“Chaucer’s worst ribaldry is learned by rote,
    And beastly Skelton heads of houses quote: 
    One likes no language but the ‘Faery Queen’;
    A Scot will fight for ‘Christ’s Kirk o’ the Green.’"[3]

But, furthermore, the great body of Elizabethan and Stuart literature was already obsolescent.  Dramatists of the rank of Marlowe and Webster, poets like George Herbert and Robert Herrick—­favorites with our own generation—­prose authors like Sir Thomas Browne—­from whom Coleridge and Emerson drew inspiration—­had fallen into “the portion of weeds and outworn faces.”  Even writers of such recent, almost contemporary, repute as Donne, whom Carew had styled

    “—­a king who ruled, as he thought fit,
    The universal monarch of wit”: 

Or as Cowley, whom Dryden called the darling of his youth, and who was esteemed in his own lifetime a better poet than Milton; even Donne and Cowley had no longer a following.  Pope “versified” some of Donne’s rugged satires, and Johnson quoted passages from him as examples of the bad taste of the metaphysical poets.  This in the “Life of Cowley,” with which Johnson began his “Lives of the Poets,” as though Cowley was the first of the moderns.  But,

    “Who now reads Cowley?”

asks Pope in 1737.[4] The year of the Restoration (1660) draws a sharp line of demarcation between the old and the new.  In 1675, the year after Milton’s death, his nephew, Edward Philips, published “Theatrum Poetarum,” a sort of biographical dictionary of ancient and modern authors.  In the preface, he says:  “As for the antiquated and fallen into obscurity from their former credit and reputation, they are, for the most part, those that have written beyond the verge of the present age; for let us look back as far as about thirty or forty years, and we shall find a profound silence of the poets beyond that time, except of some few dramatics.”

This testimony is the more convincing, since Philips was something of a laudator temporis acti.  He praises several old English poets and sneers at several new ones, such as Cleaveland and Davenant, who were high in favor with the royal party.  He complains that nothing now “relishes so well as what is written in the smooth style of our present language, taken to be of late so much refined”; that “we should be so compliant with the French custom, as to follow set fashions”; that the imitation of Corneille has corrupted the English state; and that Dryden, “complying with the modified and gallantish humour of the time,” has, in his heroic plays, “indulged a little too much to the French way of continual rime.”  One passage, at least, in Philips’ preface has been thought to be an echo of Milton’s own judgment on the pretensions of the new school of poetry.  “Wit, ingenuity, and learning in verse; even elegancy itself, though that comes nearest, are one thing.  True native poetry is another; in which