I come, kind Gentlemen, strange news to tell ye; I am the Ghost of poor departed Nelly. Sweet Ladies, be not frighted; I'll be civil; I'm what I was, a little harmless Devil. For, after death, we Sprights have just such Natures, We had, for all the World, when human Creatures. In the following generation Pope discarded, with the rarest exceptions, all these variations upon the metre and wrought up successions of separate couplets, each containing a single sentence or clause of a sentence complete, and each line having its breathing-pause or caesura almost exactly in the same place, to a pitch of polished and glittering elegance, of striking, instantaneous effect both upon ear and mind, which completely dazzled and subjugated not only his contemporaries but three full generations of rimers and readers after them. Everyone knows the tune; it is the same whether applied to purposes of pastoral sentiment or rhetorical passion or playful fancy, of Homeric translation or Horatian satire, of witty and plausible moral and critical reflection or of savage personal lampoon and invective. Let the reader turn in memory from Ariel's account of the duties of his subordinate elves and fays:-- Some in the fields of purest ether play, And bask and whiten in the blaze of day: Some guide the course of wandering orbs on high, Or roll the planets through the boundless sky: Some, less refin'd, beneath the moon's pale light Pursue the stars that shoot athwart the night, Or suck the mists in grosser air below, Or dip their pinions in the painted bow, Or brew fierce tempests on the wintry main, Or o'er the glebe distil the kindly rain. Others, on earth, o'er human race preside, Watch all their ways, and all their actions guide,-- let the reader turn in memory from this to the familiarly known lines in which Pope congratulates himself That not in fancy's maze he wandered long, But stoop'd to truth, and moraliz'd his song; That not for fame, but virtue's better end, He stood the furious foe, the timid friend, The damning critic, half approving wit, The coxcomb hit, or fearing to be hit; Laughed at the loss of friends he never had, The dull, the proud, the wicked, and the mad; The distant threats of vengeance on his head, The blow unfelt, the tear he never shed; The tale revived, the lie so oft o'erthrown, The imputed trash, and dulness not his own,-- and again from this to his castigation of the unhappy Bayes:-- Swearing and supperless the hero sate, Blasphem'd his gods, the dice, and damn'd his fate; Then gnaw'd his pen, then dash'd it on the ground, Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profound! Plung'd for his sense, but found no bottom there, Yet wrote and flounder'd on in mere despair. Round him much embryo, much abortion lay, Much future ode, and abdicated play; Nonsense precipitate, like running lead, That slipped through cracks and zigzags of the head.