396 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN 



exquisite tact was unable to produce a tolerable specimen. 

 The song became neat, terse, epigrammatic, shorn of pictur- 

 esqueness, sparkling with elegance. But the dominant metre 

 of the eighteenth century was the rhyming couplet. Poets 

 used this form with a fine sense of its point, with a sustained 

 respect for its structural limitations ; not as the Elizabethans 

 had employed it, loosely, with variety of pause and period, 

 and with frequent enjambements from one line to another. 

 The wilding graces which we appreciate in the couplets of 

 Marlowe, Beaumont, Spenser, Fletcher, were abhorred by the 

 school of versifiers at whose head stands Pope. 



In close connection with these changes in the form of 

 poetry the intermediate period of a hundred and fifty years 

 exhibits a marked alteration of artistic aim and feeling. 

 Diction is corrected, luxuriant shoots are pruned ; wit, sense, 

 and taste words recurring with significant frequency in the 

 literature of the eighteenth century are cultivated at the 

 expense of imagination and capricious fancy. At the height 

 of the epoch a conceit is held in abomination, and a play on 

 words regarded as a crime. The point and polish of Pope, 

 the limpid purity of Goldsmith, the weighty eloquence of 

 Johnson, were the climax of this counter movement in our 

 literature. Didactic, satirical, epistolary compositions assumed 

 predominance under the reign of criticism, sense, restricted 

 form. 



With the dawn of the Victorian age a second reaction set 

 in. It was indicated by the Rowley poems of Chatterton, the 

 lyrics of Blake, the sonnets of Bowles, the blank verse of 

 Cowper and of Landor. Then the current ran strongly, as we 

 have already seen, toward Elizabethan metres, Elizabethan 

 modes of workmanship, and ways of regarding art and nature. 

 The English Renaissance of the sixteenth century became 

 renascent in the nineteenth. 



It has been the purpose of the foregoing pages to show in 

 what way this renascent Elizabethanism of the Victorian 

 epoch differs from that of the earlier period ; how the altered 

 conditions of English life, especially in the growth of great 

 cities and the emergence of grave social problems through 



