style that did not closely follow these rules was
considered good. Horace, seen through French spectacles, was the
classical author most copied by this school. His _Epistles_ and
_Satires_ were considered models.

The motto of the classicists was polished regularity. Pope struck the
keynote of the age when he said:--

"True wit is nature to advantage dress'd,
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd."[1]

These two lines show the form of the "riming couplet," which the
classical poets adopted. There is generally a pause at the end of each
line; and each couplet, when detached from the context, will usually
make complete sense.

Edmund Waller (1606-1687), remembered today for his single
couplet:--

"The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made,"

had used this form of verse before 1630; but it was reserved for
Dryden, and especially for Pope, to bring the couplet to a high degree
of perfection. A French critic advised poets to compose the second
line of the couplet first. No better rule could have been devised for
dwarfing poetic power and for making poetry artificial.

Voltaire, a French classicist, said, "I do not like the monstrous
irregularities of Shakespeare." An eighteenth-century classicist
actually endeavored to improve Hamlet's soliloquy by putting it in
riming couplets. These lines from _Macbeth_ show that Shakespeare will
not tolerate such leading strings nor allow the ending of the lines to
interfere with his sense:--

"...Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued against
The deep damnation of his taking-off."

A later romantic poet called the riming couplet "rocking-horse meter";
and said that the reading of many couplets reminded him of round trips
on a rocking-horse.

Advances are usually made by overstressing some one point. The
classicists taught the saving grace of style, the need of restraint,
balance, clearness, common sense. We should therefore not despise the
necessary lesson which English literature learned from such
teaching,--a lesson which has never been forgotten.

The Drama.--The theaters were reopened at the time of the
Restoration. It is interesting to read in the vivacious _Diary_ of
Samuel Pepys how he went in 1661 to see Shakespeare's _Romeo and
Juliet_, "a play of itself the worst