[29] “History of the Gothic Revival,” pp. 49-50 (edition of 1872).

[30] Palgrave says that the poetry of passion was deformed, after 1660, by “levity and an artificial time”; and that it lay “almost dormant for the hundred years between the days of Wither and Suckling and the days of Burns and Cowper,” “Golden Treasury” (Sever and Francis edition, 1866). pp. 379-80.

[31] Excepting the “Nocturnal Reverie” of Lady Winchelsea, and a passage or two in the “Windsor Forest” of Pope, the poetry of the period intervening between the publication of the “Paradise Lost” and the “Seasons” [1667-1726] does not contain a single new image of external nature.—­Wordsworth.  Appendix to Lyrical Ballads, (1815).

[32] Gild is a perfect earmark of eighteenth-century descriptive verse:  the shore is gilded and so are groves, clouds, etc.  Contentment gilds the scene, and the stars gild the gloomy night (Parnell) or the glowing pole (Pope).

[33] Johnson, “Prologue at the Opening of Drury Lane,” 1747.

[34] See Coleridge, “Biographia Literaria,” chap.  Xviii

[35] Essay on Pope, in “My Study Windows.”

[36] “From Shakespere to Pope,” pp. 9-11.

CHAPTER III.

The Spenserians

Dissatisfaction with a prevalent mood or fashion in literature is apt to express itself either in a fresh and independent criticism of life, or in a reversion to older types.  But, as original creative genius is not always forthcoming, a literary revolution commonly begins with imitation.  It seeks inspiration in the past, and substitutes a new set of models as different as possible from those which it finds currently followed.  In every country of Europe the classical tradition had hidden whatever was most national, most individual, in its earlier culture, under a smooth, uniform veneer.  To break away from modern convention, England and Germany, and afterward France, went back to ancient springs of national life; not always, at first, wisely, but in obedience to a true instinct.

How far did any knowledge or love of the old romantic literature of England survive among the contemporaries of Dryden and Pope?  It is not hard to furnish an answer to this question.  The prefaces of Dryden, the critical treatises of Dennis, Winstanley, Oldmixon, Rymer, Langbaine, Gildon, Shaftesbury, and many others, together with hundreds of passages in prologues and epilogues to plays; in periodical essays like the Tatler and Spectator; in verse essays like Roscommon’s, Mulgrave’s and Pope’s; in prefaces to various editions of Shakspere and Spenser; in letters, memoirs, etc., supply a mass of testimony to the fact that neglect and contempt had, with a few exceptions, overtaken all English writers who wrote before the middle of the seventeenth century.  The exceptions, of course, were those supreme masters