One of the great attractions of the eighteenth century for the modern world is that, while it is safely set at an historical distance from us, it is, at the same time, brought within range of our everyday interests.  It is not merely that about the beginning of it men began to write and talk according to the simple rules of modern times.  It is rather that about this time the man of letters emerges from the mists of legend and becomes as real as one’s uncle in his daily passions and his train of little interests.  One has not to reconstruct the lives of Swift and Pope from a handful of myths and references in legal documents.  There is no room for anything akin to Baconianism in their regard.  They live in a thousand letters and contemporary illusions, and one might as well be an agnostic about Mr. Asquith as about either of them.  Pope was a champion liar, and Swift spun mystifications about himself.  But, in spite of lies and Mystifications and gossip, they are both as real to us as if we met them walking down the Strand.  One could not easily imagine Shakespeare walking down the Strand.  The Strand would have to be rebuilt, and the rest of us would have to put on fancy dress in order to receive him.  But though Swift and Pope lived in a century of wig and powder and in a London strangely unlike the London of to-day, we do not feel that similar preparations would be needed in their case.  If Swift came back, one can without difficulty imagine him pamphleteering about war as though he had merely been asleep for a couple of centuries; and Pope, we may be sure, would resume, without too great perplexity, his attack on the egoists and dunces of the world of letters.  But Shakespeare’s would be a return from legendary Elysian fields.

Hence Mr. Saintsbury may justly hope that his summons to the modern random reader, no less than to the scholar, to go and enjoy himself among the writers of the eighteenth century will not fall on entirely deaf ears.  At the same time, it is only fair to warn the general reader not to follow Mr. Saintsbury’s recommendations and opinions too blindly.  He will do well to take the author’s advice and read Pope, but he will do very ill to take the author’s advice as regards what in Pope is best worth reading.  Mr. Saintsbury speaks with respect, for instance, of the Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady—­an insincere piece of tombstone rhetoric.  “There are some,” he declared in a footnote, “to whom this singular piece is Pope’s strongest atonement, both as poet and man, for his faults as both.”  It seems to me to be a poem which reveals Pope’s faults as a poet, while of Pope the man it tells us simply nothing.  It has none of Pope’s wit, none of his epigrammatic characterization, none of his bewigged and powdered fancies, none of his malicious self-revelation.  Almost the only interesting thing about it is the notes the critics have written on it, discussing whether the lady ever lived, and, if so, whether she was a Miss Wainsbury