by which a whole nation sees its religious doctrine so vividly and really, as to throw it into a narrative form, these are seen in Bunyan in their full strength, and it is to these that his narrative owes its beauty, and his prose its Saxon purity.,

VII. The Restoration.

FROM 1660 TO 1688.

1. This new age came when the return of the Stuarts cast to the winds the gravity which had given to the literature and society of England a dignified and even a sombre cast for half a century. Latterly there had doubtless been something of hypocrisy in this gravity. At all events it was so considered now. All that was most opposed to it, full and unbridled revelry, came to take its place with a rush. For a moment something of the old quaint conceits of the "metaphysical" poetry which has been mentioned before (Part VI. § 3) was revived. Some of these poets still survived; and as Charles II. submitted for a few years to the guidance of the most respectable of his party, Lord Clarendon, so society and the court submitted for a short time to the courtly poetry of Cowley. But that Cowley. soon gave place to what was more after the taste of the age. The poetry of the day became licentious; but the drama which now, after lying for a dozen years under the ban of Puritanism, began to revive, was more licentious still. The plots of the dramas were borrowed from those of France and Spain, and neither

1618-1667.

1631-1700.

were good schools for morality. In one thing only the authors of the day excelled, and that was in their wit; but even for it they had recourse to very questionable devices. The drama was a picture of the court life of the day, and the court life of the day was worse than it has ever been before or since in England.

2. One name soon stood high above any other of his John Dryden. time, that of John Dryden. He began with imitating the frigid conceits of the school of Donne and Cowley, and even exaggerated them. He wrote poems such as occasion called for on the death of Oliver Cromwell, and then on various prominent events in the career of the Stuarts. He turned to the stage, and wrote drama after drama, in the rhymed verse which was then in vogue, after the fashion set by the French stage. He turned Paradise Lost' into the form of such a rhymed drama, and wrote preface after preface to show that the taste of the age was the true one, and that the older drama of England had merely represented the ruder life and conversation of a ruder age. Only after he had wasted many years in these pursuits did he turn to the field where his genius had full play—that of poetical satire. Once that field was open to him his powers began to show themselves in their true light. First there came the great political satire of Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Duke of Monmouth and his friends were held up to hatred or to ridicule. Then came a series of satires on the literary cliques of the day, of even greater force. It was something new to English literature. Satire was of late birth in our

literature, and had begun hardly a century before; but now it had sprung up to its full height, with an edge and a keenness that had never been known in any literature. The subject-a passing episode in history which had little interest for later times, or a dispute between obscure literary factions-might have been thought unlikely to attract readers after his own day; but Dryden has thrown into it so much insight into character, such pitiless dissection of human vice or weakness, such dramatic force, that it lives for all time.

3. There was another quality in Dryden's poetry that not only added to its force, but had great influence on later literature; it was his language. In that he produced almost a revolution. In his hands the English language acquired new terseness, vigour, and smoothness. When at his best he never lets a line pass that is not bold, forcible, and telling. His epithets are so pithy that each seems to add some fresh, vigorous idea to the line. His language is best described by a metaphor, if we call it nervous, like the muscles of a trained athlete in its force and tension.

4. With Dryden begins what is often called the classical age of our literature. By this we mean the age when literature was tested by severe laws of taste, and was to follow the fixed rules of the schools. Nothing that did not conform to these fixed rules would have been held of much value; and so universally were they accepted by the greatest of the day,

that nothing good or valuable was for a time produced that did not conform to them. But, unfortunately, these rules were applied not only to the productions of that day, but to the works of earlier writers, to whom they were utterly inapplicable; and so, even Shakespeare, because he did not conform to the set rules of the drama as then understood, was held to be a rough and unpolished writer. What we admire most in him was often held to be irregular and full of improprieties. His verse was said to be careless; his dramatic situations to be unnatural. And yet these same rules did not prevent many glaring sins against taste, which we wonder that any age could have been guilty of.

VIII. The Revolution.

FROM 1688 TO 1745.

1. Better principles of morality, and a greater hatred for licentious wit, came in with the Revolution. Men tired of the scandals which a loose-living court had inflicted upon the nation. They did not go back to Puritanism, but they did return to a more thoughtful cast of mind. The study of politics and history, of theology and philosophy, began to interest them. In this way taste was to some extent improved; and more solid work was done.

2. But the same rules of literary criticism still prevailed; indeed their rigidity was even increased. French literature had for seventy years been cultivated

under the auspices of what was called the French Academy. This was a body of men selected for their high literary standing to be the judges of what was correct in taste. It had led men to accept the rules which they laid down and to bow to their judgment; to believe nothing could be correct, but what was confirmed by their approval. Something like this now came into English literature. French critical works were studied, and their canons or laws were applied to the works of English authors.

Pope.

3. This had the good effect of making the English style still more polished than Dryden had left it. His great successor was Pope, whose language is the most Alexander polished, and whose thought is the most lucid of any in 1688-1744. English poetry. No verse has ever been more perfect in its structure than that of Pope; no one has been more skilful in expressing the most delicate shades of meaning than he. He is not a deep thinker, nor is he ever carried away by a great enthusiasm, as Dryden was, and as many poets of another kind are; but he had a power over language, which nothing but the most prodigious genius could possess. In him the Classic Age reached its greatest triumph. Like Dryden, he wrote satire, but his satire, though less impetuous, was more incisive and delicate. He wrote poetical essays on criticism, and on Man and his place in Creation; pastorals after the fashion of Virgil; elegiacs after Horace; mock epic poems giving us a picture of his time —and in all, the same clear, well-defined, perspicuous thought is clothed in the same facile, polished verse.