But Keats had never then[3] studied the writers of whom he speaks so
contemptuously, though he might have profited by so doing. Boileau would
at least have taught him that _flimsy_ would have been an apter epithet
for the _standard_ than for the mottoes upon it. Dryden was the author of
that schism against which Keats so vehemently asserts the claim of the
orthodox teaching it had displaced. He was far more just to Boileau, of
whom Keats had probably never read a word. "If I would only cross the
seas," he says, "I might find in France a living Horace and a Juvenal in
the person of the admirable Boileau, whose numbers are excellent, whose
expressions are noble, whose thoughts are just, whose language is pure,
whose satire is pointed, and whose sense is just. What he borrows from
the ancients he repays with usury of his own, in coin as good and almost
as universally valuable."[4]

Dryden has now been in his grave nearly a hundred and seventy years; in
the second class of English poets perhaps no one stands, on the whole, so
high as he; during his lifetime, in spite of jealousy, detraction,
unpopular politics, and a suspicious change of faith, his pre-eminence
was conceded; he was the earliest complete type of the purely literary
man, in the modern sense; there is a singular unanimity in allowing him a
certain claim to _greatness_ which would be denied to men as famous and
more read,--to Pope or Swift, for example; he is supposed, in some way or
other, to have reformed English poetry. It is now about half a century
since the only uniform edition of his works was edited by Scott. No
library is complete without him, no name is more familiar than his, and
yet it may be suspected that few writers are more thoroughly buried in
that great cemetery of the "British Poets." If contemporary reputation be
often deceitful, posthumous fame may be generally trusted, for it is a
verdict made up of the suffrages of the select men in succeeding
generations. This verdict has been as good as unanimous in favor of