From Shakespeare to Pope Author:Edmund Gosse Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE EXILES. The earliest critics of our classical poetry never wavered in their allegiance to Waller and to Denham as the Castor and Pollux, the divine twin b... more »rethren, who first refined the art of verse and taught us Englishmen the graces. In dedicating his tragedy of The Rival Ladies to Lord Orrery, himself a rhyming tragedian, Dryden says: " The excellence and dignity of rime were never fully known till Mr Waller taught it; but this sweetness of his lyric poesy was afterwards followed in the epic by Sir John Denham, in his Cooper s Hill, a poem which, your lordship knows, for the majesty of the style, is, and ever will be, the exact standard of good writing." With the sweetness of Waller we are already acquainted. We must now introduce ourselves to this majesty -, of Denham, who demands our consideration all the more because it happened that a book of his was the first poetry published by the English classicists1. Waller's Poems were widely circulated from handto hand, but they remained in MS. until 1645. Denham's Sophy was published in 1642, and his Cooper s Hill later in the same year. 1 Appendix I. John Denham was ten years younger than Edmund Waller, towards whom in spite of all his literary successes he remained till the end of his life in the position of a pupil. His father, also John Denham, and a knight, was an English lawyer, who became Chief Baron of the Exchequer in Ireland, and who married the daughter of an Irish peer, Lord Mellisfont. The poet was born at Dublin in 1615 into a flourishing and luxurious condition, and he remained through his whole life a man of high social position and recognized quality. When the poet was two years old, his father was recalled to England, as one of the Barons of the home Exchequer, and Denham's early education was acquir...« less