SOURCE: "On Dryden and Pope," in Lectures on the English Poets and the English Comic Writers, edited by William Carew Hazlitt, George Bell and Sons, 1894, pp. 91-113.

An English essayist, Hazlitt was one of the most important critics of the Romantic age. In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in 1818, he discusses Pope's verse as an incomparably refined body of work which must, nevertheless, be placed outside the English tradition of "natural" verse established by Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, and John Milton.

Dryden and Pope are the great masters of the artificial style of poetry in our language, as …Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, were of the natural; and though this artificial style is generally and very justly acknowledged to be inferior to the other, yet those who stand at the head of that class ought, perhaps, to rank higher than those who occupy an inferior...