As to the machinery of the Rape of the Lock, most of us in this country have been prepared, by our infantine familiarity with the fairies of the nursery, to give a sort of anticipated credence, not only to Shakespeare's inimitable little sprites, but to those of the Rosicrucian dream, which Pope's youthful fancy and cultivated. taste led him to borrow from the fictitious Gabalis, a name assumed by the Abbé de Montfaucon de Villars.

It must have surprised some of those sectaries in poetry with us who seem desirous of excluding that author from the pale of the first of the fine arts, if they have chanced to meet with the work 15 of the Historian of all Literature, a book of considerable repute when I was last in Italy, and quoted above as objecting to the machinery of the Rape of the Lock, to have found him-after having accused Pope, the most concise of all poets, of a redundancy of expression, and that he never knows when to end-complimenting him with great fertility of imagination.

I might have been tempted, after having thus suffered myself to fall into a sort of patriotic de

fence of Pope's Rape of the Lock, to say something of the Dunciad; but the limits within which I had resolved to confine this discourse, require that I should omit what I might otherwise have added concerning that other admirable mock epic of his, though too temporary and personal not to have already lost much of the interest and picquant, which must at first have belonged to it; I except, however, from that observation the fourth book, written in a loftier strain than the other three, and calculated to please equally readers of taste, at all times and in all countries where our language shall be understood, 16

I shall in like manner pass over Hudibras, in its form belonging to the chivalrous burlesque, of which Voltaire 17. poem says that he never met with so much wit in any other book; while Mr. Hume, in his History of England, no less justly observes, that, though scarcely any other author was ever able to express his thoughts in so few words, Butler often employs too many thoughts on one subject, and thereby becomes prolix after an unusual manner.

I now therefore proceed to give some account of the author of Ricciardetto, and of his work, in which last respect he himself will be my principal authority; and also of the circumstances which led me to attempt a translation of his first canto, and my reasons for proceeding no farther.

Niccolò Forteguerri, otherwise Fortiguerra, was born in the year 1674, of respectable parents at Pistoia, in Tuscany, and after the example of one, or perhaps more, of the same family in that city, he often assumed, both in his Latin and Italian compositions, the name of Carteromachus, or Carteromaco, according to the pedantic custom of adopting the Greek translation of modern names, which was so prevalent with the learned at the revival of letters, and for many years afterwards. 18 Scipio Carteromachus, a Pistoian, and no doubt of our author's family, a learned man who lived during the reign, and some time in the service, of Leo the Tenth, seems to have been known by no other name, either by his contemporary Erasmus, who had been familiarly acquainted with him while in Italy, or by Bayle. The former gives to this Forteguerri an encomium for recondite and finished