After years of comparative neglect, and, it must be admitted, a good deal of uncritical disparagement, the “age of prose and reason” would seem at last to have come into its own. Or at any rate during recent years there has become evident a disposition to look more kindly on a period which has but seldom had justice done to it. The label which Matthew Arnold’s dictum attached to a good portion, if not the whole, of the eighteenth century seems to imply a period of arid and prosaic rationalism in which “the shaping spirit of imagination” had no abiding place, and this has no doubt been partly responsible for the persistency of an unjust conception. But it is now more generally recognized that, in prose and even in poetry, the seventy or eighty years, which begin when Dryden died, and end when William Blake was probably writing down the first drafts of his “Poetical Sketches,” had some definite and far from despicable legacies to pass on to its successors, to the writers in whom the Romantic revival was soon to be triumphantly manifested. The standards in all branches of literature were to be different, but between “classical” and “romantic” there was not to be, and indeed could not be, any great gulf fixed. There was continuity and much was handed on. What had to be transformed (and of course the process is to be seen at work in the very height of the Augustan supremacy) were the aims and methods of literature, both its matter in large measure, and its style.[249] It is the poetry of the period with which we are specially concerned, and it is in poetry that the distinction between the old order and the new was to be sharpest; for the leaders of the revolt had been gradually winning new fields, or re-discovering old ones, for poetry, and thus in more than one sense the way had been prepared for both the theory and practice of Wordsworth. Then came the great manifestoes, beginning with the Preface of 1798, followed by an expansion in 1800 and again in 1802; fifteen years later, Coleridge, with his penetrating analysis of the theories advanced by his friend and fellow-worker, began a controversy, which still to-day forms a fruitful theme of discussion.