POPE. 391 



the productions of a pseudo-classicism, the classicism of 

 red heels and periwigs. Even poor old Dennis himself 

 had arrived at a kind of muddled notion that artifice was 

 not precisely art, that there were depths in human nature 

 which the most perfectly manufactured line of five feet 

 could not sound, and passionate elations that could not 

 be tuned to the lullaby seesaw of the couplet. The sat 

 isfactions of a conventional taste were very well in their 

 own way, but were they, after all, the highest of which 

 men were capable who had obscurely divined the Greeks, 

 and who had seen Hamlet, Lear, and Othello upon the 

 stage 1 Was not poetry, then, something which delivered 

 us from the dungeon of actual life, instead of basely 

 reconciling us with it ] 



A century earlier the school of the cultists had estab 

 lished a dominion, ephemeral, as it soon appeared, but 

 absolute while it lasted. Du Bartas, who may, perhaps, 

 as fairly as any, lay claim to its paternity,* had been 

 called divine, and similar honors had been paid in turn 

 to Gongora, Lilly, and Marini, who were in the strictest 

 sense contemporaneous. The infection of mere fashion 

 will hardly account satisfactorily for a vogue so sudden 

 and so widely extended. It may well be suspected that 

 there was some latent cause, something at work more 

 potent than the fascinating mannerism of any single au 

 thor in the rapid and almost simultaneous diffusion of 

 this purely cutaneous eruption. It is not improbable 

 that, in the revival of letters, men whose native tongues 

 had not yet attained the precision and grace only to 

 be acquired by long literary usage, should have learned 

 from a study of the Latin poets to value the form above 



* Its taste for verbal affectations is to be found in the Roman de la 

 Rose, and (yet more absurdly forced) in Gauthier de Coinsy; but in 

 Du Bartas the research of effect not seldom subjugates the thought as 

 well as the phrase. 



