not his soul and its ideals; and so, like most realists, they resemble a man lost in the woods, who wanders aimlessly around in circles, seeing the confusing trees but never the whole forest, and who seldom thinks of climbing the nearest high hill to get his bearings.  Later, however, this tendency to realism became more wholesome.  While it neglected romantic poetry, in which youth is eternally interested, it led to a keener study of the practical motives which govern human action.

The second tendency of the age was toward directness and simplicity of expression, and to this excellent tendency our literature is greatly indebted.  In both the Elizabethan and the Puritan ages the general tendency of writers was towards extravagance of thought and language.  Sentences were often involved, and loaded with Latin quotations and classical allusions.  The Restoration writers opposed this vigorously.  From France they brought back the tendency to regard established rules for writing, to emphasize close reasoning rather than romantic fancy, and to use short, clean-cut sentences without an unnecessary word.  We see this French influence in the Royal Society,[173] which had for one of its objects the reform of English prose by getting rid of its “swellings of style,” and which bound all its members to use “a close, naked, natural way of speaking ... as near to mathematical plainness as they can.”  Dryden accepted this excellent rule for his prose, and adopted the heroic couplet, as the next best thing, for the greater part of his poetry.  As he tells us himself: 

    And this unpolished rugged verse I chose
    As fittest for discourse, and nearest prose.

It is largely due to him that writers developed that formalism of style, that precise, almost mathematical elegance, miscalled classicism, which ruled English literature for the next century.[174]

Another thing which the reader will note with interest in Restoration literature is the adoption of the heroic couplet; that is, two iambic pentameter lines which rime together, as the most suitable form of poetry.  Waller,[175] who began to use it in 1623, is generally regarded as the father of the couplet, for he is the first poet to use it consistently in the bulk of his poetry.  Chaucer had used the rimed couplet wonderfully well in his Canterbury Tales, but in Chaucer it is the poetical thought more than the expression which delights us.  With the Restoration writers, form counts for everything.  Waller and Dryden made the couplet the prevailing literary fashion, and in their hands the couplet becomes “closed”; that is, each pair of lines must contain a complete thought, stated as precisely as possible.  Thus Waller writes: 

    The soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed,
    Lets in new light through chinks that time has made.[176]