political accidents is doubtless true, as it is also true that a reform of English versification and poetic style would have worked itself out upon native lines independent of foreign example, and even had there been so such thing as French literature.  Mr. Gosse has pointed out couplets of Waller, written as early as 1623, which have the formal precision of Pope’s; and the famous passage about the Thames in Denham’s “Cooper’s Hill” (1642) anticipates the best performance of Augustan verse: 

    “O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
    My great example, as it is my theme! 
    Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull,
    Strong without rage, without o’erflowing full.”

However, as to the general fact of the powerful impact of French upon English literary fashions, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, there can be no dispute.[9]

This change of style was symptomatic of a corresponding change in the national temper.  It was the mission of the eighteenth century to assert the universality of law and, at the same time, the sufficiency of the reason to discover the laws, which govern in every province:  a service which we now, perhaps, undervalue in our impatience with the formalism which was its outward sign.  Hence its dislike of irregularity in art and irrationality in religion.  England, in particular, was tired of unchartered freedom, of spiritual as well as of literary anarchy.  The religious tension of the Commonwealth period had relaxed—­men cannot be always at the heroic pitch—­and theological disputes had issued in indifference and a skepticism which took the form of deism, or “natural religion.”  But the deists were felt to be a nuisance.  They were unsettling opinions and disturbing that decent conformity with generally received beliefs which it is the part of a good citizen to maintain.  Addison instructs his readers that, in the absence of certainty, it is the part of a prudent man to choose the safe side and make friends with God.  The freethinking Chesterfield[10] tells his son that the profession of atheism is ill-bred.  De Foe, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, Johnson all attack infidelity.  “Conform!  Conform!” said in effect the most authoritative writers of the century.  “Be sensible:  go to church:  pay your rates:  don’t be a vulgar deist—­a fellow like Toland who is poor and has no social position.  But, on the other hand, you need not be a fanatic or superstitious, or an enthusiast.  Above all, pas de zele!”

“Theology,” says Leslie Stephen, “was, for the most part, almost as deistical as the deists.  A hatred for enthusiasm was as strongly impressed upon the whole character of contemporary thought as a hatred of skepticism. . .  A good common-sense religion should be taken for granted and no questions asked. . .  With Shakspere, or Sir Thomas Browne, or Jeremy Taylor, or Milton, man is contemplated in his relations to the universe; he is in presence of