Yet they have hopelessly perished, whilst Pope's work remains classical.

Of all the crowd of eighteenth-century writers in Pope's manner, only two made an approach to him worth notice.

Johnson's _Vanity of Human Wishes_ surpasses Pope in general sense of power, and Goldsmith's two poems in the same style have phrases of a higher order than Pope's.

But even these poems have not made so deep a mark.

In the last generation, Gifford's _Baviad and Maeviad_, and Byron's _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_, were clever reproductions of the manner; but Gifford is already unreadable, and Byron is pale beside his original; and, therefore, making full allowance for Pope's monotony, and the tiresome prominence of certain mechanical effects, we must, I think, admit that he has after all succeeded in doing with unsurpassable excellence what innumerable rivals have failed to do as well.