Fools Rush in ...

... where angels fear to tread.

A phrase attributed to the 18th century poet Alexander Pope.

Now not much read - except by academics .

As a young boy Pope was expelled from school for writing a satire about one of his teachers, and he continued to lose friends and create enemies through not being afraid to speak out and criticise those with whom he disagreed. (For a time, while fearing attacks from especially vicious rivals, Pope rarely left his house without being armed with pistols and his dog, a Great Dane named Bounce.)

Few people read Pope for fun now because his witty verses are perceived as dry and emotionless, and even in the late nineteenth century, his fellow master of the one-liner, Oscar Wilde, was quipping, ‘There are two ways of disliking poetry. One way is to dislike it, and the other is to read Pope.’