THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE The student of literature, when he passes in his reading from the age of Shakespeare and Milton to that of Dryden and Pope, will be conscious of certain sharply defined differences between the temper and styles of the writers of the two periods.

If besides being a student of literature he is also (for this is a different thing) a student of literary criticism he will find that these differences have led to the affixing of certain labels--that the school to which writers of the former period belong is called "Romantic" and that of the latter "Classic," this "Classic" school being again overthrown towards the end of the eighteenth century by a set of writers who unlike the Elizabethans gave the name "Romantic" to themselves.

What is he to understand by these two labels; what are the characteristics of "Classicism" and how far is it opposite to and conflicting with "Romanticism"?
The question is difficult because the names are used vaguely and they do not adequately cover everything that is commonly put under them.

It would be difficult, for instance, to find anything in Ben Jonson which proclaims him as belonging to a different school from Dryden, and perhaps the same could be said in the second and self-styled period of Romanticism of the work of Crabbe.

But in the main the differences are real and easily visible, even though they hardly convince us that the names chosen are the happiest that could be found by way of description.
This period of Dryden and Pope on which we are now entering sometimes styled itself the Augustan Age of English poetry.