want to hear anything about it.[2] Now and then, hints Pope, an
antiquarian pedant, a university don, might affect an admiration for some
obsolete author:

"Chaucer's worst ribaldry is learned by rote,
And beastly Skelton heads of houses quote:
One likes no language but the 'Faery Queen';
A Scot will fight for 'Christ's Kirk o' the Green.'"[3]

But, furthermore, the great body of Elizabethan and Stuart literature was
already obsolescent. Dramatists of the rank of Marlowe and Webster,
poets like George Herbert and Robert Herrick--favorites with our own
generation--prose authors like Sir Thomas Browne--from whom Coleridge and
Emerson drew inspiration--had fallen into "the portion of weeds and
outworn faces." Even writers of such recent, almost contemporary, repute
as Donne, whom Carew had styled

"--a king who ruled, as he thought fit,
The universal monarch of wit":

Or as Cowley, whom Dryden called the darling of his youth, and who was
esteemed in his own lifetime a better poet than Milton; even Donne and
Cowley had no longer a following. Pope "versified" some of Donne's
rugged satires, and Johnson quoted passages from him as examples of the
bad taste of the metaphysical poets. This in the "Life of Cowley," with
which Johnson began his "Lives of the Poets," as though Cowley was the
first of the moderns. But,

"Who now reads Cowley?"