Elizabethan poets. But, on the higher side, it was no less positive,
though doubtless far less noble, than the ideal it displaced.

The great writers of the eighty years following the Restoration were
consumed by a passion for observation--observation of the men and
things that lay immediately around them. They may have seen but little;
but what they did see, they grasped with surprising force and clearness.
They may not have gone far beneath the surface; but, so far as they
went, their work was a model of acuteness and precision. This was the
secret of their power. To this may be traced their victory in the
various tasks that they undertook.

Hence, on the one hand, their success in painting the manners of their
own day--a task from which, with some notable exceptions, the greatest
of the Elizabethans had been apt to shrink, as from something alien
to their genius; and, on the other hand, the range and keenness of
their satire. Hence, finally, the originality of their work in
criticism, and their new departure in philosophy. The energies of these
men were diverse: but all sprang from the same root--from their
invincible resolve to see and understand their world; to probe life,
as they knew it, to the bottom.

Thus the new turn given to criticism by Dryden was part of a far-
reaching intellectual movement; a movement no less positive and self-
contained than, in another aspect, it was negative and reactionary.
And it is only when taken as part of that movement, as side by side
with the philosophy of Locke and the satire of Swift or Pope, that its
true meaning can be understood. Nor is it the least important or the
least attractive of Dryden's qualities, as a critic, that both the
positive and the negative elements of the prevailing tendency--both