Those Rules of old discovered, not devis'd,
Are Nature still, but Nature methodiz'd;
Nature, like liberty, is but restrain'd
By the same laws which first herself ordain'd.1

Verisimilitude, a quality much insisted on at this time, and in origin a restricted interpretation of Aristotle's preference for the probable, was exalted into a tyrannical principle which again excluded the individual, in its fear of the abnormal or self-contradictory, and reduced the delineation of character to a simplicity which belied human nature. A king must be kingly, and nothing else; an official must be officious, and nothing else; a maid must be modest and nothing else; and so through the whole range of humanity; until in the perfection of decorum and verisimilitude, all interest evaporated, and a dead monotony reigned.

The mis-reading of Aristotle and of human life which this extreme implies is not more surprising than the delusion that the ancient poets exemplified these preposterous rules. Pope but versifies the view of the dominant contemporary school:

His fable, subject, scope in ev'ry page;
Religion, country, genius of his age :
Without all these at once before your eyes,
Cavil you may, but never criticize.
Be Homer's works your study and delight,
Read them by day, and meditate by night;
Thence form your judgment, thence your maxims bring,
And trace the Muses upward to their spring.
Still with itself compar'd, his text peruse;
And let your comment be the Mantuan Muse.

When first young Maro in his boundless mind
A work t' outlast immortal Rome design'd,
Perhaps he seem'd above the critic's law,
And but from Nature's fountains scorn'd to draw :
But when t' examine ev'ry part he came,
Nature and Homer were, he found, the same.
Convinc'd, amaz'd, he checks the bold design;
And rules as strict his labour'd work confine,
As if the Stagirite o'erlook'd each line.
Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem;
To copy nature is to copy them.1

}

It is hardly necessary to go into details to show how far astray is such criticism: how impossible it is to identify the freshness of observation and spontaneity of utterance of Homer, or the sublime imaginations of Æschylus, with this conventionalized and methodized "nature" which Pope finds, or says he finds, in them. Nor are we to believe that Pope, in his most vital work, practises his own precepts. But we have said enough to show the relation of eighteenth-century criticism to the literature of antiquity. Of course, the attitude was not constant or uniform. Historians of criticism find many subdivisions and stages of development, the school of rules, the school of common sense, the school of taste, and the like: but throughout runs the prevailing tendency to conceive art as the product of rules that can be deduced from the practice of antiquity and can be justified by reason. The gulf separating such criticism and creation founded upon it, from the essential and characteristic quality of the art of antiquity, more especially of Greece, has long been recognized, and is acknowledged in the application to the eighteenth century of the terms neo-classic and pseudo-classic, as distinct from the genuinely classic, whether in time or in quality.1

We turn now to the poetry itself produced in the period when this neo-classic criticism was prevalent, to inquire what are its characteristic qualities, and how far it has anything in common with the essentially classic.

The passage from Pope just quoted is typical enough of a large part of eighteenth-century verse. Couched in admirably concise and pointed diction, and set to a metre of perfect regularity and marvelously fitted to its purpose, the Essay on Criticism is literature of a quality which must be treated with respect. The writer has set before him the best models, and, even at this early stage of his career, has mastered the means appropriate to his ends and turned out a triumph of technical skill. Judgment, the power which in the view of the time gave structure and strength to a poem, ing) modern works exhibiting classical tendencies, or produced in modern periods of marked formalism.

It is worth noting, perhaps, that our use of pseudo-romantic was not exactly parallel to this. We applied that term to Gothic novels and the like, which pretended to be highly imaginative, but were not; the pseudo-classicist is narrowly partisan, but is not necessarily insincere. He is a classicist at once mannered and extreme; a rationalist whose lack of the balancing qualities brings him to the limits of art.

is everywhere apparent; and wit, whether taken in the sense of fancy, the power of noting unsuspected resemblances, or in the modern sense, decorates the work throughout. Perfection of form, then, it has in a high degree; and both in this and in the theoretical discussion which forms its content the strength of the rational element is obvious. But what of imagination and the sense of fact? It can hardly be maintained that anywhere in it the element of imagination rises above the level of fancy. Neat similes occur here and there; metaphorical expressions and illuminating allusions are frequent; but of the larger constructive uses of imagination there is hardly a trace. Generalization, where it is employed, is logical, not a matter of intuition; and there is no vision of an ideal world. Neither is the sense of fact much in evidence. The subjectmatter is largely abstract theory; and when the writer turns aside to illustrate by concrete instances, we get the impression, not of a first hand reaction from real men and books, but of the clever retailing of conventional estim

ates.

Our examination of this poem, then, leads to the conclusion, that it does not contain