ESSAY

ON

AKENSIDE'S POEM

ON THE

PLEASURES OF IMAGINATION.

DIDACTIC, or preceptive Poetry, seems to

include a folecism, for the end of Poetry is to please, and of Didactic precept the object is instruction. It is however a fpecies of Poetry which has been cultivated from the earliest stages of fociety; at first, probably, for the fimple purpose of retaining, by means of the regularity of measure and the charms of harmony, the precepts of agricultural wisdom and the aphorifms of economical experience. When Poetry came to be cultivated for its own fake, it

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was natural to esteem the Didactic, as in that view it certainly is, as a species of inferior merit compared with those which are more peculiarly the work of the imagination; and accordingly in the more fplendid era of our own Poetry it has been much less cultivated than many others. Afterwards, when Poetry was become an art, and the more obvious fources of description and adventure were in some measure exhaufted, the Didactic was resorted to, as affording that novelty and variety which began to be the great defideratum iu works of fancy. This fpecies of writing is likewife favoured by the diffufion of knowledge, by which many fubjects become proper for general reading, which in a lefs informed ftate of fociety, would have favoured of pedantry and abftrufe fpeculation. For Poetry cannot defcend to teach the elements of any art or fcience, or confine itself to that regular arrangement and clear brevity which suits the communication of unknown truths. In fact, the Mufe would

make a very indifferent school-miftrefs. Whoever therefore reads a Didactic Poem ought to come to it with a previous knowledge of his subject; and whoever writes one, ought to suppose such a knowledge in his readers. If he is obliged to explain technical terms, to refer continually to critical notes, and to follow a system step by step with the patient exactnefs of a teacher, his Poem, however laboured, will be a bad Poem. His office is rather to throw a luftre on fuch prominent parts of his fyftem as are most fufceptible of poetical ornament, and to kindle the enthusiasm of those feelings which the truths he is converfant with are fitted to infpire. In that beautiful Poem the Essay on Man, the fyftem of the author, if in reality he had any fyftem, is little attended to, but those paffages which breathe the love of Virtue are read with delight, and fix themselves on the memory. Where the reader has this previous knowledge of the subject, which we have mentioned as neceffary, the art of

the Poet becomes itself a fource of pleasure, and fometimes in proportion to the remoteness of the fubject from the more obvious province of Poetry; we are delighted to find with how much dexterity the artist of verse can avoid a technical term, how neatly he can turn an uncouth word, and with how much grace embellish a scientific idea. Who does not admire the infinite art with which Dr. DARWIN has defcribed the machine of Sir RICHARD ARKWRIGHT. His verse is a piece of mechanism as complete in its kind as that which he describes. Allured perhaps too much by this artificial species of excellence, and by the hopes of novelty, hardly any branch of knowledge has been fo abftrufe, or so barren of delight as not to have afforded a subject to the Didactic Poet. Even the loathsomeness of disease and the dry maxims of medical knowledge have been decorated with the charms of Poetry. Many of these pieces however owe all their entertainment to frequent digreffions.