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Updated: June 12, 2025
Pope likewise, though he "lisped in numbers," could never, for all of his cleverness, learn to sing. The age of the Augustans, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, was an age of prose, of reason, of good sense, of "correctness." The decasyllabic couplet, so resonant in Dryden, so admirably turned and polished by Pope, was its favorite measure. The poets played safe.
Gerda was different from Kay, who devoured thrillers, shockers, and ingenious crime and mystery stories with avidity. She did not believe that life was really much like that, and Kay's assertion that if it weren't it ought to be, she rightly regarded as pragmatical. Neither did she share Kay's more fundamental taste for the Elizabethans, Carolines and Augustans.
Life grew again something mysterious, not to be comprehended by the "good sense" of the Augustans, or expressible in the terms of the rhymed couplet. Instead of the normal, poets sought the exceptional, then the strange, the far-away in time or place, or else the familiar set in some unusual fantastic light.
In the year of his election to the professorship appeared his Roman Poets of the Republic, quite the best book of its kind existing in English; and this was followed up by others on Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, and Propertius good, but less good, the mannered correctness of the Augustans evidently appealing to the author less than the more strictly poetic excellence of Lucretius and Catullus.
The dulness of modern Jack, in letters as elsewhere, arises from the fact that when he is not at work he is too desperately set on playing to have time for anything else. The Augustans are not usually thought God-like: but they have this of Gods, that they "lived easily."
Andronicus, the Syrian Epicurean, brought to Rome by Sulla, made his home at nearby Cumae; Archias, Cicero's client, also from Syria, spent much time at Naples, and the poet Agathocles lived there; Parthenius of Nicaea, to whom the early Augustans were deeply indebted, taught Vergil at Naples.
There is perhaps still something to be said as to the apparently almost pre-established harmony between the eighteenth century and letter-writing. It concerns what has been called the "Peace of the Augustans"; the at least comparative freedom alike from the turmoil of passion and the most riotous kinds of fun.
It is significant of Vergil's breadth of sympathy that he remitted not a jot in his devotion to Catullus and Gallus and that he won the deep reverence of Propertius while remaining the friend and companion of the courtly group working towards a stricter classicism. If we may attempt to classify the early Augustans, we find them aligning themselves thus.
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