The positions of the two were indeed different, for Dryden was a dead man when the century opened, though he had died on its very eve, while Prior was an actual member of its first great literary group. And, further, Dryden's influence, though it continued to some extent directly through the whole time, was largely exercised at second-hand through Pope, while Prior's was first-hand all through. For which reasons we need not say anything more here on Dryden himself, while we must say something on Prior. But the rhetorical influence which had produced such great poetry (for great it is, let who will gainsay) as the finest passages of Dryden's satires, the opening of _Religio Laici_, the "wandering fires" paragraph in _The Hind and the Panther_, and not a few things in the neglected plays, was well justified of its children in the following century. I have never seen any successful attempt to deny the name of poetry to such magnificent things as the close of _The Dunciad_ and the close of _The Vanity of Human Wishes_. I have never seen any real fight at all made for this denial except the endeavour to turn them, as scapegoats, into the wilderness of rhetoric. And that, as I have said already, is really a begging of the question. Most certainly there is rhetoric which is not poetry--there is a very great deal of it--in fact most of it; as certainly there is rhetoric which is. And the passages which may claim that name in the eighteenth century, if never quite so great as the two just mentioned, are very numerous. There is that fine one in Tickell's epitaph on Cadogan which, after the eclipse of eighteenth-century verse in the earlier nineteenth, Thackeray was the first to rediscover: Ah, no! when once the mortal yields to fate The blast of Fame's sweet trumpet sounds too late-- Too late to stay the spirit on its flight Or soothe the new inhabitant of light, with its later address to Fame herself: Thou music, warbling to the deafened ear! Thou incense, wasted on the funeral bier! There is Akenside's still finer _Epistle to Curio_, which Macaulay laughed at rather ignobly as unpractical. Well, Akenside, like Macaulay himself, was a Whig, and I am a Tory; nor are the ideals expressed in the following lines by any means mine. But if they are not fine lines, if they are not, though in one of the outer provinces no doubt, poetical, I will acknowledge that I know nothing at all about poetry: