an age of
prose and reason. Do you ask me whether Pope's verse, take it almost
where you will, is not good?

'To Hounslow Heath I point, and Banstead Down
Thence comes your mutton, and these chicks my own.'

I answer: Admirable for the purposes of the high priest of an age of
prose and reason. But do you ask me whether such verse proceeds from
men with an adequate poetic criticism of life, from men whose criticism
of life has a high seriousness, or even, without that high seriousness,
has poetic largeness, freedom, insight, benignity? Do you ask me
whether the application of ideas to life in the verse of these men,
often a powerful application, no doubt, is a powerful _poetic_
application? Do you ask me whether the poetry of these men has either
the matter or the inseparable manner of such an adequate poetic
criticism; whether it has the accent of

'Absent thee from felicity awhile . . .'

or of

'And what is else not to be overcome . . .'

or of

'O martyr souded in virginitee!'

I answer: It has not and cannot have them; it is the poetry of the
builders of an age of prose and reason. Though they may write in
verse, though they may in a certain sense be masters of the art of
versification, Dryden and Pope are not classics of our poetry, they are
classics of our prose.

Gray is our poetical classic of that literature and age; the position
of Gray is singular, and demands a word of notice here. He has not the
volume or the power of poets who, coming in times more favourable, have
attained to an independent criticism of life. But he lived with the
great poets, he lived, above all, with the Greeks, through perpetually
studying and enjoying them; and he caught their poetic point of view
for regarding life, caught their poetic manner. The point of view and
the manner are not self-sprung in him, he caught them of others; and he
had not the free and abundant use of them. But, whereas Addison and
Pope never had the use of them, Gray had the use of them at times. He
is the scantiest and frailest of classics in our poetry, but he is a
classic.

And now, after Gray, we are met, as we draw towards the end of the
eighteenth century, we are met by the great name of Burns. We enter
now on times where the personal estimate of poets begins to be rife,
and where the real estimate of them is not reached without difficulty.
But in spite of the disturbing pressures of personal partiality, of
national part