[Alexander Pope by Leslie Stephen]@TWC D-Link book
Alexander Pope

CHAPTER II
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The classicism of the time was the natural corollary; for the classical models were the historical symbols of the movement which Pope represented.

He states his view very tersely in the essay.

Classical culture had been overwhelmed by the barbarians, and the monks "finished what the Goths began." Letters revived when the study of classical models again gave an impulse and supplied a guidance.
At length Erasmus, that great injured name, The glory of the priesthood and their shame, Stemm'd the wild torrent of a barbarous age, And drove these holy Vandals off the stage.
The classicalism of Pope's time was no doubt very different from that of the period of Erasmus; but in his view it differed only because the contemporaries of Dryden had more thoroughly dispersed the mists of the barbarism which still obscured the Shakspearean age, and from which even Milton or Cowley had not completely escaped.

Dryden and Boileau and the French critics, with their interpreters Roscommon, Sheffield, and Walsh, who found rules in Aristotle, and drew their precedents from Homer, were at last stating the pure canons of unadulterated sense.

To this school, wit and sense, and nature, and the classics, all meant pretty much the same.


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