Stephen Gwynn

“ Now the distinctive characteristic of the Augustan literature is that we have no longer in a book the mind of an individual, but the mind of a Society finding expression through the mouth of one of its members. It was a natural result of that intellectual ascendency of France, which at this time made itself so strongly felt; for the Frenchman is always social rather than individualist; and, at least in criticism, men had come to take their beliefs from France. ”

“ It can be easily shown that although the Restoration inaugurated in England an age of prose, yet the position of poetry as the chief and natural medium for pure literature was still accepted almost without question. For that reason Pope was taken in his own day to be the undisputed head and front of English letters. His contemporaries probably felt, as we feel, that Swift's was immeasurably the greater genius; but they held, and held rightly, that Pope in his work was the true representative of what has come to be called the Augustan literature. ”

“ Yet it sometimes happens that the master of prose can beat him on his own ground. "Who are the critics?" says Mr. Phoebus in Lord Beaconsfield's Lothair. "The critics are those who have failed in literature or in art." That is happier than Pope's lines ”

“ When his matter is intrinsically valuable apart from expression it consists in reflections upon the human life with which he was in contact socially. He is the poet of Society, and his observation, if acute, is often petty and malicious to a degree that spoils our pleasure in his triumphant mastery of language. ”

“ No letters in the world show a warmer feeling of one man for another than those which Swift wrote to him and about him.
Pope was best known in his own day by his translation of Homer—the most profitable book, financially, to its author that had ever been published in England. His most pretentious work, the Essay on Man, abounds in much-quoted distichs and is singularly barren of real thought. Those poems of Pope which the average reader to-day is likely to enjoy are first, the Essay on Criticism ”