the tradition is constant that Waller was the first modern English poet, the first correct versifier.  Pope is praised by Johnson because he employed but sparingly the triplets and alexandrines by which Dryden sought to vary the monotony of the couplet; and he is censured by Cowper because, by force of his example, he “made poetry a mere mechanic art.”  Henceforth the distich was treated as a unit:  the first line was balanced against the second, and frequently the first half of the line against the second half.

     “To err is human, to forgive divine.” 
    “And so obliging, that he ne’er obliged.” 
    “Charms strike the eye, but merit wins the soul,” etc., etc.

This type of verse, which Pope brought to perfection, and to which he gave all the energy and variety of which it was capable, so prevailed in our poetry for a century or more that one almost loses sight of the fact that any other form was employed.  The sonnet, for instance, disappeared entirely, until revived by Gray, Stillingfleet, Edwards, and Thomas Warton, about the middle of the eighteenth century.[28] When the poets wished to be daring and irregular, they were apt to give vent in that species of pseudo-Pindaric ode which Cowley had introduced—­a literary disease which, Dr. Johnson complained, infected the British muse with the notion that “he who could do nothing else could write like Pindar.”

Sir Charles Eastlake in his “History of the Gothic Revival” testifies to this formal spirit from the point of view of another art than literature.  “The age in which Batty Langley lived was an age in which it was customary to refer all matters of taste to rule and method.  There was one standard of excellence in poetry—­a standard that had its origin in the smooth distichs of heroic verse which Pope was the first to perfect, and which hundreds of later rhymers who lacked his nobler powers soon learned to imitate.  In pictorial art, it was the grand school which exercised despotic sway over the efforts of genius and limited the painter’s inventions to the field of Pagan mythology.  In architecture, Vitruvius was the great authority.  The graceful majesty of the Parthenon—­the noble proportions of the temple of Theseus—­the chaste enrichment which adorns the Choragic monument of Lysicrates, were ascribed less to the fertile imagination and refined perceptions of the ancient Greek, than to the dry and formal precepts which were invented centuries after their erection.  Little was said of the magnificent sculpture which filled the metopes of the temple of the Minerva; but the exact height and breadth of the triglyphs between them were considered of the greatest importance.  The exquisite drapery of caryatids and canephorae, no English artist, a hundred years ago, thought fit to imitate; but the cornices which they supposed were measured inch by inch with the utmost nicety.  Ingenious devices were invented for enabling the artificer to reproduce,