Thus he was a politician among the statesmen
Bolingbroke, Buckingham, Oxford, Sunderland, Halifax, Harley, and
Marlborough. His _Essay on Criticism_ presents to us the artificial taste
and technical rules which were established as a standard in literature.
His _Essay on Man_, his _Moral Epistles_, and his _Universal Prayer_ are
an index to the semi-Christian, semi-Grecian ethics of an age too selfish
to be orthodox, and too progressive to be intolerant. His _Rape of the
Lock_ is a striking picture of social life, sketched by the hand of a
gentle satire. His translations of Homer, and their great success, are
significant of a more extended taste for scholarship; not attended,
however, with many incentives to originality of production. The nobles
were still the patrons of literature, and they fancied old things which
were grand, in new and gaudy English dresses. The age was also marked by
rapid and uniform progress in the English language. The sonorous, but
cumbrous English of Milton had been greatly improved by Dryden; and we
have seen, also, that the terse and somewhat crude diction of Dryden's
earlier works had been polished and rendered more harmonious in his later
poems.
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