be a true poem,'--we pronounce that such a prose has
its own grandeur, but that it is obsolete and inconvenient. But when
we find Dryden telling us: 'What Virgil wrote in the vigour of his age,
in plenty and at ease, I have undertaken to translate in my declining
years; struggling with wants, oppressed with sickness, curbed in my
genius, liable to be misconstrued in all I write,'--then we exclaim
that here at last we have the true English prose, a prose such as we
would all gladly use if we only knew how. Yet Dryden was Milton's
contemporary.

But after the Restoration the time had come when our nation felt the
imperious need of a fit prose. So, too, the time had likewise come
when our nation felt the imperious need of freeing itself from the
absorbing preoccupation which religion in the Puritan age had
exercised. It was impossible that this freedom should be brought about
without some negative excess, without some neglect and impairment of
the religious life of the soul; and the spiritual history of the
eighteenth century shows us that the freedom was not achieved without
them. Still, the freedom was achieved; the preoccupation, an
undoubtedly baneful and retarding one if it had continued, was got rid
of. And as with religion amongst us at that period, so it was also
with letters. A fit prose was a necessity; but it was impossible that
a fit prose should establish itself amongst us without some touch of
frost to the imaginative life of the soul. The needful qualities for a
fit prose are regularity, uniformity, precision, balance. The men of
letters, whose destiny it may be to bring their nation to the
attainment of a fit prose, must of necessity, whether they work in
prose or in verse, give a predominating, an almost exclusive attention
to the qualities of regularity, uniformity, precision, balance. But an
almost exclusive attention to these qualities involves some repression
and silencing of poetry.

We are to regard Dryden as the puissant and glorious founder, Pope as
the splendid high priest, of our age of prose and reason, of our
excellent and indispensable eighteenth century. For the purposes of
their mission and destiny their poetry, like their prose, is admirable.
Do you ask me whether Dryden's verse, take it almost where you will, is
not good?

'A milk-white Hind, immortal and unchanged,
Fed on the lawns and in the forest ranged.'

I answer: Admirable for the purposes of the inaugurator of