this class, on _The Alliance of Education
and Government_. These poems were discredited by the publication of _The
Sugar-Cane_ (1764), a long verse-treatise about the cultivation of sugar
by negroes in the West Indies, by James Grainger (1721-1766), but,
though liable to ridicule, such versified treatises continued to
appear. Whether so great a writer as Cowper is to be counted among the
didactic poets is a question on which readers of _The Task_ may be
divided; this poem belongs rather to the class of descriptive poetry,
but a strong didactic tendency is visible in parts of it. Perhaps the
latest frankly educational poem which enjoyed a great popularity was
_The Course of Time_ by Robert Pollok (1798-1827), in which a system of
Calvinistic divinity is laid down with severity and in the pomp of blank
verse. This kind of literature had already been exposed, and
discouraged, by the teaching of Wordsworth, who had insisted on the
imperative necessity of charging all poetry with imagination and
passion. Oddly enough, _The Excursion_ of Wordsworth himself is perhaps
the most didactic poem of the 19th century, but it must be acknowledged
that his influence, in this direction, was saner than his practice.
Since the days of Coleridge and Shelley it has been almost impossible to
conceive a poet of any value composing in verse a work written with the
purpose of inculcating useful information.

The history of didactic poetry in France repeats, in great measure, but
in drearier language, that of England. Boileau, like Pope, but with a
more definite purpose as a teacher, offered instruction in his _Art
poetique_ and in his _Epistles_. But his doctrine was always literary,
not purely educational. At the beginning of the 18th century, the
younger Racine (1692-1763) wrote sermons in verse, and at the close of
it the Abbe Delille (1738-1813) tried to imitate Virgil in poems about
horticulture. Between these two there lies a vast mass of verse written
for the indulgence of intellect rather than at the dictates of the
heart; wherever this aims at increasing knowledge, it at once becomes
basely and flatly didactic. There is nothing in French literature of the
transitional class that deserves mention beside _The Task_ or _The
Excursion_.

During the century which preceded the Romantic revival of poetry in
Germany, didactic verse was cultivated in that country on the lines of
imitation of the French, but with a greater dryness and on a lowe