masques, Lord Mayors’ shows, and public pageants of all kinds, mythology ran mad.  “Every procession was a pantheon.”  But the poets were not careful to keep the two worlds of pagan antiquity and mediaeval Christianity distinct.  The art of the renaissance was the flower of a double root, and the artists used their complex stuff naively.  The “Faerie Queene” is the typical work of the English renaissance; there hamadryads, satyrs, and river gods mingle unblushingly with knights, dragons, sorcerers, hermits, and personified vices and virtues.  The “machinery” of Homer and Vergil—­the “machinery” of the “Seven Champions of Christendom” and the “Roman de la Rose”!  This was not shocking to Spenser’s contemporaries, but it seemed quite shocking to classical critics a century later.  Even Milton, the greatest scholar among English poets, but whose imagination was a strong agent, holding strange elements in solution, incurred their censure for bringing Saint Peter and the sea-nymphs into dangerous juxtaposition in “Lycidas.”

But by the middle of the seventeenth century the renaissance schools of poetry had become effete in all European countries.  They had run into extravagances of style, into a vicious manner known in Spain as Gongorism, in Italy as Marinism, and in England best exhibited in the verse of Donne and Cowley and the rest of the group whom Dr. Johnson called the metaphysical poets, and whose Gothicism of taste Addison ridiculed in his Spectator papers on true and false wit.  It was France that led the reform against this fashion.  Malherbe and Boileau insisted upon the need of discarding tawdry ornaments of style and cultivating simplicity, clearness, propriety, decorum, moderation; above all, good sense.  The new Academy, founded to guard the purity of the French language, lent its weight to the precepts of the critics, who applied the rules of Aristotle, as commented by Longinus and Horace, to modern conditions.  The appearance of a number of admirable writers—­Corneille, Moliere, Racine, Bossuet, La Fontaine, La Bruyere—­simultaneously with this critical movement, gave an authority to the new French literature which enabled it to impose its principles upon England and Germany for over a century.  For the creative literature of France conformed its practice, in the main, to the theory of French criticism; though not, in the case of Regnier, without open defiance.  This authority was re-enforced by the political glories and social eclat of the siecle de Louis Quatorze

It happened that at this time the Stuart court was in exile, and in the train of Henrietta Maria at Paris, or scattered elsewhere through France, were many royalist men of letters, Etherege, Waller, Cowley, and others, who brought back with them to England in 1660 an acquaintance with this new French literature and a belief in its aesthetic code.  That French influence would have spread into England without the aid of these