Note 11 — THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

In place of the remainder of the sentence he had written in the manuscript, "is but to live twenty years longer than Quarles, or Withers, or Dennis." The doctrine of Pope was unworthy the countryman of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton. The first three had not been "thrown aside at the end of one age," and no one who was capable of comprehending the last could seriously believe that his reputation would be ephemeral. The hypothesis, that the writers in a dead tongue can alone secure a worthy audience, is altogether chimerical. The literature of living languages has the ascendancy, and Shakespeare is more read, and better appreciated, than Æschylus and Sophocles.