ters is not due to
imaginative sensibility. Not even in the consummate genius of Pope is
there aught of the magical charm which fascinates us in a Wordsworth and
a Keats, in a Coleridge and a Shelley. The prose of the age, masterly
though it be, stands also on a comparatively low level. There is much in
it to attract, but little to inspire.

The difference between the Elizabethan and Jacobean authors, and the
authors of the Queen Anne period cannot be accounted for by any single
cause. The student will observe that while the inspiration is less, the
technical skill is greater. There are passages in Addison which no
seventeenth century author could have written; there are couplets in
Pope beyond the reach of Cowley, and that even Dryden could not rival.
In these respects the eighteenth century was indebted to the growing
influence of French literature, to which the taste of Charles II. had in
some degree contributed. One notable expression of this taste may be
seen in the tragedies in rhyme that were for a time in vogue, of which
the plots were borrowed from French romances. These colossal fictions,
stupendous in length and heroic in style, delighted the young English
ladies of the seventeenth century, and were not out of favour in the
eighteenth, for Pope gave a copy of the _Grand Cyrus_ to Martha Blount.

The return, as in Addison's _Cato_, to the classical unities, so
faithfully preserved in the French drama, was another indication of an
influence from which our literature has never been wholly free. That
importations so alien to the spirit of English poetry should tend to the
degeneration of the national drama was inevitable. For a time, however,
the study of French models, both in the drama and in other departments
of literature, may have been productive of benefit. Frenchmen knew
before we did, how to say what they wanted to say in a lucid style.
Dryden, who was open to every kind of influence, bad as well as good,
caught a little of their fine tact and consummate workmanship without
lessening his own originality; so also did Pope, who, if he was
considerably indebted to Boileau, infinitely excelled him. That, in M.
Taine's judgment, would have been no great difficulty. 'In Boileau,' he
writes, 'there are, as a rule, two kinds of verse, as was said by a man
of wit (M. Guillaume Guizot); most of which seem to be those of a sharp
school-boy in the third class; the rest those of a good school-boy in
the upper divisio