ABSTRACT
The complacency with which the English Augustans regarded their own achievements in poetry and the drama has not been shared by succeeding critics, “Dryden and Pope are not classics of our poetry, they are classics of our prose” (Matthew Arnold); “In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered” (T. S. Eliot). The disagreement with Johnson’s view of Pope’s metrics, for example—”to attempt any further improvement of versification will be dangerous. Art and diligence have now done their best, and what shall be added will be the effort of tedious toil and needless curiosity”—is almost total. But Augustan literature makes up in range and coherence what it lacks in glamour. In their several ways at least five of Dry-den’s non-literary contemporaries or near-contemporaries —Clarendon, Hobbes, Bunyan, Halifax, and Locke—are almost as good writers as he is. And the eighteenth century, if without supreme poets or dramatists, is after all that of our greatest philosopher (Hume), our greatest historian (Gibbon), our greatest political thinker (Burke), and our greatest biographer (Boswell). It was to an exceptional degree a common culture—one based on common assumptions, many of which were literary. And one of them was that the way to serve one’s society, whatever one’s speciality might be, was to write good English.
