Donne, especially to the concettist in him, must be granted the credit — if credit it be — of delaying for more than a generation the natural revulsion of English literature back to classicism and restraint. This is not the place in which to discuss the interesting relations of Jonson and Donne. Except for a certain rhetorical and dialectical address, which might be referred to a study of the ancients, the poetry of Donne is marked by its disregard of conventions, by its extraordinary originality of thought and expression, by that rare quality of poetic insight that justifies Jonson's enthusiastic claim that " John Donne [was] the first poet in the world in some things." Not less significant on the other hand are Jonson's contrasted remarks to Drummond on the same topic: "That Donne's 'Anniversary' [in which true womanhood is idealized if not deified] was profane and full of blasphemies," and " that Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging." The classicist has always regarded the romanticist thus, nor have the retorts been more courteous, as witness the well known lines of Keats' "Sleep and Poetry " in which the age of classicism is summarily dismissed as "a schism nurtured by foppery and barbarism."

3

Thus we find Spenser and Jonson standing as exponents respectively of the expansive or romantic movement and the repressive or classical spirit. In a different line of distinction Donne is equally in contrast with Spenser, as the intensive, or subjective artist. Both of these latter are romanticists in that each seeks to pro3 Conversations, Shakespeare Society, 1842, 8 and 3.

duce the effect demanded of art by means of an appeal to the sense of novelty; but Spenser's romanticism is that of selection, which chooses from the outer world the fitting and the pleasing, and constructs it into a permanent artistic joy. Donne's is the romanticism of insight, which, looking inward, descries the subtle relations of things and transmutes them into poetry with a sudden and unexpected flood of light. Between Jonson and Donne there is the kinship of intellectuality; between Spenser and Donne the kinship of romanticism; between Spenser and Jonson the kinship of the poet's joy in beauty. Spenser is the most objective and therefore allegorical and mystical; Donne is the most subjective and the most spiritual; Jonson, the most artistic and therefore the most logical.

But not only did Jonson dominate his age and stand for the classical ideal in the midst of current Spenserianism, concettist and other popular modes, it was this position of Jonson, defended as it was in theory as well as exemplified in his work, that directed the course which English literature was to take for a century and a half after his death. There are few subjects in the history of literature attended with greater difficulty than the attempt to explain how the lapse of a century in time should have transformed the literature of England from the traits which characterized it in the reign of Queen Elizabeth to those which came to prevail under the rule of Queen Anne. The salient characteristics of the two ages are much too well known to call for repetition here. Few readers, moreover, are unfamiliar with the more usual theories on this sub

ject: how one critic believes that Edmund Waller invented the new poetry by a spontaneous exercise of his own cleverness; how another demands that this responsibility be fixed upon George Sandys. How some think that "classicism" was an importation from France, which came into England in the luggage of the fascinating Frenchwoman, who afterwards became the Duchess of Portsmouth; and how still others suppose that the whole thing was really in the air, to be caught by infection by anyone who did not draw apart and live out of the literary miasma as did Milton. It may not be unnecessary to add that some of these theorists place the beginning and end of "classicism" in the definite and peculiar construction of a certain species of English decasyllabic verse; and that even when they escape this, the "heroic" or "Popean couplet " has always usurped an undue share of consideration.

The conservative reaction which triumphed with the Restoration has been so "hardly entreated" and so bitterly scorned that there is much temptation to attempt a justification. Imaginative literature did lose in the change, and enormously; but if the imagination, and with it the power that produces poetry, became for a time all but extinct, the understanding, or power which arranges, correlates, expounds and explains, went through a course of development which has brought with it in the end nothing but gain to the literature considered as a whole.

* Gosse, Eighteenth Century Literature, p. 2. Henry Wood, "Beginnings of the Classical' Heroic Couplet in England." American Journal of Philology, xi, p. 73.

If the reader will consider the three great names, Ben Jonson, finishing his work about 1635, Dryden, at the height of his fame fifty years later, and Pope, with nearly ten years of literary activity before him a century after Jonson's death, he will notice certain marked differences in a general resemblance in the range, subject-matter and diction of the works of these three. The plays of Jonson, despite the restrictive character of his genius, exemplify nearly the whole spacious field of Elizabethan drama, with two added successes, the invention of the comedy of humors and the development of the masque, which are Jonson's own. Jonson is the first poet who gave to occasional verse that variety of subject, that power and finish, which made it, for nearly two centuries, the most important form of poetical expression. The works of Jonson are pervaded with satire, criticism and translation, though all appear less in set form than as applied to original work. Finally Jonson's lyrics maintain the diversity, beauty and originality which distinguishes this species of poetry in his favored

age.

If we turn now to Dryden, we find still a wide range in subject, although limitations are discoverable in the character of his dramas and of his lyrics. If we except his operas and those pseudo-dramatic aberrations in which he adapted the work of Shakespeare and Milton, Dryden writes only two kinds of plays, the heroic drama and the comedy of manners; whilst his lyrics, excepting the two odes for Saint Cecelia's Day and some perfunctory religious poems, are wholly amatory

in the narrow and vitiated sense in which that term was employed in the time of Charles II. The strongest element of Dryden's work is occasional verse; and he makes a new departure, showing the tendency of the time, in the development of what may be called occasional prose: the preface and dedicatory epistle. Satire takes form in the translation of Juvenal and in the author's own brilliant original satires, translation becomes Dryden's most lucrative literary employment, and criticism is the very element in which he lives. Lastly, we turn to Pope. Here are no plays and very few lyrics, scarcely one which is not an applied poem. Occasional verse, satire, criticism, and translation have usurped the whole field. There was no need that Pope should write his criticism in prose, as did Dryden; for verse had become in his hands essentially the medium for the expression of that species of thought which we now habitually associate with the prose form. Indeed the verse of Pope was more happily fitted for the expression of the thought of Pope, than any prose that could possibly have been devised; for Pope's demand was for a medium in which rhetorical brilliancy and telling antithesis was a treasure to be coveted above precision of thought.

It has often been affirmed that England's is the greater poetry, while France possesses the superior prose; and in the confusion or distinction of the two species of literature this difference has been explained. Poetry must be governed by the imagination, it must not only see and imitate, it must transform what it sees, converting the actual into the terms of the ideal: