Given so many reservations regarding the classical past, most eighteenth-century writers scarcely quivered beneath the shade of Homer's or Virgil's amply blooming and very different trees. Instead, they normally made sane assessments of their own, their contemporaries', and their varied predecessors' moral and literary abilities – often distinguishing between those two traits. Alexander Pope well illustrates the ability to compartmentalize, so that the horror stories chronicled in the previous chapters could be suspended during the acts of reading and of learning to write.

Pope, for example, was appalled by classical Augustan politics and enthralled by classical Augustan art. His Temple of Fame (1715) includes Virgil, whose labored, finished, patient “unweary'd Art” has deservedly earned him “A Golden Column … / On which a Shrine of purest Gold was rear'd.” Virgil himself, Pope later tells Joseph Spence, nonetheless was a “slavish … writer” whose Aeneid lacked a single honest line. The Georgics begin with “the grossest flattery to Augustus that could be invented. The turn of mind in it [is] as mean as the poetry in it is noble.” Those distinctions, indeed, may have helped modern authors soberly to assess the past and their own relation to it.

Those whose assessments were wrong – like Charles Churchill in his angry dismissal of Homer – often were either conventionally idiosyncratic or vainly and commercially self-interested. Even for such authors, however, the past was neither bunk, nor unapproachable, nor radically discontinuous with the present, since it needed to be known in order to be scolded.