When we pass into a world of new artistic aim, the world of which Alexander Pope is president, we find the same thing happening. The worldly pilgrims of Chaucer’s book, Elizabeth’s intrepid adventures, the saintly learning and gestured gallantry that fought it out in Puritan England, have in turn passed from the centre of the stage of articulate national life, to make way for the man about town, the philanderer, the coquette, and the sententious moralist. The innuendo and the moral precept are together on every man’s lips, not wholly insincere in their partnership. And the idiom of this witty, argumentative, intriguing and rather self-righteous society is perfectly turned to the use of genius in the Popean poetry. When _The Dunciad_ and _The Essay on Man_ and the _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_ were first read, the coffee-houses and boudoirs may have been moved by every varying degree of delight and resentment, but nobody questioned that here was the common language and that at the same time it was being used above the common pitch. Pastoral, invective, worldly-wisdom, religious philosophising, the same instrument was there exactly tempered for each alike, thus-- Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread, Whose flocks supply him with attire; Whose trees in summer yield him shade, In winter fire. and-- One dedicates in high heroic prose, And ridicules beyond a hundred foes: One from all Grub Street will my fame defend, And, more abusive, calls himself my friend. This prints my letters, that expects a bribe, And others roar aloud, “Subscribe, subscribe!” ... and-- A little learning is a dangerous thing, Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring ... and-- All nature is but art unknown to thee, All chance, direction which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good; And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite, One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right. It is true that the Augustan school in its decline, which was contemporary with the faint prelude of the Romantic Revival, fell into an extreme artificiality of diction that can hardly have had its model even by suggestion in the common speech of the time. So good a poet as Gray, who was himself one of the preludists, was not blameless in this respect, and could write-- Him the dog of darkness spied, His shaggy throat he open’d wide, While from his jaws, with carnage fill’d, Foam and human gore distill’d: Hoarse he bays with hideous din, Eyes that glow, and fangs that grin; And long pursues, with fruitless yell, The father of the powerful spell ... which Collins, at his best even surer than Gray in prophecy of a new age, could match with--