POPE. 



TN 1675 Edward Phillips, the elder of Milton's 

 JL nephews, published his Theatrum Poetarum. In his 

 Preface and elsewhere there can be little doubt that he 

 reflected the aesthetic principles and literary judgments 

 of his now illustrious uncle, who had died in obscurity 

 the year before.* The great poet who gave to English 

 blank verse the grandeur and compass of organ-music, 

 and who in his minor poems kept alive the traditions of 

 Fletcher and Shakespeare, died with no foretaste, and 

 yet we may believe as confident as ever, of that " im- 

 mortality of fame " which he tells his friend Diodati he 

 was " meditating with the help of Heaven " in his youth. 

 He who may have seen Shakespeare, who doubtless had 

 seen Fletcher, and who perhaps personally knew Jon- 

 son, f 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 1 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 



* This was Thomas Warton's opinion. 



t Milton, a London boy, was in his eighth, seventeenth, and twenty- 

 ninth years, respectively, when Shakespeare (1616), Fletcher (1625), 

 and B. Jonson (1637) died. 



17 T 



