With dreadful faces throng'd, and fiery arms:
Some natural tears they dropt, but wip'd them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide."




LECTURE IV.
ON DRYDEN AND POPE.


Dryden and Pope are the great masters of the artificial style of
poetry in our language, as the poets of whom I have already treated,
Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton, were of the natural; and
though this artificial style is generally and very justly acknowledged
to be inferior to the other, yet those who stand at the head of that
class, ought, perhaps, to rank higher than those who occupy an inferior
place in a superior class. They have a clear and independent claim upon
our gratitude, as having produced a kind and degree of excellence which
existed equally nowhere else. What has been done well by some later
writers of the highest style of poetry, is included in, and obscured by
a greater degree of power and genius in those before them: what has been
done best by poets of an entirely distinct turn of mind, stands by
itself, and tells for its whole amount. Young, for instance, Gray, or
Akenside, only follow in the train of Milton and Shakspeare: Pope and
Dryden walk by their side, though of an unequal stature, and are
entitled to a first place in the lists of fame. This seems to be not
only the reason of the thing, but the common sense of mankind, who,
without any regular process of reflection, judge of the merit of a work,