some quarter century
since people took to building Queen Anne cottages, and gentlemen at
costume parties to treading minuets in small clothes and perukes, with
ladies in high-cushioned hair and farthingales. Girl babies in large
numbers were baptised Dorothy and Belinda. Book illustrators like Kate
Greenaway, Edwin Abbey, and Hugh Thomson carried the mode into art. The
date of the Queen Anne revival in literature and the beginnings of the
_bric-a-brac_ school of verse are marked with sufficient precision by the
publication of Austin Dobson's "Vignettes in Rhyme" (1873), "Proverbs in
Porcelain" (1877), and the other delightful volumes of the same kind that
have followed. Mr. Dobson has also published, in prose, lives of Steele,
Fielding, Hogarth, and Goldsmith; "Eighteenth-Century Vignettes," and the
like. But his particular ancestor among the Queen Anne wits was Matthew
Prior, of whose metrical tales, epigrams, and _vers de societe_ he has
made a little book of selections, and whose gallantry, lightness, and
tone of persiflage, just dashed with sentiment, he has reproduced with
admirable spirit in his own original work.

It was upon the question of Pope that romantics and classics first joined
issue in the time of Warton, and that the critical battle was fought in
the time of Bowles and Byron; the question of his real place in
literature, and of his title to the name of poet. Mr. Dobson has a word
to say for Pope, and with this our enquiries may fittingly end:

"Suppose you say your Worst of POPE, declare
His Jewels Paste, his Nature a Parterre,
His Art but Artifice--I ask once more
Where have you seen such artifice before?
Where have you seen a Parterre better grac'd,
Or gems that glitter like his Gems of Paste?
Where can you show, among your Names of Note,
So much to copy and so much to quote?
And where, in Fine, in all our English Verse,
A Style more trenchant and a Sense more terse?"

"So I, that love the old Augustan Days
Of formal courtesies and formal Phrase;
That like along the finish'd Line to feel
The Ruffle's Flutter and the Flash of Steel;
That like my Couplet as Compact as Clear;
That like my Satire sparkling tho' severe,
Unmix'd with Bathos and unmarr'd by trope,
I fling my Cap for Polish--and for POPE!" [55]

But ground once gained in a literary movement is never wholly lost; and a
reversion to an earlier type is never complete. The classicism of
Matthew