ned differences between the temper and styles of
the writers of the two periods. If besides being a student of literature
he is also (for this is a different thing) a student of literary
criticism he will find that these differences have led to the affixing
of certain labels--that the school to which writers of the former period
belong is called "Romantic" and that of the latter "Classic," this
"Classic" school being again overthrown towards the end of the
eighteenth century by a set of writers who unlike the Elizabethans gave
the name "Romantic" to themselves. What is he to understand by these two
labels; what are the characteristics of "Classicism" and how far is it
opposite to and conflicting with "Romanticism"? The question is
difficult because the names are used vaguely and they do not adequately
cover everything that is commonly put under them. It would be difficult,
for instance, to find anything in Ben Jonson which proclaims him as
belonging to a different school from Dryden, and perhaps the same could
be said in the second and self-styled period of Romanticism of the work
of Crabbe. But in the main the differences are real and easily visible,
even though they hardly convince us that the names chosen are the
happiest that could be found by way of description.

This period of Dryden and Pope on which we are now entering sometimes
styled itself the Augustan Age of English poetry. It grounded its claim
to classicism on a fancied resemblance to the Roman poets of the golden
age of Latin poetry, the reign of the Emperor Augustus. Its authors saw
themselves each as a second Vergil, a second Ovid, most of all a second
Horace, and they believed that their relation to the big world, their
assured position in society, heightened the resemblances. They
endeavoured to form their poetry on the lines laid down in the critical
writing of the original Augustan age as elaborated and interpreted in
Renaissance criticism. It was tacitly assumed--some of them openly
asserted it--that the kinds, modes of treatment and all the minor
details of literature, figures of speech, use of epithets and the rest,
had been settled by the ancients once and for all. What the Greeks began
the critics and authors of the time of Augustus had settled in its
completed form, and the scholars of the Renaissance had only interpreted
their findings for modern use. There was the tragedy, which had certain
proper parts and a certain fixed order of treatment