But when all is said in criticism the poetry of the earlier half of the eighteenth century excels all other English poetry in two respects.  Two qualities belong to it by virtue of the metre in which it is most of it written—­rapidity and antithesis.  Its antithesis made it an incomparable vehicle for satire, its rapidity for narrative.  Outside its limits we have hardly any even passable satirical verse; within them there are half-a-dozen works of the highest excellence in this kind.  And if we except Chaucer, there is no one else in the whole range of English poetry who have the narrative gift so completely as the classic poets.  Bentleys will always exist who will assure us with civility that Pope’s Homer, though “very pretty,” bears little relation to the Greek, and that Dryden’s Vergil, though vigorous and virile, is a poor representation of its original.  The truth remains that for a reader who knows no ancient languages either of those translations will probably give a better idea of their originals than any other rendering in English that we possess.  The foundation of their method has been vindicated in the best modern translations from the Greek.

(2)

The term “eighteenth century” in the vocabulary of the literary historian is commonly as vaguely used as the term Elizabethan.  It borrows as much as forty years from the seventeenth and gives away ten to the nineteenth.  The whole of the work of Dryden, whom we must count as the first of the “classic” school, was accomplished before chronologically it had begun.  As a man and as an author he was very intimately related to his changing times; he adapted himself to them with a versatility as remarkable as that of the Vicar of Bray, and, it may be added, as simple-minded.  He mourned in verse the death of Cromwell and the death of his successor, successively defended the theological positions of the Church of England and the Church of Rome, changed his religion and became Poet Laureate to James II., and acquiesced with perfect equanimity in the Revolution which brought in his successor.  This instability of conviction, though it gave a handle to his opponents in controversy, does not appear to have caused any serious scandal or disgust among his contemporaries, and it has certainly had little effect on the judgment of later times.  It has raised none of the reproaches which have been cast at the suspected apostasy of Wordsworth.  Dryden had little interest in political or religious questions; his instinct, one must conceive, was to conform to the prevailing mode and to trouble himself no further about the matter.  Defoe told the truth about him when he wrote that “Dryden might have been told his fate that, having his extraordinary genius slung and pitched upon a swivel, it would certainly turn round as fast as the times, and instruct him how to write elegies to Oliver Cromwell and King Charles the Second with all the coherence imaginable; how to write Religio Laici and the Hind and the