by a series of complicated curves, the profile of a Doric capital, which probably owed its form to the steady hand and uncontrolled taste of the designer.  To put faith in many of the theories propounded by architectural authorities in the last century, would be to believe that some of the grandest monuments which the world has ever seen raised, owe their chief beauty to an accurate knowledge of arithmetic.  The diameter of the column was divided into modules:  the modules were divided into minutes; the minutes into fractions of themselves.  A certain height was allotted to the shaft, another to the entablature. . .  Sometimes the learned discussed how far apart the columns of a portico might be."[29]

This kind of mensuration reminds one of the disputes between French critics as to whether the unity of time meant thirty hours, or twenty-four, or twelve, or the actual time that it took to act the play; or of the geometric method of the “Saturday papers” in the Spectator.  Addison tries “Paradise Lost” by Aristotle’s rules for the composition of an epic.  Is it the narrative of a single great action?  Does it begin in medias res, as is proper, or ab ovo Ledae, as Horace has said that an epic ought not?  Does it bring in the introductory matter by way of episode, after the approved recipe of Homer and Vergil?  Has it allegorical characters, contrary to the practice of the ancients?  Does the poet intrude personally into his poem, thus mixing the lyric and epic styles? etc.  Not a word as to Milton’s puritanism, or his Weltanschauung, or the relation of his work to its environment.  Nothing of that historical and sympathetic method—­that endeavor to put the reader at the poet’s point of view—­by which modern critics, from Lessing to Sainte-Beuve, have revolutionized their art.  Addison looks at “Paradise Lost” as something quite distinct from Milton:  as a manufactured article to be tested by comparing it with standard fabrics by recognized makers, like the authors of the Iliad and Aeneid.

When the Queen Anne poetry took a serious turn, the generalizing spirit of the age led it almost always into the paths of ethical and didactic verse.  “It stooped to truth and moralized its song,” finding its favorite occupation in the sententious expression of platitudes—­the epigram in satire, the maxim in serious work.  It became a poetry of aphorisms, instruction us with Pope that

    “Virtue alone is happiness below;”

or, with Young, that

    “Procrastination is the thief of time;”

or, with Johnson, that

    “Slow rises worth by poverty depressed.”

When it attempted to deal concretely with the passions, it found itself impotent.  Pope’s “Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard” rings hollow:  it is rhetoric, not poetry.  The closing lines of “The Dunciad”—­so strangely overpraised by Thackeray—­with their metallic clank and grandiose verbiage, are not truly imaginative.  The poet is simply working himself up to a climax of the false sublime, as an orator deliberately attaches a sounding peroration to his speech.  Pope is always “heard,” never “overheard.”