_or tinsel of Tasso.--_Spectator_, No. 5.

[23] _Spectator_, No. 419.

[24] See his "Life of Collins."

[25] _Spectator_, No. 40.

[26] "The Verse": Preface to "Paradise Lost."

[27] Dedicatory epistle to "The Rival Ladies."

[28] Mr. Gosse says that a sonnet by Pope's friend Walsh is the only one
"written in English between Milton's in 1658, and Warton's about 1750,"
Ward's "English Poets," Vol. III, p. 7. The statement would have been
more precise if he had said published instead of _written_.

[29] "History of the Gothic Revival," pp. 49-50 (edition of 1872).

[30] Palgrave says that the poetry of passion was deformed, after 1660, by
"levity and an artificial time"; and that it lay "almost dormant for the
hundred years between the days of Wither and Suckling and the days of
Burns and Cowper," "Golden Treasury" (Sever and Francis edition, 1866).
pp. 379-80.

[31] Excepting the "Nocturnal Reverie" of Lady Winchelsea, and a passage
or two in the "Windsor Forest" of Pope, the poetry of the period
intervening between the publication of the "Paradise Lost" and the
"Seasons" [1667-1726] does not contain a single new image of external
nature.--_Wordsworth. Appendix to Lyrical Ballads_, (1815).

[32] _Gild_ is a perfect earmark of eighteenth-century descriptive verse:
the shore is gilded and so are groves, clouds, etc. Contentment gilds
the scene, and the stars gild the gloomy night (Parnell) or the glowing
pole (Pope).

[33] Johnson, "Prologue at the Opening of Drury Lane," 1747.

[34] See Coleridge, "Biographia Literaria," chap. Xviii

[35] Essay on Pope, in "My Study Windows."

[36] "From Shakespere to Pope," pp. 9-11.

CHAPTER III.

The Spenserians

Dissatisfaction with a prevalent mood or fashion in literature is apt to
express itself either in a fresh and independent criticism of life, or in
a reversion to older types. But, as original creative genius is not
always forthcoming, a literary revolution commonly begins with imitation.
It seeks inspiration in the past, and substitutes a new set of models as
different as possible from those which it finds currently followed. In
every country of Europe the classical tradition had hidden whatever was
most national, most individual, in its earlier culture, under a smooth,
uniform veneer. To break away from modern convention, England and
Germany, and afterward France, went back to ancient springs of national
life; not always, at first, wisely, b