h no one wishes to undo the poetic achievement of
the nineteenth century, every one has come to wish to understand that
of the eighteenth. We shall never again think that Dryden and Pope had
the essence of poetry in them to the same extent, as, for instance,
Wordsworth or Shelley; but neither shall we ever again treat them with
the superficial and ignorant contempt which was not uncommon twenty or
thirty years ago. The twentieth century is not so confident as its
predecessor that the poetry and criticism of the eighteenth may safely
be ignored.

If, then, we are not to ignore Johnson's writing, what are we to
remember? In a sketch like this the point of view to be taken is that
of the man with a general interest in English letters, not that of the
specialist in the eighteenth century, or indeed, that of any specialist
at all. Well, then, first of all Johnson wrote verses which though not
great poetry have some fine qualities. They are, like so much of the
verse of that century, chiefly "good sense put into good metre." That
is what Twining, the Aristotelian critic, said of them when Johnson
died. He had a much {181} finer sense of poetry than Johnson, and he
was perfectly right in this criticism. But it is a loss and not a gain
that, since Wordsworth gave us such a high conception of what poetry
should be, we have ceased to take pleasure in good verses simply for
their own sake. In the eighteenth century a new volume of verse became
at once the talk of the town and every cultivated person read it. Now
we have allowed poetry to become a thing so esoteric in its exaltation
that only the poetically minded can read it. Neither the _Excursion_
nor the _Epipsychidion_ could possibly be read by the great public.
All the world could and did read Pope's _Epistles_ and Goldsmith's
_Traveller_. It may have been worth while to pay the price for the new
greatness of poetry that came in with the nineteenth century; but it is
at any rate right to remember that there was a price, and that it has
had to be paid. It may be that some day we shall be able again to take
pleasure in well-turned verses without losing our appreciation of
higher things. Good verse is, really, a delightful thing even when it
is not great poetry, and we are too apt now-a-days to forget that verse
has one great inherent advantage over prose, that it impresses itself
on the memory as no prose can. We can all quote scores of lines from
Pope, though we