"Chaucer," he writes, "I think obscene and contemptible."
He could see no merit in Spenser, preferred Tasso to Milton, and called
the old English dramatists "mad and turbid mountebanks." In the same
spirit he writes: "In the time of Pope it was all Horace, now it is all
Claudian." He saw--what fanatics had begun to deny--that Pope was a great
writer, and the "angel of reasonableness," the strong common sense of both
was a link between them; but the expressions he uses during his
controversy with Bowles look like jests, till we are convinced of his
earnestness by his anger. "Neither time, nor distance, nor grief, nor age
can ever diminish my veneration for him who is the great moral poet of all
times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of all stages of existence....
Your whole generation are not worth a canto of the _Dunciad_, or anything
that is his." All the while he was himself writing prose and verse, in
grasp if not in vigour as far beyond the stretch of Pope, as Pope is in
"worth and wit and sense" removed above his mimics. The point of the
paradox is not merely that he deserted, but that he sometimes imitated his
model, and when he did so, failed.
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