From this anarchy it is rescued, no doubt, as a general determining influence by the settling once more of pronunciation, but directly and particularly by the efforts of Wyatt, Surrey, and their minor successors from 1525 to 1575. Then Spenser comes, and performs almost more than the work of Chaucer, inasmuch as his material is more trustworthy and has fewer seeds of decay in it. He, like his predecessors, recoiling from the frightful disorder of the preceding century, inclines, save in his earliest work, to a rather strict form of verse, mostly dissyllabic. But the mere exigencies of the stage, the nature of blank verse itself when once established, and the genius of Shakespeare, restore there the liberty of trisyllabic substitution, and the influence of music helps to bring in trisyllabic measures--"triple time"--as such. In Shakespeare first the whole freedom, as well as nearly the whole order, of English prosody discovers itself. But this freedom is pushed by others to licence, and blank verse becomes practically as ruinous a heap as the rhyme-royal of the fifteenth century, with one form of decasyllabic couplet keeping it company, if not quite in actual cacophony, at any rate in disorderly slackness. Then Milton restores blank verse to almost all the freedom and more than the order of Shakespeare, infusing also into all the other metres that he touches this same combination; so that in these two practically everything is reached. But poetic fervour dies down; blank verse becomes for a time unpopular; the age calls for the more prosaic subject-kinds of verse--satire, didactics, etc.; prevailing standards of prosody are strictly regulated to an accomplished but decidedly limited "smoothness." The results of this, with a few exceptions reserved, we are to see in the present chapter.
It was fortunate that the poet under whom this "Reign of Order" was introduced, was one who had in himself a certain irrepressible vigour and _verve_, which would not tolerate mere monotony. John Dryden wrote most of his most famous poems in the couplet, and in a stopped form of it; but he did not confine himself thereto, using also the heroic quatrain (which he made an exceedingly fine measure); "Pindarics" (of which the same may be said); occasional, though few, octosyllabics; and lyrical measures of the most varied kind, both dissyllabic and trisyllabic, which sometimes do not fall far short of all but the very best work of the preceding generation. His couplet itself, moreover, was not quite rigidly stopped; and even if it had been, was so largely varied by the licences of triplet, Alexandrine, and sometimes these two combined, that the purely or mainly mechanical effect with which his successor Pope is charged, and which is undoubtedly to be observed in that successor's imitators, does not impress itself. Even had these devices (which may be said themselves to have something mechanical about them) not been present, the extraordinary nerve and full-bloodedness of Dryden's verse would have been almost if not quite sufficient to remove the reproach. The antithetic yet never snip-snap explosion of his distichs; the way in which they fling themselves against the object; the momentum given to them by striking words strikingly placed, ingenious manipulation of pause, unexpected and exciting turns of phrase--are unprecedented. His prosody may be called a somewhat rhetorical prosody, but it is the very highest of its own kind. It exercised strong and good influence over the whole classical period with which we are dealing in this chapter; a little after the middle of the eighteenth century it effected a diversion from the too monotonous limitation of Pope; and in the very hey-day of the Romantic movement it taught new devices, and revealed new sources of prosodic beauty, to Keats.