n Translated Verse_. Of the same
kind were Addison's epistle to Sacheverel, entitled _An Account of the
Greatest English Poets_, and Pope's _Essay on Criticism_, 1711, which
was nothing more than versified maxims of rhetoric, put with Pope's
usual point and brilliancy. The classicism of the 18th century, it has
been said, was a classicism in red heels and a periwig. It was Latin
rather than Greek; it turned to the least imaginative side of Latin
literature and found its models, not in Vergil, Catullus, and Lucretius,
but in the satires, epistles, and didactic pieces of Juvenal, Horace,
and Persius.

The chosen medium of the new poetry was the heroic couplet. This had, of
course, been used before by English poets as far back as Chaucer. The
greater part of the _Canterbury Tales_ was written in heroic couplets.
But now a new strength and precision were given to the familiar measure
by imprisoning the sense within the limit of the couplet, and by
treating each line as also a unit in itself. Edmund Waller had written
verse of this kind as early as the reign of Charles I. He, said Dryden,
"first showed us to conclude the sense most commonly in distichs, which,
in the verse of those before him, runs on for so many lines together
that the reader is out of breath to overtake it." Sir John Denham, also,
in his _Cooper's Hill_, 1643, had written such verse as this:

O, could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example as it is my theme!
Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full.

Here we have the regular flow, and the nice balance between the first
and second member of each couplet, and the first and second part of each
line, which characterized the verse of Dryden and Pope.

Waller was smooth, but Dryden taught to join
The varying verse, the full resounding line,
The long resounding march and energy divine.

Thus wrote Pope, using for the nonce the triplet and alexandrine by
which Dryden frequently varied the couplet. Pope himself added a greater
neatness and polish to Dryden's verse and brought the system to such
monotonous perfection that he "made poetry a mere mechanic art."

The lyrical poetry of this generation was almost entirely worthless. The
dissolute wits of Charles the Second's court, Sedley, Rochester,
Sackville, and the "mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease," threw off a
few amatory trifles; but the age was not spontaneous or sinc