often staged today. It was the source of the comedy-of-manners tradition in English
writing: Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Sheridan, Jane Austen, W. S.
Gilbert, Oscar Wilde and much since. Dryden was the leading poet of the period,
excelling in all its forms, especially satire and translation. He also wrote the best crit-
ical prose of an age in which prose moved towards conversation.
If the Restoration period produced no writer of the first rank, it gave secular liter-
ature new importance. It is notable that Charles II’s tolerance extended to the great
writer who was the public apologist for his father’s execution. Milton’s absoluteness
was recognized rather than welcome in an age of compromise and crisis manage-
ment. After a sunset of ‘heroic’ gestures, poetry subsided into the verse of the smooth
sons of the ‘Sons’ of Ben Jonson: Suckling, Denham and Waller. The civil, secular,
social culture of the Restoration period is often called Augustan: its writers saw
parallels between the restored monarchy and the peace restored by the Emperor
Augustusafter civil war and the assassination of Caesar had ended the Roman
republic. Charles I was no Caesar and Charles II no Augustus, but he was ‘civilized’:
he shared his cousin Louis XIV’s esteem for les beaux arts et les belles lettres.He
patronized the Royal Society, the theatre, and actresses. The English Augustans
prized peace and order – and envied the prestige, patronage and polish of the first
Augustans.
Augustanism, a set of attitudes owing much to French example, ruled from the
time of Dryden’s maturity in the 1680s until the death of Alexander Pope in 1744,
but its ideals guided Dr Johnson (d.1784), and schooled Jane Austen (1775–1817).
Literary history sometimes includes the Restoration in the 18th century, for
‘eighteenth-century’ qualities can be found in literature from 1660 to 1798, the
publication date of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads.
Augustan ver se was typically in the rhymed pentameter couplet, as for example in
Pope’s epigram:
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said,Let Newton be! and all was light.
The ‘heroic couplet’, so called from its use in Restoration heroic tragedy, was less
about ancient virtue than about its modern absence. This example typically recalls a
higher text, the creation of light in Genesis. The theoretical prestige of ‘the heroick
poem’ was maintained by criticism, as in Joseph Addison’s appreciation ofParadise
Lostin The Spectator in 1712.Another homage to the heroic was translation.
Dryden’s Aeneid (1697) and Pope’s Iliad (1720) echo Milton, but they moderate and
modernize their exemplars. These heroic frames put into perspective the tameness
of everyday life; which was also explored less critically in prose.
The Restoration consensus was an agreement to disagree. Charles II managed to
govern without parliament and rode out his troubles, but James II rekindled old
conflicts and in 1688 was forced out. An Act of 1662 had re-established Anglican
Uniformity, banishing to the nonconformist wings both Catholics and the dissent-
ing heirs of the Puritans. The new centrists could laugh at Samuel Butler’s Hudibras
(1678), a satire on a Presbyterian knight, one
of that stubborn crew
Oferrant saints whom all men grant
To be the true Church Militant:
Such as do build their faith upon
The holy text of pike and gun;164 5 · STUART LITERATURE: TO 1700
Augustus The first Roman
Emperor (r.31 BC–AD14)
Among the poets of Augustus
were Virgil (70–19 BC), Horace
(65–8 BC), Propertius
(54/48–c.16 BC) and Ovid (43
BC–AD17/18).