Keats denounced the authors of that style which came in toward the close
of the seventeenth century, and reigned absolute through the whole of the
eighteenth, as
"A schism,
Nurtured by foppery and barbarism,
... who went about
Holding a poor decrepit standard out,
Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and in large
The name of one Boileau!"
But Keats had never then[3] studied the writers of whom he speaks so
contemptuously, though he might have profited by so doing. Boileau would
at least have taught him that _flimsy_ would have been an apter epithet
for the _standard_ than for the mottoes upon it. Dryden was the author of
that schism against which Keats so vehemently asserts the claim of the
orthodox teaching it had displaced. He was far more just to Boileau, of
whom Keats had probably never read a word. "If I would only cross the
seas," he says, "I might find in France a living Horace and a Juvenal in
the person of the admirable Boileau, whose numbers are excellent, whose
expressions are noble, whose thoughts are just, whose language is pure,
whose satire is pointed, and whose sense is just. What he borrows from
the ancients he repays with usury of his own, in coin as good and almost
as universally valuable.
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