The impression which had been made, in that day of feeble verse (as far as the southern part of the realm is concerned), by _The Landscape_, gained for _The Progress of Civil Society_ an amount of attention of which it was intrinsically unworthy. The work deals with social progress, and it treats the convictions dearest to Christian men as being simply the conjectures of ‘presumptuous ignorance.’ It is the work of a man who writes after nine generations of his ancestors and countrymen have had a free and open Bible in their hands, and who none the less puts the worship of Nature, and of her copyists, in the place of the worship of Nature’s God. This ‘didactic poem’ is written in the land of BACON, MILTON, and SHAKESPEARE, and it bases itself on the ‘fifth book of LUCRETIUS.’ Not the least curious thing about the matter is the effect which was wrought by Mr. KNIGHT’S poetic flight upon the mind of a brother antiquarian. The work absolutely inspired Horace WALPOLE with a serious and deep regret that he was consciously too near the grave to undertake the defence of Christian philosophy against its new assailant. Such a labour, from such a pen, would indeed have been a curiosity of literature. [Sidenote: HORACE WALPOLE ON THE ‘PROGRESS OF CIVIL SOCIETY,’ 1796.] Feeling that for a man who was almost an octogenarian the tasks of controversy would be too much, WALPOLE writes to MASON. He entreats him to expose the daring poetaster. His earnestness in the matter approaches passion. ‘I could not, without using too many words,’ he says, ‘express to you how much I am offended and disgusted by Mr. KNIGHT’S new, insolent, and self-conceited poem. Considering to what height he dares to carry his insolent attack, it might be sufficient to lump [together] all the rest of his impertinent sallies ... as trifling peccadillos.... The vanity of supposing that his authority—the authority of a trumpery prosaic poetaster—was sufficient to re-establish the superannuated atheism of LUCRETIUS!... I cannot engage in an open war with him.... Weak and broken as I am, tottering to the grave at some months past seventy-eight, I have not spirits or courage enough to tap a paper war.’ WALPOLE then adverts to a foregone thought, on MASON’S part, to have taken up the foils on the appearance of _The Landscape_. ‘I ardently wish,’ he says, ‘you had overturned and expelled out of gardens this new Priapus, who is only fit to be erected in the Palais de l’Egalité.’ [Sidenote: Horace Walpole to William Mason, March 22, 1796 (_Letters_; Coll. Edit., vol. ix, p. 462).] And he urges his correspondent not to let the present occasion slip. Irony and ridicule, he thinks, would be weapons quite sufficient to overthrow this ‘Knight of the Brazen Milk-Pot.’ The last thrust was unkind indeed. It was hard that our Collector, whatever his other demerits, should be reproached for his passion to gather small bronzes, by the builder and furnisher of Strawberry-Hill.