"These three personages, S * *, W * *, and C * *, had all of them a
very natural antipathy to Pope, and I respect them for it, as the
only original feeling or principle which they have contrived to
preserve. But they have been joined in it by those who have joined
them in nothing else: by the Edinburgh Reviewers, by the whole
heterogeneous mass of living English poets, excepting Crabbe,
Rogers, Gifford, and Campbell, who, both by precept and practice,
have proved their adherence; and by me, who have shamefully
deviated in practice, but have ever loved and honoured Pope's
poetry with my whole soul, and hope to do so till my dying day. I
would rather see all I have ever written lining the same trunk in
which I actually read the eleventh book of a modern Epic poem at
Malta in 1811, (I opened it to take out a change after the paroxysm
of a tertian, in the absence of my servant, and found it lined with
the name of the maker, Eyre, Cockspur-street, and with the Epic
poetry alluded to,) than sacrifice what I firmly believe in as the
Christianity of English poetry, the poetry of Pope.

"Nevertheless, I will not go so far as * * in his postscript, who
pretends that no great poet ever had immediate fame, which, being
interpreted, means that * * is not quite so much read by his
contemporaries as might be desirable. This assertion is as false
as it is foolish. Homer's glory depended upon his present
popularity: he recited,--and without the strongest impression of
the moment, who would have gotten the Iliad by heart, and given it
to tradition? Ennius, Terence, Plautus, Lucretius, Horace, Virgil,
Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Sappho, Anacreon, Theocritus, all
the great poets of antiquity, were the delight of their
contemporaries.[3] The very existence of a poet, previous to the