Poets, according to the ordinary rule, should begin by exuberant fancy, and learn to prune and refine as the reasoning faculties develop.

But Pope was from the first a conscious and deliberate artist.

He had read the fashionable critics of his time, and had accepted their canons as an embodiment of irrefragable reason.

His head was full of maxims, some of which strike us as palpable truisms, and others as typical specimens of wooden pedantry.

Dryden had set the example of looking upon the French critics as authoritative lawgivers in poetry.