u insisted
upon the need of discarding tawdry ornaments of style and cultivating
simplicity, clearness, propriety, decorum, moderation; above all, good
sense. The new Academy, founded to guard the purity of the French
language, lent its weight to the precepts of the critics, who applied the
rules of Aristotle, as commented by Longinus and Horace, to modern
conditions. The appearance of a number of admirable writers--Corneille,
Moliere, Racine, Bossuet, La Fontaine, La Bruyere--simultaneously with
this critical movement, gave an authority to the new French literature
which enabled it to impose its principles upon England and Germany for
over a century. For the creative literature of France conformed its
practice, in the main, to the theory of French criticism; though not, in
the case of Regnier, without open defiance. This authority was
re-enforced by the political glories and social _eclat_ of the _siecle de
Louis Quatorze_

It happened that at this time the Stuart court was in exile, and in the
train of Henrietta Maria at Paris, or scattered elsewhere through France,
were many royalist men of letters, Etherege, Waller, Cowley, and others,
who brought back with them to England in 1660 an acquaintance with this
new French literature and a belief in its aesthetic code. That French
influence would have spread into England without the aid of these
political accidents is doubtless true, as it is also true that a reform
of English versification and poetic style would have worked itself out
upon native lines independent of foreign example, and even had there been
so such thing as French literature. Mr. Gosse has pointed out couplets
of Waller, written as early as 1623, which have the formal precision of
Pope's; and the famous passage about the Thames in Denham's "Cooper's
Hill" (1642) anticipates the best performance of Augustan verse:

"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."

However, as to the general fact of the powerful impact of French upon
English literary fashions, in the latter half of the seventeenth century,
there can be no dispute.[9]

This change of style was symptomatic of a corresponding change in the
national temper. It was the mission of the eighteenth century to assert
the universality of law and, at the same time, the sufficiency of the
re