English Poets of the Eighteenth Century by Unknown
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also obscurity and extravagance; men whom the love of women too often
impelled to utter fantastic hyperbole, and the love of honor to glorify preposterous adventures; quarrelsome men, who assailed their opponents with rancorous personalities; doctrinaires, who employed their fiery energy of mind in the creation of rigid systems of religion and government; uncompromising men, who devoted to the support of those systems their fortunes and lives, drenched the land in the blood of a civil war, executed a king, presently restored his dynasty, and finally exiled it again, thus maintaining during half a century a general insecurity of life and property which checked the finer growths of civilization. Their successors trusted that the compromise of 1688 had reduced political and sectarian affairs to a state of calm equilibrium; and they desired to cultivate the fruits of serenity by fostering in all things the spirit of moderation. In poetry, as in life, they tended more and more to discountenance manifestations of vehemence. Even the poetry of Dryden, with its reflections of the stormy days through which he had struggled, seemed to them, though gloriously leading the way toward perfection, to fall short of equability of temper and smoothness of form. To work like Defoe's _True-Born Englishman_ (1701) and _Hymn to the Pillory_ (1703), combative in spirit and free in style, they gave only guarded and temporary approval. Inevitably the change of mood entailed losses. Sir Henry Wotton's _Character of a Happy Life_ (c. 1614) treats the same theme as Pomfret's _Choice_; but Pomfret's contemporaries were rarely if ever visited by such gleams as shine in Wotton's lines describing the happy man as one who never understood How deepest wounds are given by praise, |
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