1673, inspired by Horace's _Ars
Poetica_, was a treatise in verse upon the rules of correct
composition, and it gave the law in criticism for over a century, not
only in France, but in Germany and England. It gave English poetry a
didactic turn and started the fashion of writing critical essays in
riming couplets. The Earl of Mulgrave published two "poems" of this
kind, an _Essay on Satire_, and an _Essay on Poetry_. The Earl of
Roscommon--who, said Addison, "makes even rules a noble poetry"--made a
metrical version of Horace's _Ars Poetica_, {174} and wrote an original
_Essay on Translated Verse_. Of the same kind were Addison's epistle
to Sacheverel, entitled _An Account of the Greatest English Poets_, and
Pope's _Essay on Criticism_, 1711, which was nothing more than
versified maxims of rhetoric, put with Pope's usual point and
brilliancy. The classicism of the 18th century, it has been said, was
a classicism in red heels and a periwig. It was Latin rather than
Greek; it turned to the least imaginative side of Latin literature and
found its models, not in Vergil, Catullus, and Lucretius, but in the
satires, epistles, and didactic pieces of Juvenal, Horace, and Persius.

The chosen medium of the new poetry was the heroic couplet. This had,
of course, been used before by English poets as far back as Chaucer.
The greater part of the _Canterbury Tales_ was written in heroic
couplets. But now a new strength and precision were given to the
familiar measure by imprisoning the sense within the limit of the
couplet, and by treating each line as also a unit in itself. Edmund
Waller had written verse of this kind as early as the reign of Charles
I. He, said Dryden, "first showed us to conclude the sense most
commonly in distichs, which, in the verse of those before him, runs on
for so many lines together that the reader is out of breath to overtake
it." Sir John Denham, also, in his _Cooper's Hill_, 1643, had written
such verse as this:

"O, could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example as it is my theme!
{175}
Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full."

Here we have the regular flow, and the nice balance between the first
and second member of each couplet, and the first and second part of
each line, which characterized the verse of Dryden and Pope.

"Waller was smooth, but Dryden taught to join
The varying verse, the full reso