which happened to be this: that Pompey was 'pitiful enough.' These are Joe's own words. Still, I do not see that one witness establishes a fact of this magnitude. A shade of doubt, therefore, continues to linger over Pompey's very existence; and the upshot is, that Pompey (not the great, but confessedly) the doubtful, eighteen-penny Pompey, but, in any case, Pompey, 'the Pitiful,' is the Great overriding and tutelary power, under whose inspiration and inaugurating impulse our English literature has blossomed and ripened, root, stem, and branch, through the life-struggles of five centuries, into its present colossal proportions. Here pause, reader, and look back upon the separate reticulations--so as, if possible, to connect them--in this network of hideous extravagance; where as elsewhere it happens, that one villany, hides another, and that the mere depth of the umbrage spread by fraudulent mystifications is the very cause which conceals the extent of those mystifications. Contemplated in a languid mood, or without original interest in the subject, that enormity of falsehood fails to strike, which, under circumstances personally interesting, would seem absolutely incredible. The outrage upon the intellect actually obscures and withdraws the outrage upon the facts. And, inversely, the affronts to historical accuracy obscure the affronts to good sense. Look steadily for a moment at the three points in the array of impeachments:-- I. In the Red-rose invasion of France, Pope assumes, as a matter of notoriety, that the English invading force went from a land of semi-barbarism to a land of literature and refinement: the simple fact being so conspicuously the other way, that, whilst France had no literature at all, consequently _could_ have nothing to give (there being no book extensively diffused in the France of that period, except the 'De Imitatione Christi,') [Footnote 13] England, on the other hand, had so bright a jewel to offer, that to this hour the whole of Christendom has not matched it or approached it. Even at present, in the case so often supposed, that a man were _marooned_, that is, confined (as regarded his residence) to one desert island, and marooned also as to books, confined I mean (as regarded his reading) to one sole book, his choice (if he read English) would probably oscillate between Shakspeare and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Now, the Canterbury Tales had been finished about thirty-five years before Agincourt; so exquisitely false, even in this point, is Pope's account. Against the _nothing_ of beggarly France was even then to be set a work which _has_ not been rivalled, and probably _will_ not be rivalled, on our planet.