mere mechanic art."
Henceforth the distich was treated as a unit: the first line was balanced
against the second, and frequently the first half of the line against the
second half.

"To err is human, to forgive divine."
"And so obliging, that he ne'er obliged."
"Charms strike the eye, but merit wins the soul," etc., etc.

This type of verse, which Pope brought to perfection, and to which he
gave all the energy and variety of which it was capable, so prevailed in
our poetry for a century or more that one almost loses sight of the fact
that any other form was employed. The sonnet, for instance, disappeared
entirely, until revived by Gray, Stillingfleet, Edwards, and Thomas
Warton, about the middle of the eighteenth century.[28] When the poets
wished to be daring and irregular, they were apt to give vent in that
species of pseudo-Pindaric ode which Cowley had introduced--a literary
disease which, Dr. Johnson complained, infected the British muse with the
notion that "he who could do nothing else could write like Pindar."

Sir Charles Eastlake in his "History of the Gothic Revival" testifies to
this formal spirit from the point of view of another art than literature.
"The age in which Batty Langley lived was an age in which it was
customary to refer all matters of taste to rule and method. There was
one standard of excellence in poetry--a standard that had its origin in
the smooth distichs of heroic verse which Pope was the first to perfect,
and which hundreds of later rhymers who lacked his nobler powers soon
learned to imitate. In pictorial art, it was the grand school which
exercised despotic sway over the efforts of genius and limited the
painter's inventions to the field of Pagan mythology. In architecture,
Vitruvius was the great authority. The graceful majesty of the
Parthenon--the noble proportions of the temple of Theseus--the chaste
enrichment which adorns the Choragic monument of Lysicrates, were
ascribed less to the fertile imagination and refined perceptions of the
ancient Greek, than to the dry and formal precepts which were invented
centuries after their erection. Little was said of the magnificent
sculpture which filled the metopes of the temple of the Minerva; but the
exact height and breadth of the triglyphs between them were considered of
the greatest importance. The exquisite drapery of caryatids and
canephorae, no English artist, a hundred years ago, thought fit to
imitate; but