With
all their alertness, with all their wide outlook, with all their zeal
for classical models, the men of that time were too much of children,
too much beneath the spell of their own genius, to be critics. Compare
them with the great writers of other ages; and we feel instinctively
that, in spite of their surroundings, they have far more of vital
kindred with Homer or the creators of the mediaval epic, than with the
Greek dramatists--Aschylus excepted--or with Dante or with Goethe. The
"freshness of the early world" is still upon them; neither they nor
their contemporaries were born to the task of weighing and pondering,
which is the birthright of the critic.
It was far otherwise with the men of the Restoration. The creative
impulse of a century had at length spent its force. For the first time
since Wyatt and Surrey, England deserted the great themes of literature,
the heroic passions of Tamburlaine and Faustus, of Lear and Othello,
for the trivial round of social portraiture and didactic discourse;
for _Essays on Satire_ and _on Translated Verse_, for the Tea-Table
of the _Spectator_, for dreary exercises on the _Pleasures of the
Imagination_ and the _Art of Preserving Health_.
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