346 POPE. 



Our age was cultivated thus at length, 

 But what we gained in skill we lost in strength ; 

 Our builders were with want of genius curst, 

 The second temple was not like the first.&quot; 



There would seem to be a manifest reminiscence of Waller s 

 verse in the half -scornful emphasis which Dryden lays on 

 &quot;cultivated. Perhaps he was at first led to give greater 

 weight to correctness and to the restraint of arbitrary rules 

 from a consciousness that he had a tendency to hyperbole 

 and extravagance. But he afterwards became convinced 

 that the heightening of discourse by passion was a very 

 different thing from the exaggeration which heaps phrase 

 on phrase, and that genius, like beauty, can always plead 

 its privilege. Dryden, by his powerful example, by the 

 charm of his verse, which combines vigour and fluency in a 

 measure perhaps never reached by any other of our poets, 

 and above all, because it is never long before the sunshine 

 of his cheerful good sense breaks through the clouds of 

 rhetoric, and gilds the clipped hedges over which his 

 thought clambers like an unpruned vine Dryden, one of the 

 most truly English of English authors, did more than all 

 others combined to bring about the triumphs of French 

 standards in taste and French principles in criticism. But 

 he was always like a deserter who cannot feel happy in the 

 victories of the alien arms, and who would go back if he 

 could to the camp where he naturally belonged. Between 

 1660 and 1700 more French words, I believe, were directly 

 transplanted into our language than in the century and 

 a-half since. What was of more consequence, French ideas 

 came with them, shaping the form, and through that 

 modifying the spirit, of our literature. 



Voltaire, though he came later, was steeped in the 

 theories of art which had been inherited as traditions of 

 classicism from the preceding generation. He had lived in 

 England, and, I have no doubt, gives us a very good notion 

 of the tone which was prevalent there in his time, an 

 English version of the criticism imported from France. He 

 tells us that Mr. Addison was the first Englishman who had 



