again. Are the favorite 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 be a true poem,"[102]--we pronounce that such a prose has its
own grandeur, but that it is obsolete and inconvenient. But when we find
Dryden telling us: "What Virgil wrote in the vigor of his age, in plenty
and at ease, I have undertaken to translate in my declining years;
struggling with wants, oppressed with sickness, curbed in my genius,
liable to be misconstrued in all I write,"[103]--then we exclaim that
here at last we have the true English prose, a prose such as we would
all gladly use if we only knew how. Yet Dryden was Milton's
contemporary.

But after the Restoration the time had come when our nation felt the
imperious need of a fit prose. So, too, the time had likewise come when
our nation felt the imperious need of freeing itself from the absorbing
preoccupation which religion in the Puritan age had exercised. It was
impossible that this freedom should be brought about without some
negative excess, without some neglect and impairment of the religious
life of the soul; and the spiritual history of the eighteenth century
shows us that the freedom was not achieved without th