We have attempted to show that, as knowledge is extended and as
the reason develops itself, the imitative arts decay. We should,
therefore, expect that the corruption of poetry would commence in
the educated classes of society. And this, in fact, is almost
constantly the case. The few great works of imagination which
appear in a critical age are, almost without exception, the works
of uneducated men. Thus, at a time when persons of quality
translated French romances, and when the universities celebrated
royal deaths in verses about tritons and fauns, a preaching
tinker produced the Pilgrim's Progress. And thus a ploughman
startled a generation which had thought Hayley and Beattie great
poets, with the adventures of Tam O'Shanter. Even in the latter
part of the reign of Elizabeth the fashionable poetry had
degenerated. It retained few vestiges of the imagination of
earlier times. It had not yet been subjected to the rules of
good taste. Affectation had completely tainted madrigals and
sonnets. The grotesque conceits and the tuneless numbers of
Donne were, in the time of James, the favourite models of
composition at Whitehall and at the Temple. But, though the
literature of the Court was in its decay, the literature of the
people was in its perfection. The Muses had taken sanctuary in
the theatres, the haunts of a class whose taste was not better
than that of the Right Honourables and singular good Lords who
admired metaphysical love-verses, but whose imagination retained
all its freshness and vigour; whose censure and approbation might
be erroneously bestowed, but whose tears and laughter was never
in the wrong. The infection which had tainted lyric and didactic
poetry had but slightly and partially touched the drama. While
the noble and the learned were comparing eyes to burning-glasses,