ABSTRACT
Spence (1699-1768), friend of Pope, wrote in French for a pupil at some time in the early 1730S a historical account of English poetry. His remarks on the seventeenth-century poets clearly demonstrate Augustan standards of judgment. Donne stands as a corrupter of taste and an inept versifier. Spence singles out Suckling as by far the best poet of his age-'The only genius of them all; who by his purity didn't let himself be infected by the general contagion'; and he also praises Waller as 'The sweetest of our lyric poets'. These arc the poets who anticipate 'our Augustan Age' which began with the Restoration of Charles II. Taking Milton for an Augustan in that sense Spence hails him as 'the Prince of all us poets'. But he reprehends Cowley for being always 'too full of an affectation of brilliance'. (Quelques Remarqtles Hist: sur les Poets Anglois, ?1732-3. Given in]. M. Oxborn, 'The First History of English Poetry', in Pope and his Contemporaries, ed. J. L. Clifford and 1. A. Landa, Oxford, 1949, p. 247.) There was no copy of Donne's poems in Spence's library when it was sold the year after his death, though this magnificent collection was rich in the works of the English poets from Wyatt and Surrey on and there were many sets of some of the major ones (Sale Catalogues ~f Libraries oj Eminent Perso/ls, v, ed. S. Parks, 1972, pp. 87-256).
