ABSTRACT
Pore had surrendered poetry to reason and through-out the eighteenth century Alexander Pope remained popular. In the libraries of the great houses in the eighteenth century Mr. Pope's works were preserved and read, but in the very grounds of those houses there could often be found the dismembered relics of medievalism. To that other world of the imagination the eighteenth century found easy access through the remains of the middle ages which still lay so close to the modern world. Scott is the eighteenth-century romantic, with genius added, knowing that 'the literary character with all its duties was perfectly reconcilable with the habits of a man of business and man of the world'. The eighteenth century developed a poetry distinct from that of Pope and from the gothic world of William Beckford and Horace Walpole.
