"Back to nature!" was the rallying cry of a protest against this formalism--an inarticulate protest which culminated in the Romantic movement. Under the leadership of Dryden and for more than a century after him, canons of literary art based on classical models had almost undisputed sway. Aristotle filtered through Horace and Horace diluted by Boileau were prescribed by doctors who would correct and amend English speech and literature. From these masters were drawn rules so minute and so inflexible as to put to the death budding originality by the demand for "correctness." If the poet were moved to describe pastoral scenes, he must needs go to Theocritus for the names of his characters, to Virgil for the contour of his scenery. But all this classicism was counterfeit. It was "more Latin than Greek, and more French than Latin." The classical poet, as he misnamed himself, followed with slavish persistence the creed which he had adopted. It was an accepted law that "the best of the modern poets in all languages are those that have the nearest copied the ancients." He would have nothing of country life. Rough and irregular scenery were distasteful to him. Mountains he described by Gothic--his pet term of opprobrium. Scenery as well as thought must conform to the level. "Decent conformity," then, characterized the Augustan age and enthusiasm had no place in the age of Dryden and of Pope. Some of the characteristic features of the Romantic movement may be readily got at, by prefixing a negative to the qualities of the classical school. The country, out door life, rugged mountains, folk-songs, ballads in every form, the picturing of English people in English scenery were used as subject-matter--in other words, the telling what the writer had himself seen and, therefore, what he really knew, instead of what he had read. It was this reaction against formalism which produced such men as Chatterton, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Scott.