ll read
Carew's _Rapture_, the most audacious, and of course wilfully audacious
expression of the style, and then turn to the archangel's colloquy with
Adam in _Paradise Lost_, I should like to ask him on which side, according
to his honour and conscience, the coarseness lies. I have myself no
hesitation in saying that it lies with the husband of Mary Powell and the
author of _Tetrachordon_, not with the lover of Celia and the author of the
lines to "A. L."

There are other matters to be considered in the determination of the
critical fortunes of the Caroline school. Those fortunes have been rather
odd. Confounded at first in the general oblivion which the Restoration
threw on all works of "the last age," and which deepened as the school of
Dryden passed into the school of Pope, the writers of the Donne-Cowley
tradition were first exhumed for the purposes of _post-mortem_ examination
by and in the remarkable "Life" of Johnson, devoted to the last member of
the class. It is at this time of day alike useless to defend the
Metaphysical Poets against much that Johnson said, and to defend Johnson
against the charge of confusion, inadequacy, and haste in his
generalisations. The term metaphysical, originating with Dryden, and used
by Johnson with a slight difference, may be easily miscomprehended by any
one who chooses to forget its legitimate application both etymologically
and by usage to that which comes, as it were, behind or after nature. Still
Johnson undoubtedly confounded in one common condemnation writers who have
very little in common, and (which was worse) criticised a peculiarity of
expression as if it had been a deliberate substitution of alloy for gold.
The best phrases of the metaphysical poets more than justify themselves to
any one who looks at poetry with a more catholic appreciation than
Johnson's training and associations enabled him to apply; and even the
worst are but mistaken attempts to follow out a very sound principle, that
of "making the common as though it were not common." Towards the end of the
eighteenth century some of these poets, especially Herrick, were revived
with taste and success by Headley and other men of letters. But it so
happened that the three great critics of the later Romantic revival,
Hazlitt, Lamb, and Coleridge, were all strongly attracted to the bolder and
more irregular graces of the great dramatic poets, to the not less quaint
but less "mignardised" quaintnesses of prose wri