XII. The Eighteenth Century
The summary of the history of eighteenth-century prosody has been foreshadowed in the above lines. Addison, Garth, and others follow Dryden; and Pope further "corrects" him in a couplet which becomes polished to the extreme, but, when handled without almost supreme genius, is distinctly monotonous. And this couplet, with almost complete and definite acceptance by theorists and little overt protest on the part of practitioners, assumes the position of premier metre in English for long poems, continuing to hold it throughout the hundred years. Lyric, too, confines itself to relatively few forms, chiefly iambic—the "common" and "long" measure, the Romance-six, the decasyllabic quatrain, the regular or irregular Pindaric ode. There are, however, certain privileged exceptions to the uniformity. Two poets not in their first youth at the beginning of the century—Prior and Swift—secure a position for the light octosyllable and for anapæstic measures; Gray and Collins raise the ode; Thomson—preceded by one or two minor poets, and followed by a considerable number, some of whom are not so minor—takes up "the manner of Milton," that is to say, blank verse. Even in the first half of the century Shenstone timidly pleads for trisyllabic substitution, while in the second half Chatterton and Blake boldly practise it; and that study of old (and especially ballad) English verse, of which Percy's Reliques is the central example, slowly but surely leads the way to a restoration of its principles.