poetry,--a school without truth of sentiment or harmony of
versification,--without the powers of an earlier, or the
correctness of a later age,--was left to enjoy undisputed
ascendency. A vicious ingenuity, a morbid quickness to perceive
resemblances and analogies between things apparently
heterogeneous, constituted almost its only claim to admiration.
Suckling was dead. Milton was absorbed in political and
theological controversy. If Waller differed from the Cowleian
sect of writers, he differed for the worse. He had as little
poetry as they, and much less wit; nor is the languor of his
verses less offensive than the ruggedness of theirs. In Denham
alone the faint dawn of a better manner was discernible.

But, low as was the state of our poetry during the civil war and
the Protectorate, a still deeper fall was at hand. Hitherto our
literature had been idiomatic. In mind as in situation we had
been islanders. The revolutions in our taste, like the
revolutions in our government, had been settled without the
interference of strangers. Had this state of things continued,
the same just principles of reasoning which, about this time,
were applied with unprecedented success to every part of
philosophy would soon have conducted our ancestors to a sounder
code of criticism. There were already strong signs of
improvement. Our prose had at length worked itself clear from
those quaint conceits which still deformed almost every metrical
composition. The parliamentary debates, and the diplomatic
correspondence of that eventful period, had contributed much to
this reform. In such bustling times, it was absolutely necessary
to speak and write to the purpose. The absurdities of Puritanism
had, perhaps, done more. At the time when that odious style,