Note 77 — SONNET XXI.
Reading edition
l. 7 Shaftsbury plain’d—Of the Poets, who were contemporary with Lord Shaftsbury, Dryden, Cowley, Pope, Prior, Congreve, Gay, Addison, &c., in the period which this age styles Augustan, his lordship speaks with sovereign scorn. In his Characteristics he, without making any exception, labours to prove, that the compositions of Dryden are uniformly contemptible. See his advice to an author in the second volume of the Characteristics, and also his miscellaneous reflections, in the third volume; “If,” says he to the authors, “your Poets are still to be Mr Bayeses, and your prose writers Sir Rogers, without offering at a better manner, must it follow that the manner is good, and the wit genuine?”
Thus it is that the jealousy people of literary fame often feel of each other, produces the foolish and impolitic desire of decrying the general pretensions of the Age to Genius.—Their narrow selfishness leads them to betray the common cause which is their true interest to support. They persuade the credulous many, with whom envy of superior talents increases their willingne to despise, that imagination is become enervated; designing, however, to have it understood, that in their individual instance exists the sole exception,
“For they would each bestride the narrow world “Like a Colossus.”