er writer, he calls attention to the importance of
correctness of form and of careful expression. He is the prince of
artificial poets. Though he erred in exalting form above matter, he
taught his age the needed lesson of careful workmanship.

SUMMARY

The Restoration and the first part of the eighteenth century display a
low moral standard in both church and state. This standard had its
effect on literature. The drama shows marked decline. We find no such
sublime outbursts of song as characterize the Elizabethan and Puritan
ages. The writers chose satiric or didactic subjects, and avoided
pathos, deep feeling, and sublimity. French influence was paramount.

The classical school, which loved polished regularity, set the fashion
in literature. An old idea, dressed in exquisite form, was as welcome
as a new one. Anything strange, irregular, romantic, full of feeling,
highly imaginative, or improbable to the intellect, was unpopular.
Even in _Gulliver's Travels_, Swift endeavored to be as realistic as
if he were demonstrating a geometrical proposition.

Dryden and Pope are the two chief poets of the classical school. Both
use the riming couplet and are distinguished for their satiric and
didactic verse. Their poetry shows more intellectual brilliancy than
imaginative power. They display little sympathy with man and small
love for nature.

The age is far more remarkable for its prose than for its poetry.
French influence helped to develop a concise, flexible, energetic
prose style. The deterioration in poetry was partly compensated for by
the rapid advances in prose, which needed the influences working
toward artistic finish. Because of its cleverness, avoidance of long
sentences, and of classical inversions, Dryden's prose is essentially
modern. Defoe's _Robinson Crusoe_ is the world's most popular story of
adventure, told in simple and direct, but seemingly artless, prose. Of
all the prose writers since Swift's time, few have equaled him and
still fewer surpassed him in simplicity, flexibility, directness, and
lack of affectation. The essays of Steele and Addison constitute a
landmark. No preceding English prose shows so much grace of style,
delicate humor, and power of awakening and retaining interest as do
the _Sir Roger de Coverley Papers_.

The influence of this age was sufficient to raise permanently the
standard level of artistic literary expression. The unpruned,
shapeless, and extravagant forms of earlier t