And the same thing is true to a large extent of the poets, who are usually considered as having taken Pope for their model. Whenever there is a real concentration of interest, whenever they are dealing with the didactic and moral questions characteristic of the “age of prose and reason,” whenever they are writing of man and of his doings, his thoughts and moods as a social member of civilized society, their language is, as a rule, adequate, vivid, fresh, because the aim then is to present a general thought in the language best adapted to bring it forcibly before the mind of the reader. Here, as has been justly said,[257] rhetoric has passed under the influence and received the transforming force of poetry. “The best rhetorical poetry of the eighteenth century is not the best poetry, but it is poetry in its own way, exhibiting the glow, the rush, the passion which strict prose cannot, and which poetry can, give.” Judged on the basis of this kind of poetical diction, the distinctions usually drawn between the neo-classical “kind” of language in the eighteenth century and the romantic “kind” all tend to disappear; at the head (though perhaps we should go back to the Dryden of the “Religio Laici” and “The Hind and the Panther”) is the “Essay on Criticism”; in the direct line of descent are Akenside’s “Epistle to Curio,” large portions of “The Seasons,” “The Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” the “Deserted Village,” and at the end of the century, the “Village” of Crabbe. And in another _genre_, but just as good in its own way, is that light verse, as it may perhaps best be called, successfully ushered in, at the very beginning of the century, by John Pomfret’s “The Choice,” and brought to perfection by Matthew Prior in his lines “To a Child of Quality,” and many another piece.