literary works by
the rank of the author:

What woful stuff this madrigal would be
In some starved hackney sonneteer, or me!
But let a lord once own the happy lines,
How the wit brightens! how the style refines!
Before his sacred name flies ev'ry fault,
And each exalted stanza teems with thought.[25]

The "sacred name" of Lansdowne imparted genius to verse which would have
been "woful stuff" in Dennis or Welsted. When Pope, in later years,
called him "Granville the polite" he characterised him correctly; when,
in Windsor Forest, he exalted him to the rank of a transcendent poet, he
said what he could not believe. He outraged candour in prose as well as
in verse. He wrote a sycophantic letter to Lord Lansdowne, boasting his
freedom from the insincerity of his "fellow scribblers" who composed
panegyrics "at random, and persuaded the next vain creature they could
find that it was his own likeness." Pope vowed he had erred in the
opposite direction, and had forborne to praise Lord Lansdowne up to the
height of his deserts out of deference to his modesty. "Whereas others
are offended if they have not more than justice done them, you would be
displeased if you had so much. Therefore I may safely do you as much
injury in my word as you do yourself in your own thoughts. I am so vain
as to think I have shown you a favour in sparing your modesty, and you
cannot but make me some return for prejudicing the truth to gratify
you."[26] Here was triple incense,--the original adulation, the
protestation that it was inadequate, and the pretence that Lord
Lansdowne, a man noted for vanity, was too modest to endure merited
praise. Pope spoke more truth than he intended when he said that he had
"prejudiced truth to gratify him."

"Who now reads Cowley?" asked Pope in 1737.[27] The panegyric in Windsor
Forest was an anachronism, and he might have asked the same question in
1713. Never was an equal reputation more ephemeral. While Cowley lived,
and for a few years afterwards, the most cultivated minds in the kingdom
called him the "great Cowley," the "incomparable Cowley," the "divine
Cowley." When he died, Denham said that Death had

Plucked the fairest, sweetest flow'r
That in the Muses' garden grew.

The herd of readers vied with men of letters in applauding him, as was
shown by the sale of his works, and is implied in the couplet of Oldham:

One likes my verses, and commends each line,
And