date of the Queen Anne revival in literature and the beginnings of the bric-a-brac school of verse are marked with sufficient precision by the publication of Austin Dobson’s “Vignettes in Rhyme” (1873), “Proverbs in Porcelain” (1877), and the other delightful volumes of the same kind that have followed.  Mr. Dobson has also published, in prose, lives of Steele, Fielding, Hogarth, and Goldsmith; “Eighteenth-Century Vignettes,” and the like.  But his particular ancestor among the Queen Anne wits was Matthew Prior, of whose metrical tales, epigrams, and vers de societe he has made a little book of selections, and whose gallantry, lightness, and tone of persiflage, just dashed with sentiment, he has reproduced with admirable spirit in his own original work.

It was upon the question of Pope that romantics and classics first joined issue in the time of Warton, and that the critical battle was fought in the time of Bowles and Byron; the question of his real place in literature, and of his title to the name of poet.  Mr. Dobson has a word to say for Pope, and with this our enquiries may fittingly end: 

  “Suppose you say your Worst of POPE, declare
  His Jewels Paste, his Nature a Parterre,
  His Art but Artifice—­I ask once more
  Where have you seen such artifice before? 
  Where have you seen a Parterre better grac’d,
  Or gems that glitter like his Gems of Paste? 
  Where can you show, among your Names of Note,
  So much to copy and so much to quote? 
  And where, in Fine, in all our English Verse,
  A Style more trenchant and a Sense more terse?”

  “So I, that love the old Augustan Days
  Of formal courtesies and formal Phrase;
  That like along the finish’d Line to feel
  The Ruffle’s Flutter and the Flash of Steel;
  That like my Couplet as Compact as Clear;
  That like my Satire sparkling tho’ severe,
  Unmix’d with Bathos and unmarr’d by trope,
  I fling my Cap for Polish—­and for POPE!” [55]

But ground once gained in a literary movement is never wholly lost; and a reversion to an earlier type is never complete.  The classicism of Matthew Arnold is not at all the classicism of the eighteenth century; Thackeray’s realism is not the realism of Fielding.  It is what it is, partly just because Walter Scott had written his Waverley Novels in the mean while.  Apart from the works for which it is directly responsible, the romantic movement had enriched the blood of the literature, and its results are seen even in writings hostile to the romantic principles.  As to the absolute value of the great romantic output of the nineteenth century, it may be at once acknowledged that, as “human documents,” books which reflect contemporary life have a superior importance to the creations of the modern imagination, playing freely over times and places distant, and attractive through their distance; over ancient Greece or the Orient or the Middle Age.  But that a very beautiful and quite legitimate product of literary art may spring from this contact of the present with the past, it is hoped that our history may have shown.