The classicism of the 18th century, it has
been said, was a classicism in red heels and a periwig. It was Latin
rather than Greek; it turned to the least imaginative side of Latin
literature and found its models, not in Vergil, Catullus, and Lucretius,
but in the satires, epistles, and didactic pieces of Juvenal, Horace,
and Persius.
The chosen medium of the new poetry was the heroic couplet. This had, of
course, been used before by English poets as far back as Chaucer. The
greater part of the _Canterbury Tales_ was written in heroic couplets.
But now a new strength and precision were given to the familiar measure
by imprisoning the sense within the limit of the couplet, and by
treating each line as also a unit in itself. Edmund Waller had written
verse of this kind as early as the reign of Charles I. He, said Dryden,
"first showed us to conclude the sense most commonly in distichs, which,
in the verse of those before him, runs on for so many lines together
that the reader is out of breath to overtake it." Sir John Denham, also,
in his _Cooper's Hill_, 1643, had written such verse as this:
O, could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example as it is my theme!
Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full.
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