The intellectual horizon might
be widened by including a greater number of ages and countries; or men
might try to fall back upon the thoughts and emotions common to all
races, and so cast off the superficial incrustation. The first method,
that of the romanticists, aims at increasing our knowledge: the second,
that of the naturalistic school, at basing our philosophy on deeper
principles.[5]

The classic, or pseudo-classic, period of English literature lasted from
the middle of the seventeenth till the end of the eighteenth century.
Inasmuch as the romantic revival was a protest against this reigning
mode, it becomes necessary to inquire a little more closely what we mean
when we say that the time of Queen Anne and the first two Georges was our
Augustan or classical age. In what sense was it classical? And was it
any more classical than the time of Milton, for example, or the time of
Landor? If the "Dunciad," and the "Essay on Man," are classical, what is
Keats' "Hyperion"? And with what propriety can we bring under a common
rubric things so far asunder as Prior's "Carmen Seculare" and Tennyson's
"Ulysses," or as Gay's "Trivia" and Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon"?
Evidently the Queen Anne writers took hold of the antique by a different
side from our nineteenth-century poets. Their classicism was of a
special type. It was, as has been often pointed out, more Latin than
Greek, and more French than Latin.[6] It was, as has likewise been said,
"a classicism in red heels and a periwig." Victor Hugo speaks of "cette
poesie fardee, mouchetee, poudree, du dix-huitieme siecle, cette
literature a paniers, a pompons et a falbalas."[7] The costumes of
Watteau contrast with the simple folds of Greek drapery very much as the
"Rape of the Lock," contrasts with the Iliad, or one of Pope's pastorals
with an idyl of Theocritus. The times were artificial in poetry as in
dress--

"Tea-cup times of hood and hoop,
And when the patch was worn."

Gentlemen wore powdered wigs instead of their own hair, and the power and
the wig both got into their writing. _Perruque_ was the nickname applied
to the classicists by the French romanticists of Hugo's generation, who
wore their hair long and flowing--_cheveaux merovigiennes_--and affected
an _outre_ freedom in the cut and color of their clothes. Similarly the
Byronic collar became, all over Europe, the symbol of daring independence
in matters of taste and opinion. Its ca