the recrudescence of society verse in Dobson and others, is perhaps symptomatic of the fact that the present generation has entered upon a prosaic reaction against romantic excesses and we are finding our picturesque in that era of artifice which seemed so picturesque to our forerunners.  The sedan chair, the blue china, the fan, farthingale, and powdered head dress have now got the “rime of age” and are seen in fascinating perspective, even as the mailed courser, the buff jerkin, the cowl, and the cloth-yard shaft were seen by the men of Scott’s generation.

Once more, the eighteenth century was classical in its respect for authority.  It desired to put itself under discipline, to follow the rules, to discover a formula of correctness in all the arts, to set up a tribunal of taste and establish canons of composition, to maintain standards, copy models and patterns, comply with conventions, and chastise lawlessness.  In a word, its spirit was academic.  Horace was its favorite master—­not Horace of the Odes, but Horace of the Satires and Epistles, and especially Horace as interpreted by Boileau.[17] The “Ars Poetica” had been englished by the Earl of Roscommon, and imitated by Boileau in his “L’Art Poetique,” which became the parent of a numerous progeny in England; among others as “Essay on Satire” and an “Essay on Poetry,” by the Earl of Mulgrave;[18] an “Essay on Translated Verse” by the Earl of Roscommon, who, says Addison, “makes even rules a noble poetry";[19] and Pope’s well-known “Essay on Criticism.”

The doctrine of Pope’s essay is, in brief, follow Nature, and in order that you may follow nature, observe the rules, which are only “Nature methodized,” and also imitate the ancients.

    “Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem;
    To copy nature is to copy them.”

Thus Vergil when he started to compose the Aeneid may have seemed above the critic’s law, but when he came to study Homer, he found that Nature and Homer were the same.  Accordingly,

                “he checks the bold design,
    And rules as strict his labor’d work confine.”

Not to stimulate, but to check, to confine, to regulate, is the unfailing precept of this whole critical school.  Literature, in the state in which they found it, appeared to them to need the curb more than the spur.

Addison’s scholarship was almost exclusively Latin, though it was Vergilian rather than Horatian.  Macaulay[20] says of Addison’s “Remarks on Italy”; “To the best of our remembrance, Addison does not mention Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bolardo, Berni, Lorenzo de’ Medici, or Machiavelli.  He coldly tells us that at Ferrara he saw the tomb of Ariosto, and that at Venice he heard the gondoliers sing verses of Tasso.  But for Tasso and Ariosto he cared far less than for Valerius Flaccus and Sidonius Apollinaris.  The gentle flow of the Ticino brings a line of Silius to his mind.  The sulphurous