ABSTRACT
This is an age of criticism, so much an age of criticism that in certain quarters- particularly in the U.S.A.- literature is regarded as a more primitive form which justifies its existence only by providing raw material for processing. Students of literature nowadays prefer reading criticism, for the critic displays in full-flowering clarity what was perhaps buried or obscure in the rich confusion of the original work. The difficult New Criticism seems to have been a proper and useful response to the challenge of the difficult, new literature of the twentieth century. On Augustan work, modern critics have operated not like eighteenth-century critics but like eighteenth-century surgeons: painfully, with the wrong tools. As a conversationalist-particularly in the Restoration period- the educated Augustan aimed at elegance and wit, and lay awake at night preparing spontaneous epigrams for the morrow.
