282 POPE. 



which he tells his friend Diodati he was meditating with the 

 help of Heaven in his youth. He who may have seen Shak- 

 speare, who doubtless had seen Fletcher, and who perhaps per 

 sonally knew Jonson,* lived to see that false school of writers 

 whom he qualified as good rhymists, but no poets/ at once the 

 idols and the victims of the taste they had corrupted. As he 

 saw, not without scorn, how they found universal hearing, while 

 he slowly won his audience fit though few, did he ever think of 

 the hero of his own epic at the ear of Eve ? It is not impossible ; 

 but however that may be, he sowed in his nephew s book the 

 dragon s teeth of that long war which, after the lapse of a century 

 and a half, was to end in the expulsion of the usurping dynasty 

 and the restoration of the ancient and legitimate race whose 

 claim rested on the grace of God. In the following passage 

 surely the voice is Milton s, though the hand be that of Phillips : 

 Wit, ingenuity, and learning in verse, even elegancy itself, 

 though that comes nearest, are one thing ; true native poetry is 

 another, in which there is a certain air and spirit, which, perhaps, 

 the most learned and judicious in other arts do not perfectly 

 apprehend; much less is it attainable by any art or study. The 

 man who speaks of elegancy as coming nearest, certainly shared, 

 if he was not repeating, the opinions of him who thirty years 

 before had said that decorum (meaning a higher or organic 

 unity) was the grand masterpiece to observe in poetry.f 



It is upon this text of Phillips (as Chalmers has remarked) 

 that Joseph Warton bases his classification of poets in the dedi 

 cation to Young of the first volume of his essay on the Genius 

 and Writings of Pope, published in 1756. That was the earliest 

 public and official declaration of war against the reigning mode, 

 though private hostilities and reprisals had been going on for 

 some time. Addison s panegyric of Milton in the Spectator was 

 a criticism, not the less damaging because indirect, of the super 

 ficial poetry then in vogue. His praise of the old ballads con 

 demned by innuendo the artificial elaboration of the drawing- 

 room pastoral by contrasting it with the simple sincerity of 

 nature. Himself incapable of being natural except in prose, he 

 had an instinct for the genuine virtues of poetry as sure as that 

 of Gray. Thomson s Winter (1726) was a direct protest against 

 the literature of Good Society, going as it did to prove that the 

 noblest society was that of one s own mind, heightened by the 



* Milton, a London boy, was in his eighth, seventeenth, and twenty-ninth years, 

 respectively, when Shakspeare (1616), Fletcher (1625), and B. Jonson (1637) died. 

 t In his Tractate on Education, 



