350 POPE. 



style, the joint result of culture and natural aptitude, is 

 always in fashion, as fine manners always are, in whatever 

 clothes. Perhaps some reform was needed when Quarles, 

 who had no mean gift of poesy, could write, 



&quot; My passion has BO April in her eyes : 

 I cannot spend in mists ; I cannot mizzle ; 

 My fluent brains are too severe to drizzle 

 Slight drops.&quot;* 



Good taste is an excellent thing when it confines itself to 

 its own rightful province of the proprieties, but when it 

 attempts to correct those profound instincts out of whose 

 judgments the higher principles of aesthetics have been form 

 ulated, its success is a disaster. During the era when the 

 French theory of poetry was supreme, we notice a decline 

 from imagination to fancy, from passion to wit, from 

 metaphor, which fuses image and thought in one, to simile, 

 which sets one beside the other, from the supreme code of 

 the natural sympathies to the parochial by-laws of etiquette. 

 The imagination instinctively Platonises, and it is the 

 essence of poetry that it should be unconventional, that the 

 soul of it should subordinate the outward parts ; while the 

 artificial method proceeds from a principle the reverse of 

 this, making the spirit lackey the form. 



Waller preaches up this new doctrine in the epilogue to 

 the &quot; Maid s Tragedy &quot;: 



&quot; Nor is t less strange such mighty wits as those 

 Should use a style in tragedy like prose ; 

 Well-sounding verse, where princes tread the stage 

 Should speak their virtue and describe their rage.&quot; 



That it should be beneath the dignity of princes to speak in 



* Elegie on Doctor Wilson. But if Quarles had been led astray by 

 the vices of Donne s mariner, he had good company in Herbert and 

 Yaughan. In common with them, too, he had that luck of simpleness 

 which is even more delightful than wit. In the same poem he says, 



&quot; Go, glorious soul, and lay thy temples down 

 In Abram s bosom, in the sacred down 

 Of soft eternity.&quot; 



