Excerpt from Red Letter Library

We are inclined to think of Temple to-day, if we ever think of him at all, as the lover to whom Dorothy Osborne wrote such charming letters, or as the patron under whose roof the unhappy romance of Swift and Stella had its birth. In the eighteenth century he stood on a literary pedestal. Pope looked to him as the standard of correct English. Johnson cited him as "the first writer who gave cadence to English prose" - a bewildering dictum from the biographer, and imitator, of Sir Thomas Browne. Goldsmith has told us that "his style is the model by which the best prose writers in the reign of Queen Anne formed themselves." But Temple has a claim to remembrance apart from the merely academic interest of his place in the development of English prose or his relation to those affaires de c?ur which are all that present-day readers seem to care for in the memories of the Past.

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