"In this merciless attack on eighteenth-century society, Alexander Pope expertly satirses the blind reliance on false learning that was then so prevalent. By taking one ambitious father and his determination to do everything in his power to produce a child of genius, Pope exposes the true folly of the men of his age and their absurd veneration of the ancients. And as this hallowed child grows into a man, it becomes clear that instead of being the scholar his father so desired, he is simply the inevitable offspring of a laughable generation of pseudo-intellecturals and literati"--Cover.