This period of Dryden and Pope on which we are now entering sometimes styled itself the Augustan Age of English poetry.  It grounded its claim to classicism on a fancied resemblance to the Roman poets of the golden age of Latin poetry, the reign of the Emperor Augustus.  Its authors saw themselves each as a second Vergil, a second Ovid, most of all a second Horace, and they believed that their relation to the big world, their assured position in society, heightened the resemblances.  They endeavoured to form their poetry on the lines laid down in the critical writing of the original Augustan age as elaborated and interpreted in Renaissance criticism.  It was tacitly assumed—­some of them openly asserted it—­that the kinds, modes of treatment and all the minor details of literature, figures of speech, use of epithets and the rest, had been settled by the ancients once and for all.  What the Greeks began the critics and authors of the time of Augustus had settled in its completed form, and the scholars of the Renaissance had only interpreted their findings for modern use.  There was the tragedy, which had certain proper parts and a certain fixed order of treatment laid down for it; there was the heroic poem, which had a story or “fable,” which must be treated in a certain fixed manner, and so on.  The authors of the “Classic” period so christened themselves because they observed these rules.  And they fancied that they had the temper of the Augustan time—­the temper displayed in the works of Horace more than in those of any one else—­its urbanity, its love of good sense and moderation, its instinctive distrust of emotion, and its invincible good breeding.  If you had asked them to state as simply and broadly as possible their purpose they would have said it was to follow nature, and if you had enquired what they meant by nature it would turn out that they thought of it mainly as the opposite of art and the negation of what was fantastic, tortured, or far sought in thinking or writing.  The later “Romantic” Revival, when it called itself a return to nature, was only claiming the intention which the classical school itself had proclaimed as its main endeavour.  The explanation of that paradox we shall see presently; in the meantime it is worth looking at some of the characteristics of classicism as they appear in the work of the “Classic” authors.

In the first place the “Classic” writers aimed at simplicity of style, at a normal standard of writing.  They were intolerant of individual eccentricities; they endeavoured, and with success, to infuse into English letters something of the academic spirit that was already controlling their fellow-craftsmen in France.  For this end amongst others they and the men of science founded the Royal Society, an academic committee which has been restricted since to the physical and natural sciences and been supplemented by similar bodies representing literature and learning only in our own day.  Clearness, plainness, conversational