Palamon and Arcite | Page 4

morning a flea that had feasted during the night on his wife and himself,
he was overcome by its poetic possibilities, and wrote:
"This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed and temple is;

Tho' parents frown, and you, we're met
And cloister'd in these living
walls of jet."
To strain after conceits, to strive for quaintness of thought and
expression, was the striking characteristic of all the poets of the
generation, to whom Dr. Johnson gave the title Metaphysical, and who
are now known as the Marinists. There were Quarles, with his Dutch
Emblems; Vaughan, Sandys, Crashaw, and pure-souled George Herbert,
with his Temple_. There were Carew, with the _Rapture; Wither and
his "Shall I wasting in despair"; the two dashing Cavaliers Suckling and
Lovelace, the latter the only man who ever received an M.A. for his
personal beauty. There was Herrick, the dispossessed Devonshire rector,
with Hesperides_ and _Noble Numbers, freer than were the others from
the beauty-marring conceits of the time. There, too, were to be found

the gallant love-maker Waller, Cowley, the queen's secretary during her
exile, and Marvell, Milton's assistant Secretary of State. But these three
men were to pledge allegiance to a new sovereignty in English verse.
In the civil strife, Waller had at first sided with Parliament, had later
engaged in a plot against it, and after a year's imprisonment was exiled
to France. At this time the Academy, organized to introduce form and
method in the French language and literature, held full sway. Malherbe
was inculcating its principles, Corneille and Molière were practicing its
tenets in their plays, and Boileau was following its rules in his satires,
when Waller and his associates came in contact with this influence. The
tendency was distinctly toward formality and conventionality. Surfeited
with the eccentricities and far-fetched conceits of the Marinists, the
exiled Englishmen welcomed the change; they espoused the French
principles; and when at the Restoration they returned to England with
their king, whose taste had been trained in the same school, they began
at once to formalize and conventionalize English poetry. The writers of
the past, even the greatest writers of the past, were regarded as men of
genius, but without art; and English poetry was thenceforth, in Dryden's
own words, to start with Waller.
Under the newly adopted canons of French taste, narrative and didactic
verse, or satire, took first place. Blank verse was tabooed as too
prose-like; so, too, were the enjambed rhymes. A succession of rhymed
pentameter couplets, with the sense complete in each couplet, was set
forth as the proper vehicle for poetry; and this unenjambed distich
fettered English verse for three-quarters of a century. In the drama the
characters must be noble, the language dignified; the metrical form
must be the rhymed couplet, and the unities of time, place, and action
must be observed.
Such, in brief, were the principles of French Classicism as applied to
English poetry, principles of which Dryden was the first great exponent,
and which Pope in the next generation carried to absolute perfection.
Waller, Marvell, and Cowley all tried their pens in the new method,
Cowley with least success; and they were the poets in vogue when
Dryden himself first attracted attention. Denham quite caught the favor

of the critics with his mild conventionalities; the Earl of Roscommon
delighted them with his rhymed Essay on Translated Verse; the
brilliant court wits, Rochester, Dorset, and Sedley, who were writing
for pleasure and not for publication, still clung to the frivolous lyric;
but the mostread and worst-treated poet of the Restoration was Butler.
He published his Hudibras, a sharp satire on the extreme Puritans, in
1663. Every one read the book, laughed uproariously, and left the
author to starve in a garret. Of Dryden's contemporaries in prose, there
were Sir William Temple, later the patron of Swift, John Locke who
contributed to philosophy his Essay Concerning the Human
Understanding, the two diarists Evelyn and Pepys, and the critics
Rymer and Langbaine; there was Isaac Newton, who expounded in his
Principia, 1687, the laws of gravitation; and there was the preaching
tinker, who, confined in Bedford jail, gave to the world in 1678 one of
its greatest allegories, Pilgrim's Progress.
Dryden was nearly thirty before the production of the drama was
resumed in England. Parliament had closed the theaters in 1642, and
that was an extinguisher of dramatic genius. Davenant had vainly tried
to elude the law, and finally succeeded in evading it by setting his
_Siege of Rhodes_ to music, and producing the first English opera. At
the Restoration, when the theaters were reopened, the dramas then
produced reflected most vividly the looseness and immorality of the
times. Their worst feature was that "they possessed not wit enough to
keep the mass of moral putrefaction sweet."
Davenant was prolific,