How deficient had been the sense of classical beauty in the so-called classical age of English literature, is a trite consideration of criticism. The treatment of mythology is particularly conclusive on this point. Throughout the ‘Augustan’ era, mythology was approached as a mere treasure-house of pleasant fancies, artificial decorations, ‘motives’, whether sumptuous or meretricious. Allusions to Jove and Venus, Mercury, Apollo, or Bacchus, are of course found in every other page of Dryden, Pope, Prior, Swift, Gay, and Parnell. But no fresh presentation, no loving interpretation, of the old myths occur anywhere. The immortal stories were then part and parcel of a sort of poetical curriculum through which the whole school must be taken by the stern masters Tradition and Propriety. There is little to be wondered at, if this matter of curriculum was treated by the more passive scholars as a matter of course, and by the sharper and less reverent disciples as a matter of fun. Indeed, if any personality is then evinced in the adaptation of these old world themes, it is generally connected with a more or less emphatic disparagement or grotesque distortion of their real meaning. When Dryden, for example, makes use of the legend of Midas, in his _Wife of Bath’s Tale_, he makes, not Midas’s minister, but his queen, tell the mighty secret—and thus secures another hit at woman’s loquacity. Prior’s _Female Phaëton_ is a younger sister, who, jealous of her elder’s success, thus pleads with her ‘mamma’: I’ll have my earl as well as she Or know the reason why. And she wants to flaunt it accordingly. Finally, Fondness prevailed; mamma gave way; Kitty, at heart’s desire, Obtained the chariot for a day, And set the world on fire. Pandora, in Parnell’s _Hesiod or the Rise of Woman_, is only a ‘shining vengeance... A pleasing bosom-cheat, a specious ill’ sent by the gods upon earth to punish the race of Prometheus. The most poetical fables of Greece are desecrated by Gay into mere miniatures for the decoration of his _Fan_. Similar instances abound later on. When Armstrong brings in an apostrophe to the Naiads, it is in the course of a _Poetical Essay on the Art of Preserving Health_. And again, when Cowper stirs himself to intone an _Ode to Apollo_, it is in the same mock-heroic vein: Patron of all those luckless brains, That to the wrong side leaning Indite much metre with much pains And little or no meaning...