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