xc
every Thing) consulted upon her reformation, and endeavoured to abstract her to Metaphysical Idea's, and Scholastical Quiddities, denuding her of her own Habits, and those Ornaments with which she hath amused the World some Thousand Years. Poesy is not a Thing that is yet in the finding and search, or which may be otherwise found out, being already condescended upon by all Nations, and as it were established jure Gentium, amongst Greeks, Romans, Italians, French, Spaniards. Neither do I think that a good Piece of Poesy, which Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Petrarch, Bartas, Ronsard, Boscan, Garcilasso, (if they were alive, and had that Language) could not understand, and reach the Sense of the Writer. . . . What is not like the Ancients and conform to those Rules which hath been agreed unto by all Times, may (indeed) be something like unto Poesy, but it is no more Poesy than a Monster is a Man."[1] This is probably the first use of the term metaphysical in connection with the group of poets to which it was afterward applied by Dryden, Pope, and Dr. Johnson. While the passage consists of traditional classical formulae, these for the writer were by no means dead or empty; and they express the attitude of himself and his friends as clearly as they anticipate the view of poetry which was to prevail during the next hundred and fifty years.
Though not in the court, Drummond was in close touch with it, and would voice its tastes so far as these were determined by the King and his household intimates. The verse of these writers, it is true, was in many ways different from that of Waller and the later school, especially in the absence of stereotyped epithet, smart antithesis, and a general air of urbanity. But conservatism is not innovation, and so far as the correctness of the later poets was a return to accepted tradition, it found sanction in the theory and practice of the court poets of the reign of James. Drummond, Jonson, and George Sandys have usually been considered as the immediate precursors of Waller, especially in the use of the confined or classical heroic couplet.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 143.
