of our ancestors.  All remembrances of the great poetic works of the Middle Ages is completely effaced.  No one supposes in those barbarous times the existence of ages classical also in their way; no one imagines either their heroic songs or romances of adventure, either the rich bounty of lyrical styles or the naive, touching crudity of the Christian drama.  The seventeenth century turned disdainfully away from the monuments of national genius discovered by it; finding them sometimes shocking in their rudeness, sometimes puerile in their refinements.  These unfortunate exhumations, indeed, only serve to strengthen its cult for a simple, correct beauty, the models of which are found in Greece and Rome.  Why dream of penetrating the darkness of our origin?  Contemporary society is far too self-satisfied to seek distraction in the study of a past which it does not comprehend.  The subjects and heroes of domestic history are also prohibited.  Corneille is Latin, Racine is Greek; the very name of Childebrande suffices to cover an epopee with ridicule.—­Pellissier, pp. 7-8.

[3] “Epistle to Augustus.”

[4] “Epistle of Augustus.”

[5] I.e., learning.

[6] “Life of Dryden.”

[7] “Epistle to Augustus.”

[8] The tradition as to Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton is almost equally continuous.  A course of what Lowell calls “penitential reading,” in Restoration criticism, will convince anyone that these four names already stood out distinctly, as those of the four greatest English poets.  See especially Winstanley, “Lives of the English Poets,” 1687; Langbaine, “An Account of the English Dramatic Poets,” 1691; Dennis, “Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakspere,” 1712; Gildon, “The Complete Art of Poetry,” 1718.  The fact mentioned by Macaulay, that Sir Wm. Temple’s “Essay on Ancient and Modern Learning” names none of the four, is without importance.  Temple refers by name to only three English “wits,” Sidney, Bacon, and Selden.  This very superficial performance of Temple’s was a contribution to the futile controversy over the relative merits of the ancients and moderns, which is now only of interest as having given occasion to Bentley to display his great scholarship in his “Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris,” (1698), and to Swift to show his powers of irony in “The Battle of the Books” (1704).

[9] Preface to the “Plays of Shakspere,” 1765.

[10] Prologue, spoken by Garrick at the opening of Drury Lane Theater, 1747.

[11] “The Tragedies of the Last Age Considered and Examined,” 1678.

[12] “Shakspere Illustrated,” 1753.

[13] See Dryden’s “Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy” and “Defence of the Epilogue to the Conquest of Granada.”

[14] “Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakspere,” 1712.

[15] “The Art of Poetry,” pp. 63 and 99. Cf.  Pope, “Epistle to Augustus”: 

    “Shakspere (whom you and every play-house bill
    Style the divine, the matchless, what you will)
    For gain, not glory, winged his roving flight,
    And grew immortal in his own despite.”