y its form and direction.
In its outer shape as in its inner spirit our literature obeyed the
impulse he had given it from the beginning of the eighteenth century
till near its close. His influence told especially on poetry. Dryden
remained a poet; even in his most argumentative pieces his subject
seizes him in a poetic way, and prosaic as much of his treatment may be,
he is always ready to rise into sudden bursts of imagery and fancy. But
he was a poet with a prosaic end; his aim was not simply to express
beautiful things in the most beautiful way, but to invest rational
things with such an amount of poetic expression as may make them at once
rational and poetic, to use poetry as an exquisite form for argument,
rhetoric, persuasion, to charm indeed, but primarily to convince. Poetry
no longer held itself apart in the pure world of the imagination, no
longer concerned itself simply with the beautiful in all things, or
sought for its result in the sense of pleasure which an exquisite
representation of what is beautiful in man or nature stirs in its
reader. It narrowed its sphere, and attached itself to man. But from all
that is deepest and noblest in man it was shut off by the reaction from
Puritanism, by the weariness of religious strife, by the disbelief that
had sprung from religious controversy; and it limited itself rigidly to
man's outer life, to his sensuous enjoyment, his toil and labour, his
politics, his society. The limitation, no doubt, had its good sides;
with it, if not of it, came a greater correctness and precision in the
use of words and phrases, a clearer and more perspicuous style, a new
sense of order, of just arrangement, of propriety, of good taste. But
with it came a sense of uniformity, of monotony, of dulness. In Dryden
indeed this was combated if not wholly beaten off by his amazing force;
to the last there was an animal verve and swing about the man that
conquered age. But around him and after him the dulness gathered fast.

[Sidenote: The new prose.]

Of hardly less moment than Dryden's work in poetry was his work in
prose. In continuity and grandeur indeed, as in grace and music of
phrase, the new prose of the Restoration fell far short of the prose of
Hooker or Jeremy Taylor, but its clear nervous structure, its handiness
and flexibility, its variety and ease, fitted it far better for the work
of popularization on which literature was now to enter. It fitted it for
the work of journalism, a