Here, as in the vers de societe of Matthew Prior and Ambrose Philips, the age was illuminating with the graces of poetry something it really understood and delighted in,—­the life of leisure and fashion; and here, accordingly, is its most original and masterly work. The Rape of the Lock is the product of a society which had the good sense and good breeding to try to laugh away incipient quarrels, and which greeted with airy banter the indiscreet act of an enamoured young gallant,—­the kind of act which vulgarity meets with angry lampoons or rude violence.  The poem is an idyll quite as much as a satire.  The follies of fashionable life are treated with nothing severer than light raillery; and its actually distasteful features,—­its lapses into stupidity, its vacuous restlessness, its ennui,—­are cunningly suppressed.  But all that made it seem the height of human felicity is preserved, and enhanced in charm.  “Launched on the bosom of the silver Thames,” one glides to Hampton Court amid youth and gayety and melting music; and for the nonce this realm of “airs, flounces, and furbelows,” of merry chit-chat, and of pleasurable excitement, seems as important as it is to those exquisite creatures of fancy that hover about the heroine, assiduous guardians of her “graceful ease and sweetness void of pride.”  Of that admired world likewise are the lovers that Matthew Prior creates, who woo neither with stormy passion nor with mawkish whining, but in a courtly manner; lovers who deem an epigram a finer tribute than a sigh.  So the tender fondness of a middle-aged man for an infant is elevated above the commonplace by assuming the tone of playful gallantry.

The ignobler aspects of life,—­nutriment of the comic sense,—­were not ignored.  The new school of poets, however deficient in the higher vision, were keen observers of actuality; and among them the satiric spirit, though not militant as in the days of Dryden, was still active.  The value which they attached to social culture is again shown in the persistence of the sentiment that as man grew in civility he became less ridiculous.  The peccadilloes of the upper classes they treated with comparatively gentle humor, and aimed their strokes of satire chiefly against the lower.  Rarely did they idealize humble folk:  Gay’s Sweet William’s Farewett to Black-Eyed Susan is in this respect exceptional.  Their typical attitude is seen in his Shepherd’s Week, with its ludicrous picture of rustic superstition and naive amorousness; and in Allan Ramsay’s Gentle Shepherd, where the pastoral, once remote from life, assumes the manners and dialect of the countryside in order to arouse laughter.