d standard
works, and it was not the number of his imitators who finally hurt
his fame, but the despair of imitation, and the _ease_ of _not_
imitating him sufficiently. This, and the same reason which induced
the Athenian burgher to vote for the banishment of Aristides,
'because he was tired of always hearing him called _the Just_,'
have produced the temporary exile of Pope from the State of
Literature. But the term of his ostracism will expire, and the
sooner the better; not for him, but for those who banished him, and
for the coming generation, who

"Will blush to find their fathers were his foes."

[Footnote 3: As far as regards the poets of ancient times, this
assertion is, perhaps, right; though, if there be any truth in what
AElian and Seneca have left on record, of the obscurity, during their
lifetime, of such men as Socrates and Epicurus, it would seem to prove
that, among the ancients, contemporary fame was a far more rare reward
of literary or philosophical eminence than among us moderns. When the
"Clouds" of Aristophanes was exhibited before the assembled deputies of
the towns of Attica, these personages, as AElian tells us, were
unanimously of opinion, that the character of an unknown person, called
Socrates, was uninteresting upon the stage; and Seneca has given the
substance of an authentic letter of Epicurus, in which that philosopher
declares that nothing hurt him so much, in the midst of all his
happiness, as to think that Greece,--"illa nobilis Graecia,"--so far
from knowing him, had scarcely even heard of his existence.--Epist. 79.]

[Footnote 4: I certainly ventured to differ from the judgment of my
noble friend, no less in his attempts to depreciate that peculiar walk
of the art in which he himself so grandly trod, than in the
inconsistency of which I thought him guilty, in condemning all those who
stood up for particular "schools" of poetry, and yet, at the same time,
maintaining so exclusive a theory of the art himself. How little,
however, he attended to either the grounds or degrees of my dissent from
him, will appear by the following wholesale report of my opinion, in his
"Detached Thoughts:"

"One of my notions different from those of my contemporaries, is, that
the present is not a high age of English poetry. There are _more_ poets
(soi-disant) than ever there were, and proportionally _less_ poetry.

"This _thesis_ I have maintained f