quarrelsome men, who assailed their opponents with rancorous personalities; doctrinaires, who employed their fiery energy of mind in the creation of rigid systems of religion and government; uncompromising men, who devoted to the support of those systems their fortunes and lives, drenched the land in the blood of a civil war, executed a king, presently restored his dynasty, and finally exiled it again, thus maintaining during half a century a general insecurity of life and property which checked the finer growths of civilization.  Their successors trusted that the compromise of 1688 had reduced political and sectarian affairs to a state of calm equilibrium; and they desired to cultivate the fruits of serenity by fostering in all things the spirit of moderation.  In poetry, as in life, they tended more and more to discountenance manifestations of vehemence.  Even the poetry of Dryden, with its reflections of the stormy days through which he had struggled, seemed to them, though gloriously leading the way toward perfection, to fall short of equability of temper and smoothness of form.  To work like Defoe’s True-Born Englishman (1701) and Hymn to the Pillory (1703), combative in spirit and free in style, they gave only guarded and temporary approval.

Inevitably the change of mood entailed losses.  Sir Henry Wotton’s Character of a Happy Life (c. 1614) treats the same theme as Pomfret’s Choice; but Pomfret’s contemporaries were rarely if ever visited by such gleams as shine in Wotton’s lines describing the happy man as one

  who never understood
  How deepest wounds are given by praise,

and as one

  Who God doth late and early pray
  More of his grace than gifts to lend.

Such touches of penetrative wisdom and piety, like many other precious qualities, are of an age that had passed.  In the poetry of 1700-1725, religion forgoes mysticism and exaltation; the intellectual life, daring and subtlety; the imagination, exuberance and splendor.  Enthusiasm for moral ideals declines into steadfast approval of ethical principles.  Yet these were changes in tone and manner rather than in fundamental views.  The poets of the period were conservatives.  They were shocked by the radicalism of Mandeville, the Nietzsche of his day, who derided the generally accepted moralities as shallow delusions, and who by means of a clever fable supported a materialistic theory which implied that in the struggle for existence nothing but egotism could succeed: 

  Fools only strive
  To make a great and honest hive.

Obloquy buried him; he was a sensational exception to the rule.  As a body, the poets of his time retained the orthodox traditions concerning God, Man, and Nature.