wore their hair long and flowing--_cheveaux mérovigiennes_--and affected
an _outré_ freedom in the cut and color of their clothes. Similarly the
Byronic collar became, all over Europe, the symbol of daring independence
in matters of taste and opinion. Its careless roll, which left the
throat exposed, seemed to assist the liberty of nature against cramping
conventions.

The leading Queen Anne writers are so well known that a somewhat general
description of the literary situation in England at the time of Pope's
death (1744) will serve as an answer to the question, how was the
eighteenth century classical. It was remarked by Thomas Warton[8] that,
at the first revival of letters in the sixteenth century, our authors
were more struck by the marvelous fables and inventions of ancient poets
than by the justness of their conceptions and the purity of their style.
In other words, the men of the renaissance apprehended the ancient
literature as poets: the men of the _Éclaircissement_ apprehended them as
critics. In Elizabeth's day the new learning stimulated English genius
to creative activity. In royal progresses, court masques, Lord Mayors'
shows, and public pageants of all kinds, mythology ran mad. "Every
procession was a pantheon." But the poets were not careful to keep the
two worlds of pagan antiquity and mediaeval Christianity distinct. The
art of the renaissance was the flower of a double root, and the artists
used their complex stuff naïvely. The "Faërie Queene" is the typical
work of the English renaissance; there hamadryads, satyrs, and river gods
mingle unblushingly with knights, dragons, sorcerers, hermits, and
personified vices and virtues. The "machinery" of Homer and Vergil--the
"machinery" of the "Seven Champions of Christendom" and the "Roman de la
Rose"! This was not shocking to Spenser's contemporaries, but it seemed
quite shocking to classical critics a century later. Even Milton, the
greatest scholar among English poets, but whose imagination was a strong