The three essays composing this small book were written several years
ago for publication in the "Times Literary Supplement," to the editor of
which I owe the encouragement to write them, and now the permission to
reprint them. Inadequate as periodical criticism, they need still more
justification in a book. Some apology, therefore, is required.
My intention had been to write a series of papers on the poetry of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: beginning with Chapman and Donne,
and ending with Johnson. This forbidden fruit of impossible leisure
might have filled two volumes. At best, it would not have pretended to
completeness; the subjects would have been restricted by my own
ignorance and caprice, but the series would have included Aurelian
Townshend and Bishop King, and the authors of "Cooper's Hill" and "The
Vanity of Human Wishes," as well as Swift and Pope. That which
dissipation interrupts, the infirmities of age come to terminate. One
learns to conduct one's life with greater economy: I have abandoned this
design in the pursuit of other policies. I have long felt that the
poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, even much of that of
inferior inspiration, possesses an elegance and a dignity absent from
the popular and pretentious verse of the Romantic Poets and their
successors. To have urged this claim persuasively would have led me
indirectly into considerations of politics, education, and theology
which I no longer care to approach in this way. I hope that these three
papers may in spite of and partly because of their defects preserve in
cryptogram certain notions which, if expressed directly, would be
destined to immediate obloquy, followed by perpetual oblivion.