style (which used to be thought
almost perfect) unworthy of this age of progress, then let us have
his moral without his style, his matter without his form; or--that we
may be sure of never falling for a moment into his besetting sins of
terseness, grace, and completeness--without any form at all. If
poetry, in order to be worthy of the nineteenth century, ought to be
as unlike as possible to Homer or Sophocles, Virgil or Horace,
Shakespeare or Spenser, Dante or Tasso, let those too-idolised names
be erased henceforth from the calendar; let the "Ars Poetica" be
consigned to flames, and Martinus Scriblerus's "Art of Sinking"
placed forthwith on the list of the Committee of Council for
Education, that not a working man in England may he ignorant that,
whatsoever superstitions about art may have haunted the benighted
heathens who built the Parthenon, nous avons change tout cela. In
one word, if it be best and most fitting to write poetry in the style
in which almost every one has been trying to write it since Pope and
plain sense went out, and Shelley and the seventh heaven came in, let
it be so written; and let him who most perfectly so "sets the age to
music," he presented by the assembled guild of critics, not with the
obsolete and too classic laurel, but with an electro-plated brass
medal, bearing the due inscription, "Ars est nescire artem." And
when, in twelve months' time, he finds himself forgotten, perhaps
decried, for the sake of the next aspirant, let him reconsider
himself, try whether, after all, the common sense of the many will
not prove a juster and a firmer standing-ground than the
sentimentality and bad taste of the few, and read Alexander Pope.

In Pope's writings, whatsoever he may not find, he will find the very
excellences after which our young poets strive in vain, produced by
their seeming opposites, which are now despised and discarded;
naturalness produced by studious art; sublimity by strict self-
restraint; depth by clear simplicity; pathos by easy grace; and a
morality infinitely more merciful, as well as more righteous, than
the one now in vogue among the poetasters, by honest faith in God.
If he be shocked by certain peculiarities of diction, and by the
fondness for perpetual antitheses, let him remember, that what seems
strange to our day was natural and habitual in Pope's; and that, in
the eyes of our grandchildren, Keats's and Shelley's peculiarities
will seem as monstrous as Pope's or