It is not necessary to indicate more than very briefly what the
principles of the classic poetry had been. The time had passed when
readers and writers in England gave much attention to the sources of the
popular poetry of their day. Malherbe had never been known here, and the
vigorous _Art poétique_ of Boileau, which had been eagerly studied at
the close of the seventeenth century, was forgotten. Even the Prefaces
of Dryden had ceased to be read, and the sources of authority were now
the prose of Addison and the verse of Pope. To very young readers these
stood in the same relation as the writings of the post-Tennysonian
critics stand now. To reject them, to question their authority, was
like eschewing the essays of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater. In
particular, the _Essay on Criticism_ was still immensely admired and
read; it had crystallised around cultivated opinion very much as the
_Studies in the Renaissance_ did from 1875 onwards. It was the last
brilliant word on the aims and experiences of poetical art, and how
brilliant it was can be judged by the pleasure with which we read it
to-day, in spite of our total repudiation of every æsthetic dogma which
it conveys. It is immortal, like every supreme literary expression, and
it stands before us in the history of poetry as an enduring landmark.
This was the apparently impregnable fortress which the Wartons had the
temerity to bombard.

Pope had said that Nature was the best guide to judgment, but what did
he mean by nature? He had meant the "rules," which he declared were
"Nature methodis'd" or, as we should say, systematised. The "rules" were
the maxims, rather than laws, expressed by Aristotle in a famous
treatise. The poet was to follow the Stagirite, "led"--as Pope says in
one of those rare lines in which he catches, in spite of himself, the
Romantic accent--"led by the light of the Mæonian Star." Aristotle