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Lovely Thais sits beside thee,

Take the good the gods provide thee.

The many rend the skies with loud applause;

So Love was crown'd, but Musique won the cause.

The prince, unable to conceal his pain,

Gaz'd on the fair

Who caus'd his care,

And sigh'd and look'd, sigh'd and look'd,
Sigh'd and look'd, and sigh'd again :

At length, with love and wine at once oppress'd,
The vanquish'd victor sunk upon her breast.

Chorus

The prince, unable to conceal his pain,
Gaz'd on the fair

Who caus'd his care,

And sigh'd and look'd, sigh'd and look'd,
Sigh'd and look'd, and sigh'd again :
At length, with love and wine at once oppress'd,
The vanquish'd victor sunk upon her breast.

6

Now strike the golden lyre again;

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A lowder yet, and yet a lowder strain.

Break his bands of sleep asunder,

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And rouze him, like a rattling peal of thunder.

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Those are Grecian ghosts, that in battail were slayn,

And unbury'd remain
Inglorious on the plain :
Give the vengeance due

To the valiant crew.

Behold how they toss their torches on high,
How they point to the Persian abodes,

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And glitt'ring temples of their hostile gods.

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The princes applaud with a furious joy;

And the king seyz'd a flambeau with zeal to destroy;
Thais led the way,

To light him to his prey,

And, like another Hellen, fir'd another Troy.

Chorus

And the king seyz'd a flambeau with zeal to destroy;
Thais led the way,

To light him to his prey,

And, like another Hellen, fir'd another Troy.

7

Thus, long ago,

Ere heaving bellows learn'd to blow,
While organs yet were mute,

Timotheus, to his breathing flute

And sounding lyre,

Cou'd swell the soul to rage, or kindle soft desire.

At last divine Cecilia came,

Inventress of the vocal frame;

Enlarg'd the former narrow bounds,

150

155

160

The sweet enthusiast, from her sacred store,

And added length to solemn sounds,

165

With Nature's mother-wit, and arts unknown before.

Let old Timotheus yield the prize,

Or both divide the crown:

He rais'd a mortal to the skies;

She drew an angel down.

170

Chorus

At last divine Cecilia came,

Inventress of the vocal frame;

The sweet enthusiast, from her sacred store,
Enlarg'd the former narrow bounds,

And added length to solemn sounds,

175

With Nature's mother-wit, and arts unknown before.

Let old Timotheus yield the prize,

Or both divide the crown:

He rais'd a mortal to the skies;

She drew an angel down.

180

CHAPTER VI

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

1. THE CLASSICAL OR CONVENTIONAL SCHOOL

THE intellectual and artificial school of poetry which, as we have said, arose not long after the accession of Charles II, continued, without any considerable change, through the greater part of the eighteenth century. Taste was still largely governed by precepts borrowed from France, which, in its turn, pretended to be governed by the practice of the masters of Greece and Rome. But the French cultivated few of the ancient masters, save Horace and Juvenal, and these they followed at a very decided distance. Poetry in England remained chiefly satirical, didactic, pseudo-philosophical. In their desire to avoid the extravagances of the later Elizabethans, writers carefully avoided not only the recklessly imaginative manner and the free and easy blankverse form, but even the subjects of the earlier poetry. Dramas and lyrics expressing the passions of man, his conduct in the moment of dramatic activity, his yearning for adventure and his love of nature, were discarded for critical essays in verse upon the institutions of man and the conventions of society, or stanzas of rhetorical diction and ingenious wit tinkling in the breeze of artificial emotion. The attempt of any poet to overleap the boundaries within which the set rules of the art had confined him was regarded as proof that he was really no poet. Nothing could be beautiful if irregularly beautiful. Hence individuality was repressed, and writers retained scarcely any other mark of personal distinction than the degree in which wit was keen or style laboriously elegant.

The uniformity of style in the writers of this school is accentuated by the inflexibility of the verse form which it had adopted, and which held almost complete sway in English poetry for over a hundred years. This was the heroic couplet, consisting of two iambic pentameter lines connected by rhyme a form of which Macaulay says in his essay on Addison: "The art of arranging words in this measure, so that the

lines may flow smoothly, that the accents may fall correctly, that the rhymes may strike the ear strongly, and that there may be a pause at the end of every distich, is an art as mechanical as that of mending a kettle or shoeing a horse, and may be learned by any human being who has sense enough to learn anything. But, like other mechanical arts, it was gradually improved by means of many experiments and many failures. It was reserved for Pope to discover the trick, to make himself complete master of it, and to teach it to everybody else." Though Macaulay, in this passage, shows not a little of his characteristic dogmatism, and underestimates the skill requisite to write good heroic couplets, at least two of his statements are unquestionably true: first, that ALEXANDER POPE made himself absolute master of this form of verse; and secondly, that many of his contemporaries imitated him. These two facts explain Pope's leadership of what a distinguished critic designates as the "artificial-conventional school of verse," with its ideals of emotional reserve and mental equipoise, its methods of formal correctness, point, and finish. The heroic couplet in which they wrote was, as we have already noticed, an old and common English measure. But in Chaucer and other poets who had early used the couplet, as well as in Keats and Swinburne and other poets of the nineteenth century who have since employed it, the thought runs on connectedly from line to line and couplet to couplet, stopping to take breath somewhere within a line, if it pleases, in a manner that would not have been tolerated by the rule of the end-stopt couplet and unit line used in the eighteenth century (see INTRODUCTION). The influence of Dryden's personality had been such as to popularize even rugged and vigorous couplets as a vehicle of expression. When Pope met the demands of his age, not only with couplets perfect in their sprightliness and polish, but also with phraseology unparalleled for conciseness and lucidity, he rose at once to a position of acknowledged leadership among the poets of his time. The influences of this dictatorship were both bad and good. On the one hand, scores of writers who, as Macaulay says, 66 never blundered on one happy thought or expression," in their attempt to follow the lead of Pope, inflicted upon the world "reams of couplets" entirely mechanical and artificial, and utterly devoid of poetry. On the other hand, subsequent English poetry could ill afford to dispense with the characteristics indirectly derived from the manner of Pope and his disciples. These writers of the "Classical school" labored from the first for a neatness, condensation, and perfection of style, such as had hitherto been strangers to English verse, but which, once attained, have never since been wholly disregarded. No poet to-day could write in the untrained, formless manner that marks, and so frequently mars, some very excellent early Elizabethans. The influence of Pope's

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