The age of Dryden, together with our whole eighteenth century which followed it, sincerely believed itself to have produced poetical classics of its own, and even to have made advance, in poetry, beyond all its predecessors.  Dryden regards as not seriously disputable the opinion “that the sweetness of English verse was never understood or practised by our fathers."[98] Cowley could see nothing at all in Chaucer’s poetry.[99] Dryden heartily admired it, and, as we have seen, praised its matter admirably; but of its exquisite manner and movement all he can find to say is that “there is the rude sweetness of a Scotch tune in it, which is natural and pleasing, though not perfect."[100] Addison, wishing to praise Chaucer’s numbers, compares them with Dryden’s own.  And all through the eighteenth century, and down even into our own times, the stereotyped phrase of approbation for good verse found in our early poetry has been, that it even approached the verse of Dryden, Addison, Pope, and Johnson.

Are Dryden and Pope poetical classics?  Is the historic estimate, which represents them as such, and which has been so long established that it cannot easily give way, the real estimate?  Wordsworth and Coleridge, as is well known, denied it;[101] but the authority of Wordsworth and Coleridge does not weigh much with the young generation, and there are many signs to show that the eighteenth century and its judgments are coming into favor again.  Are the favorite poets of the eighteenth century classics?

It is impossible within my present limits to discuss the question fully.  And what man of letters would not shrink from seeming to dispose dictatorially of the claims of two men who are, at any rate, such masters in letters as Dryden and Pope; two men of such admirable talent, both of them, and one of them, Dryden, a man, on all sides, of such energetic and genial power?  And yet, if we are to gain the full benefit from poetry, we must have the real estimate of it.  I cast about for some mode of arriving, in the present case, at such an estimate without offence.  And perhaps the best way is to begin, as it is easy to begin, with cordial praise.

When we find Chapman, the Elizabethan translator of Homer, expressing himself in his preface thus:  “Though truth in her very nakedness sits in so deep a pit, that from Gades to Aurora and Ganges few eyes can sound her, I hope yet those few here will so discover and confirm that, the date being out of her darkness in this morning of our poet, he shall now gird his temples with the sun,”—­we pronounce that such a prose is intolerable.  When we find Milton writing:  “And long it was not after, when I was confirmed in this opinion, that he, who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem,"[102]—­we pronounce that such a prose has its own grandeur, but that it is obsolete and inconvenient.  But when we find Dryden telling us:  “What Virgil wrote in the vigor of his age, in plenty and at ease, I have undertaken to translate in my declining years; struggling with wants, oppressed with sickness, curbed in my genius, liable to be misconstrued in all I write,"[103]—­then we exclaim that here at last we have the true English prose, a prose such as we would all gladly use if we only knew how.  Yet Dryden was Milton’s contemporary.