or
practised by our fathers.' Cowley could see nothing at all in
Chaucer's poetry. Dryden heartily admired it, and, as we have seen,
praised its matter admirably; but of its exquisite manner and movement
all he can find to say is that 'there is the rude sweetness of a Scotch
tune in it, which is natural and pleasing, though not perfect.'
Addison, wishing to praise Chaucer's numbers, compares them with
Dryden's own. And all through the eighteenth century, and down even
into our own times, the stereotyped phrase of approbation for good
verse found in our early poetry has been, that it even approached the
verse of Dryden, Addison, Pope, and Johnson. Are Dryden and Pope
poetical classics? Is the historic estimate, which represents them as
such, and which has been so long established that it cannot easily give
way, the real estimate? Wordsworth and Coleridge, as is well known,
denied it; but the authority of Wordsworth and Coleridge does not weigh
much with the young generation, and there are many signs to show that
the eighteenth century and its judgments are coming into favour again.
Are the favourite poets of the eighteenth-century classics?

It is impossible within my present limits to discuss the question
fully. And what man of letters would not shrink from seeming to
dispose dictatorially of the claims of two men who are, at any rate,
such masters in letters as Dryden and Pope; two men of such admirable
talent, both of them, and one of them, Dryden, a man, on all sides, of
such energetic and genial power? And yet, if we are to gain the full
benefit from poetry, we must have the real estimate of it. I cast
about for some mode of arriving, in the present case, at such an
estimate without offence. And perhaps the best way is to begin, as it
is easy to begin, with cordial praise.

When we find Chapman, the Elizabethan translator of Homer, expressing
himself in his preface thus: 'Though truth in her very nakedness sits
in so deep a pit, that from Gades to Aurora and Ganges few eyes can
sound her, I hope yet those few here will so discover and confirm that,
the date being out of her darkness in this morning of our poet, he
shall now gird his temples with the sun,'--we pronounce that such a
prose is intolerable. When we find Milton writing: 'And long it was
not after, when I was confirmed in this opinion, that he, who would not
be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things,
ought himself to