ft and Lady Montague and
others. Literature was a polished mirror in which the gay world saw its
own grinning face. It threw back a most brilliant picture of the surface
of society, showed manners but not the elementary passions of human
nature. As a whole, it leaves an impression of hardness, shallowness,
and levity. The polite cynicism of Congreve, the ferocious cynicism of
Swift, the malice of Pope, the pleasantry of Addison, the early
worldliness of Prior and Gay are seldom relieved by any touch of the
ideal. The prose of the time was excellent, but the poetry was merely
rhymed prose. The recent Queen Anne revival in architecture, dress, and
bric-a-brac, the recrudescence of society verse in Dobson and others, is
perhaps symptomatic of the fact that the present generation has entered
upon a prosaic reaction against romantic excesses and we are finding our
picturesque in that era of artifice which seemed so picturesque to our
forerunners. The sedan chair, the blue china, the fan, farthingale, and
powdered head dress have now got the "rime of age" and are seen in
fascinating perspective, even as the mailed courser, the buff jerkin, the
cowl, and the cloth-yard shaft were seen by the men of Scott's generation.

Once more, the eighteenth century was classical in its respect for
authority. It desired to put itself under discipline, to follow the
rules, to discover a formula of correctness in all the arts, to set up a
tribunal of taste and establish canons of composition, to maintain
standards, copy models and patterns, comply with conventions, and
chastise lawlessness. In a word, its spirit was academic. Horace was
its favorite master--not Horace of the Odes, but Horace of the Satires
and Epistles, and especially Horace as interpreted by Boileau.[17] The
"Ars Poetica" had been englished by the Earl of Roscommon, and imitated
by Boileau in his "L'Art Poetique," which became the parent of a numerous
progeny in England; among others as "Essay on Satire" and an "Essay on
Poetry," by the Earl of Mulgrave;[18] an "Essay on Translated Verse" by
the Earl of Roscommon, who, says Addison, "makes even rules a noble
poetry";[19] and Pope's well-known "Essay on Criticism."

The doctrine of Pope's essay is, in brief, follow Nature, and in order
that you may follow nature, observe the rules, which are only "Nature
methodized," and also imitate the ancients.

"Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem;
To copy nat