the charmed circle of his friendships, Pope was ready enough to use his wit against any pretender. The change began gradually, and in very innocent fashion. Poetry had been taught to be scholarly, self-conscious, experimental; and it showed its skill in half-playful imitations of the older English masters. Pope himself imitated Chaucer and Spenser in burlesque fashion. John Philips, in _The Splendid Shilling_, used Milton's heightened style to describe the distresses of an impecunious poet. William Shenstone in _The School- mistress_, parodied Spenser, yet the parody is in no way hostile, and betrays an almost sentimental admiration. Spenser, like Milton, never lost credit as a master, though his fame was obscured a little during the reign of Dryden. His style, it must be remembered, was archaic in his own time; it could not grow old, for it had never been young. Addison, in _An Account of the Greatest English Poets_, says that Spenser's verse Can charm an understanding age no more; The long-spun allegories fulsome grow, While the dull moral lies too plain below. But the _Account_ is a merely juvenile work; its dogma is not the sword of judgment, but the shield of ignorance. "The character he gives of Spenser," said Pope, "is false; and I have heard him say that he never read Spenser till fifteen years after he wrote it." As for Pope himself, among the English poets Waller, Spenser, and Dryden were his childhood's favorites, in that order; and the year before his death he said to Spence--"I don't know how it is; there is something in Spenser that pleases one as strongly in one's old age as it did in one's youth. I read the Faerie Queene, when I was about twelve, with infinite delight; and I think it gave me as much when I read it over, about a year or two ago." The lyrical Milton and the romantic Spenser found disciples among poets in the early half of the eighteenth century. Two of these disciples may be mentioned, both born about the year 1700, only twelve years later than Pope. John Dyer, the son of a solicitor in Wales, was bred to the law, but gave it up to study painting under Jonathan Richardson. His earlier and better poems were written while he wandered about South Wales in pursuit of his art. _Grongar Hill_, the most notable of them, was published in 1726. Love of the country is what inspires his verses, which have a very winning simplicity, only touched here and there by the conventions deemed proper for poetry: Grass and flowers Quiet treads, On the meads and mountain-heads, Along with Pleasure, close ally'd, Ever by each other's side; And often, by the murmuring rill, Hears the thrush, while all is still, Within the groves of Grongar Hill. The truth of his observation endeared him to Wordsworth; and his moral, when he finds a moral, is without violence: