It may, however, be admitted--in fact no admission or confession is required, no idea of contesting or denying having been entertained--that neither the qualities of _Grongar Hill_ nor those of the _Prayer_, that still less the general characteristics of the group of romantic precursors from Collins to Blake distinguish eighteenth-century poetry generally. And it may in the same way be further allowed that some of the actual characteristics of this poetry in general are not _strictly_ poetic at all. Its didacticism is perhaps the chief of these; but there are undoubtedly others. And we are busy not with what is not poetical in eighteenth-century verse, but with what is poetical in eighteenth-century poetry. There are two departments in which it is almost pre-eminent, in which it is certainly very distinguished. The strict poeticalness of both of them has indeed been denied by extremists. All of us probably have heard it said, perhaps some of us have said it ourselves, that rhetoric is not poetry; and (though here there may not have been so much agreement) that "light" verse, whether regularly satiric or not, is at best poetry by allowance and, short of the best, not poetry at all. Now undoubtedly some rhetoric is not poetry, and a good deal of light verse is poetry only by extremely generous allowance. But the complete ostracising of either kind from the poetical city involves two propositions which are contentious in the extreme, and which I and those who think with me hold to be abominable heresies. The one is that "All depends on the subject" in poetry, and the other is that "Verse is not an essential feature of poetry." _We_ maintain that anything can be treated poetically, though some things are very rebellious to such treatment, and that though rhetoric is strictly a characteristic of prose, it cam be, so to speak, super-saturated with poetry when it adopts poetical form, the same contention extending to the subjects of satiric or of merely light verse. A great deal of the abundant rhetorical verse of the eighteenth century is no doubt not poetry, or not very poetical poetry, and a good deal of its abundant satire, not a very little of its _vers de société_ and trifles is not poetry or not very poetical. But, on the other hand, not a very little of both kinds is poetry, and the reason and origin of its poetical character are by no means uninteresting to trace. There is no room, and indeed not much occasion, to do this at length here. Suffice it to say that for its rhetorical verse the century was very much indebted to Dryden, and that for its light verse it was still more indebted to Prior.