Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions that follow in your own words: In the later half of the seventeenth century and practically the whole of the eighteenth century—the Augustan age, as they are called—the classics came to exercise a complete hold over English Literature. It was even believed that they represented the highest standards of literary beauty which English writers had only to follow to attain perfection in their art. To this end therefore they directed all their energies, conveniently forgetting what their own predecessors—Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare—had achieved without any direct aid from them. There were two chief reasons for it. One was the excess of the Metaphysical poets and the other the unprecedented influence of the French literary modes on the English.