The classic, or pseudo-classic, period of English literature lasted from
the middle of the seventeenth till the end of the eighteenth century.
Inasmuch as the romantic revival was a protest against this reigning
mode, it becomes necessary to inquire a little more closely what we mean
when we say that the time of Queen Anne and the first two Georges was our
Augustan or classical age. In what sense was it classical? And was it
any more classical than the time of Milton, for example, or the time of
Landor? If the "Dunciad," and the "Essay on Man," are classical, what is
Keats' "Hyperion"? And with what propriety can we bring under a common
rubric things so far asunder as Prior's "Carmen Seculare" and Tennyson's
"Ulysses," or as Gay's "Trivia" and Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon"?
Evidently the Queen Anne writers took hold of the antique by a different
side from our nineteenth-century poets. Their classicism was of a
special type. It was, as has been often pointed out, more Latin than
Greek, and more French than Latin.[6] It was, as has likewise been said,
"a classicism in red heels and a periwig." Victor Hugo speaks of "cette
poésie fardée, mouchetée, poudrée, du dix-huitième siècle, cette
litèrature à paniers, à pompons et à falbalas."[7] The costumes of
Watteau contrast with the simple folds of Greek drapery very much as the
"Rape of the Lock," contrasts with the Iliad, or one of Pope's pastorals
with an idyl of Theocritus. The times were artificial in poetry as in
dress--

"Tea-cup times of hood and hoop,
And when the patch was worn."

Gentlemen wore powdered wigs instead of their own hair, and the power and
the wig both got into their writing. _Perruque_ was the nickname applied
to the classicists by the French romanticists of Hugo's generation, who