The assimilation of latinisms and the revival of obsolete terms of speech had ceased; it had become finally a more or less fixed form, shedding so much of its imports as it had failed to make part of itself and acquiring a grammatical and syntactical fixity which it had not possessed in Elizabethan times.

When Shakespeare wrote "What cares these roarers for the name of king," he was using, as students of his language never tire of pointing out to us, a perfectly correct local grammatical form.

Fifty years after that line was written, at the Restoration, local forms had dropped out of written English.

We had acquired a normal standard of language, and either genius or labour was polishing it for literary uses.
What they did for prose these "Classic" writers did even more exactly--and less happily--for verse.

Fashions often become exaggerated before their disappearance, and the decadence of Elizabethan romanticism had produced poetry the wildness and extravagance of whose images was well-nigh unbounded.