SOURCE: "Alexander Pope and His Kingdom," in The Peace of the Augustans: A Survey of Eighteenth Century Literature as a Place of Rest and Refreshment, G. Bell and Sons, Ltd., 1916, pp. 43-104.

Saintsbury has been called the most influential literary historian and critic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His studies of French literature have established him as a leading authority on such writers as Guy de Maupassant and Honoré de Balzac. In the following excerpt, Saintsbury praises the superior phrasing and wit in Pope's verse, despite the many faults he perceives in the poet's work.

There is a tendency which, being human, is like most human things not unpardonable, but like many human things rather irritating—to try to make out that everything is something else. In illustration of this a rather well-known Frenchman once wrote a book, not without merit, on Le Romantisme des...