ght and strong, idiomatic and direct. He knows
precisely what he has to say, and says it in the simplest words. It is
the form and not the substance of Dryden's prose to which attention is
drawn here. There is a splendour of imagery, a largeness of thought, and
a grasp of language in the prose of Hooker, of Jeremy Taylor, and of
Milton which is beyond the reach of Dryden, but he has the merit of
using a simple form of English free from prolonged periods and classical
constructions, and fitted therefore for common use. The wealthy baggage
of the prose Elizabethans and their immediate successors was too
cumbersome for ordinary travel; Dryden's riches are less massive, but
they can be easily carried, and are always ready for service.

In these respects he is the literary herald of a century which, in the
earlier half at least, is remarkable in the use it makes of our mother
tongue for the exercise of common sense. The Revolution of 1688 produced
a change in English politics scarcely more remarkable than the change
that took place a little later in English literature and is to be seen
in the poets and wits who are known familiarly as the Queen Anne men. It
will be obvious to the most superficial student that the gulf which
separates the literary period, closing with the death of Milton in 1674,
from the first half of the eighteenth century, is infinitely wider than
that which divides us from the splendid band of poets and prose writers
who made the first twenty years of the present century so famous. There
is, for example, scarcely more than fifty years between the publication
of Herrick's _Hesperides_ and of Addison's _Campaign_, between the _Holy
Living_ of Taylor and the _Tatler_ of Steele, and less than fifty years
between _Samson Agonistes_, which Bishop Atterbury asked Pope to polish,
and the poems of Prior. Yet in that short space not only is the form of
verse changed but also the spirit.

Speaking broadly, and allowing for exceptions, the literary merits of
the Queen Anne time are due to invention, fancy, and wit, to a genius
for satire exhibited in verse and prose, to a regard for correctness of
form and to the sensitive avoidance of extremes. The poets of the period
are for the most part without enthusiasm, without passion, and without
the 'fine madness' which, as Drayton says, should possess a poet's
brain. Wit takes precedence of imagination, nature is concealed by
artifice, and the delight afforded by these wri