Some of the later medieval allegories
are didactic or nothing. The first poem, however, which we can in any
reasonable way compare with the classic works of which we have been
speaking is the _Hundreth Pointes of Good Husbandrie_, published in 1557
by Thomas Tusser; these humble Georgics aimed at a practical description
of the whole art of English farming. Throughout the early part of the
17th century, when our national poetry was in its most vivid and
brilliant condition, the last thing a poet thought of doing was the
setting down of scientific facts in rhyme. We come across, however, one
or two writers who were as didactic as the age would permit them to be,
Samuel Daniel with his philosophy, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke with his
"treatises" of war and monarchy. After the Restoration, as the lyrical
element rapidly died out of English poetry, there was more and more room
left for educational rhetoric in verse. The poems about prosody, founded
upon Horace, and signed by John Sheffield, 3rd earl of Mulgrave
(1648-1721), and Lord Roscommon, were among the earliest purely didactic
verse-studies in English. John Philips deserves a certain pre-eminence,
as his poem called Cyder, in 1706, set the fashion which lasted all down
the 18th century, of writing precisely in verse about definite branches
of industry or employment. None of the greater poets of the age of Anne
quite succumbed to the practice, but there is a very distinct flavour of
the purely didactic about a great deal of the verse of Pope and Gay. In
such productions as Gilbert West's (1703-1756) _Education_, Dyer's
_Fleece_, and Somerville's _Chase_, we see technical information put
forward as the central aim of the poet. Instead of a passionate
pleasure, or at least an uplifted enthusiasm, being the poet's object,
he frankly admits that, first and foremost, he has some facts about wool
or dogs or schoolmasters which he wishes to bring home to his readers,
and that, secondly, he consents to use verse, as brilliantly as he can,
for the purpose of gilding the pill and attracting an unwilling
attention. As we descend the 18th century, these works become more and
more numerous, and more dry, especially when opposed by the descriptive
and rural poets of the school of Thomson, the poet of _The Seasons_. But
Thomson himself wrote a huge poem of _Liberty_ (1732), for which we have
no name if we must not call it didactic. Even Gray began, though he
failed to finish, a work of