reless roll, which left the
throat exposed, seemed to assist the liberty of nature against cramping
conventions.

The leading Queen Anne writers are so well known that a somewhat general
description of the literary situation in England at the time of Pope's
death (1744) will serve as an answer to the question, how was the
eighteenth century classical. It was remarked by Thomas Warton[8] that,
at the first revival of letters in the sixteenth century, our authors
were more struck by the marvelous fables and inventions of ancient poets
than by the justness of their conceptions and the purity of their style.
In other words, the men of the renaissance apprehended the ancient
literature as poets: the men of the _Eclaircissement_ apprehended them as
critics. In Elizabeth's day the new learning stimulated English genius
to creative activity. In royal progresses, court masques, Lord Mayors'
shows, and public pageants of all kinds, mythology ran mad. "Every
procession was a pantheon." But the poets were not careful to keep the
two worlds of pagan antiquity and mediaeval Christianity distinct. The
art of the renaissance was the flower of a double root, and the artists
used their complex stuff naively. The "Faerie Queene" is the typical
work of the English renaissance; there hamadryads, satyrs, and river gods
mingle unblushingly with knights, dragons, sorcerers, hermits, and
personified vices and virtues. The "machinery" of Homer and Vergil--the
"machinery" of the "Seven Champions of Christendom" and the "Roman de la
Rose"! This was not shocking to Spenser's contemporaries, but it seemed
quite shocking to classical critics a century later. Even Milton, the
greatest scholar among English poets, but whose imagination was a strong
agent, holding strange elements in solution, incurred their censure for
bringing Saint Peter and the sea-nymphs into dangerous juxtaposition in
"Lycidas."

But by the middle of the seventeenth century the renaissance schools of
poetry had become effete in all European countries. They had run into
extravagances of style, into a vicious manner known in Spain as
Gongorism, in Italy as Marinism, and in England best exhibited in the
verse of Donne and Cowley and the rest of the group whom Dr. Johnson
called the metaphysical poets, and whose Gothicism of taste Addison
ridiculed in his _Spectator_ papers on true and false wit. It was France
that led the reform against this fashion. Malherbe and Boilea