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
reason to discover the laws, which govern in every province: a service
which we now, perhaps, undervalue in our impatience with the formalism
which was its outward sign. Hence its dislike of irregularity in art and
irrationality in religion. England, in particular, was tired of
unchartered freedom, of spiritual as well as of literary anarchy. The
religious tension of the Commonwealth period had relaxed--men cannot be
always at the heroic pitch--and theological disputes had issued in