Malherbe was inculcating its principles, Corneille and Moliere were
practicing its tenets in their plays, and Boileau was following its
rules in his satires, when Waller and his associates came in contact
with this influence. The tendency was distinctly toward formality and
conventionality. Surfeited with the eccentricities and far-fetched
conceits of the Marinists, the exiled Englishmen welcomed the change;
they espoused the French principles; and when at the Restoration they
returned to England with their king, whose taste had been trained in the
same school, they began at once to formalize and conventionalize English
poetry. The writers of the past, even the greatest writers of the past,
were regarded as men of genius, but without art; and English poetry was
thenceforth, in Dryden's own words, to start with Waller.

Under the newly adopted canons of French taste, narrative and didactic
verse, or satire, took first place. Blank verse was tabooed as too
prose-like; so, too, were the enjambed rhymes. A succession of rhymed
pentameter couplets, with the sense complete in each couplet, was set
forth as the proper vehicle for poetry; and this unenjambed distich
fettered English verse for three-quarters of a century. In the drama the
characters must be noble, the language dignified; the metrical form must
be the rhymed couplet, and the unities of time, place, and action must
be observed.

Such, in brief, were the principles of French Classicism as applied to
English poetry, principles of which Dryden was the first great exponent,
and which Pope in the next generation carried to absolute perfection.
Waller, Marvell, and Cowley all tried their pens in the new method,
Cowley with least success; and they were the poets in vogue when Dryden
himself first attracted attention. Denham quite caught the favor of the
critics with his mild conventionalities; the Earl of Roscommon delighted