t visible in the 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 develo