yearnings, lusts, greatness, and irrationality of modern genius. Now and then, behind his plough, he lighted on genuine verses, verses such as Heine and Alfred de Musset have written in our own days. In those few words, combined after a new fashion, there was a revolution. Two hundred new verses sufficed. The human mind turned on its hinges, and so did civil society. When Roland, being made a minister, presented himself before Louis XVI in a simple dress-coat and shoes without buckles, the master of the ceremonies raised his hands to heaven, thinking that all was lost. In reality, all was changed. [Footnote 1: Paul Louis Courier (1772-1825) says, "a lady's maid, in Louis XIV's time, wrote better than the greatest of modern writers."] [Footnote 2: The Rev. Whitwell Elwin, in his second volume of the works of Alexander Pope, at the end of his introduction to "An Essay on Man," p. 338, says: "M. Taine asserts that from the Restoration to the French Revolution, from Waller to Johnson, from Hobbes and Temple to Robertson and Hume, all our literature, both prose and verse, bears the impress of classic art. The mode, he says, culminated in the reign of Queen Anne, and Pope, he considers, was the extreme example of it.... Many of the most eminent authors who flourished between the English Restoration wrote in a style far removed from that which M. Taine calls classical... The verse differs like the prose, though in a less degree, and is not 'of a uniform make, as if fabricated by a machine.'... Neither is the substance of the prose and verse, from the Restoration to the French Revolution, an invariable common-sense mediocrity.... There is much truth in his (M. Taine's) view, that there was a growing tendency to cultivate style, and in some writers the art degenerated into the artificial."--Tr.] [Footnote 3: R. Carruthers, "Life of Alexander Pope," 2d ed. 1857. ch. I. 33.] [Footnote 4: It is very doubtful whether Pope was not older than sixteen when he wrote the Pastorals. See on this subject, Pope's Works, ed. Elwin, London, 1871, I. 230 et passim.--Tr.] [Footnote 5: Ibid. 233.] [Footnote 6: Pope's Works, ed. Elwin, I. 242.] [Footnote 7: Johnson, "Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets." 3 vols. ed. Cunningham, 1854. A. Pope, III. 96.] [Footnote 8: Johnson. "Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets"; A. Pope, III. 99.] [Footnote 9: Boswell's "Life of Johnson," ch. LXXI. 670.] [Footnote 10: Carruthers's "Life of Pope," ch. X. 377.] [Footnote 11: Carruthers's "Life of Pope," ch. IV. 164.] [Footnote 12: Johnson, "The Lives of the English Poets"; Alexander Pope, III. 114.] [Footnote 13: Ibid. III. 111.] [Footnote 14: Ibid. III. 105.]