reflected light of his denunciation of them.  Though Buckingham is forgotten and Shaftesbury’s name swallowed up in that of his more philanthropic descendant, we can read of Achitophel and Zimri still, and feel something of the strength and heat which he caught from a fiercely fought conflict and transmitted with his own gravity and purposefulness into verse.  The Thirty-nine Articles are not a proper subject for poetry, but the sustained and serious allegory which Dryden weaves round theological discussion preserves his treatment of them from the fate of the controversialists who opposed him.  His work has wit and vitality enough to keep it sweet.

Strength and wit enter in different proportions into the work of his successor, Alexander Pope—­a poet whom admirers in his own age held to be the greatest in our language.  No one would think of making such a claim now, but the detraction which he suffered at the hands of Wordsworth and the Romantics, ought not to make us forget that Pope, though not our greatest, not even perhaps a great, poet is incomparably our most brilliant versifier.  Dryden’s strength turns in his work into something more fragile and delicate, polished with infinite care like lacquer, and wrought like filigree work to the last point of conscious and perfected art.  He was not a great thinker; the thoughts which he embodies in his philosophical poems—­the Essay on Man and the rest, are almost ludicrously out of proportion to the solemnity of the titles which introduce them, nor does he except very rarely get beyond the conceptions common to the average man when he attempts introspection or meditates on his own destiny.  The reader in search of philosophy will find little to stimulate him and in the facile Deism of the time probably something to smile at.  Pope has no message to us now.  But he will find views current in his time or borrowed from other authors put with perfect felicity and wit, and he will recognize the justice of Addison’s comment that Pope’s wit and fine writing consist “not so much in advancing things that are new, as in giving things that are known an agreeable turn.”  And he will not fall into the error of dubbing the author a minor poet because he is neither subtle nor imaginative nor profound.  A great poet would not have written like Pope—­one must grant it; but a minor poet could not.

It is characteristic of Pope’s type of mind and kind of art that there is no development visible in his work.  Other poets, Shakespeare, for instance, and Keats, have written work of the highest quality when they were young, but they have had crudenesses to shed—­things to get rid of as their strength and perceptions grew.  But Pope, like Minerva, was full grown and full armed from the beginning.  If we did not know that his Essay on Criticism was his first poem it would be impossible to place it in the canon of his work; it might come in anywhere and so might everything else that he wrote.  From