pecific experience, the vital fact."[14]
Classical tragedy, _e.g._, undertook to present only the universal,
abstract, permanent truths of human character and passion.[15] The
impression of the mysterious East upon modern travelers and poets like
Byron, Southey, De Quincey, Moore, Hugo,[16] Ruckert, and Gerard de
Nerval, has no counterpart in the eighteenth century. The Oriental
allegory or moral apologue, as practiced by Addison in such papers as
"The Vision of Mirza," and by Johnson in "Rasselas," is rather faintly
colored and gets what color it has from the Old Testament. It is
significant that the romantic Collins endeavored to give a novel turn to
the decayed pastoral by writing a number of "Oriental Eclogues," in which
dervishes and camel-drivers took the place of shepherds, but the
experiment was not a lucky one. Milton had more of the East in his
imagination than any of his successors. His "vulture on Imaus bred,
whose snowy ridge the roving Tartar bounds"; his "plain of Sericana where
Chinese drive their cany wagons light"; his "utmost Indian isle
Taprobane," are touches of the picturesque which anticipate a more modern
mood than Addison's.

"The difference," says Matthew Arnold, "between genuine poetry and the
poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school is briefly this: their
poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is
conceived and composed in the soul." The representative minds of the
eighteenth century were such as Voltaire, the master of persiflage,
destroying superstition with his _souriere hideux_; Gibbon, "the lord of
irony," "sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer"; and Hume, with his
thorough-going philosophic skepticism, his dry Toryism, and cool contempt
for "zeal" of any kind. The characteristic products of the era were
satire, burlesque, and travesty: "Hudibras," "Absalom and Achitophel,"
"The Way of the World," "Gulliver's Travels" and "The Rape of the Lock."
There is a whole literature of mockery: parodies like Prior's "Ballad on
the Taking of Namur" and "The Country Mouse and the City Mouse";
Buckingham's "Rehearsal" and Swift's "Meditation on a Broomstick";
mock-heroics, like the "Dunciad" and "MacFlecknoe" and Garth's
"Dispensary," and John Phillips' "Splendid Shilling" and Addison's
"Machinae Gesticulantes"; Prior's "Alma," a burlesque of philosophy;
Gay's "Trivia" and "The Shepherd's Week," and "The Beggars' Opera"-a
"Newgate pastoral"; "Town Eclogues" by Swi