it":

Or as Cowley, whom Dryden called the darling of his youth, and who was
esteemed in his own lifetime a better poet than Milton; even Donne and
Cowley had no longer a following. Pope "versified" some of Donne's
rugged satires, and Johnson quoted passages from him as examples of the
bad taste of the metaphysical poets. This in the "Life of Cowley," with
which Johnson began his "Lives of the Poets," as though Cowley was the
first of the moderns. But,

"Who now reads Cowley?"

asks Pope in 1737.[4] The year of the Restoration (1660) draws a sharp
line of demarcation between the old and the new. In 1675, the year after
Milton's death, his nephew, Edward Philips, published "Theatrum
Poetarum," a sort of biographical dictionary of ancient and modern
authors. In the preface, he says: "As for the antiquated and fallen into
obscurity from their former credit and reputation, they are, for the most
part, those that have written beyond the verge of the present age; for
let us look back as far as about thirty or forty years, and we shall find
a profound silence of the poets beyond that time, except of some few
dramatics."

This testimony is the more convincing, since Philips was something of a
_laudator temporis acti_. He praises several old English poets and
sneers at several new ones, such as Cleaveland and Davenant, who were
high in favor with the royal party. He complains that nothing now
"relishes so well as what is written in the smooth style of our present
language, taken to be of late so much refined"; that "we should be so
compliant with the French custom, as to follow set fashions"; that the
imitation of Corneille has corrupted the English state; and that Dryden,
"complying with the modified and gallantish humour of the time," has, in
his heroic plays, "indulged a little too much to the French way of
continual rime." One passage, at least, in Philips' preface has been
thought to be an echo of Milton's own judgment on the pretensions of the
new school of poetry. "Wit, ingenuity, and learning in verse; even
elegancy itself, though that comes nearest, are one thing. True native
poetry is another; in which there is a certain air and spirit which
perhaps the most learned and judicious in other arts do not perfectly
apprehend, much less is it attainable by any study or industry. Nay,
though all the laws of heroic poem, all the laws of tragedy were exactly
observed, yet still this _tour entrejeant_--this p