Charles Churchill's Treatment of the Couplet

Extract

The middle of the eighteenth century was a period of transition, and Charles Churchill, its greatest satirist, was typical of his age. The men whose influence appears most strongly in his works belonged to the classical and the pseudo-classical schools; those whom he influenced were the exponents of some phase of romanticism. In him we find the spirit of revolt against authority that appears in the early romanticists, but we do not find the lofty ideals, the introspective analysis, the spiritual interpretation of nature, that characterized the later poets. The very fact that he was a satirist links him indissolubly with the classicists. In his exaltation of reason as the “Lord Chief-Justice in the court of man,” in his general mode of thought and expression, he is conservative—in revolt, to be sure, against the school of Pope, yet an imitator of it at every turn.