Many writings and events of the time may
doubtless be understood and enjoyed by readers ignorant of the classics,
but to them the heart and spirit of the period as a whole will hardly be
revealed. Poetry, philosophy, history, biography, controversy, sermons,
correspondence, even conversation,--all have come down to us from the
age of Milton either written in or so touched with Latin that one is
compelled to enter seventeenth century England by way of Rome as Rome
must be entered by way of Athens."
Great as was the vogue of Latin in the earlier centuries, it was the
first half of the eighteenth, the most critical period in English
letters, that realized to the full the virtues of Horace. His words in
the _Ars Poetica_ "were accepted, even more widely than the laws of
Aristotle, as the standard of critical judgment. Addison and Steele by
their choice of mottoes for their periodicals, Prior by his adoption of
a type of lyric that has since his time been designated as Horatian, and
Pope with his imposing series of _Imitations_, gave such an impulse to
the already widespread interest that it was carried on through the whole
of the century.
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