But he will find views current in his time or borrowed from other authors put with perfect felicity and wit, and he will recognize the justice of Addison's comment that Pope's wit and fine writing consist "not so much in advancing things that are new, as in giving things that are known an agreeable turn." And he will not fall into the error of dubbing the author a minor poet because he is neither subtle nor imaginative nor profound.

A great poet would not have written like Pope--one must grant it; but a minor poet could not.
It is characteristic of Pope's type of mind and kind of art that there is no development visible in his work.

Other poets, Shakespeare, for instance, and Keats, have written work of the highest quality when they were young, but they have had crudenesses to shed--things to get rid of as their strength and perceptions grew.

But Pope, like Minerva, was full grown and full armed from the beginning.

If we did not know that his _Essay on Criticism_ was his first poem it would be impossible to place it in the canon of his work; it might come in anywhere and so might everything else that he wrote.