The eighteenth century, says Legouis in A Short History of English Literature, “viewed as a whole has a distinctive character.” It was “the classical age” in English literature, and, as such, held and practised some basic principles concerning life and literature. Even then one should avoid sweeping generalizations/The temptation to generalize-the eighteenth century particularly-is hard to overcome.
“Few centuries,” says George Sherburn in A Literary History of. England edited by Albert C. Baugh, “have with more facility been reduced to a formula tHan the eighteenth….Few centuries, to be sure, have demonstrated more unity of character than superficially considered the eighteenth seems to have possessed.” However, it is fallacious to believe that there is a clear cleavage between the seventeenth century and the eighteenth. Observes Sherburn: “The ideas of the later seventeenth century continue into the eighteenth.” At any rate, in the eighteenth century there was the completion of the reaction against Elizabethan romanticism. This reaction had started in the seventeenth century with Denham, Waller, and Dryden. Pope and his contemporaries stood on the other extreme to Elizabethan romanticists and ushered in “the age of prose and reason,” as Matthew Arnold characterises the eighteenth century. Now, let us see how and how far the eighteenth century was “an age of prose and reason.”