time seems to me to have arrived for a just consideration of the classical school. We can now contemplate in a calm perspective what was too near for the generation of Keats to observe without the injustice of foreshortening.

I have hitherto spoken only of the formal character of the change which took place in English poetry towards the middle of the seventeenth century, and not of its ethical or essential character; because poetry is an art, and must be regarded primarily from an artistic and not from a philosophical point of view. To fail to acknowledge this to be a postulate, is to fall into an error such as a critic of music would make, although a less serious one, if he gave attention to the emotional sentiments awakened in the hearer by a performance, in priority to the science of the harmonical and melodious sounds of which that performance was the executive production. I must therefore dwell a moment longer on the formal character of the change, and beg my readers to consider the marvel of a nation that was free to use in any combination all the endless varieties of iambic and trochaic movement (for the dactylic and anapæstic1

1 I purposely take no note here of the experiments in tumbling rimeless measure made by certain Elizabethans. These were purely

movement was, curiously enough, entirely unknown. to the Elizabethans) trammelling themselves by a series of pedantic and artificial rules, the function of which was to reduce to a minimum the effects possible to poetic art.

But this change of form was accompanied by an equally extraordinary change of subject and of treatment. Here, again, where all had been liberty, where no bounds of space or time, no regulations of any kind, had curbed the erratic inclinations of the poets, they suddenly and wilfully shut themselves up between walls of rule, and abandoned the wild woods for stately and mechanical circuits. around the box-walks of a labyrinth. For the direct appeal to Nature, and the naming of specific objects, they substituted generalities and secondhand allusions. They no longer mentioned the gilly-flower and the daffodil, but permitted themselves a general reference to Flora's vernal wreath. It was vulgar to say that the moon was rising, the gentlemanly expression was, "Cynthia is lifting her silver horn." Women became "nymphs" in this new phraseology, fruits became "the treasures of

exotic, and, even in the hands of Campion himself, neither natural nor successful. I would at the same time guard myself from being supposed to think, though for convenience sake I speak of iambics and dactyls, that we possess real metrical quantity in English.

Pomona," a horse became "the impatient courser1." The result of coining these conventional counters for groups of ideas was that the personal, the exact, was lost in literature. Apples were the treasures of Pomona, but so were cherries too, and if one wished to allude to peaches, they also were the treasures of Pomona.

This decline from particular to general language was regarded as a great gain in elegance. It was supposed that to use one of these genteel tokens. which passed for coin of poetic language brought the speaker closer to the grace of Latinity. It was thought that the old direct manner of speaking was crude and futile; that a romantic poet who wished to allude to caterpillars could do so without any exercise of his ingenuity by simply introducing the word "caterpillars," whereas the classical poet had to prove that he was a scholar and a gentleman by inventing some circumlocution such as "the crawling scourge that smites the leafy plain."

1 It may be noticed that it is in the Cyder of John Philips (written in 1699) that this pompous and allusive language is first used without stint or shame. Philips united two strains of influence, that of Waller and that of Paradise Lost, and introduced into Augustan poetry the sub-Miltonic phraseology which took so fast a hold of the eighteenth century. He had not learned, however, to avoid the exact expression, and names his peaches and walnuts like a marketgardener.

Shaftesbury introduced this exaggerated elegance of diction into the field of prose, and his success increased the foppishness of the poets. It made their vices inveterate, and in course of time the desire politely to avoid saying what was meant reached a height that was quite ridiculous. In the generation that succeeded Pope really clever writers spoke of a "gelid cistern" when they meant a cold bath, and "the loud hunter-crew" when they meant a pack of fox-hounds, and then at last the public began to crave a more direct form of utterance.

To detect and to ridicule,-sometimes most unfairly, these peculiarities of the classical school, has, however, become a commonplace in the present generation. We know perfectly well, there is not a text-book that fails to instruct us, that the guarded generalities of eighteenth century poetry were bald and insipid. But we must be careful to discriminate. This indirectness, these strange, unnatural forms of circumlocution, were not in themselves characteristic of the classical school alone; all poetry, the most romantic poetry that ever was written, has hated to be forced to call a spade a spade. Shakespeare is quite as far removed at times from straightforward reference to his subject as Armstrong or Darwin, but the difference lies in the presence or absence of liberty of action.

Shakespeare says "sore labour's bath," but he likes. also to say "sleep," simply, if he chooses; and he likes to feel free to say "balm of hurt minds as well. The classical poet, on the other hand, must not only avoid the direct word, he must select one circumlocution and keep to it. His principle is restriction, ingenuity, a strait-laced elegance; the romantic poet's principle is liberty even though it lead to licence.

The secret of the enigma that a whole generation meekly and even eagerly consented to clip its own wings and subside into servitude, is primarily to be found in the word we have just used, licence. The people of the seventeenth century were weary of liberty, weary of the unmitigated rage of the dramatists, cloyed with the roses and the spices and the kisses of the lyrists, tired of being carried over the universe and up and down the avenues of history at the freak of every irresponsible rhymester. Literature had been set open to all the breezes of heaven by the blustering and glittering Elizabethans, and in the hands of their less gifted successors it was fast declining into a mere cave of the Winds. The last efflorescence of the spirit of humanism had taken that strange form which it found in the hands of Lyly, Marini, and Gongora, and the brief vogue of this wonderful