had used this form of verse before 1630; but it was reserved for Dryden, and especially for Pope, to bring the couplet to a high degree of perfection. A French critic advised poets to compose the second line of the couplet first. No better rule could have been devised for dwarfing poetic power and for making poetry artificial. Voltaire, a French classicist, said, "I do not like the monstrous irregularities of Shakespeare." An eighteenth-century classicist actually endeavored to improve Hamlet's soliloquy by putting it in riming couplets. These lines from _Macbeth_ show that Shakespeare will not tolerate such leading strings nor allow the ending of the lines to interfere with his sense:-- "...Besides, this Duncan Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been So clear in his great office, that his virtues Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued against The deep damnation of his taking-off." A later romantic poet called the riming couplet "rocking-horse meter"; and said that the reading of many couplets reminded him of round trips on a rocking-horse. Advances are usually made by overstressing some one point. The classicists taught the saving grace of style, the need of restraint, balance, clearness, common sense. We should therefore not despise the necessary lesson which English literature learned from such teaching,--a lesson which has never been forgotten. The Drama.--The theaters were reopened at the time of the Restoration. It is interesting to read in the vivacious _Diary_ of Samuel Pepys how he went in 1661 to see Shakespeare's _Romeo and Juliet_, "a play of itself the worst that I ever heard." The next year he characterizes _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ as "the most ridiculous play that I ever saw." He liked the variety in _Macbeth_, and calls _The Tempest_ "the most innocent play that I ever saw." The Restoration dramatists, who were dominated by French influence, so often sneered at morality and the virtues of the home, that they have paid the penalty of being little read in after times. The theater has not yet entirely recovered from the deep-seated prejudice which was so intensified by the coarse plays which flourished for fifty years after the Restoration.