no quarter; that there is no use giving them any; to spare them is to
make them insolent; to fondle the reptile is to be bitten by it.
True poetry, as the messenger of heavenly beauty, is decaying; true
refinement, true loftiness of thought, even true morality, are at
stake. And so he writes his "Dunciad." And would that he were here,
to write it over again, and write it better!

For write it again he surely would. And write it better he would
also. With the greater cleanliness of our time, with all the
additional experience of history, with the greater classical,
aesthetic, and theological knowledge of our day, the sins of our
poets are as much less excusable than those of Eusden, Blackmore,
Cibber, and the rest, as Pope's "Dunciad" on them would be more
righteously severe. What, for instance, would the author of the
"Essay on Man" say to anyone who now wrote p. 137 (for it really is
not to be quoted) of the "Life Drama" as the thoughts of his hero,
without any after atonement for the wanton insult it conveys toward
him whom he dares in the same breath to call "Father," simply because
he wants to be something very fine and famous and self-glorifying,
and Providence keeps him waiting awhile? Has Pope not said it
already?


Persist, by all divine in man unawed,
But learn, ye dunces, not to scorn your God!


And yet no; the gentle goddess would now lay no such restriction on
her children, for in Pope's day no man had discovered the new poetic
plan for making the divine in man an excuse for scorning God, and