the sons of privilege, complacent in their inviolability. Pope, we recall, had to make his writing pay in order to maintain a living, as did Samuel Johnson, who was making his way to London to join the ranks of would-be professional journalists and writers even as Pope was writing his Imitations of Horace.

Pope turns the tables on such idlers by demonstrating, in these very lines, that the real professional writer can produce ‘easeful’ poetry—poetry that moves with smooth rhythm, with a genuine stylistic nonchalance—while also being precise and honed to sharp perfection. The ‘mob’ may come up with one telling simile in their work (on the principle, presumably, of monkeys accidentally hitting the right keys), but Pope can not only turn a simile back on them (‘Like twinkling stars’), but throw in a related metaphor while he is at it: the ‘dry desert’ of dull and lifeless obscurity. The result is a creatively supple piece of comic writing, lines which humorously mimic the mob’s facility, subtly undermine its assumed superiority, and demonstrate real wit (humour derived from knowledge). And he can ‘ease’ the lines into the wider satirical context of his address to George Augustus. ‘Don’t worry, George,’, he seems to be saying, ‘poets are just idle nobodies, out of place in the new Hanoverian order, and so of no use or threat; except that I know exactly what I’m doing—if you had the wit to pay attention.’

Lines 189–200

Yet, sir, reflect, the mischief is not great;

These madmen never hurt the church or state:

Sometimes the folly benefits mankind;

And rarely avarice taints the tuneful mind.

Allow him but his plaything of a pen,

He ne’er rebels, or plots, like other men:

Flight of cashiers, or mobs, he’ll never mind;

And knows no losses while the muse is kind.

To cheat a friend, or Ward, he leaves to Peter;

The good man heaps up nothing but mere metre,

Enjoys his garden and his book in quiet;

And then—a perfect hermit in his diet.

To paraphrase, ‘Now, I don’t want you to think that I’m lecturing you. Hence my deferential ‘sir’—I hope you noticed. Yet (I know I’m using rather a lot of qualifying conjunctions, but, well, there’s quite a lot that needs qualifying). I do want—at the risk of repeating myself—to reassure you that, although the country and the town may be teeming with would-be poets (‘one poetic itch / Has seized the court and city, poor and rich’, lines 169–70), they are all quite harmless. Indeed, as long as you allow them their toys (‘his plaything of a pen’), they will stay out of trouble and be no bother.’

Pope’s rhetoric here is directed at diminishing the status of poets and poetry. Writing, he wants to persuade George Augustus, is a childish pursuit. To prove the point, he makes up his own address with easeful lines, often stripped of awkward caesuras (‘Allow him but his plaything of a pen’), and pointed by significant phonic echoes. So ‘plaything of a pen’ is succeeded in the following line by ‘plots’, as the work of ‘other men’. These others are disruptive types, such as the ‘cashier’ of the South Sea Company, Robert Knight, who, after the notorious Bubble burst, fled the country upon being found guilty of breach of trust by the House of Lords. They are ‘mobs’ in a more sinister sense than the old ‘mob of gentlemen’. The Hanoverian dynasty had scarcely begun when the 1715 first Jacobite rebellion was hatched, and rumours of plots were—like mobs—never far from fearful apprehension.

Poetry, by contrast, need cause no concern. A disparaging adjective ‘mere’ (line 198) both qualifies and phonically merges into ‘metre’, a noun that, in any case, reduces poetry’s status to mechanics of prosody. The phrasal verb ‘heaps up’ further demeans poetry by implying that writing is simply a matter of piling up words by the shovelful. No skill or artistry is required. The rhyme with ‘Peter’ emphasizes by antithesis poets’ harmlessness. The real villains are the Peter Walters of this world, who accumulate wealth, heap up gold, by deceitful and even criminal means. Pope had earlier referred to this common butt of satirists in The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace Imitated, line 3, and in The Second Satire of the Second Book of Horace Imitated, line 168 (see Erskine-Hill 1975). ‘You do not need to concern yourself about mere poets.’

Harmlessness is a value lying at the core of the final couplet of this verse-paragraph, as it is frequently in Pope’s self-projection in his Horatian Imitations. The paragraph’s concluding rhyme, ‘quiet / diet’, links repose and innocence to lack of excess in lifestyle. It is a retirement myth, of course, and, as such, is open to accusations of being yet another of those poses adopted by poets to present themselves in a favourable, modest light. It is just what a wary but gullible monarch would wish to hear. Pope knows full well that this is the case, and he wants a really alert reader to gather the force of his irony. Now is the time for Pope to move on and speak to the truly intelligent and worthy in his final two Imitations, which are addressed to the lawyer William Murray and the statesman Viscount Bolingbroke. The first opens ‘Not to admire’, a literal rendering of Horace’s ‘nil admirari’. This was also the motto on Bolingbroke’s coat of arms. Thus, Pope deftly unites two meritorious friends from different generations, the young aspiring barrister and the mature philosopher. ‘Meaner things’ can be left to the ‘pride’ of mere ‘kings’, as Pope earlier declared to Bolingbroke in the opening couplet of An Essay on Man.