336 POPE. 



any art or study.&quot; 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 

 &quot; decorum &quot; (meaning a higher or organic unity) was &quot; the 

 grand masterpiece to observe&quot; in poetry.* 



It is upon this text of Phillips (as Chalmers has re 

 marked) that Joseph Warton bases his classification of poets 

 in the dedication to Young of the first volume of his essay 

 on the &quot; Genius and Writings of Pope,&quot; published in 1756. 

 That was the earliest public and official declaration of war 

 against the reigning mode, though private hostilities and re 

 prisals had been going on for some time. Addison s 

 panegyric of Milton in the &quot;Spectator&quot; was a criticism, 

 not the less damaging because indirect, of the superficial 

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

 demned by innuendo the artificial elaboration of the draw 

 ing-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 &quot; Winter &quot; (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 contemplation of out 

 ward nature. What Thomson s poetical creed was may be 

 surely inferred from his having modelled his two principal 

 poems on Milton and Spenser, ignoring rhyme altogether in 

 the &quot;Seasons,&quot; and in the &quot;Castle of Indolence&quot; rejecting 

 the stiff mould of the couplet. In 1744 came Akenside s 

 &quot; Pleasures of Imagination,&quot; whose very title, like a guide- 

 post, points away from the level highway of commonplace 

 to mountain-paths and less domestic prospects. The poem 

 was stiff and unwilling, but in its loins lay the seed of 

 nobler births, and without it the &quot; Lines written at Tintern 

 Abbey &quot; might never have been. Three years later Collins 

 printed his little volume of Odes, advocating in theory and 

 exemplifying in practice the natural supremacy of the imag 

 ination (though he called it by its older name of fancy) as a 

 * In his Tractate on Education. 



