A History of English Literature

the demonstrable. Hence the characteristic Restoration verse is satire of a
prosaic sort which scarcely belongs to poetry at all. More fortunate
results of the prevailing spirit were the gradual abandonment of the
conceits and irregularities of the 'metaphysical' poets, and, most
important, the perfecting of the highly regular rimed pentameter couplet,
the one great formal achievement of the time in verse. In prose style the
same tendencies resulted in a distinct advance. Thitherto English prose had
seldom attained to thorough conciseness and order; it had generally been
more or less formless or involved in sentence structure or pretentious in
general manner; but the Restoration writers substantially formed the more
logical and clear-cut manner which, generally speaking, has prevailed ever
since.
Quite consistent with this commonsense spirit, as the facts were then
interpreted, was the allegiance which Restoration writers rendered to the
literature of classical antiquity, an allegiance which has gained for this
period and the following half-century, where the same attitude was still
more strongly emphasized, the name 'pseudo-classical.' We have before noted
that the enthusiasm for Greek and Latin literature which so largely
underlay the Renaissance took in Ben Jonson and his followers, in part, the
form of a careful imitation of the external technique of the classical
writers. In France and Italy at the same time this tendency was still
stronger and much more general. The seventeenth century was the great
period of French tragedy (Corneille and Racine), which attempted to base
itself altogether on classical tragedy. Still more representative, however,
were the numerous Italian and French critics, who elaborated a complex
system of rules, among them, for tragedy, those of the 'three unities,'
which they believed to dominate classic literature. Many of these rules
were trivial and absurd, and the insistence of the critics upon them showed
an unfortunate inability to grasp the real spirit of the classic,
especially of Greek, literature. In all this, English writers and critics
of the Restoration period and the next half-century very commonly followed
the French and Italians deferentially. Hence it is that the literature of
the time is pseudo-classical (false classical) rather than true classical.
But this reduction of art to strict order and decorum, it should be clear,
was quite in accord with the whole spirit of the time.
One particular social institution of the period should be mentioned for its
connection with literature, namely the coffee houses, which, introduced
about the middle of the century, soon became very popular and influential.
They were, in our own idiom, cafes, where men met to sip coffee or
chocolate and discuss current topics. Later, in the next century, they
often developed into clubs.
MINOR WRITERS. The contempt which fell upon the Puritans as a deposed and
unpopular party found stinging literary expression in one of the most
famous of English satires, Samuel Butler's 'Hudibras.' Butler, a reserved
and saturnine man, spent much of his uneventful life in the employ
(sometimes as steward) of gentlemen and nobles, one of whom, a Puritan
officer, Sir Samuel Luke, was to serve as the central lay-figure for his
lampoon. 'Hudibras,' which appeared in three parts during a period of
fifteen years, is written, like previous English satires, in
rough-and-ready doggerel verse, in this case verse of octosyllabic couplets
and in the form of a mock-epic. It ridicules the intolerance and
sanctimonious hypocrisy of the Puritans as the Cavaliers insisted on seeing
them in the person of the absurd Sir Hudibras and his squire Ralph (partly
suggested by Cervantes' Don Quixote and Sancho). These sorry figures are
made to pass very unheroically through a series of burlesque adventures.
The chief power of the production lies in its fire of witty epigrams, many