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source of the notion which, losing sight of his unquestionable worth as a poet and a translator, has assigned to Sandys an undue prominence in the history of English versification. Although we do Waller wrong to consider him the conscious originator of that revolution in poetry which substituted for the ideals of Spenser, Jonson or Donne those of Dryden and Pope, his age was right in declaring him the true exponent of the new classicism," for it was in Waller, above all others, that the tendencies of conservatism in thought, diction, and versification at length became confirmed into a system which gave laws to English poetry for a hundred and fifty years. Waller had practised the old manner with a greater freedom than was ever that of Sandys; but the earlier part of Waller's career as a poet is difficult to make out, for when he had achieved success in the new and fashionable style, he became solicitous, like Malherbe, to have the world believe that his classicism began in his cradle.1 In Waller we have a man the essence of whose character was time-serving, a man to whom ideals were nothing, but to whom immediate worldly success, whether in politics or letters, was much; a man whose very unoriginality and easy adaptability made him precisely the person to fill what Mr. Gosse deftly calls the post of "coryphæus of the long procession of the commonplace." The instinct of his followers was right in singling him out for that position of historical eminence; not because, as a boy, he sat down and deliberately resolved on a new species of poetry, but because 1769. It has recently been used by Mr. Courthope in the preface of his History of English Poetry as a point of departure for the discussion of that interesting question, How should a history of English poetry be written ?

1 Cf. Ode à Louis XIII, partant pour la Rochelle, ed. Malherbe, Paris, 1823, p. 75:

Les puissantes faveurs, dont Parnasse m'honore

Non loin de mon berceau commencèrent leur cours.

he chose out with unerring precision just those qualities of thought, form, and diction which appealed to the people of his age, and wrote and rewrote his poetry in conformity therewith. In Carew, Waller found the quintessence of vers de société and "reformed" it of its excessive laces and falling bands to congruity with the greater formality which governed the costume of the succeeding century. In Sandys, Fairfax, Drummond, and some others he found an increasing love of that regularity of rhythm which results from a general correspondence of length of phrase with length of measure, and he found, as well, a smoothness and sweetness of diction, in which these poets departed measurably from their immediate contemporaries and preserved something of the mellifluousness of the Spenserians. Lastly, in Jonson and the Elizabethan satirists he found, amongst much with which he was in little sympathy, a minute attention to the niceties of expression, a kind of spruce antithetical diction, and a versification of a constructiveness suited to the epigrammatic form in which the thought was often cast. With almost feminine tact Waller applied these things to his unoriginal but cleverly chosen subject-matter, and in the union of the two he wrought his success.

As we approach the end of the seventeenth century, the lyrists become fewer. The Elizabethan lyric, whose province was the whole world, which dignified great or petty themes alike with its fervid sincerity, has given place to a product more and more restricted to a conventional treatment of subjects within an ever-narrowing range. An occasional poet, absorbed in another art, like Thomas Flatman, a man of genuine poetic spirit, might neglect to learn the mannerisms of contemporary poetic craft; or, living without the popular literary current, might sing, as did Norris of Bemerton, a slender, independent strain. But in the main the lyric had ceased to be an instrument for the expression

of literary thought, although it remained a plaything for the idle hours of writers whose business was with occasional verse, social satire, heroic drama, or the comedy of a "Utopia of gallantry." To Dorset, Sedley, Rochester, and Aphara Behn, a dissolute, cynical, godless rout of Comus even to Dryden himself a lyric is a love-song and nothing more. It may be languishing or disdainful, passionate or satirical; whether frank or indirect in its animalism, the subject is ever love, or what went by that much-abused name in the eign of the Merry Monarch. Although the true note recurs occasionally in the faltering quavers of Anne, Marchioness of Wharton, or the stronger tones of Katherine Philips, John Wilson the dramatist, or John Oldmixon, it is not too much to say that the lyric had all but disappeared from English literature before the year 1700. A style the essence of which is surprise, which demands the snap of the cracker of wit in every couplet and yet maintains a rigid adherence to conventions in metre, phrase, and manner, is precisely the style to destroy the lyric, the soul of which is its simplicity, artistic freedom, and inevitability. Aside from an occasional instance in which the poetry which was in the heart of John Dryden asserted itself, despite his sophistication and venal following of the lower tastes of his age, and aside from a few sincere and dainty little lyrics that Matthew Prior threw off in the intervals of his supposedly more valuable labors in epic and occasional verse, there is scarcely a lyric of the last quarter of the seventeenth century, from the hand of those poets who were in the prevailing mode, which rings unmistakably true. When Congreve, after repeating the hackneyed comparison of the rise of the sun with the rising of Sabrina, distinguishes the effects of these two luminaries upon mankind by exclaiming

How many by his warmth will live!

How many will her coldness kill!

we are tickled with his wit, if we have not neard the thing too often. To be moved by the simple and beautiful expression of an emotion which we are fain to repeat again and again because of the pleasure it gives us, is to be moved as poetry can move. To witness the pyrotechnics of the most consummate wit and ingenuity once is enough; the fuse and powder are consumed, and nothing but the dead design, sullied with smoke, is left. What is worse, we have not always the pyrotechnics of wit, but too commonly, in the lyric of this age, a false product written with the rhetorician's condescension to what he feels an inferior species of literature, a condescension like to nothing but the contemporary attitude towards the inferior capacity and understanding of "females," with its mingled air of flattery and gallantry, itself an affront. Thus after a sojourn with the Elizabethan and seventeenth-century lyrists it becomes difficult to support the insipidity of this later literature of Chloe, Celia, and Dorinda, unless it be seasoned with the salt of cynicism, and then the product turns out to be something else, a something, whatever its merit, forever untranslatable into the terms of true poetry.