The letters of the cold-hearted
Chesterfield to his son were accepted as a manual of conduct, and La
Rochefoucauld's cynical maxims were quoted as authority on life and
human nature. Said Swift:
As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew
From nature, I believe them true.
They argue no corrupted mind
In him; the fault is in mankind.
The succession which Dryden had willed to Congreve was taken up by
Alexander Pope. He was a man quite unlike Dryden--sickly, deformed,
morbidly precocious, and spiteful; nevertheless he joined on to and
continued Dryden. He was more careful in his literary workmanship than
his great forerunner, and in his _Moral Essays_ and _Satires_ he brought
the Horatian epistle in verse, the formal satire and that species of
didactic poem of which Boileau had given the first example, to an
exquisite perfection of finish and verbal art. Dryden had translated
Vergil, and so Pope translated Homer. The throne of the dunces, which
Dryden had conferred upon Shadwell, Pope, in his _Dunciad_, passed on to
two of his own literary foes, Theobald and Colley Cibber. There is a
great waste of strength in this elaborate squib, and most of the petty
writers, whose names it has preserved, as has been said, like flies in
amber, are now quite unknown.
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