History of English Literature from "Beowulf" to Swinburne

by Andrew Lang

AUGUSTAN PROSE.

Steele.

Steele and Addison are the Twins among the stars of the age of Queen Anne. Swift impresses us as a greater genius than either Steele or Addison, but he is not loved, and he is not read as they are. Their lives, till two or three years before Addison's death, were united. They were schoolfellows at Charterhouse, fellow-undergraduates at Oxford, each was apt to take a hand in the other's play when the stage attracted them; they wrote together in the two famous journals, "The Tatler" and "The Spectator," which Steele created; some essays therein are a patchwork of pieces from both hands. They were both anxious to cleanse the stage; to bring decent morals and manners into fashion In the original manuscript of Steele's comedy, "The Conscious Lovers" (1722), are rough notes for a preface, written after Addison's death, "The fourth act was the business of the play. The case of duelling I have fought nor shall I ever fight again... Addison told me I had a faculty of drawing tears... Be that as it will, I shall endeavour to do what I can to promote noble things...."

Both men were moralists, but while Addison was the more moral, Steele was infinitely the more greatly given to moralizing. His heart was in the right place. He honoured women and pure affection, and temperance, and the wedded state. But his many brief notes to his second wife "Prue" (Miss Scurlock), written from all manner of places and at all sorts of hours, prove that poor Prue had often to dine alone. Business detained her Richard; he came home with the milk, and had a terrible headache next day. With the posts which he held under Government, with what he gained by his pen (and he was the owner of his own paper, and his own paymaster), with Mrs. Steele's fortune, they had resources enough, but Richard at intervals sends Prue a guinea or two; Richard is constantly in hiding from the bailiffs; is never out of debt; sometimes there is no coal, candle, or meat in the house. Steele was the most affectionate of men and the most generous. He boasted that the world owed Addison's essays to him, because he had made Addison overcome his laziness, and he told the world how greatly Addison was his superior. He wishes that they might write together some work to be called "The Monument," the memorial of their friendship. He took the side of poor discharged soldiers, whipped from parish to parish for their poverty. He adored children; his tears were as ready and heroic as the tears of Homer's warriors. But when he yielded to the temptations of the bottle and of extravagance, his wife and children had to suffer just as much as if Richard, in place of being a Christian Hero, had been no better than the wicked. Like Balzac he was a man of debts and of projects; he even wasted money on alchemy, and had a scheme for getting wealth in connexion with a lottery, a scheme which even then was found to be illegal. Mr. Swinburne called Steele "a sentimental debauchee," and indeed he shone more in preaching than in practice. Addison calls him "poor Dick," he is "poor Dick" to all the world now, if he were Sir Richard "to all Europe". But, when lip preached, he meant what he said, and his pleasant sermons, or rather pleas for goodness, kindness, faith, did "promote noble things," and he left the world more decent and more human than he found it.

Steele was born in Dublin in 1672; his family were not Celtic Irish folk; his father was in what is reckoned the less noble branch of the legal profession. When Sir Richard assumed heraldic bearings he calmly annexed those of another family of Steele, as' the elder Osborne, in "Vanity Fair," was supplied by his coachbuilder with the arms of the House of Leeds. Like the cousin of Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff, in "The Tatler" (No. 14), he was guilty of "treason against the Kings at Arms". Of his childhood we know only what he tells in that pathetic passage about his father's funeral: "I had a battledore in my hand and fell a-beating the coffin, and calling papa, for, I know not how, I had some idea that he was locked up there.... My mother was a very beautiful woman, of a noble spirit, and there was a dignity in her grief amidst all the wildness of her transport, which methought struck me with an instinct of sorrow that, before I was sensible what it was to grieve, seized my very soul and has made pity the weakness of my heart ever since" ("Tatler," No. 181). "Hence it is that in me good nature is no merit, but having been so frequently overwhelmed with her tears before I knew the cause of any affliction... I imbibed consideration, remorse, and an unmanly gentleness of mind, which has since ensnared me into ten thousand calamities...." So a "Night of Memories and Sighs" is consecrated by Richard to his beloved dead, "when my servant knocked at the door with a letter, attended by a hamper of wine, of the same sort with that which is to be put on sale at Garraway's coffee house. Upon the receipt of it I sent for three friends.... We drank two bottles a man," and, as Mr. Arthur Pendennis says, found that there "was not a headache in a hogshead".

The fluid, in fact, as we know from the advertisement in this number of "The Tatler," was "extraordinary French claret". Dick conscientiously tested its merits, and gave it a puff in addition to the advertisement which was paid for. Thus he "promoted everything noble," including the vintage of Bordeaux, and, as Thackeray saw, there is no more characteristic essay of Steele's than this meditation on death and grief and loyal memory: à léal souvenir!

Steele lost his mother also in his childhood. He had an uncle, Henry Gascoigne, who, like Swift's uncle, provided for his education, but more generously. Attached to "Erin's high Ormonde," Gascoigne obtained for Steele a nomination to Charterhouse (1684) (Thackeray's school), where Steele met Addison, and their friendship began. In 1689 Steele went up to Christ Church, Addison being at Magdalen; in 1691 Steele gained a "postmastership" (a scholarship) at Merton, a college to which he was warmly attached, presenting its ancient library with the volumes of "The Tatler". He left just before his Schools (that is his examination for a degree). In 1694 he entered the Duke of Ormonde's Guards as a trooper, apparently gentlemen did this as a way of approaching a commission. Steele got his as a reward for a poem on the death of Queen Mary—the piece was dedicated to Lord Cutts, Colonel of the Coldstreams. He befriended Steele, who, stationed at the Tower, made the acquaintance of Congreve and the wits, and defeated Captain Kelly in a duel. Probably the contrast between the delicacy of Steele's sentiments, and his vein of sincere piety, on one hand, with his addiction to mundane pleasures, on the other, made him as notable in his regiment as Aramis, Abbé d'Herblay, among the Musketeers of Louis XIV.

Steele, when once he took a pen in his hand, wrote much against duelling, exposing the ludicrousness of the institution. His remarks had no effect; what killed the duel in England was the use of the pistol: unromantic, fatal, and fortuitous. His duel may have made men more wary of bantering Steele, but his "Christian Hero," a work of military devotion (1701) lowered his character in the regiment. To restore it he wrote his comedy "The Funeral" (1701); to show that blasphemy and intrigue were no necessary components of a play: for he was wholly of the party of Jeremy Collier. The idea of the plot, the revival of Lord Brampton while his coffin is waiting for him, and his watching of the manœuvres of his hateful widow, while his fair ward, Lady Sharlot, escapes in the coffin from her enemies (a common situation in ancient ballads) is too grotesque. But the scenes with the hired mutes, with the poor broken soldiers, with Lady Brampton and her maid, are very amusing. Steele's exposure of the low tricks of lawyers, his appeal for cheap and accessible justice for all, are much in, Dickens's manner, and the loves of Lord Hardy and Lady Sharlot are as pure as bonny Kilmeny, while Lady Sharlot, in her encounter with Lady Brampton, gives proof of high spirit, and Lady Harriet is a flirt as harmless as lively.

Like the other wits, Steele was presented with lucrative posts, such as the editorship of the colourless official "Gazette". In the same year, 1707, he married his second wife, Miss Scurlock, the adored Prue, a woman of some property. He had a house at Hampton Wick, horses, gardeners, footmen, everything handsome about him. In 1709 he founded "The Tatler," a folio sheet of printed matter, appearing thrice a week and containing news, political and social, correspondence, and the charming essays which soon became most important. Steele wrote 188 of these papers, Addison, forty-two, in thirty-six both men took a hand. Swift wrote very seldom. The essays, with those which he wrote in "The Spectator," and in other papers, are the foundation of the fame of Steele. They vary much in theme and style. To digest the "Iliad" into a journal, and reckon up the days of the events, cannot have much amused the public. There is plenty of dramatic criticism. Steele openly avows that he is a member of the Society for the Reformation of Manners; blames the plays of Wycherley and the rest, and calls in the name of Virtue for frequent representations of Shakespeare. "The apt use of the theatre is the most agreeable and easy way of making a polite and moral gentry, which would end in making the rest of the people regular in their behaviour," a pleasing opinion which is not quite justified by experience.

Dick was a constant patron of the best plays, but regular his behaviour was not. Various, excellent, and amiable as are Steele's essays, neither in style nor in thought do they wear quite so well as Addison's. Yet it is scarcely just to draw a distinction which may rest only on individual taste.

"The Tatler's" last appearance was on 2 January, 1711. Steele ended with a paper in which he generously attributes to his friend the essays which he deemed of most value. On 1 March the first number of "The Spectator" appeared—it ceased to exist on 6 December, 1712. Steele's new journal, "The Guardian," lasted for six months in 1713; he was elected as member for Stockbridge, and then came a quarrel of Whig and Tory with Swift, who wrote in "The Examiner". The arrival of George I from Hanover procured various lucrative posts, a patent for a theatre, and a knighthood for Steele: he edited "The Englishman," and attacked Swift's fallen friends, Harley and St. John; and in 1716 he got an income of £1000 a year as one of the commissioners of the estates forfeited by the Scottish Jacobites who were out for their King in the rising of 1715. This was not a pleasant appointment to a man of feeling. Of the coolness between Steele and Addison we speak elsewhere.

In 1722 Steele's "Conscious Lovers," with another attack on duelling was acted with success, and dedicated to the "gracious and amiable sovereign," George I. Cibber the actor added scenes rather more gay than the rest, for so moral is this drama that Fielding's Parson Adams, in "Joseph Andrews," said "it contains some things almost solemn enough for a sermon". His connexion with the theatre brought Steele into more than one lawsuit; his failing health, and the assiduities of his creditors caused him to prefer to reside in Wales; he died in Carmarthen on I September, 1729. Like Goldsmith, Charles Lamb, Walton, and Scott, he has made all his readers his friends, and if his plays are not acted much, the Lydia Languish of Sheridan, and the Tony Lumpkin of Goldsmith, are reflections from his Biddy and Humphrey in "The Tender Husband," a not successful comedy of 1705.

Addison.

There were few forms of literature, from the sacred hymn to the libretto of an opera, in which Addison did not adventure himself with success more than respectable. It is, however, as an essayist that he survives, and is read and admired. Born on 1 May, 1672, he was the eldest son of the Rev. Lancelot Addison, who, after acting as chaplain to the garrisons of Dunkirk and, later, of Tangier, obtained the small living of Milston, married the sister of a bishop, and in 1683 received the Deanery of Lichfield. He was something of a Jacobite, and as an author had pleasing traits of humour and irony. His son Joseph passed through two local schools, and thence to Charterhouse (Thackeray's school) whence first to Queen's, then to Magdalen, Oxford, where he held a demyship (scholarship), and was later a Fellow.

"Addison's Walk" is in the little wood round which two branches of the Cherwell meander with a mazy motion. Addison was soon admired for the excellence of his Latin verses: he made Dryden's acquaintance, and complimented him in verse; he began a translation of Ovid for Tonson, in the usual ten-syllable rhyming couplets.

Some of the stories of the Metamorphoses remain, with notes of literary criticism, including a compliment to William III. "The smoothness of our English verse," he casually remarks, "is too much lost by the repetition of proper names," which, in fact, are sonorous ornaments of the verse of Milton, Scott, Tennyson, and others. But Addison, bent on "smoothness" had not yet come to appreciate Milton; still less, in his early "Account of the English Poets," Spenser, who

Can charm an understanding age no more.

The young champion of smoothness and common sense unblushingly rhymed "success" to "verse".

Reluctant to take Orders, without which his Fellowship must lapse, Addison, through Congreve, was introduced to Charles Montagu (later Halifax) who, with Somers, wished to enlist Addison for his powers as a writer. They obtained for him a travelling pension of £300 yearly, and in December, 1699, left Marseilles for Italy.

His published remarks on Italy, written in a simple and easy style, are of interest mainly because they are so unlike modern ecstasies about the country. What most pleased Addison was to compare the scenes and towns which he saw, with the descriptions of them which, in Latin authors, he had read. To the natural beauties of the land, and to the works of Christian art, he is almost blind; Paul Veronese leaves him cold; at Verona he says nothing of the tomb of Romeo and Juliet, which, perhaps, was not yet shown. At Venice he is most concerned about the military strength of the place; "Tintoret is in greater esteem than in other parts of Italy," and that is enough about Tintoret! The Venetian comedies "are more lewd than in other countries". Addison paid a good deal of attention to ancient coins; and Pope wrote commendatory verses for his "Dialogues on Medals," and hoped that, on medals, Addison and Craggs will be represented: Craggs's effigy is to have an inscription in six heroic lines. Though the Dialogues be antiquated as archæology the description of collectors of coins is amusing: one of the speakers hastens to add that the science "must appear ridiculous to those who have not taken the pains to examine it". Addison, in a kind humorous way, strove to convince his age that ignorance is not the best judge of the historical, social, and artistic value of numismatics.

Returning to England in 1703 Addison was poor, and had no prospect of employment. The Whigs, however, wanted to make the most of Marlborough's victory at Blenheim. Strange as it seems to us, poetry had influence, a poet was needed, Halifax recommended Addison; the Chancellor of the Exchequer found him "up three pairs of stairs," and "The Campaign" was written. The scene is familiar to readers of "Esmond". Thackeray, devoted to Addison as he was, asks "how many fourth form boys at Mr. Addison's school of Charterhouse could write as well as that now?" as well as Addison writes in several passages of "The Campaign". Probably no fourth form boys would write

With floods of gore that from the vanquished fell,
The marshes stagnate, and the rivers swell.

However the simile of the Angel has been reckoned fine, and the poem "fulfilled the purpose for which it was written. It strengthened the position of the Whig Ministry" (what a task for the Muse!) and obtained patent places for the poet. As Under-secretary of State, Addison had leisure to write the libretto of "Rosamond," an opera, in which Queen Eleanor does not poison Rosamond, but gives her, like Juliet, a sleeping draught. The King says

O quickly relate
This riddle of fate!
My impatience forgive
Does Rosamond live?

Eleanor explains the situation:—

Soon the waking nymph shall rise
And, in a convent placed, admire
The cloistered walls and virgin choir:
With them in songs and hymns divine
The beauteous penitent shall join.

Finally the King and Queen sing

Who to forbidden joys would rove
That know the sweets of virtuous love?

Who indeed?

The rise of Blenheim Palace is prophesied, and Marlborough is flattered ingeniously by the Muse of Whiggery. The "understanding age" was not charmed: it was not absolutely destitute of humour. Nor was Addison. The intentionally funny parts of the opera, though not so comic as the serious passages, are not unworthy of Sir W. S. Gilbert. Sir Trusty, finding Rosamond's corpse, as he supposes, says

The King this doleful news shall read
In lines of my inditing;
Great Sir
Your Rosamond is dead,
As I'm at present writing.

Addison's unacknowledged comedy, "The Drummer," based on the famous rapping spirit at Tedworth (1662), was a failure, and died on its third night (1715).

Of his lucky tragedy, "Cato," he seems to have written four acts in Italy. As early as April, 1711, Addison confided his ideas on Tragedy to the Town ("Spectator," No. 39). They show us how far the wits of "the understanding age" of Anne, had moved from the taste of the Restoration stage. Addison is "very much offended when I see a play in rhyme; which is as absurd in English, as a tragedy of hexameters would have been in Greek or Latin". But blank verse is "in such due medium between rhyme and prose that it seems wonderfully adapted to tragedy," as the Elizabethan tragedians had not failed to discover. The thoughts of English tragic writers, especially of Shakespeare, "are often obscured by the sounding phrases, hard metaphors, and forced expressions in which they are clothed". These expressions, however, have been admired by many. The English tragedian is apt to make his hero successful in the fifth act: Addison does not approve of a modernization of "Lear," in which, as in the chronicles which told the story, King Lear and Cordelia triumph in the end. Aristotle says, Addison reports, that the populace preferred tragedies which ended ill (but Addison himself has made the tale of Fair Rosamond end happily). He makes no universal rule, only protests that a tragedy should not be compelled to conclude with comfort. There is "nothing which delights and terrifies our English theatre so much as a ghost, especially when he appears in a bloody shirt. A spectre has very often saved a play." Addison applauds the handling of the ghost in "Hamlet": ghosts, in fact, need delicate handling. For the moving of pity, our principal machine is the handkerchief; and the introduction of an orphan or two, but not of half a dozen fatherless children. "That dreadful butchering of one another," with the use of racks, thumbscrews, and other instruments of torture, gives occasion to French critics to think us a people who delight in blood.

In practice, Addison produced a tragedy which political accidents made highly successful at the moment, and which has enriched the stock of quotations. But Dr. Johnson described it as rather a poem in dialogue than a drama, rather a succession of just sentiments in elegant language than a representation of natural affections.... The events are expected without solicitude, and are remembered without joy or sorrow. The "love interest," Pope says, was a popular after-thought, and Pope told Addison that the play was better fitted to be read than to be acted. Thanks to the habit of mingling literature with politics, the play (13 April, 1713) was "expected" with "solicitude" by Whigs and Tories. "All the foolish industry possible has been used to make it thought a party play," says Pope. The leaders of each party clapped loudly at each remark that might be twisted into a political allusion, while Addison, with Dr. Berkeley and two or three friends, in a side-box "had a table and two or three flasks of Burgundy and champagne, with which the author (though a very sober man) thought necessary to support his spirits". A run of thirty-five nights, a great marvel then, also sustained the spirits of Addison.

Addison does not hold his high and enviable place in our literature by virtue of his plays, poems, and work on Medals, but of his brief Essays in "The Tatler" and "The Spectator". We have already seen how Steele and he worked, in the most pleasant, kindly, and humorous tone, for the improvement of morals and manners in the Court and Town.

The aim of Addison was "to temper wit with morality and to enliven morality with wit," and he succeeded so well that, to this day, if one opens a volume of "The Spectator" for any reason, one cannot lay it down. The spectacle of that world comes before us in all its aspects—toy shops, theatres, streets, coffee-houses, masquerades: there are allegories, sportive or serious, reflections at the opera, or among the monuments of the dead at Westminster Abbey; there are letters, real or "done in the office," asking for advice on points of etiquette; there are musical strains of solemn prose, or passages of exquisite banter; there are creations of character, Sir Roger de Coverley, Will Wimble, and the rest. There are criticisms, as of Milton, which led taste back from the fantasies of the Restoration to that great poet who lived lonely, fallen on evil days and evil tongues. Even the folk-poetry of the past, "songs and fables that are come from father to son, and are most in vogue among the common people of the countries through which I passed," give Addison "a particular delight," he says, in his paper on Chevy Chase, "the favourite ballad of the common people of England". In our time, a critic would fall back on the history of the ballad, showing how "Chevy Chase" is a later version of "Otterbourne," a poem common, with patriotic variations, to England and Scotland. For Addison "Chevy Chase" is an heroic poem: as such he treats it, and shows how touches of Nature make it akin to Homer and Virgil.

Here we are far away from the Restoration, and the age of conceits; we are on the way to the romantic movement, to Scott and "The Lay of the Last Minstrel". In quite another style take Addison's musings on a "lady's library," mixed with "a thousand odd figures in China ware," Japanese lacquer, and old silver. Leonora has "all the Classic Authors—in wood," dummies! "A set of Elzevirs," small classic volumes of the famous Dutch press, "by the same hand"—the cabinetmaker's. There are several of the huge wandering heroic French romances, and "Locke of Human Understanding, with a paper of patches in it": "Clelia, which opened of itself in the place that describes two lovers in a bower." Most of the books were bought, not "for her own use," but "because the lady had heard them praised, or because she had seen the authors of them".

Addison, it must be confessed, did not take the learning of the sex very seriously. Now the learning of many of them is serious indeed; but, we ask, are either men or women more seriously inclined, on the whole, to study than they were in Queen Anne's day? Addison, says Thackeray, "walks about the world watching women's pretty humours—fashions, follies, flirtations, rivalries, and noting them with the most charming humour". It was not he, but Steele, who found in a lady's society "a liberal education". But it was Addison whom Lady Mary Wortley Montagu proclaimed to be "the best companion in the world".

There is still no better companion: we can still hear him "sweetly talk and sweetly smile" in his Essays. He knows so much, and he is never tedious in giving information. Like Coleridge in talk with Keats, he deals in ghost stories: and this child of an age of reason does not scout them. He makes the judicious remark that Lucretius, the Roman materialist, does not believe that the soul can exist apart from the body, yet "makes no doubt of the reality of apparitions, and that men often appeared after their death... he was so pressed with the matter of fact, which he could not have the confidence to deny...." He explains by "one of the most absurd unphilosophical notions that was ever started"—in a different way of statement this theory of Lucretius has lately been revived.

What a variety of themes Addison illustrates and adorns! His writings are like better conversation than was ever held save in the Fortunate Islands by the happy Dead.

The humour and the drawing of character in the papers on Sir Roger de Coverley, have a delicacy, a minuteness, a happy humour, which we scarcely meet again in our literature till they reappear, a century later, in the novels of Miss Austen. It must be admitted that Addison's manner of writing sent son vieux temps, is not "up to date," but this only lends an agreeable quaintness. Nobody, to-day, in writing of the scene in the "Odyssey" where the hero beholds, in the next world, "the far-renowned brides of ancient song," would speak of them as "a circle of beauties," "the finest women". Nor, when the hero says "each of them gave me an account of her birth and family," would a critic now say "this is a gentle satire upon female vanity"! To give such an account is the universal practice in Homer, when strangers meet, whether men or women.

"The Spectator" was dropped after running for about two years, not before Addison had praised in his paper Pope's "Essay on Criticism". Steele introduced Pope to Addison; perhaps they never were very attached friends, for a man of Addison's sense could not but be watchful of himself in the company of the vain and irritable little satirist. Pope's jealousy and suspicions produced a coldness, and, after Addison was dead, Pope emitted his venom in the poisonous character of "Atticus":—

Blest with each talent and each art to please,
And born to live, converse, and write with ease;

yet,

Bears, like the Turk, no brother near the throne,"

and so forth. Nothing that inspired skill and spite can do is better than this satire; had Addison been alive when it was given to the world he could not have hit a return blow, for cruelty was not in his nature, and Pope was so sensitive that any retort on him was cruel.

In 1715 Addison conducted for six months another paper, "The Freeholder," in the Whig interest; was made one of the Commissioners for Trade and the Colonies, and married the Dowager-Countess of Warwick. He died in 1719, "three years after that splendid but dismal union," says Thackeray. A dowager-countess is not usually splendid, and we really have no reason to think that the union was "dismal". Addison's position as Secretary of State was sufficiently good, not to speak of his fame, popularity, and genius. In 1719 Addison was matched against Steele in a newspaper controversy: Steele probably was not welcome to Lady Warwick at Holland House, but the two men, says Steele, "still preserved the most passionate concern for their mutual welfare. When they met they were as unreserved as boys...."

Addison with Steele, founded a school of essayists of merit, who never came near the supremacy of their masters: Addison not only delighted his world, but left it better than he found it; not by preaching violent sermons, not by "lashing the vices of the age," but by sensibly lowering the tyranny of the fashion which insisted on the duty of being vicious.

Swift.

Concerning the genius, character, and career of Jonathan Swift there are interesting varieties of opinion, but nobody denies that the genius was great or that the career was sad, strange, even mysterious. In an old-fashioned comedy of Humours, Swift would have been cast for the part of Wycherley's Captain Manly in "The Plain Dealer"; the man of tender heart who hates an age and a society that do not come up to his ideals. Swift had, indeed, depths of affection, and a noble capacity for friendship, but, unlike Captain Manly, he would never have made Fidelia, or any other woman, happy. He lived in this world the life of a flogging schoolmaster. He expresses a hope, at about the age of 26, that, in his poems,

Each line shall stab, shall blast, like daggers and like fire.

He hopes, at the same hopeful period, that

My hate, whose lash just heaven has long decreed,
Shall on a day make Sin and Folly bleed.

He lashed away, but Sin and Folly remained "more than usual calm," they did not hear, they did not heed him; and the presentable part of his most comprehensive and ferocious satire of humanity, the one book published by him which is still generally known, "Gulliver's Travels," has been an innocent source of amusement to many generations of children.

At about the age of 37, Swift, in a private letter, wrote thus of his own case, "I envy very much your prudence and temper, and love of peace and settlement: the reverse of which has been the great uneasiness of my life, and is like to continue so". He recognizes one source of his sorrows. As to "prudence," Swift had even too much of it, if "prudence" were the motive which made him put off marriage with the woman ("Stella," Esther Johnson) whom he loved, and who loved him. But for "peace and settlement," he had no partiality; and his temper was no better than he deemed it.

The curses of Swift were, first, his just consciousness of powers far superior to those of the great politicians who adulated, and used, and failed to reward him. With their wine, and their amours, and their bitter, petty jealousies, they let the great opportunity go by, and, lo! Harley is in the Tower; and Bolingbroke, a fugitive, drinks, and loves, and intrigues in France, vituperating the Prince whose cause he has helped to ruin; while Swift eats out his own heart in that Ireland which he hated.

Another curse was that he had attached himself as a priest to the Church of England; while the author of "The Tale of a Tub," however loyal he might be in practice, certainly cannot have been "a trusty and undoubting Church of England man". Of all the creeds, of all the Churches and Sects, in his heart he thought like the Jupiter of his poem,

You, who in various Sects were shamm'd,
And come to hear each other damn'd.

This bleak lucidity of soul, this consciousness of being able "to see forward with a fatal clearness," this knowledge of the greatness of his own genius,—thwarted by poverty, driven wild by servitude, lacerated by the torments of a mysterious disease, crushed by terrible forebodings of the appointed end; these things drove Swift to cut himself among the tombs, and to curse in the wilderness.

Though born in Dublin (30 Nov. 1667) Swift was no Irishman: his father belonged to an old Yorkshire, his mother to an old Leicestershire family. But on his father's death, his mother being left ill-provided, Swift's was the position of a poor relation. His training at Kilkenny school and Trinity College, Dublin, was paid for by his uncle, Godwin Swift, who was either poor or penurious. Men like Swift seldom yield much attention to their tutors; and Swift, though he did well in Greek and Latin, failed in physics and took no pains with his Latin essay. He was, however, allowed to pass. In 1688 he went to England, to his mother at Leicester, and in the following year entered the household of Sir William Temple, a politician and diplomatist, retired from active life, busy with literature and gardening, but in friendly relations with William III and with men of affairs.

Sir William Temple (1628-1699) was himself a writer admired for his style, especially in his Essay on Poetry. His periods, though long, are graceful and well balanced, but seldom have such brief melancholy cadences as this reflection "when all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over".

Swift's position, at first, was between those of a secretary and an upper servant; he left Temple's house for Ireland, in 1690; returned in 1691: next year obtained a degree at Oxford; and in 1694, in Ireland, took Orders, and received a small benefice, Kilroot, near Belfast, where the people were Presbyterians, and he had no congregation worth mentioning. He entangled himself with a Miss Waring (Varina) and wrote "Pindaric" poems. Dryden, a remote cousin of his, told him that he would never be a poet, and no other reason has been discovered for Swift's flouts and jeers at Dryden's reputation. The anecdote may be untrue, and, as a Catholic, Dryden would be disapproved of by Swift.

In 1696 Swift was reconciled with Temple, and during the next two years was treated with more favour, met politicians, met the King; educated Stella, an inmate of Temple's house, then a girl of 15; read much in Temple's library, and was about to attach himself to the double-dyed traitor, Sunderland, when Sunderland was dismissed from office. Swift went back to Ireland, held a living at Laracor, lived much with Lord Berkeley at the Castle, Dublin; wrote lively verses of the lighter sort, wrote a political pamphlet which was successful, and showed leanings towards the Whig party. In London (1704) his "Tale of a Tub" was published anonymously: it had been composed in 1696-1697.

In "An Apology" (1709) Swift, still, as always, anonymous, writes "the book seems calculated to live as long as our language and our taste admit no great alterations". In taste great alterations have been admitted. Though excellent judges still applaud this whimsical allegory, few readers who approach it with high expectations are likely to escape disappointment. The allegory of Peter (Rome) Martin (Anglicans and Lutherans) and Jack (Presbyterians and all other Protestant sects), is utterly incoherent. At present no self-respecting person would write of the religions of Islam and Buddha in such terms and such temper as Swift wrote about the Churches and sects of Christianity. Whatever we may think of Transubstantiation and Vestments, we do not make uproarious fun of them.

Already Swift indulges his half-insane delight in malodorous references; the wit of the dirty schoolboy scrawling on the walls. Few things in the work are more witty than this on Dryden: "he has often said to me in confidence, that the world would never have suspected him to be so great a poet, if he had not assured them so frequently in his prefaces, that it was impossible they could ever doubt or forget it".

Thackeray remarks, "I think the world was right, and the Bishops who advised Queen Anne not to appoint the author of 'The Tale of the Tub' to a Bishopric, gave perfectly good advice". James IV did not give Dunbar a benefice: the line must be drawn somewhere. Swift, in his "Apology," denied that he had attacked religion: be it so, he had written on matters ecclesiastical with amazingly bad taste. His "Argument against Abolishing Christianity" (1708) is not the sort of argument that we expect from a bishop-postulant, but its irony seems as charming and dexterous now as it did two centuries ago. In "The Tale of a Tub," on the other hand, we seldom find a passage that wins a smile, except in "those fine curses" which Peter spoke, and in some of the gambols of Jack. The apologue, in feet, is heavy-handed; the author does not clearly know where he is making for; the perfect clearness of his later style is absent. (These observations, entirely candid, are at odds with the usual applause of "The Tale of a Tub".)

With "The Tale of a Tub" was published, in the same volume, "The Battle of the Books," written about 1697; this was a now belated contribution to the controversy as to the relative merits of the Ancients and the Moderns, begun in France by Charles Perrault, the author of our most familiar fairy tales. As it happened, Temple, in an essay, had taken up the cause of the Ancients, and had chosen, as proofs of superiority of the oldest books, the Fables ascribed to Æsop, and the Letters attributed to Phalaris, the half-mythical tyrant of Agrigentum. The matter of the fables is prehistoric, but the crooked slave, Æsop, did not contribute their form; and the Letters of Phalaris were a literary exercise composed long after the tyrant's date. Wotton, with some help from the greatest scholar of his day, Richard Bentley, King's Librarian, and (1700) Master of Trinity, Cambridge, replied to Temple, and Charles Boyle, of Christ Church, Oxford, introduced a personal squabble with Bentley. The Christ Church wits, including the formidable Atterbury, sided with Boyle,—there was a war between elegant scholars, on Boyle's side; and the nascent science of the Royal Society allied with perfect scholarship and Bentley, on the other. Boyle did not insist that the Letters of Phalaris were genuine; Bentley displayed his sagacious learning in his proof that they were not. Temple was discreetly silent, but Swift espoused the cause of the wits in "The Battle of the Books". The Books in the King's Library, Ancient and Modern, meet in a parody of a fight in Homer. The goddess, Dulness, befriends the Moderns, as Aphrodite, in Homer, protects Paris and Æneas. The mock-Homeric manner was not then outworn, and it amused; while Swift heaped personal scorn on Bentley, and, of course, on Dryden, who is ridiculed for being old. Bentley, crooked-legged and hump-backed, is armed with a flail, and "a vessel full of ordure". Boyle transfixes Bentley and Wotton as a cook spits a brace of woodcocks—and that is the humour of it.

Infinitely more amusing were Swift's predictions of the death of a prophetic almanac-maker, Partridge (1708), and the sequel of that jest. Swift styled himself Isaac Bickerstaff, and lent the name to Steele, for use in his new paper "The Tatler". He lived in close friendship with Addison, Steele, Congreve, and Prior; and began his love affair with Miss Vanhomrigh, the unfortunate Vanessa, rival of Stella. Like Lord Foppington, Swift probably coveted nothing less than her heart, which she gave, and his difficulty was "to get rid of the rest of her body".

After a visit to Ireland, Swift returned to find the Tories in power, "a new world" (September, 1710). He met Harley (Lord Oxford), took service under him, and for three years was the Achitophel of the Tories, writing for them lampoons and political pamphlets which "were cried up to the skies". For half a year (1710-1711) Swift's papers appeared in "The Examiner". Swift dined with Harley and St. John—they called him, "Jonathan"; he snubbed their attempts to treat him as a mere gentleman of the Press; and in the delightful pages of his familiar "Journal to Stella," he paints the age, and himself, triumphant, adulated, powerful, but "seeing all his own mischance"; "I believe they will leave me Jonathan as they found me".

Among the pamphlets of this period are "The Hue and Cry after Dismal" (Lord Nottingham,'ancestor of Horace Walpole's "black funereal Finches"), and the more important "Conduct of the Allies". By 1713 Swift hoped "that the present age and posterity would learn who were the real enemies of the country". The old question of Tory Short and Whig Codlin! But he had cruelly offended the Duchess of Somerset by "The Windsor Prophecy"; and the Queen could not endure the author of "The Tale of a Tub". He asked for his reward, and with much trouble obtained the Deanery of St. Patrick's, Dublin (June, 1713). He went to Ireland, but he could not get rid of Vanessa. Her letters pursued him; other letters called him to town—Harley and St. John were at odds, and he was needed. He engaged in a paper war with Steele, now an enemy; he wrote "The Public Spirit of the Whigs"; he offended the Scottish members, and the Duke of Argyll, the hero of Malplaquet, an ill man to meddle with. He was consoled by the friendship of Pope, Gay, and Arbuthnot, a good man and a great humorist. They founded the Martinus Scriblerus Club, for the writing of facetious papers: but politics went ill, Harley and St. John quarrelled in the Queen's presence: her death was near; Harley was overthrown by St. John; St. John had no courage, and, on the death of Anne, was checked by Argyll and his regiment. Bishop Atterbury would have proclaimed the King, King James over the Water; the laymen dared not back him; the Elector of Hanover occupied the throne; and of Swift's great friends St. John fled to France, and Harley was imprisoned in the Tower; while Swift, hooted by the pressmen whom he had bullied, made for Ireland. The Jacobite Cause was lost, and we cannot here ask, would Swift (as St. John says in "Esmond") have accepted the Primacy of England from la bonne cause, the young Catholic King?

My life is now a burden grown
To others, ere it be my own,

Swift wrote. He corresponded (1716) with Atterbury, and Atterbury was at the head of the Jacobite party in England. In 1719 Swift dedicated to a Swedish diplomatist, Count Gyllenborg, a History of England. "My intention was to inscribe it to the King, your late Master, for whose great virtues I had ever the highest admiration, as I shall continue to bear to his memory." This King, Charles XII, in 1716 meant to land in Britain with an army in support of the Jacobites, and Gyllenborg, his ambassador, managed the plot in England. Charles had invited Swift, at an earlier date, to Sweden: now Swift dwells "in a most obscure disagreeable country" (Ireland), "and among a most profligate and abandoned people".

All this does not look like zeal for the Protestant succession.

The years 1719-1723 saw the completion of Swift's ambiguous poem, "Cadenus and Vanessa," and the arrival of Vanessa in Swift's neighbourhood. "In vain he protested, he vowed, he soothed and bullied; the news of the Dean's marriage to Stella at last reached her; and it killed her,—Vanessa died of that passion" (Thackeray). The marriage is still matter of controversy.

In 1724 Swift, who hated the English Government if he did not love Ireland, wrote the famous "Drapier's Letters" against a job in copper currency, and gained high popularity.

In 1726 he gave to the world the most famous of his books, "Gulliver's Travels," in which his gift of narrative, his amazing power of being truthful in the minutest details of the most extravagant imaginations, his misanthropy, his irony, and his delight in unsavoury things, are all carried to the highest perfection. In 1729 came the "Modest Proposal" for eating Irish children; in 1738 his "Polite Conversation" and "Directions to Servants," with the same merit of humour, and the same inveterate fault.

In visits to London (1726, 1727) Swift had enjoyed the society of his old friends and comrades in letters; and hoped there, perhaps, to find a Fountain of Youth. He felt himself slipping into the vice of hoarding; and rusting in a second-rate society. Bolingbroke had been allowed to return from exile; the banished King had found him worthless as a statesman: he had said his worst against the banished King; nobody wanted Bolingbroke and nobody was afraid of him. He played the philosopher, and Swift did not believe in his affectation of philosophy. Arbuthnot, Swift loved, Pope he had always admired; and he tried to protect Gay from his own reckless improvidence. He ridiculed, in "Gulliver," the proofs brought against Atterbury as a Jacobite agent: if Swift was not convinced by the evidence he must have shut his eyes very hard.

In January, 1728, Stella died: Swift tried to fill the gap in his life by activity in Irish politics. His disease, apparently some malady of the ear which gradually affected the brain, became more unendurable, but he had still to write some of his most powerful satires in verse. Then his memory began to fail, and he drifted slowly into the half-unconscious dotage of his last five years, dying on 19 October, 1745, unconscious, probably, of the meteoric adventure of Prince Charles.

The failure of his party, of his political ambition, and measureless hopes of greatness, gave Swift the retirement and the leisure to produce his greatest works. If fortune had "bantered us" as Bolingbroke said, he turned and bantered Fate and mankind. In the long array of his volumes, so seldom opened, are many brief flights, in verse and prose, which are full of entertainment, of wild fancy, orderly and gravely presented; and there is the "Journal to Stella," with its infinite tenderness of affection; and the Letters, the confidences of the wits from romantic Charles Wogan, who rescued from prison the bride of a King, and died as Governor of the appropriate province of La Mancha, to those of Pope and Arbuthnot and Gay. The works of Swift are a library in themselves.

De Foe.

"One man in his time plays many parts," and no man played more parts than Daniel Foe or De Foe. The son of a butcher in St. Giles's, born in 1661, he received at a Nonconformist school an education that was a sufficient basis for literary undertakings, but not tending to such "classical" flights as led young University men to profitable sinecures under Government. He is said to have been out under Monmouth in 1685. He betook himself to commerce of various kinds, thus acquiring little or no money (in 1692 he "broke," like Mr. Badman), but a competent knowledge of the currents of trade, and the courses of financial speculation, exhibited in his "Essay on Projects," projects, educational and social as well as financial (1698). In 1701 his "True Born Englishman," showing in the interest of William III that the English are a mixed race, was successful.

In 1702 his famous "Shortest Way with the Dissenters" was discovered to be, not a candid plea for the Church of England, but an irritating parody of High Church pretensions, nearly as serious as Swift's apology for cannibalism. De Foe was pilloried, but not pelted, and imprisoned for his waggery; was released, probably through the agency of Harley, Lord Oxford, the wavering and enigmatic "Dragon" of Swift's correspondence; and while editing and indeed writing a weekly "Review," the precursor in its social columns of Steele's "Tatler," De Foe served Harley in divers subterranean ways. In Scotland, in the autumn of 1706, he acted as Harley's spy and newsagent: his letters to Harley contain an admirable picture of the struggles for and against the Union of Scotland and England, and of De Foe's own versatile, acute and daring character. He made himself "all things to all men," could talk to each citizen as a member of his own trade, explained all the economic conditions of the country, understood, and did not revere, the Kirk, and the preachers; and, by securing the services of that lively and humorous rogue and sham-fanatic, Ker of Kersland, broke up an unholy alliance between the extreme "Cameronians" and the Jacobite gentry and clansmen of Perthshire and Angus. They had intended to break up the Parliament; but the wild Whigs did not keep tryst.

It is plain that Harley treated De Foe very ill, and that, like most spies, he was underpaid. Still he was working for a cause which he had at heart; as he was later, when, to all appearance, playing the part of journalist in the Tory or even Jacobite interest under Government.

The needy De Foe was a man of dark corners, an absolute "Johannes Factotum". Swift called him "a grave, sententious, dogmatical rogue". He professed that he received assistance from "The Divine Spirit".

No man who wrote so much and so variously has written so well. His favourite topic, if we may judge by the frequency with which he handled it, was "psychical research". Like Glanvill, Henry More, and other writers in the sceptical age of the Restoration, he collected, and told in his own inimitable manner, many current anecdotes of wraiths, death-warnings, second sight, and phantasms of the dead. The most prominent merit of De Foe, in fiction, is his power of convincing the reader by the minute and sober realism of his details. Some of his novels, in autobiographic form, have caused disputes as to whether they be romances, or actual memoirs.

"A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal, on September 8, 1705" (published in 1706) has been described as "the first instance of De Foe's wonderful lies like truth". "This relation is matter of fact," said De Foe in the Preface. Sir Walter Scott, a ghost-hunter himself, explained the "fact" by saying that De Foe invented and wrote the story as a puff of Drelincourt "On Death," which the appearance of Mrs. Veal, on the day after her death recommended to her friend (who believed her to be alive), Mrs. Bargrave.

But Mr. George Aitken has proved "that the piece was, as De Foe said, 'a true relation of matter of fact,'" that is, De Foe merely wrote the story as told by Mrs. Bargrave—"the percipient"—the person who saw and conversed with the dead Mrs. Veal about her gown—"a scoured silk, newly made up". Mr. Aitken found a manuscript note of 21 May, 1714, by some one who had interviewed Mrs. Bargrave, and for whom Mrs. Bargrave made three or four minute additions. As for Mrs. Veal herself, she died on 7 September, appeared on 8 September to Mrs. Bargrave, and we have the record of her burial on 10 September, in the register of St. Mary's, Dover.

In another case, "The Botethan Ghost," told in an appendix to De Foe's "Duncan Campbell," the tale was really written, as De Foe says, not by himself, but by one of the people who saw the spectre, the Rev. Mr. Ruddle of Launceston in Cornwall, in June, 1665; the narrative was written on 4 September of the same year.

Thus De Foe's extraordinary gift of making things fictitious seem true has caused him to be charged with inventing stories which he merely retold, or printed from the manuscript of another.

De Foe was 60 years of age, and had suffered from apoplexy, when he wrote the masterpiece which made him immortal, "Robinson Crusoe" (1719). New editions appeared in May, June, and August; a sequel followed which few read; still more scarce are readers of De Foe's "Serious Reflections and Vision of the Angelic World" (1720). The "metapsychical" world was always very near De Foe, practical and shrewd man as he was.

"Crusoe" is based on Captain Rogers's narrative of the adventures of Alexander Selkirk, a mariner of Largo, in Fife, marooned (1704) on the Island of Juan Fernandez. An allegory of De Foe's own life has been suspected, the idea is unimportant.

It is superfluous to dilate on the sterling merits of "Robinson Crusoe". Before he published it a critic had recognized "the little art he is truly master of, of forging a story, and imposing it on the world for truth". The style is as simple as Swift's, and more "homely". The tale of love was not De Foe's trade, any more than "the moving accident" was Wordsworth's. "Moll Flanders," and "Roxana" are no doubt meant to have a moral influence; but their readers are looking for something else: like the readers of the edifying Monsieur Zola.

De Foe was one of the fathers of journalism, and almost "the only begetter" of the story of adventure, the desert island romance, and, in "Memoirs of a Cavalier," and "A Journal of the Plague Year," of the historical autobiographical novel. "It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard, in ordinary discourse, that the plague was returned again in Holland...." That keynote reverberates in scores of the historical romances of 1885-1900.

The modern novelist, of course, avoids De Foe's strict statistical method. De Foe's story reads precisely like a historical document, and the modern reader dislikes nothing more than that sort of reading. De Foe's hero saw a number of people looking at "a ghost walking on a grave stone". Less fortunate Mr. Pepys "went forth, to see (God forgive my presumption!) whether I could see any dead corpse going to the grave, but, as God would have it, did not".

By a truly realistic touch De Foe's contemplative saddler closes his journal with "a coarse but sincere stanza of my own,"

A dreadful plague in London was
In the year sixty-five,
Which swept an hundred thousand souls
Away; yet I alive!

The modern reader finds that De Foe's fictions are too like facts, and, often, in the moral and religious reflections, too like tracts, for his taste. On the other hand, to a contemplative mind, "Robinson Crusoe," carefully read, and compared with its descendants in fiction, is a source of delight. De Foe, at the age of 60, must have been, while he wrote it, as happy as his innumerable readers. For example, we compare Robinson's felling of a cedar tree "five feet ten inches diameter at the lower part..." and his construction of a vessel "fit to carry twenty-six men," a vessel quite unlaunchable, with the practicable coracle, the most "home-made" of things in "Treasure Island". We compare the trial trips of the two crafts (Robinson's second boat); we see that R. L. Stevenson has produced the less impossible narrative of the twain, and that both rejoice the heart.

The mass, and the variety, of what must be called the "pot-boilers" of De Foe are unequalled. In better conditions of authorship he would have been a rich man, but he died poor, in distress, and under a cloud, in 1731.

A history of literature is not necessarily a history of philosophical, metaphysical, and theological speculation. In such speculation the age was rich that saw the volcanic eruption of sects and heresies during the religious frenzy of the Civil War, and also beheld the reaction from all "enthusiasm" to the passion for common sense and for science as "organized common sense" which came in with the Restoration. Hobbes's works did not encourage religious "enthusiasm," or mysticism, or belief in the ineffable spiritual experiences of devout men, from John Bunyan with his visions, to Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688), an Anglican divine, with his Neoplatonic hints at Union with the Absolute ("True Intellectual System of the Universe," "Eternal and Immutable Morality"). The learned and the unlearned wrote books on either side, sceptical or in favour of belief.

The Royal Society impartially included Joseph Glanvill (16361680) with his "Vanity of Dogmatising," and his "Sadducismus Triumphatus," the pioneer of Psychical Research, with its tales of Poltergeists, wraiths, and levitations, some of them fairly well authenticated. The Royal Society also gave a place to the far more famous philosopher of liberal common sense philosophy, John Locke (1632-1704). Locke's first eighteen years were passed under the shadow of the Great Rebellion, and at Christ Church, Oxford, under a Head who was an Independent divine. He did not like the new freedom, in which he found the old slavery, but after the Restoration he found liberty for discussion, in which "enthusiasm" was not permitted to enter. His attitude towards mental philosophy was not unlike that of Bacon. He disliked Aristotelianism as then held at Oxford, thinking that words usurped the place of facts, and in his "Essay on the Human Understanding" he employed that plain style which the Royal Society enjoined. The work was written at intervals during seventeen years, disturbed when as a friend of Shaftesbury, Dryden's Achitophel, the turbulent patron of Titus Oates, he was sent into exile. The burden of the essay, which appeared in 1690, is opposition to the theory of "innate ideas"—the terms need defining—and insistence that we derive our ideas from the presentations of our senses. "Average common sense was always kept in his view," and "he wrote for the most part in the language of the market-place". He wanted man to think as a human being very limited in his faculties, "to distinguish between what is, and what is not comprehensible by us," and his treatise had the most potent and enduring effects on continental as well as on English Philosophy. He was a friend of his junior, Berkeley, whose philosophic fancy took a wider and more audacious range. His "Treatise on Government" and "Thoughts on Education" followed rapidly. He obtained a place as Commissioner of Trade and Plantations (Colonies), and advised England to anticipate Scotland in founding an emporium at Darien, in Spanish territory, as the Scots were to discover.

We have not space for much more than the names of other prose writers of this great age. John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), a Scot in London, was an admirable humorist, a great physician, and the friend of all the wits; himself a good-humoured Swift in prose satire. Bishop Atterbury (1662-1732) excited an enthusiastic devotion in Pope, who proposed to accompany this clerical conspirator into exile, after his great Jacobite plot was crushed in 1723. Atterbury was an accomplished general writer, while the great scholar and Master of Trinity, Richard Bentley (1662-1742), gave to his classical criticism of the forged "Epistles of Phalaris" the merit of vigorous literature. His conjectural various readings in Milton's text are now and then comical, and seem a parody of classical criticism. The Viscount Bolingbroke, Henry St. John (1678-1751), was a wit among politicians, the patron, friend, and inspiration of the wits; he had his fame as an eloquent rhetorician in his life, and as a daring thinker, but he really wrote best when he wrote simply and humorously, as in his satire of his Jacobite allies, "The Epistle to Windham" (1716). His "Ideal of a Patriot King" also preserves his literary reputation (1738). Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), was an elegant philosopher, a thinker of taste; while George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (born at Kilkenny 1685, died 1753), was an idealistic philosopher and man of science ("The Theory of Vision") whose style, in grace and irony, is akin to the manners of Plato and of Pascal. The best and most delightful of his works is the dialogue "Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher," directed against the Sceptics, and deistical writers. Berkeley's character was not less admirable than his works.

---

[CHAPTER XXVIII.]

GEORGIAN POETRY.

I.

Edward Young.

"Is it to the credit or discredit of Young, as a poet, that of his 'Night Thoughts' the French are particularly fond?" So asks Croft, the sardonic author of a notice on Young in Dr. Johnson's "Lives of the Poets". The preference is certainly not to the credit of the French! Born in Hampshire in 1683, the son of a clergyman, Young lived till 1765: writing much verse, and more prodigal of praises to "the Great" than any other poet of any age.

Young's father, in 1703, appears to have been poor, for the son, to save expense, was hospitably entertained in the lodges of the Warden of New College and the President of Corpus. A Fellowship was found for him at All Souls', and as he was chosen to make and speak the Latin oration at the founding of the fine Codrington Library, it may be supposed that, at All Souls', he was held to be more than mediocriter doctus (the qualifications for a Fellow were said to be "well born, well dressed, moderately learned").

Young's earlier poems, and his dedications always, seem bids for patronage and preferment. In his "Last Day" (1710),

An archangel eminently bright
From off his silver staff of wondrous height
Unfurls the Christian flag, which waving flies
And shuts and opens more than half the skies.

Angels are asked, on the annihilation of the universe, to say where Britannia is now?

All, all is lost, no monument, no sign,
Where once so proudly blazed the great machine.

In the Dedication, which Young later suppressed, nothing was left but Queen Anne, whom the poet distinctly saw floating upwards, and leaving the fixed stars behind her. The clever but eccentric and unfortunate Jacobite Duke of Wharton was a patron of Young, and the defender of Atterbury. The Duke died, under arms for the exiled James III, or Chevalier de St. George, at Lerida; he was then composing a tragedy on Mary, Queen of Scots. Young suppressed, in later years, the dedication to Wharton of his successful tragedy, "The Revenge" (1721).

In 1725-1726 Young published his Satires, "The Universal Passion". They read like a poor imitation of Pope's satires, but in point of time they precede the "Dunciad".

Why slumbers Pope, who leads the tuneful train,
Nor hears that Virtue, which he loves, complain?

Pope was not slumbering, he was counting every groan of Virtue, to whom he was so devoted, and was about to lash Vice with the best of them. The Universal Passion which Young flogs, is the Love of Fame. Every one is the fool of Fame except this earl or that, at whom Young dedicates his strings of epigrams which remind us of Pope, with a difference. Sloane and Ashmole are derided for their Museums. Young even dedicated a satire to Sir Robert Walpole; he must smile, "or the Nine inspire in vain". He also adulated the Duke of Newcastle in 1745, when

a pope-bred princeling crawled ashore,

meaning,

The Prince who did in Moidart land
With seven men at his right hand,
And all to conquer kingdoms three.
Oh, he's the lad to wanton me!

as a poet of the opposite party exclaimed. The inglorious Duke is

Holles! immortal in far more than fame!

In 1727 Young became a clergyman, at the ripe age of 44. His "Night Thoughts" in blank verse, are of 1741-1742, in Nine Nights

My song the midnight raven has outwinged,

and the midnight owl was outshrieked.

From short (as usual) and disturbed repose
I wake, how happy they who wake no more!
Yet that were vain, if dreams infest the grave.

We remember

In that sleep of death what dreams may come!

A few lines are in the common stock of quotations such as,

An undevout astronomer is mad.

There are good passages, here and there, but long sermons in a kind of blank verse which "does not overstimulate" are not immortal. "Young has the trick of joining the turgid with the familiar... but with all his faults he was a man of genius and a poet." He was not, as people, misled by the existence of one William Young, foolishly supposed, the original of Fielding's Parson Adams in "Joseph Andrews", But Young may be the original of Robert Montgomery, who added to the piety of Young the ebullitions of an unprecedented genius for nonsense.

James Thomson.

Romance secured a firm footing in English literature, after the artificialities of the eighteenth century had sunk into dotage, through the genius of a Borderer, Sir Walter Scott. But another Borderer, long before, had seen glimmerings and had heard strains of the fairy world and the fairy songs. This was James Thomson, son of the parish minister of Ednam in Roxburghshire. The father was presently translated to Southdean, in the Cheviots, and on the old line of Scottish marches: by that way they rode, as Froissart shows, to Otterbourne fight. Thomson's father died while trying to lay a ghost in a house near Southdean, when the son was at the University of Edinburgh. The haunted house was demolished. Thomson studied divinity, but abandoned the prospective pulpit for poetry, and went to London to seek his fortune in 1725. He lost his letters of introduction, and he needed a pair of shoes; his only resource was the manuscript of his "Winter," in "The Seasons". A dedication brought to Thomson twenty guineas: the piece was praised by Aaron Hill and Malloch (or Mallet, Malloch is a Macgregor name); the poem was liked; "Spring" and "Summer" followed, and Thomson dallied over "Autumn" till 1730.

In 1730 he Had been successful with the moral tragedy of "Sophonisba": though in opposition to the Court party, Thomson had obtained several noble patrons, and they did their best for his drama. A long poem on Liberty was not a triumph: but the Prince of Wales gave the author a pension of £100 yearly. His tragedy of "Tancred and Sigismunda" was popular (1745), and a patent place brought to the poet £300 a year, which he did not long enjoy, dying on 27 August, 1748. Thomson was notoriously indolent, and his last, perhaps his best, work is "The Castle of Indolence" in the Spenserian stanza.

"The Seasons" are in blank verse, a welcome change from the eternal rhyming couplets, and prove that Thomson, unlike his contemporaries, wrote "with his eye on the object". He had been bred in "the wide places of the shepherds," among the lonely Border moors and hills; he had not always been a man of towns. In the sunless winter day

scarce
The bittern knows his time, with bill ingulpht
To shake the sounding marsh; or from the shore
The plovers when to scatter o'er the heath,
And sing their wild notes to the listening waste.

This was a new voice. Being a Borderer, Thomson was an angler, and describes fly-fishing well, though not better than Gay.

In that old theme of the Middle Ages "the symphony of spring," the songs of birds, he shows knowledge of their ways, and if he makes the hen nightingale the singer, so does Homer, following the myth. In "Summer," Thomson describes, with wonderful tact, sultry climes in which he never breathed, and adds the little idyll of Musidora.

"Autumn" includes a picture of fox-hunting, a sport which James probably did not indulge in, and celebrates the Argyll of Malplaquet and Duncan Forbes of Culloden, and the water of Tweed,

Whose pastoral banks first heard my Doric reed.

Despite his power of rendering nature, the artificiality of his age is still strong with Thomson, and it cannot be said that "The Seasons" are very attractive to modern readers.

"The Castle of Indolence," by virtue of the poet's return to the measure of an author in his day despised, Spenser, yields a welcome change from the eternal rhymed couplets.

A pleasant land of drowsyhead it was.

like the land of the Lotus-eaters in Tennyson. The stanza beginning

And when a shepherd of the Hebrid isles,
Set far amid the melancholy main

is the voice of reviving poetry, and is immortal. Nobody has the slightest sympathy with

The Knight of arts and industry,
And his achievements fair;
That by his castle's overthrow
Secur'd and crowned were.

The castle is a very good castle, it is good to be there, where no cocks disturb the dawn, no dogs murder sleep, "no babes, no wives, no hammers" make a din,

But soft-embodied Fays through airy portals stream.

William Collins.

"The grandeur of wildness and the novelty of extravagance, were always desired by Collins, but not always attained," says Dr. Johnson. After half a century of tame poets, we are happy to meet with one who did not cultivate the trim parterre, and who sometimes did attain to being "exquisitely wild".

Collins was born at Chichester on Christmas Day, 1721, was educated at Winchester, and at Oxford was a "demy," or scholar of Magdalen, like Addison. About 1744 he came to London with many literary projects in his mind, and very little money in his pockets. Johnson met him, while "immured by a bailiff". Collins cleared his debt with money advanced by a confiding bookseller on the credit of a contemplated translation of Aristotle's "Poetics," with a commentary. A legacy of £2000 from an uncle, Colonel Martin, was "a sum which Collins could scarcely think exhaustible, and which he did not live to exhaust". His mind weakened: he died in 1759: sane, but incapable of composition. His Odes (1746-1747) are the firm base of his renown: the little volume is extremely scarce; Collins is said to have burned, in disappointment, the greater part of the edition.

Of his "Persian Eclogues" (1742) Collins said that they were his "Irish Eclogues," being inadequately Oriental in local colour. The brief "Ode" (1746) "How Sleep the Brave" (of Fontenoy and Culloden) in ten lines has the magic of an elder day, and of all time. The "Ode to Evening," where the poet sees

hamlets brown and dim discovered spires
And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all
Thy dewy fingers draw
The gradual dusky veil,

has escaped from the manner of the eighteenth century, and preludes to Keats.

There are fine free passages in "The Ode to the Passions," and the "Dirge in Cymbeline" is not unworthy of its place. The "Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands," was long lost, and did not receive the poet's final touches. He obtained his knowledge of the Second Sight from John Home, author of "Douglas," who was a Hanoverian volunteer in the Forty-five, and inspired in Collins an unfulfilled desire to visit Tay and Teviotdale and Yarrow. The conventions of his age sometimes disfigure Collins's poems, but his face was set towards the City of Romance. Tastes still vary as to the relative merit of Collins and Gray: Matthew Arnold being the advocate of Gray; Swinburne of Collins. There is no way of settling such disputes; each writer, at his best, was truly a poet; neither, at his best, is staled or dimmed by time; both were almost portentous exceptions, when really inspired, to the conventional rules of their age in England.

Thomas Gray.

Nature occasionally brings into the world pairs of men destined to be distinguished in literature, and, without their own consent, to be pitted against each other as rivals. We have Scott and Byron, Dickens and Thackeray, Tennyson and Browning, and Collins and Gray. Gray was the elder, born in 1716 (Collins was born in 1721). If Collins's father was a hatter, Gray's mother was a bonnet-maker, if milliners make bonnets. Collins went to Oxford, after being at Winchester; Gray, before going to Peterhouse, Cambridge, was at Eton. Both poets wrote little: the health of Collins broke down; Gray, from his boyhood, was of a gentle morbid melancholy, and had humour enough to laugh at himself. Collins was neglected; Gray died, later, at the age of 54, beyond competition or dispute the foremost of English poets at the moment. Both men had their faces set to the North as the home of old poetry and poetic beliefs. Collins wrote his Ode on Highland Superstitions; Gray was delighted (at first) by Macpherson's "Ossian," he translated ancient Norse poems, visited Scotland, and appreciated the Highlands, and the lakes that Wordsworth was to make famous. Both men were scholars: Collins meant to translate Aristotle's "Poetics"; Gray meant to write a history of English Poetry. Both broke away from the tyranny of the rhymed heroic couplet; both especially cultivated the Ode.

There is no doubt as to which of the two is and always has been the more popular. Eton has made Gray her own. The great General Wolfe, before falling in the arms of Victory at Quebec, recited the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" to one of his officers, saying, "I would prefer being the author of that poem to the glory of beating the French to-morrow".

It is not easy to criticize Gray, because so many of his lines are household words, and have been familiar to us from childhood. It may perhaps be said that Gray never attains to the magical effect of Collins's "How Sleep the Brave," and of the "Ode to Evening". But there are cadences in "The Elegy," and sentiments noble, pure, pious, and modest in his poems which lend to them an unspeakable charm, while the ideas are such as come home to men's bosoms. It is true that his habit of personifying abstract ideas is an unfortunate survival of the weary allegorical company of the "Romance of the Rose," and no more than Collins does he escape from the mannerisms of his age. But like Collins, and indeed like his friend Horace Walpole, he was passing towards the kingdom of Romance.

At Eton he acquired Walpole's friendship; and if, after leaving Cambridge, he and Walpole quarrelled in Italy, Walpole confessed that he was to blame, made the first steps to reconciliation, and cherished, admired, and at last regretted Gray with all the ardour of a heart devoted and constant in friendship.

For the rest, Gray's life was passed quietly, and in a melancholy way, at Cambridge, which he reckoned a bear garden, and a home of Indolence; and, with his mother and aunt at Stoke Pogis, where he wrote the Elegy. His poems distilled very slowly from his genius: the Eton Ode appeared, and was unnoticed, in 1747. In the same year were written, to Horace Walpole, the rather hard-hearted lines on Walpole's handsome cat,

'Twas on a lofty vase's side.

The Eton Ode was composed, with a beautiful sonnet commemorating a private sorrow, in 1742:—

In vain to me the smiling mornings shine.

Earlier in the same year the "Ode to Spring," marked "to be sent to Fav,"—to West, his friend commemorated in the sonnet,—had been written, "not knowing he was then dead". Again, in October, 1742, another death prompted "The Elegy," which lay unfinished for about eight years. Grief had shaken Gray out of causeless melancholy, and 1742 was his great poetic year. In 1750 he wrote the light and bright "Long Story," on an unexpected visit from some poet-hunting ladies. In 1753, Walpole had Gray's "Six Poems" published, in twenty-one pages, with illustrations by Bentley. In 1754 he began the "Pindaric Odes," of which "The Progress of Poesy" is the noblest, and displays most of

the pride and ample pinion
That the Theban eagle bear
Sailing with supreme dominion
Thro' the azure deep of air.

To compose "The Bard" (the Welsh Bard) took two years and a half, and neither the style nor the ideas of the Odes were thought pleasing, or comprehensible, by the public and Dr. Johnson. In his demure way the little poet was a rebel, and Dr. Johnson knew it. Gray never practised the adulation of "the great" that was customary; he asked for no places, he refused the Laureateship. Late in life a sinecure Professorship at Cambridge was given to him. The professor never lectured: not to lecture was the convention, and against this happy convention Gray did not rebel. He studied, made notes, learned Norse, translated, visited haunted Glamis, with the chamber where Malcolm II was murdered, visited the Lakes, wrote the most delightful letters, and died at 54 in 1771, the year of the birth of Sir Walter Scott, the year of Burns's twelfth birthday.

Gray had genius—not a great, but a new genius, and had many accomplishments. His satires were surprisingly sharp and fierce. He had the light French touch of the day in verses of society. There is something of the noble pensiveness and mysteriously appealing music of Virgil in his best poems: if he be "a second-rate poet" (an unkind way of saying that he is not a Shakespeare or Homer), he shares with first-rate poets the power of moving all readers; he is not the poet of a set of refined amateurs. He who moved and soothed the heart of James Wolfe in the crisis of his fortunes, and who has charmed every generation of the English race since Wolfe and Montcalm gloriously fell, has done more than enough for fame.

The Wartons.

Gray's taste for ancient Scandinavian poetry, itself a symptom of the tendency to study all poetry, however old, exotic, and unconscious of the rules of the eighteenth century, was not a new thing. We are apt to think of Swift's patron, Sir William Temple, as an example of mere gentlemanly and conventional ideas, though happy in the gift of a pure and sometimes exquisite style in prose. But Temple in his essay "Of Heroic Virtue" shows that he was capable of taking sincere pleasure in old Norse poetry, though he knew it only through the Latin translations "by Olaus Wormius in his 'Literatura Runica' (who has very much deserved from the commonwealth of learning, and is very well worth reading by any that love poetry); and to consider the several stamps of that coin, according to several ages and climates". Temple speaks of "The Death Song" of Ragnar Lodbrog as a "sonnet" and applauds "An Ode of Scallogrim" (Skalagrim); but his remarks, "I am deceived if in this sonnet and ode there be not a vein truly poetical, and in its kind Pindaric, taking it with the allowance of the different climates, fashions, opinions, and languages of such different countries," though well meant, show a curious idea of the nature of the sonnet.

Here we have, before the end of the seventeenth century, the essence of historical comparative criticism of literature; and admiration for a kind of poetry as remote as possible from the standards of the eighteenth century. Temple handed on the torch to the elder Thomas Warton, Professor of Poetry at Oxford in his day, who himself translated from the Latin, as "a Runic ode," two stanzas of the Death Song of Regnar Lodbrog.[1]

One of Warton's sons, Thomas (born 1728), was Professor of Poetry, at Oxford (1757-1767), and, from 1774 onwards (he died in 1790), published a History of English Poetry, which may be unsystematic, but is both interesting and erudite. Warton had to read the earlier and later mediaeval poets, French and English, in the manuscripts, and he quoted profusely from sources then scarcely known. "Partly through the store of new matter that is provided for 'the reading public,' partly through the zest and enthusiasm of its students—the spirit of adventure which is the same in Warton as in Scott"—his book "did more than any theory to correct the narrow culture, the starved elegance, of the preceding age". The elder brother of Thomas, Joseph Warton, born 1722, was a schoolfellow of Collins, and published "Odes" in the same year as he (1746). In his preface he boldly said that "the fashion of moralizing in verse has been carried too far," and "he looks upon invention and imagination to be the chief faculties of a poet". He preached what Collins practised; he wrote good criticism in Dr. Johnson's paper, "The Adventurer"; in his essay on Pope he tried "to impress on the reader that a clear head and acute understanding are not sufficient alone to make a Poet," "that it is a creative and glowing imagination... and that alone, that can stamp a writer with this exalted and very uncommon character...." These were to be the watchwords of the Romantic movement, into which Warton, dying in 1800, did not live to enter.

John Dyer.

Of John Dyer we know from his most famous poem, "Grongar Hill," that, on a certain occasion, he

Sate upon a flowery bed
With my hand beneath my head.

If he had lain upon a flowery bed the posture would have been more poetical. In blank verse, deserting Grongar Hill, he found

Lo, the resistless theme, imperial Rome.

His "Ruins of Rome" are less impressive than Spenser's sonnets translated from Du Bellay. His "Fleece," an instructive epic of the wool trade, though praised by the illustrious Akenside, proved no golden fleece to its publisher. The prose summaries are pleasing. "Disputes between France and England on the coast of Coromandel, censured".

Dyer, at his best, is less successful than Thomson. He was born in 1700, son of an eminent solicitor of Carmarthen, was educated at Westminster, attempted the painter's art, visited Italy, took holy orders, published "The Fleece," in 1757, and died in 1758.

Briefer notes must suffice for the Rev. Mr. Blair of Athelstaneford (1699-1746) who wrote "The Grave," later recommended to amateurs by Blake's illustrations; and Matthew Green, who wrote "The Spleen" (1696-1737), a somewhat lively subsatirical effort.

William Shenstone.

Shenstone was one of the many poets who owe their reputation to their luck in being contemporaries of their biographer, Dr. Johnson. No Johnson could keep records of all the versifiers of the nineteenth century who have occasionally written good things. William Shenstone was born in November, 1714, at the Leasowes, in Halesowen. His life was much devoted to landscape gardening; and his harmless taste made him a noted character in his day. "He learned to read of an old dame," and pleasantly described her, or some other old dame, in "The School Mistress," an agreeable idyll in the Spenserian measure.

In 1732 Shenstone went to Johnson's college, his "nest of singing birds," Pembroke, in Oxford. He took no degree, he rhymed, printed his rhymes, and "The School Mistress" appeared in 1742. Thenceforth he landscape-gardened, being so little of an angler that he was indignant, says Johnson, when asked if there were any trout in his purely ornamental water. His expenses in gardening brought the haunting forms of bailiffs into his groves, but Johnson informs us gravely that "his life was unstained by any crime". He died in February, 1763. Several of his innocent poems, such as

I have found out a gift for my fair,
I have found where the wood pigeons breed,

are still familiar to many memories: they are from the "Pastoral Ballad". He perceived the demerits of the rhyming heroic couplet (as it was then written), as "apt to render the expression either scanty or constrained," and preferred the verse of four lines with alternate rhymes. Thus, on the death of Pope

Now sadly lorn, from Twit'nam's widow'd bow'r
The drooping muses take their casual way,
And where they stop a flood of tears they pour,
And where they weep, no more the fields are gay.

Of such matter are Shenstone's Elegies composed: his ballad on Jemmy Dawson, a martyr of the Jacobite cause, was celebrated and popular; poor Jemmy's lady-love died of grief and horror at his execution.

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[1] Posthumously published in 1748. See Mr. W. P. Ker's "Warton Lecture on English Poetry," "Proceedings of the British Academy," Vol. IV.

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[CHAPTER XXIX.]

GEORGIAN POETRY.

II.

Thomas Chatterton.

The name of Thomas Chatterton, the youngest and most short-lived of English poets, is curiously connected with that of Horace Walpole. Born, at Bristol, on 20 November, 1752, under the shadow of the beautiful old church of St. Mary Redcliffe, Chatterton from infancy became, as it were, possessed by the charm of the edifice and of the Middle Ages. Members of Chatterton's family had for more than a century been associated with the church as sextons; probably they had never given a thought to its beauty and historical associations, but these haunted their descendant, and the story of his childhood reads like a fantasy by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Among the clergy and people of Bristol the spirit of the eighteenth century, indeed the natural, usual contempt for things old, beautiful, and not understood, was complacently active. The chests which contained the archives of the church had been broken into by the Vestry, and quantities of old parchment documents, some of them illuminated, had been thrown about. Chatterton's father (died 1752), a schoolmaster, had taken as much of the stuff as he chose, and manuscripts in the house of the boy's mother were used for domestic purposes. The little boy, till the age of 6, had been curiously lethargic (and far from truthful); the sight of the illuminated parchments awakened his intellect; he stored all that he could find in a den of his own, and became a voracious reader. In 1760 he was sent to Colston's Hospital, a school resembling Christ's Hospital in London. He was soon, at the age of 10, a versifier, his Muse was first the sacred, then the satiric; but already, by the age of 11, he had made for himself, as some children do, a society of "invisible playmates," notably "T. Rowlie, a secular priest," of the age of Henry VI and Edward IV, and already he was writing, in a kind of old English made up out of glossaries, poems which he passed off as Rowlie's, found by himself in the derelict archives of the church.

In short, Chatterton might have seemed to be a victim of "split personality," and to be now Rowlie, and a number of other secondary selves, now the actual Chatterton, apprentice to an attorney. His conduct was almost as abnormal as his genius was precocious, and his passion for fame or notoriety was not quite sane. But, in fact, he knew very well what he was about, and, in December, 1768, attempted to dispose of "Rowley's ancient poems," including "The Tragedy of Aella," to Dodsley, the publisher. The success of Percy's ballads from the Old Folio (1765) may have suggested his scheme to the boy, but Dodsley was not tempted. Horace Walpole had published the first edition of "The Castle of Otranto" at the end of 1764. He used the conventional device (already familiar to the Greek romancers in the third century a.d.) of pretending to have found the tale in an ancient manuscript. Chatterton had proclaimed his discoveries in manuscripts in the summer of 1764, when he was 12 years old; in Horace Walpole he recognized, in 1769, a kindred spirit, and offered to show Walpole not only poems by Rowlie, but a history of English painters by the same learned divine. Walpole replied very courteously and gratefully, but "I have not the happiness of understanding the Saxon language". In a reply Chatterton explained his circumstances; his youth and position; and Gray had assured Walpole that the manuscripts sent were forgeries. Walpole therefore advised Chatterton to adhere to his profession, adding that experts were not convinced of the genuineness of the papers. He took no notice of several letters from Chatterton, and, after receiving a curt and angry note (24 July, 1769), sent back the manuscripts without further comment, and thought no more of the matter till he heard from Goldsmith, at a dinner of the Royal Academy, that Chatterton had committed suicide in London. After an attempt to support himself by hackwork, political and other, the poor boy, whose pride could not stoop to soliciting charity, had poisoned himself on the night of 24 August, 1770. Six weeks earlier he had been buying and sending presents of porcelain, fans, and snuff, to his mother and sister; twelve days before his death he had written that he intended to go abroad as a surgeon's mate.

Even when he wrote in ordinary English, Chatterton showed rare precocity. When he wrote in "Rowleian," in an invented dialect as remote from real English of any day as the language of the planet Mars, evolved by Mlle. Hélène Smith, is remote from French, Chatterton often produced lyrics of great charm as in "The Tragedy of Aella," and he invented a curious form of the Spenserian stanza. His touches in descriptions of Nature are sometimes charming. But he never quite escapes, as is natural, from the conventions of the eighteenth century; and his best inspiration is derived from Percy's "Reliques". What he might have been and might have done, in happier circumstances, it is impossible to conjecture. Genius he had, with more than the wonted abnormality of genius.

William Cowper.

The overlapping of styles in poetry and of tastes in poetry is pleasantly illustrated in the case of Cowper. He was born in 1731, Scott was born in 1771, and in Miss Austen's "Sense and Sensibility" we find the sensible Marianne Dashwood hesitating between the rival charms of Cowper and Scott; Byron, it appears, had not yet reached her fair hands. Cowper is a bridge between Thomson and Wordsworth. He was averse to the Popeian couplet; in his translation of Homer he preferred a blank verse which, at best, is not rapid. In writing of Nature he "had his eye on the object". His exit from the triumphant common sense of the eighteenth century was by way of spiritual religion, the Evangelical Revival promoted by Wesley, Whitefield, and their followers. They made appeal to the souls, not to the passions, of the populace; and Cowper's own sympathy with their bodies, with their poverty, like his love of retirement, and of newspapers, makes him akin to Wordsworth.

Born of the powerful Whig family of Cowper, the poet was the son of the rector of Great Berkhampstead; his mother, whom he lost when he was 6 years of age, yet ever remembered daily with intense affection, was of the name and lineage of Donne. He was cruelly bullied in childhood at a preparatory school. The innate savagery of boys of fifteen sometimes wreaks itself on a single small child, and we might think that his sufferings had their share in depressing the spirits of Cowper, did he not tell us that, at his public school, Westminster, he was eminent in cricket, which Horace Walpole and Gray despised at Eton. His master, "Vinny" Bourne, a Latin poet, was dear to him; he made many clever and lively friends, and, despite his attack on public schools in "Tirocinium" (1784), he seems to have been reasonably happy at Westminster, though he learned no more in one way than to write "lady's Greek without the accents

"Tirocinium" is a vigorous satire in Pope's metre. But Cowper, despite the vices and brutalities of school life, confesses his affection for the old place. The clergy at large come under Cowper's birch,

The parson knows enough who knows a Duke!
Behold your Bishop I well he plays his part,
Christian in name and infidel in heart.

In denouncing emulation for prizes, Cowper hit a blot that seems to have vanished, for anything like ungenerous emulation of this kind appears to be a lost vice. No boy studies

Less for improvement than to tickle spite.

Macaulay's victims, Warren Hastings and Elijah Impey, were at school with Cowper. He went to no University, but was articled to a solicitor; and idly "giggled and made giggle" with his cousins, Theodora and Harriet. He was in love with Theodora, but was disappointed, Harriet (Lady Hesketh) was one of his best friends. At the age of 32 (1763) hypochondria or hysteria shattered' his life; in a private asylum he was suddenly converted, and recovered, and religion was henceforth, now his joy and happiness, now, when the black cloud came over him, the cause of his despair. At Huntingdon, and later, at the uninviting village of Olney, he lived retired, the friend of Mrs. Unwin ("My Mary") and of a clerical ex-slave-trader, the Rev. John Newton. With Newton, Cowper wrote hymns, the ladies encouraged him to occupy himself with moral poems, "Table Talk," "Truth," "The Progress of Error," "Retirement," "Charity," "Hope," all in the metre of Pope; and all more or less satirical. Kings, in "Table Talk," are the first to suffer: one of the speakers in the dialogue is rather revolutionary. Indeed the mild tea-drinking Cowper, with his denunciations of "the great," the clergy, and the unthinking squires, preludes to the French Revolution, which he took very calmly. After politics comes talk of poetry: and the well-known lines on Pope occur; he

Made poetry a mere mechanic art,
And every warbler has his tune by heart.

Of poets in his own age Cowper prefers the reckless satirist, Churchill; of Gray and Collins nothing is said. In "The Progress of Error" the much-enduring Nimrod is attacked, in company with the well-graced popular preacher; and novelists are assailed as "flesh-flies of the land," while men who study art in Italy come home worse dunces than they went, and finally the deist and atheist are publicly birched.

It is not for his satires that Cowper is remembered: they were suggested to him, in the interests of religion and morals, by Mrs. Unwin, while Lady Austen, a lively person of quality, appointed to Cowper "The Task," or rather gave him the subject of "The Sofa," out of which grew "The Task". The poet ambles, in an essay in blank verse, as much at his ease and as fond of digressions as Montaigne, from the days when man squatted on the ground, to his invention of a three-legged stool, the addition of a fourth leg, cushions, arm-chairs, the settee, finally the sofa. The sofa pleases the gouty; never may the poet have gout; he has done nothing to deserve it; in boyhood he

Has fed on scarlet and strong haws,
The bramble, black as jet, and sloes austere.

This introduces a rural digression.

Here Ouse, slow winding through a level plain
Of spacious meads with cattle sprinkled o'er,
Conducts the eye along his sinuous course,
Delighted.

We think of

a river winding slow
By cattle, on an endless plain;
The ragged rims of thunder brooding low
With shadow streaks of rain.

How different are the methods of the two painters in words! The poet, finding geologists in the course of his wanderings, pities them, truth disclaiming them. Like Wordsworth he praises "retirement," welcomes the newspaper, and welcomes tea. In the charming lines, "The Retired Cat," temporarily shut up in a drawer lined "with linen of the softest kind," he seems to smile at his own cosy retirement; the teacups, the happy listening ladies. He is full of human kindness, of love for children, cats, and his own tame hares; he sets out to gather flowers, he says, and comes home laden with moral fruits, and religious reflections, and with his sketch book full of landscapes like Gainsborough's, and studies of cattle like Morland's. "The Task" won for the poet countless friends who never saw his face; and, though we have become attuned to blank verse of many beautiful modulations which he never dreamed of (though now and then they were attained by Thomson), "The Task" may still be read with sympathy and pleasure.

Many of Cowper's shorter poems, grave or gay, are in all memories: "The Wreck of the Royal George," as spirited and sad as a ballad; the ringing notes of "Boadicea"; the idyllic sweetness of

The poplars are felled, farewell to the shade
And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade;

the lines, "Addressed to a Young Lady," brief and beautiful as the most tender epigrams of "The Greek Anthology," from which Cowper's translating hand gathered a little garland. Of these "The Swallow," "Attic Maid with Honey Fed," are worthy of the original, as is "The Grass-hopper". Cowper shone in occasional verses on trifling matters such as "The Dog and the Water-lily"; and pretty kindly compliments, such as "Gratitude" (to his cousin, Lady Hesketh), and things tender and touched with the sense of tears in mortal things, as in the "Epitaph on a Hare," and the "To Mary" (of 1793). His "John Gilpin" is an unusual frolic.

The translations, in blank verse, of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" could not displace those of Pope, who, in Cowper's opinion, had done all that could be done in rhyme. Blank verse, especially that of Cowper, cannot convey, as Pope does, the sense of the speed of the great epic; nor was Cowper's scholarship exempt from curious errors. He was overworked; Mrs. Unwin fell into the condition described in "To Mary," his terrible melancholy returned, but his last original verses, "The Cast-away" (1798), are penned by no "maniac's hand," nor can a poet have written them without pleasure in his own genius. Cowper died in 1800.

His letters are reckoned among the best in our language, and their delightful wit and gaiety fortunately assure us that there was much happiness in a life so blameless.

Literature in Scotland (1550-1790).

Before approaching the great northern contemporary of Cowper, Robert Burns, it is necessary to cast a backward glance at his predecessors in Scottish letters. We left them in the reign of James V, when Sir David Lyndsay was the reigning poet of the Court and of the people. It is not easy to fit some remarks on Scottish literature after Sir David Lyndsay into a chronological sequence parallel with the development of literature in England. The Scottish writers under James VI and I produced no effect on their English contemporaries: the King's "Reulis and Cautelis" in poetical criticism, and his "Basilikon Doron," a treatise on king-craft, with his "Counterblast to Tobacco," and his "Demonology" are the work of a clever general writer, but now only interest the curious. Alexander Scott and Alexander Montgomery continued to practise in Scots, the style of Dunbar, though Scott shone most in love lyrics, often musical, while Montgomery survives in an allegory of the old sort, "The Cherry and the Slae"; and an old-fashioned "flyting". Sir Robert Ayton (1570-1638) lived in London with the wits of the time, and, like the Earl of Stirling (died in 1640) and William Drummond of Hawthornden, deserted for English the Scots vernacular. The most distinguished of these poets William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649) entertained Ben Jonson at his beautiful house, and has left brief notes of Ben's rather crabbed criticisms of his great contemporaries. In the previous year, when James, "with a salmonlike instinct" (1617) revisited his native country, Drummond celebrated the event in "Forth Feasting," a panegyric in fairly regular rhymed heroic couplets. Some of his sonnets have charm and are not forgotten; but the times darkened, and Drummond (who showed common sense and public spirit when Charles I unjustly persecuted Lord Balmerino (1633), advising the King to read George Buchanan's book on the Royal power in Scotland), was unlikely to find an audience for his learned verse during the subsequent troubles. His "Cypress Grove," a meditation in prose on death, is poetic in phrasing and cadences, while the periods are not over-long and over burdened. But the brief years in which Scottish wits might have learned many lessons from the great contemporary literature of England soon went by; and Scottish writers for nearly a century were confined to wranglings over theology and sermons, and to bitter tracts and pamphlets, valuable to the historical but not to the literary student.

The great Marquis of Montrose is credited with one charming Cavalier lyric, "My dear and only love, I pray," and with verses sincere but rugged and full of conceits on his own death and his King's, but he "tuned his elegies to trumpet sounds". The favourite measure of Burns was kept alive by Sempill of Beltrees, in his vernacular elegy over a piper,

On bagpipes now no body blaws
Sen Habbie's dead.

The translation of Rabelais (1653) by the learned, militant, and eccentric Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty (1611?-1660) is an imperishable monument of the author's amazing wealth of strange vocabularies, and vigour of appropriate style. The task of making Rabelais talk in English seemed little fit for a Scottish Cavalier who fought at Worcester, but Urquhart, aided by Rabelais, won a kind of immortality by his success. His translation is final and decisive; in which it stands alone. Of the preachers and controversialists, bitter or humorous, there is no space to speak, but the saintly character and gentle eloquence of Archbishop Leighton (1611-1684) live in his Commentary on the First Epistle of St. Peter and his other expository writings. The historical works of Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715), Bishop of Salisbury, are English, except in their occasional Scotticisms, as much of his life was spent in England. He had seen much of the inner wheels and springs of politics, was fond of talking of himself and of his part in great affairs, and, like Leighton, represents the Scottish divine, politician, and author, who has been Anglicized out of the Presbyterian precision and acerbity, and is as English as he can make himself.

His very conceit, and his almost incredible want of tact, make this "Scotch dog," as Swift loves to call him, a most entertaining gossip. His "History of My Own Times" was judiciously kept from publication till after his death. Burnet cannot be relied on as a safe authority either in what he insinuates most basely, against William III, or states, without an atom of corroboration, against James II. In the latter case, however, Macaulay has accepted and given circulation to Burnet's narrative.

By far the greatest man of letters of the Restoration, north of Tweed, is "that noble wit of Scotland," in Dryden's phrase, Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh (1636?-1691). Beginning with a "heroic romance," "Aretina," influenced by Sidney's "Arcadia" (1660), and the French school of heroic romances, and with verses, in which he did not shine, Mackenzie, in the "Religio Stoici" (1663) shows that he, like R. L. Stevenson, has been "the sedulous ape" of Sir Thomas Browne. He has many admirably harmonious sentences, a very lively wit, and a becomingly pensive air of disenchantment. "The scuffle of drunken men in the dark," the bloodshed and bitterness of the wars of the Covenant, have saddened him, and left him an enthusiast for Montrose,

At once his country's glory and her shame.

But political and professional ambitions carried Mackenzie away from pure literature into dark and tortuous paths. His work on the Criminal Law of Scotland has considerable literary as well as great legal merit; his observations on the persecution of witches are of great interest; and the worst of his "Memoirs of the Affairs of Scotland" is the fragmentary condition of the manuscript. Mackenzie was the cause of the foundation of the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh: after the Revolution of 1688 he retired to Oxford, where he was hospitably welcomed.

The Rev. Robert Wodrow (1679-1734) a country clergyman, would gladly have taken all knowledge for his province; his was a most inquiring mind, and perhaps no man so assiduous in his parochial duties ever left behind him so huge a mass of unpublished manuscript. His great work is "The History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland from the Restoration to the Revolution". He was, of course, a partisan, but an honest partisan; he consulted all accessible documents, and often printed them at full length; he occasionally makes errors in the direction of his bias, but never makes them consciously. He neglects not one of the humblest of the sufferers, and, as he did not belong to the extreme left of the Covenanting party, he was savagely criticized by its members. He is a most serviceable writer, and his "Analecta, or Materials for a History of Remarkable Providences" (published long after his death), is a delightful collection of ghost-stories, and tales of witches. The evidence for the ghosts is extremely frail. Wodrow was in frequent correspondence with an American divine, as simple, learned, and credulous as himself, the Rev. Cotton Mather. Wodrow, after 1714, saw the beginnings of "Latitudinarianism," or "Moderatism," in the Kirk: young ministers began to study the "Characteristics" of that polite philosopher, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713); to doubt whether virtuous heathens and Catholics must inevitably be excluded from salvation; to wander from the Calvinism of John Knox; to aim at rhetorical airs and graces; and to regard the chief end of religion as the promotion of virtue. These Moderates despised "enthusiasm," and while the fiercer Presbyterian leaders separated themselves from the Kirk, the abler Moderates attempted, sometimes with much success, to distinguish themselves in secular studies, and took part in secular amusements, being patrons of the stage.

To understand the new Georgian revival of polite letters among the clergy and laity of Scotland, we should study the writings and life of Professor Francis Hutcheson of Glasgow University (1694-1746) a follower of Shaftesbury, and a writer on æsthetics and on moral philosophy. But for a true, lively, and Humorous picture of ministers who loved society, the stage, and the company of the wits, in London and in Edinburgh, we should read the autobiography, posthumously published, of the Rev. Dr. Alexander Carlyle, minister of Inveresk (1722-1805). In youth he had revelled and drunk deep with the wicked Lord Lovat, and that stern Presbyterian, dear to Wodrow, Lord Grange, well remembered for his energy in packing off his termagant wife to seclusion on the Isle of St. Kilda. Carlyle had seen the rout of Sir John Cope at Prestonpans; he had amazed Garrick, at his villa on the Thames, by the accuracy of his driving at golf; he had championed his brother minister, John Home, when Home offended the Kirk by writing the once famous play of "Douglas"; and he lived to be the acquaintance of Sir Walter Scott. Carlyle, called "Jupiter Carlyle" from his noble presence, knew every one worth knowing in Scotland; and if we think him a kind of good-humoured pagan, he is nevertheless reported to have been an excellent parish minister. "For human pleasure" in the reading, the memoirs of this most unspiritual of divines are the best thing that the literary revival in Scotland has bequeathed to us. Very few Scottish writers had paid attention to the graces of composition, except in the period of the tenure by James I of the English Crown, and in the cases of Sir George Mackenzie and Archbishop Leighton during the Restoration. But the papers of Addison and Steele, "The Tatler" and "The Spectator," went everywhere, were eagerly read in Scotland, and provoked imitation in the matter of style. Literary clubs met in Edinburgh taverns: and men corresponded with Berkeley on philosophical subjects, as Mackenzie had corresponded on literature with John Evelyn. In addition to the literary clubs a centre of interest in poetry and prose was the shop of Allan Ramsay (1686-1758) who passed from the trade of a wigmaker to that of a bookseller. In 1724 he published "The Evergreen," a collection of old Scots verses from the manuscript made by George Bannatyne (1545-1608) during a visitation of the plague (1568).[1] Ramsay's "Tea-table Miscellany" (1724-1727) was a medley of old Scots and new songs and lyrics: the new made by Ramsay and his disciples to be sung to the old Scots tunes. The old verses were the basis of the new, which are a mixture of the simple ancient matter with that of the eighteenth century. Hamilton of Gilbertfield, who, by modernizing Blind Harry's "Wallace," produced a book very inspiring to Burns, was a contemporary of Ramsay: they wrote to each other "epistles" in verse, in the manner continued by Burns. Ramsay's "Gentle Shepherd" (1725) contains matter more true to Scottish shepherd life than is common in pastoral poetry: and Ramsay's elegies, in Burns's favourite metre, on such personages as Maggy Johnstoun, an ale-wife, were models for Fergusson and Burns. Allan was no friend of the more rigid Presbyterian party, and once, at least, in the pretty song of "The Blackbird," he showed the colours of the Jacobite. Another poet, Hamilton of Bangour (1704-1754) was actually out with Prince Charles in 1745; his slim volume of 1744, "Poems on Several Occasions," contains little that dwells in the memory except the beautiful and melancholy song of Yarrow,

Busk ye, busk ye, my bonny, bonny Bride.

In this little renaissance, whose poets always had their eyes on the romantic past, Lady Wardlaw (1677-1727) produced what was taken for an old ballad, "Hardyknute," the first, Scott said, that he ever learned, the last that he would ever forget. But it needed "a poetic child" to find so much merit in "Hardyknute". Ladies like Lady Grizel Baillie (1665-1746) with "Were na my heart licht I wad dee," and Miss Jean Elliot of Minto, with "The Flowers of the Forest," a lament for Flodden, were surpassed in the number, and equalled in the merit of their songs by Lady Nairne (an Oliphant of Gask, and a hereditary Jacobite) (1766-1845). She was the best of the known and named poets of the Cause which has had so many singers; and her strains were continued by the last of these lady minstrels and musicians, Lady John Scott, a Spottiswoode (1810-1900). The new day was dawning in Scotland, thus early in the eighteenth century, and the birds were singing prelusive to Burns, Scott, and Hogg. Indeed, Lady Nairne's "Will ye no come back again?" and "The Auld House," and "Wi' a Hundred Pipers and a,'" and "The Land o' the Leal," are far better remembered than the poems of Robert Fergusson (1750-1774) who died so young, the harmless, hapless Villon of St. Andrews and Edinburgh, and, in certain poems, the model of Burns.

These poets were not more determined to be Scots (though Ramsay and Fergusson also wrote in English) than the wits who attempted prose were set on speaking English with the English accent, and on avoiding Scotticisms. The Select Society (1754) was a debating society whose members were taught to speak English by an Irishman, the father of the famous author of "The School for Scandal". The results were matter of admiration. They produced an "Edinburgh Review" which survived into two numbers: it had intended to appear every six months, but expired, though Edinburgh was full of literati, including the Rev. Hugh Blair, a once celebrated preacher, and Hume's friend, the Rev. John Home (1722-1808) whose tragedy, "Douglas," "gave the clergy cause for speculation". Hume declared that Home possessed "the true theatric genius of Shakespeare and Otway, refined from the unhappy barbarism of the one, and licentiousness of the other". Posterity has not confirmed Hume's verdict, but Home is the one "mellow glory" of the Scottish stage.

The Rev. Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), as chaplain of the Black Watch, went in at Fontenoy with the claymore. "Remember your commission, Sir," shouted his colonel. "D— my commission, Sir!" shouted the chaplain. His "History of Margaret, otherwise called Sister Peg" (1760), is a humorous and valuable sketch of the antipathy between England and Scotland in 1760-1770. These men, and many others,—Lord Kames, Lord Monboddo, Lord Hailes, a serviceable critical historian, Beattie, the poet of "The Minstrel," and the satirist of the dead Churchill,—kept alive the interest in all forms of literature. The great men of the time, to be treated in a later chapter, alas! fall under the censure of Charles Lamb, that their "books are no books," but Charles's sympathy with Scotland was confessedly imperfect.

Out of this medley of new and old, of the vernacular Scots with the affected English of Edinburgh, out of the ancient ballads and old frolicsome rural ditties, arose the style of Burns.

Robert Burns.

The place of Burns in poetry may be called unique. His genius was the incarnation, as it were, of his country people's through many centuries, generations, from the one musical stanza on the death of Alexander III (1285) to the simplest song that the milkmaids crooned at their work. In literary poetry, as we have seen, the part played by Scotland had been partly derivative. The greatest poets, those of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, were professed followers of Chaucer: Drummond of Hawthornden was a lyrist and sonneteer under Italian and Elizabethan influences. Of Barbour and Blind Harry, Burns had little but the burning patriotism: his real predecessors were the many named or nameless popular song-makers, and makers of lays of rural merriment; and the music of the Scottish tunes to which their words were wedded. Of the popular ballads, romantic or historical, he professed no high esteem: no "white plumes were dancing in his eye," chivalry was not his subject: his matter was rural life and Nature; and he had the true Scottish love of the rivers and burns of his country. In the furnace of his genius all the ancient poetic material, all the folk-song (but not "the fairy way of writing") was recast and refashioned in forms singularly varied, vivid, and real: while, to pursue the metaphor, the furnace was fanned by all the winds of his age—now of democracy; now of loyalty to "a man undone," and a dying dynasty; now of patriotic resistance to "haughty Gaul," and her threats of invasion.

In the fire of his nature and of his passions Burns resembled Byron, but his humour was kindlier, his ear more tuneful, and his gift of creating character was infinitely more varied. He had the eye of Molière or of Fielding for a hypocrite; and combined the delusion that the Covenanters were the friends of freedom, with a scornful contempt of the discipline and doctrines of the successors of the Covenanters. In affairs of the heart he exhibits the usual pastoral morality, that of the shepherds and goatherds of Theocritus, with little of the Sicilian grace and charm.

The life of Burns is so familiarly known that the briefest survey must suffice. Born on 25 January, 1759, in a clay bigging in the parish of Alloway, in Ayrshire, he was the son of a small labouring farmer of the class whence so many of the martyrs and stout fighting men of the Covenant sprang. His father, a "grave liver" and devout, like them, managed to obtain for Burns, and out of every book which came in his way Burns picked-up for himself, a fair literary education. He owed much, especially many opportunities of reading, to a young tutor, Mr. Murdoch. He never was such a bookish man as Hogg, neglected as Hogg's education was in youth, but he acquired a knowledge of French, and studied Molière. The hardships of a poor farmer, in a cold soil, under a heartless "factor," the severest struggles for existence were known to Burns, but he also had his fill of dancing and "daffing," and the consequent "Kirk discipline". On this aspect of his life and adventures what is best to say has been said by Keats, in a letter written from Burns's country.

Entanglements of love affairs, and despair of success in life, caused Burns to contemplate emigration to the West Indies, but first he published at Kilmarnock (July, 1786), a collection of his songs and verses which instantly made him famous. Invited to Edinburgh, he passed a winter there in learned, noble, and festive society, carrying the celebrated Duchess of Gordon "off her feet," as she said, but winning far more admirers and boon companions than serviceable friends.

The Earl of Glencairn, whom Burns immortalized in sincere and glowing verse, died young; the age of Harley and Bolingbroke, of pensions and places for poets, was long dead. Burns met Scott, then a boy of 15; Scott later said that he was unworthy to tie Burns's shoes, but had the men been of equal age, better work would have been found for Burns than the perilous and bitterly uncongenial task of the exciseman (1789).

Not successful as a farmer at Ellisland (his capital was no more than the scanty profits of his poems), Burns settled in the pretty little town of Dumfries. Here his wit and genius made him the guest of the town and country, of lairds and tourists, and tradesmen. A constitution naturally robust, though injured by early privation, broke down; he had not the energy to continue in the vein of "Tam o' Shanter"; but poured out his songs, original, or re-creations of old popular ditties, till his death on 21 July, 1796.

Burns was singular as a poet, in one point: he needed, as it were, to have a key-note struck for him, and he prolonged and glorified the note which had inspired him. Far from concealing the fact, he acknowledged, with perfect candour and generosity, his debt to Robert Fergusson. This poet, born in Edinburgh (1750), and educated at the University of St. Andrews, died, after an interval of madness, in 1774. He, like Burns, had been too welcome a guest of more seasoned convivialists for the sake of his wit. His verses in English are commonplace, but his lyrics, in Burns's favourite measure, on the rude pleasures of Edinburgh tavern life, his "Leith Races," "The Farmer's Ingle," "Ode to the Gowdspink," and other pieces, gave Burns the needed key-note for "The Cottar's Saturday Night," "The Holy Fair" (the sacramental meeting in the open air, a relic of Covenanting days), and, perhaps, for the poems on "The Mouse," and "The Mountain Daisy". Burns has so entirely eclipsed Fergusson that he is scarcely remembered, even in Scotland.

"Poor Mailie's Elegy" had a much older predecessor; and, generally, Burns's songs start from an old tune, to which, through the ages, new verses had been set in new generations. There was a Jacobite "Auld Lang Syne," there was a Jacobite "For a' that," there was a very improper "Green grows the Rashes, o'" and so on, endlessly. But Burns, in many cases, transfigured his original. That he shone more in Scots than in English is admitted—but the best verses in his "Jolly Beggars" are in English, and there is only one word spelled in the Scots fashion in

Had we never lov'd sae kindly,
Had we never lov'd sae blindly,
Never met or never parted—
We had ne'er been broken hearted.

The same song contains the conventional lines—

Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,
Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee.

The vigour and variety, the humour, the pity, the scorn, and the sentiment of Burns were all entirely new when he wrote, and his variety enabled him to please the most widely different tastes. Critics who were horrified by "The Jolly Beggars," and "The Holy Fair," and the reckless song to Anna found consolation in "The Cottar's Saturday Night," and the lament for "Highland Mary"

Thou ling'ring star with lessening ray,

in English. Poems in the manner of these two last are sometimes spoken of as "sentimental," but the sentiment was as real a mood, while it lasted, as the scorn, or the revelry.

Of Burns it may be said that, beloved as he has been, not always for his best qualities, by the uncritical, he has been no less admired by the greatest poets of the age that followed his own, Keats, Scott, and Wordsworth. No poet ever was more truly national; none had more of the genius of the popular past, and the aspirations of the popular future; none was more essentially and spontaneously lyrical; none was more at home with Mature, with human society (with the life of the animal world, too, as in "The Twa Dogs"), and, in the humorous tale, none has excelled "Tam o'Shanter". No poet wears better in the changes of circumstance and taste. His letters, though of capital biographical interest, are sometimes of a comic complexion; "the style of the Bird of Paradise" prevails, now and then, in his English prose. But his English verse, as Scott found to be the way with his countrymen when they had, in passionate moments, "gotten to their English," is sometimes the natural vehicle of high reflection or of sincere grief.

Charles Churchill.

Satire is the least worthy kind of poetry; for it is almost never sincere. The writer is always in a fatiguing state of virtuous indignation about matters for which he really cares very little, except when his virulence is brewed out of personal spite. Satire, in fact, is only tolerable when combined with the smiling humour of Horace, the occasional majesty of Juvenal, the grace, wit, and finish of Pope, or the airy contempt and sonorous lines of Dryden. Charles Churchill had little of the qualities of these poets, yet was, no doubt, the most popular writer of satire in the rhymed heroic couplet between Pope and Byron. He was born in 1731, the son of the Rector at Rainham; was at Westminster School a contemporary of Cowper and Warren Hastings; did not study at either University, though he was admitted to Trinity, Cambridge; married at 18, and married unwisely; took orders, and returned to lay costume and pursuits, and in 1761, looking about for a theme of satire that promised notoriety, had the happy thought of attacking the actors and actresses of the day in "The Rosciad". "The profession" is sensitive; the actors were not silent about their wrongs; there was plenty of hubbub, and the satire was remunerative. Any man who stoops to taunt actors, and even actresses, by personal attacks in rhyme, can make himself notorious. Perhaps the best-known rhymes of Churchill are

On my life
That Davies hath a very pretty wife.

There were replies and hostile reviews, and Churchill, in "The Apology," assailed Garrick as "the vain tyrant" with

His puny green-room wits and venal bards.

Garrick is said not to have dared to contemn things contemptible, and to have propitiated Churchill. As ally of Jack Wilkes, he "took the Wilkes and Liberty" to assail Scotland in "The Prophecy of Famine".

Waft me, some Muse, to Tweed's inspiring stream
. . . . . . . . . .
Where, slowly winding the dull waters creep
And seem themselves to own the power of sleep.

In fact, "the glittering and resolute streams of Tweed," as the old Cromwellian angler, Richard Franck, styles them, are only dull and sleepy in the "dubs" where England provides their flat southern bank.

In 1763 Churchill assailed Hogarth in an epistle, and Hogarth replied in kind with a truly English caricature. He wrote several other satires and a Hudibrastic skit, in Four Books, on Dr. Johnson's incursion into psychical research, in the matter of the famous Cock Lane Ghost. Churchill died at Boulogne, in November, 1764, and is buried at Dover. In private life he displayed some kindly and honourable qualities, and Byron, before leaving England for ever, in 1816, consecrated a poem to his grave. To the discredit of Scotland, Dr. Beattie lampooned Churchill—after he was dead!

George Crabbe.

Born more than twenty years after Cowper, but making his first noticeable entry into literature at the same time as he, Crabbe belongs in curious ways to different schools and different ages. In verse he follows the tradition of Pope and Goldsmith; writing, in his best-known works, in the rhymed ten syllables, and much influenced by Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," and by reaction against the smiling conventional "pastorals", But perhaps Crabbe's genius, stern and almost grim, was unfortunate in finding no other vendible vehicle of his thought than verse, for his natural bent was to the modern "realistic" novel on the squalor, sufferings and sins of the neglected rural poor. He had a genius like that of several modern novelists, for painting all that in nature or human nature is dark, lowering, and sullen; he is unsparingly devoted to actual study from the life; and yet he has a peculiar humour of his own. His later works were "Tales," short stories in the measure of Pope, but destitute of brilliance, and extremely prolix, so that, though these narratives in verse were apparently more popular than the contemporary novels of Miss Austen, the rapid rise and universal popularity of the prose novel began to deprive Crabbe of readers even in his own later years. Crabbe, who had been praised by Dr. Johnson, lived to enjoy the generous applause of Scott, Byron, Miss Austen, and, what was more rare, the approval of Wordsworth. But as, in the beginning of his career, he censured the Newspaper as the supplanter of poetry, so, before his death in 1832, he found that the world preferred novels in prose to short tales of modern life in verse. He profited by the brief period of the bloom of poetry, but his biographer, Canon Ainger, observes that "Crabbe is practically unknown to the readers of the present day". The gaiety and grace which in Cowper alternate with gloom, and make many of his poems so generally familiar, were not elements in the genius of Crabbe.

He was born at Aldeburgh, on the coast of Suffolk, on Christmas Eve, 1754, the son of a man who had been a schoolmaster, but later obtained a small post in the Customs. In Crabbe's day Aldeburgh was not, as now, a watering-place, but through the inroads of the sea, was become a squalid smuggling village with a desolate background of poor and ill-cultivated land: as described in "The Village". Crabbe was from childhood a great devourer of books, and at the second of his two country schools acquired Latin enough for his later purposes. He was apprenticed to a surgeon, fell early in love, at 18 won a prize for a magazine poem, "Hope," made songs to his mistress's eyebrow, printed (1775) a moral poem ("Inebriety"), at Ipswich practised medicine in a humble way, and in April, 1780, went to London with his surgical instruments and three pounds in his pocket. He wrote poems which were declined by publishers; though there was an opening for a poet—

When Verse her wintry prospect weeps,
When Pope is gone, and mighty Milton sleeps,
When Gray in lofty lines has ceased to soar,
And gentle Goldsmith charms the Town no more.

(Lines of 1780.) But the opening was occupied by Cowper, and Crabbe was as destitute as Chatterton, when a letter written by him to Burke excited the sympathy of that generous heart in 1781. Burke offered encouragement and hospitality, Thurlow gave money; Crabbe was introduced to Fox, Reynolds and Dr. Johnson, took orders, was made curate of his native village, liked it not, and became chaplain of the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir. Later he held a variety of livings, and, for a poet so satirical about clerical neglect of the poor, was, inconsistently, a pluralist and an absentee, till his Bishop made him mend his ways.

His first poem of any note, "The Library" (1781-2) has no great merit: we see that the novel, to Crabbe's mind, was represented by the old heroic romance,

bloody deeds
Black suits of armour, masks, and foaming steeds.

In "The Village" (1783) Crabbe showed his true self in realistic descriptions of wretchedness. He first tells the Pastoral Muse that her day is over:—

I paint the cot,
As Truth will paint it, and as bards will not.

There follows a perfect masterpiece of landscape in his manner, "the thin harvest with its withered ears" beyond the "burning sands"; the blighted rye, the thistles, poppies, blue bugloss, slimy mallow, the tares, the charlock. The peasants are "a wild amphibious race" of smugglers and fishers; the farm-labourers

hoard up aches and agues for their age,

and

mend the broken hedge with icy thorn.

In the poorhouse, amidst unspeakable filth, the dying are neglected by the doctor and the sporting curate, and the dead are buried without rites. There is not a gleam of hope or sunshine, except in the accidental mention of "the flying ball, the bat, the wicket". The poet ends with applause of the heroic death in action of Lord Robert Manners, and with consolatory remarks to the Duke of Rutland.

The poem was successful and was admired by Scott, then a lad of 18: a few lines had been contributed by Dr. Johnson.

Deserting the topics in which he was strongest, Crabbe (1785) published "The Newspaper"; the papers are

A daily swarm that banish every Muse,
For these unread the noblest volumes lie,
For these unsoiled in sheets the Muses die....
For daily bread the dirty trade they ply,
Coin their fresh tales and live upon the lie.

"The puffing poet" is also censured.

Crabbe continued to write, but not till 1807 did he publish "The Parish Register," which returns to the theme of "The Village". He was now doing duty at his parish, Muston, and, not unnaturally, found that, in various forms, the people had become Nonconformists. He now took a much more cheerful view of "the cot," and found its book-shelf well occupied by the Bible, Bunyan, and old English fairy tales; while the garden was rich in salads, carnations, hyacinths, and tulips. But Crabbe turns with more zest

To this infected row we term our street,

he enumerates the smells, and describes the horrible results of overcrowded dwellings; and catalogues the disguises, the weapons, and the implements of the poacher. There follows the sad story of "The Miller's Daughter"; and another girl who thus addresses her clerical rebuker,

Alas! your Reverence, wanton thoughts, I grant,
Were once my motive, now the thoughts of want.

This is a fair example of Crabbe's favourite punning antitheses, like

loose in his gaiters, looser in his gait.

In "The Parish Register" Crabbe reduces the story of a life to the brevity of an anecdote, and in the dearth of novels his book was very popular. A better book of a similar scope and aim, in prose, Galt's "Annals of the Parish," was being written, but, taking time by the forelock, Crabbe, in 1810, produced "The Borough," descriptions of a large country town, including tales in verse of more considerable length. But, in 1804-1805, he had written a poem which is strange in his work, "Sir Eustace Grey," a tale told by a madman, a record of the dreams of madness, closely resembling De Quincey's account of the visions begotten by opium, and, in essence, not unlike Coleridge's "Pains of Sleep". The metre is that of the French ballade, and of the oldest Scottish ditty on the death of Alexander III. Thus

They hung me on a bough so small,
The rook could build her nest no higher,
They fixed me on the trembling ball
That crowns the steeple's quivering spire;
They set me where the seas retire,
But drown with their returning tide;
And made me flee the mountain's fire
When rolling from its burning side.

This adventure into romance has imaginative merits, and a speed of movement elsewhere unexampled in the work of Crabbe. The hymn with which poor Sir Eustace consoles himself might have been written by Cowper when first converted and "from cells of madness unconfined":—

Pilgrim, burdened with thy sin,
Come the way to Zion's gate;
There, till Mercy let thee in,
Knock and weep, and watch and wait.
Knock! He knows the sinner's cry:
Weep! He loves the mourner's tears:
Watch! for saving grace is nigh:
Wait! till heavenly light appears.

Crabbe thought it necessary to apologize for the "enthusiasm" of the hymn, and to point out that Sir Eustace, had he been sane, would not have been converted by "a methodistic call". "The World of Dreams," in the same stanza, might take its place in "Sir Eustace Grey," so similar are the processions of terrible fantastic visions. These things are very strange among the vigorous but heavy-footed marches of Crabbe's habitual style.

To return to "The Borough," Crabbe paints its very aspect with his Dutch precision; and, incidentally, strikes at his rivals, the enthusiasts of various sects, who were much more popular preachers than himself.

Their, earth is crazy and their heaven is base,

he says of the followers of Swedenborg. As for the Jews,

They will not study and they dare not fight,

he exclaims; making an exception for Mendoza and other famed Semitic bruisers. The poem is of some value to the social historian, and the tales of the country coquette, and the horrible and haunted Peter Grimes, have a gloomy vigour, and somewhat resemble, in poetry, the moral pictures of Hogarth.

Crabbe's later works were collections of tales in verse, and with all their merits their versification condemns them to general neglect. His "Lady Barbara, or the Ghost" is not so successful in rendering the well-known story of "The Beresford Ghost" as is Scott's early ballad "The Eve of St John". To read with attention novels of everyday life narrated in the metre of Pope, without the skill of Pope, requires a vigorous effort.

In his Tales (as when a sturdy orthodox farmer expels the demon of scepticism from his son by a sound trouncing) Crabbe is often somewhat remote from our sympathetic modern tolerance of honest doubt. His method of narration is obsolete. In "The Patron," the patronized youth of humble birth, who has loved the Squire's daughter, is neglected,

And in the bed of death the youth reposed.

The nymph of his adoration is thus corrected by her mother:—

"Emma," the lady cried, "my words attend,
Your syren-smiles have killed your humble friend;
The hopes you raised can now delude no more,
Nor charms, that once inspired, can now restore."

People did not speak in that style in Miss Austen's day; or in any other day.

Crabbe died in the same year as Sir Walter Scott, who, like Byron, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, appreciated that in him which was rare, excellent, and original.

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[1] The Bannatyne Club, for the printing and preservation of old manuscripts, a kind of Scottish Roxburghe Club, was founded by Sir Walter Scott in memory of the old lover of poetry.

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[CHAPTER XXX.]

GEORGIAN PROSE.

I.

The Great Novelists.

The novel, since the days of the mediaeval romances, and the Elizabethan prose stories from Sidney's "Arcadia" to the tales of Greene and Nash, was never quite unrepresented in England, for example, there were translations and imitations of the huge French "Heroic" romances; Bunyan's stories are religious and moral novels, and under the Restoration Mrs. Aphra Behn (1640-1689) wrote short novels of love which do not quite deserve the bad reputation conferred on them by an anecdote told by Sir Walter Scott. Eliza Haywood (1693-1756) was prolific in prose tales, and is the author of a little romance of Prince Charles's adventures in 1749-1750, disguised as "A Letter of H— G—," Henry Goring, the Prince's equerry. But in literary circles, the novel was held in as high disdain as it was later, before Scott produced "Waverley" (1814).

The novel of modern life, manners, and sentiment first came to its own as the universal joy of reading mankind in Richardson's "Pamela"; advertised as it was, in modern fashion from the pulpits of all denominations.

Samuel Richardson, the son of a Yorkshire joiner, was born in 1689, and after being educated at the Charterhouse was apprenticed to a London printer. As a boy he made small sums by writing love-letters for maid-servants and others who were unable to write for themselves; and when, as a middle-aged man, he turned to writing novels, he cast them in the form of letters. "Pamela," which he began to publish in 1740, is the story of a girl who is a waiting-maid to a lady and is persecuted by her mistress's son; in the end he marries her and becomes a model husband. It may annoy us from the very strange and unnatural way in which all the characters behave. Pamela strikes us less as a being of equal innocence and virtue, mistress of her own passion for "the dear obliger," Mr. B. (only the initial is given), than as a young woman who knows her game and plays her cards most adroitly. Her snobbishness was, no doubt, in the manner of her class in her day, but we approve of Pamela no more than Fielding did, when he overwhelmed it with the sturdy laughter of his parody, "Joseph Andrews," brother of Pamela, and as virtuous as that paragon, yet no milksop. But "Pamela" was admired beyond "this side idolatry".

"Clarissa" (1748) is another novel of Virtue in danger and distress, but Clarissa is a lady of good family and fortune, and of a pure and heroic spirit. Decoyed from her home and friends by the wiles of the professional seducer, Lovelace, a rake so brilliant and witty and reckless as to win the hearts, if not of Clarissa, of all Richardson's lady readers, Clarissa is exposed to the last extreme of misery, steadily refuses to marry the scoundrel who has wronged her, and dies slowly among the sobs of the congregation.

"Sir Charles Grandison," whose name has become a proverb in the English language, appeared in 1753, and is one of the longest books that ever was printed. It is very badly constructed too, and contains lengthy episodes which have nothing to do with the story, and only puzzle and confuse the reader. Properly speaking it is not so much a novel as a series of incidents, all tending to the glorification of the hero, who is made up of long words, fine sentiments and whalebone. The women of the tale are less exasperating than the men, though they can hardly be considered attractive. The reason of this may be found in the fact that Richardson neither sought nor was sought by men, while he was in the habit of reading his manuscripts to a group of enthusiastic young ladies (among whom was the future Mrs. Chapone) in his garden at Fulham. Unluckily his audience, who might have been of service to him in pointing out that well-bred people had other manners than those of the characters of Richardson, were too deeply engulfed in admiration to be capable of criticism; or possibly they may not have been aware, as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was, that Richardson did not know the society which he described. The letters themselves, besides showing a frankness and lack of reticence which it may confidently be said few real letters could ever parallel, are of a length which even on a desert island no one could write. The genuine letters in his correspondence, between him and the unknown but worshipping Lady Bradshaigh, and their romantic and elaborate arrangements to discover each other in Hyde Park, are far more amusing reading. Richardson has been accused, and justly, of a portentous lack of humour, but if his reader has any of his own, he will not read the novels in vain.

These censures are the candid criticism of the modern reader who finds that he cannot think himself back into the circle of Richardson, who finds its Virtue and its Sentiment hardly intelligible, though he is entirely at home with the society of all degrees that Fielding describes, or that lives in Boswell's "Life of Johnson," and in the "Letters" of Horace Walpole and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, expressing themselves like people of this world. But though Richardson lived in a kind of moral and sentimental hothouse, where one can scarcely breathe; though he had a more than feminine liking for accumulated minutenesses of details and a more than mediaeval prolixity; yet his full-length pictures of his personages, stippled like a miniature in a ring, delighted not only English but continental, especially French readers. It was an age when people took little exercise, were little in the open air, and passed endless hours in conversation on the ethics and philosophy of love and sentiment. The Memoirs of Madame d'Épinay are partly a romance in the manner of Richardson, and to read them is to understand the society which found in him its ideal novelist. "The man would hang himself who tried to read 'Clarissa' for its story," said Dr. Johnson, a friend of the author, partly because the author was the friend of Virtue. We, if we please, may detest and disbelieve in Lovelace, who was, none the less, the conqueror of the hearts of the ladies of the time, that implored Richardson to convert a hero so brilliant, witty and amiable. But for Richardson it had been enough to convert Mr. B., and he was artist enough to refuse to gratify tastes which, in the manner of Charles II., demanded that all tragedies should end happily. Scott, with the resurrection of Athelstane; Dickens, with the conversion of Estella, were more good-naturedly and erroneously amenable to the requests of friends.

There was a blush between Charles Lamb and the girl who sat down beside him to read "Pamela," and, in fact, Richardson's way of educating girls in virtue may seem apt to have effects which he did not contemplate. Other times, other manners.

Henry Fielding.

To say anything at once new and true about Henry Fielding passes the power of man. His defects and his qualities; the good in him and in his work, and the not so good, are so conspicuous that his contemporaries, and later generations down to our own, have passed on them the same remarks. There are the admirers of Fielding, who justly see in him one of the three very greatest of English novelists of contemporary life and manners as exhibited in the portions of society which he knew and illustrated. But he did not take all contemporary society for his province. Born at Sharpham Park, in Somerset, in 1707, he had far greater advantages of birth than other men of the pen. The House of Fielding is ancient and noble, though, unlike Gibbon in his monumental compliment to Fielding, Mr. Horace Round cannot accept its connexion with the House of Hapsburg.

The Fieldings had two Earldoms, of Desmond (in Ireland) and of Denbigh; Fielding's father was of a cadet branch of the family: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was a kind of cousin of the novelist. He was educated at Eton and in the law-loving University of Leyden; but when he "came upon the town," in 1728, he did not associate himself with the circle of Pope and Bolingbroke and the wits and the great ladies; he does not draw his characters from that splendid society, though Lady Bellaston, in "Tom Jones," is a member thereof.

Fielding had to live by his brains, by writing comedies, and by journalism. He showed his genius for parody of the heroic tiresome tragedy that was "such an unconscionable time adying," in "Tom Thumb the Great"; and his dangerous turn for political satire in "The Historical Register" (1737). But the Licensing Act, making the Lord Chamberlain, or his subaltern, Licencer of Plays, excluded Fielding from that course; he was called to the Bar (1740), where he did not practise much. He was married in 1735 to the original, it is said, of the exquisite Sophia of "Tom Jones"; he wrote in the Press; in 1745 he took the Hanoverian side, in "The True Patriot," and "The Jacobite's Journal," in mockery so named; and during all this period he saw a great deal of the world, especially the world of the stage and of light literature.

But of all this he makes little display in his novels. He falls back on the humours of the country: on the country parson, Adams; the Tory Squire, Squire Western; a neighbour, in character of Sir Tunbelly Clumsey, and so good an Englishman that he rejoices when he hears that "twenty thousand honest Frenchmen are landed in Kent" to back the Rightful King, and the landed interest, against Hanoverians, financiers, and Whigs in general. His excellent Allworthy is no townsman; Mr. Thomas Jones, a Foundling, is country born and country bred; most of the adventures of Joseph Andrews take place in the country; in "Amelia" we are in town, and in taverns and prisons often, but by no means "in society".

"Jonathan Wild" is a tale of town villains and rogues; and Fielding's minor characters, from postilions to philosophers, like Philosopher Square, landlords, landladies, serving-men, lawyers, parsons, unfortunate ladies, people on the road, are of ordinary humanity, with a considerable sprinkling of hypocrites. He had heard the chimes at midnight and much later; he had hunted; he had lived the tavern life, the life of debts and expedients, but he "had kept the bird in his bosom," the sterling excellence of his heart; pity for the poor and oppressed; honour, good humour, tolerance, and manly indignation.

To Fielding, Richardson's "Pamela," the text of many a sermon, the snow-pure prudent Pamela, with Virtue rewarded by the hand of the enterprising Mr. B., was even as a red rag to a bull. He did not weep over Pamela's tears, these "pearly fugitives". He no more believed in Mr. B.'s return to virtue than in that of Vanbrugh's Loveless. Respectability was so far from being his favourite virtue, that, like many very inferior writers, he inclined to identify it, unjustly, with hypocrisy.

Consequently he began "Joseph Andrews" as a parody or burlesque of "Pamela". That paragon had a brother, appropriately named Joseph; and the virtue of Joseph is assailed like that of his sister, but in vain. Joseph is invincibly respectable, yet no hypocrite, but a very manly young fellow with an honest love in his own rank. The story soon ceased to be a parody; that grotesque, learned, excellent and extremely muscular Christian, Parson Adams, came into the tale with the egregious Mrs. Slipslop; and the thing became a "picaresque" novel, a tale of the road and of chance meetings: with the lesson that kind hearts are more than coronets, and a postilion, later guilty of robbing a hen roost, is a better Christian than a whole coach-load of Pharisees. Indeed St. Augustine, once at least, robbed an orchard, yet became a shining light, having been misled (as regards the apples and pears) by his sense of humour.

"Joseph Andrews," though its language is occasionally coarse, as regards its meaning is not obscure, and it is certainly one of the most amusing works in our language: though it is not written for small boys and little girls. We meet Pamela and Mr. B. (cruelly styled Mr. Booby), again at the close, and they behave ill in church, when Joseph is married.

Richardson was very much hurt, of course, and spoke very ill of Fielding; if he forgave Fielding, he "forgave him as a Christian," like Rowena in Ivanhoe, "'which means,' said Wamba, 'that she does not forgive him at all'".

There is an endless discussion about Fielding's morality. Natural goodness of heart is everything with him. Of his Tom Jones the epitaph might be that devised by Joe Gargery in "Great Expectations" for his reprobate of a father,

Whatsume'er the failings on his part,
Remember reader he were that good in his hart.

Thomas was "that good at his heart" and lectures young Nightingale very nobly on the infamy of corrupting virtue. But where there is no virtue to corrupt in others, Thomas pays no attention to his own. Perhaps he could have resisted temptation, in Nightingale's circumstances, but he is wisely kept out of it by the author. He does what is thought the very basest thing that a man can do; Colonel Newcome never forgave him; if we are to pardon Tom it must be, as Dumas urges in the case of Porthos, because, "other times, other manners".

This affair is the dangerous step in "Tom Jones" (1749), that epic of the eighteenth century. Fielding thought of it as an epic in prose; he is fond of burlesquing Homer and of quoting Aristotle. The plot has been praised by Coleridge and justly, as on a level with that of the "Œdipus Tyrannus" of Sophocles. The construction of plots has not been the strong point of most great novelists, but Fielding set this good example, not immaculate of course, but admirable.

The real merit of the book lies in its pell-mell of characters, all delineated with exquisite humour, wit, and observation, from the mysterious mother of the hero, and the adorable Sophia, to the adroit hypocrite, Blifil; the uproarious stupid fox-hunter, the Jacobite who drinks healths, Squire Western; the philanthropic yet really good Allworthy; the delightful pedantic Partridge, with his tags of Latin quotations; the rural ruffian, Black George; the harmless vanity of Miss Western (the aunt), the sternly Protestant and Anglican, but not immaculately virtuous Philosopher Square, and all the attendant crowd.

The moral introductory reflections may, of course, be skipped, yet not by wise readers, for they are full of Fielding's humour, and display his confidence in the immortality of his book.

Fielding was Thackeray's master and model; in his too frequent reflections he follows Fielding too closely. If all men were equally fortunate, they would all read "Tom Jones" in the six small volumes of the First Edition: but in any edition the book is delightful. Charlotte Brontë thought it corrupting to such young fellows as her brother, the unhappy Branwell, but Branwells will go their own way, with or without the aid of the too fortunate Foundling.

Fielding was a sturdy Hanoverian, but he was mortal and an author. He must have been pleased had he known that the hero of 1745 (the year in which the tale is cast), that Prince Charles then lurking in a Parisian convent, purchased "Tom Jones," both in French and English.

Earlier than "Tom Jones" is "Jonathan Wild the Great," the romance of a thief-taker and sharer of spoils with thieves, who was gibbeted in 1725. It is customary to speak of this book, a satire of the "greatness" of men like Julius Cæsar, as a masterpiece of irony, and as a success in the field where Thackeray, on the same estimate, failed with "Barry Lyndon". If irony is to be openly and noisily unveiled in every page, then "Jonathan Wild" may be a masterpiece of irony. The reader may be left, if he can read "Jonathan Wild," to compare it with "Barry Lyndon" for himself, and to draw his own conclusions as to the relative merits of these books. The deliciously absurd adventures of Mrs. Heartfree, like those of the heroines of late Greek romances, are, at all events, intentionally or unintentionally funny. Sir Walter Scott disliked this masterpiece, and after reading it, and the commendations which eminent modern critics bestow upon it, the writer cannot honestly dissent from the disrelish of Sir Walter. He is said not to have understood Fielding's meaning which Fielding constantly proclaims and avows, namely that greatness of intellect and ambition without goodness of heart is a mischievous monstrosity. Mr. Carlyle, in some moods of hero-worship, might have differed, but we can give a general assent without wading through "Jonathan Wild".

Fielding's own heart was as good as Steele's. He adored his beautiful wife as Steele adored Prue. But, while "the greatest blessing is a faithful and beloved wife," says our author in "Amelia," "it rather tends to aggravate the misfortune of distressed circumstances from the consideration of the share which she is to bear in them". But the circumstances were distressed because Fielding, like Amelia's Captain Booth, was "a good fellow," and, like Johnson's friend, Savage, was at no time of his life the first to leave any company,—over the punch bowl. And Amelia was listening for every footstep, and dreading every accident of the streets, and money was a minus quantity, and a scrag of mutton was a rare festival, because Captain Booth had every generosity except that of a little self-denial.

By 1749 Mr. Fielding, as his friendly biographer says, "was a martyr to gout". "He had not stolen it," and we have heard of another sufferer, "a martyr to delirium tremens". By this time his wife was dead; later he married her maid, an excellent woman, Mary Daniel, probably of an old and ruined Jacobite family of Daniel. At the end of 1748 Fielding had been made a stipendiary magistrate for Westminster. Unlike his Jonathan Thrasher, Esq., J.P., who was infamously corrupt, and as ignorant of the law as the country justice before whom Frank Osbaldistone appears in "Rob Roy," Fielding brought to his work his honesty, courage, and sympathy with the poor.

The first chapters of his "Amelia" (1751) contain pictures of the contemporary corruption of justice, and the laxity of the prisons. Thence came the misfortunes of Captain Booth, a true lover, but also a young man in the prime of life. From this error of the Captain's, who met a Circe in prison, and from the greatness of his wife's character, the beautiful Amelia, the plot of the novel adroitly develops itself. She was "too good to be true". On the other hand the high spirit and temper of Miss Matthews make her a kind of shady Brynhild; and only coincidences in which Captain Booth recognized the hand of Providence prevent the most tragical catastrophe. "Men worship women on their knees; when they get up they go away," says Fielding's great successor. They never get up and go away when they worship Amelia.

The book, in addition to her and Miss Matthews, presents the delightfully amusing characters of Colonel Bath, "old honour and dignity," who fights Booth in Hyde Park from motives of the purest friendship; Colonel James, with a philosophy of love rather like Lord Foppington's; Sergeant Atkinson, a kind of later Great Heart; Mrs. Ellison, a lady "not of the nicest delicacy"; Murphy, a Jonathan Wild as attorney; and a score of other characters worthy of their creator. With "Joseph Andrews" and "Tom Jones," "Amelia" is an immortal glory of English fiction.

Fielding's experiences led him into plans for suppressing lawlessness, and for important social reforms. In 1753 he took the side of Elizabeth Canning in that unsolved mystery of a girl who, if not a good girl, "has been too hard for me," says Fielding. His own behaviour, in the case of Miss Virtue's examination, is rather startling to the modern student; and whether he ended as a partisan of the Gipsy or of Elizabeth Canning is uncertain (1753-1754). Elizabeth made a good marriage, in America, whither she was banished, and lived and died respected.

In his pamphlet on Elizabeth's affair, which excited and divided London for more than a year, Fielding speaks of his illness and overtaxed strength. He spent what was left of it in his public duties; was advised to voyage to Portugal, and his "Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon," written with a dying hand, is the record of his sufferings and reflections. He sailed in the "Queen of Portugal" (Captain Veal), had intervals of enjoyment, and sketched, with his usual humour, the events and incidents of the expedition. He died at Lisbon on 8 October, 1754.

Tobias Smollett.

The name of Smollett is coupled as familiarly with that of Fielding as the name of Thackeray with that of Dickens. Smollett and Fielding were contemporaries: both came of ancient families: each had a profession;—Smollett was a physician while Fielding was a barrister,—but each lived mainly by journalism, literature and fiction. If opinions as to their relative merits were divided in their day, posterity has awarded the crown to Fielding. The reason is obvious: Fielding is full of good humour; in him there is no rancour; he admires good women almost to adoration, and paints them as only the very greatest poets have done. Again, his tales are well constructed, especially "Tom Jones". On the other hand Smollett allows his story to wander in the roads and haunt the inns, and encounter grotesque adventures; he has bitter grudges against all and sundry, especially against his patrons and his kinsfolk. His heroines are regarded by his heroes rather as luxuries than as ladies; his heroes, to be plain, are not merely libertines, but often behave like selfish ruffians; and his relish for odious images and thoughts is hardly surpassed by that of Swift. These faults in temper and taste have made Smollett unpopular, despite his wide knowledge of life; his irresistible power of compelling laughter, his swaggering vein. But, if he drew Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle from himself, he gave them bad qualities far in excess of his own, and did not endow them with many of his own better attributes. Smollett would never have used the loyal Strap as Roderick Random often does; and was incapable of what may be styled the dastardly plot in which Peregrine was fain to have imitated Richardson's Lovelace.

Smollett was born in 1721, a younger son of a younger son of the ancient house of Smollett of Bonhill, on the Leven near Loch Lomond. An ancestor of his, he says, blew up a galleon of the Spanish Armada in Tobermory Bay. He did indeed, by an act of suborned treachery. Like Burns, Tobias celebrated in verse his native stream; like Burns in boyhood he devoured the truculent romance of "Wallace" by Blind Harry. He was poor, and believed himself to be badly treated by his kinsfolk; after studying at Glasgow University he was apprenticed to a surgeon. In 1739 he went to London to push his fortunes, carrying with him a foolish tragedy on the murder of James I, which was the apple of his eye. No manager would accept it, wherefore Smollett raged against Garrick and Lord Lyttelton: he puts the story of his woes into "Roderick Random," where Mr. Melopoyn, unhappy poet, is the sufferer. He got what Chatterton and Goldsmith failed to obtain, the post of surgeon's mate in a ship of war; lived through the distresses of the siege of Carthagena (1741), and obtained that knowledge of naval squalor and brutality, and of the good qualities of sea-men, which he used in "Roderick Random" and in the characters of Bowling and Trunnion. Leaving the navy, he married in Jamaica, came to town, practised as a physician, and certainly lived in most fashionable quarters. He speaks of Bob Sawyer's method of advertisement by being hastily called out of church as an old trick; perhaps Dickens, a reader of Smollett from his childhood, borrowed here from "Count Fathom". His patriotism was stirred by the fatal disaster of Culloden, and he boldly published his "Tears of Scotland" (1746).

In 1748 he published "Roderick Random," the history of a meritorious orphan who lives on his servant, cheats his tailor, is a gambler, and enriches himself in the slave trade; but all is to be forgiven to Roderick's ebullient vigour and occasional sentimentalism. There are countless changes of scene and varieties of character, from the ocean to the Marshalsea Prison, to adventures in French service, from Strap and Bowling to the literary Miss Snapper and the unfortunate Miss Williams. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu supposed her cousin, Fielding, to be the author, which showed little discrimination, though her ladyship's letters are among the wittiest and most brilliantly amusing of her century. Smollett had a bitter feud with Fielding; we do not know, or care, for what cause. The briskness of the book, and the novelty of the nautical horrors, made Smollett's reputation.

Going to Paris in 1750, Smollett found some of the characters who appear in the crowd of "Peregrine Pickle" (1751), of which the first edition aroused censures on passages later pruned by the author. It is a work of amazingly careless vigour and humour: the irrepressible Peregrine is even a less desirable hero than Roderick; and an infamous Jacobite spy was not ill-advised in choosing Pickle for his pseudonym. Emilia is more than too good for the rascal to whom she descends in marriage, after escaping plots of his which might have disgusted Pamela's Mr. B. But Cadwallader Crabtree, Hatchway and Pipes, and Commander Hawser Trunnion are immortal characters; it is cruel to call Trunnion caricatured; he is a comic masterpiece.

The "Ferdinand, Count Fathom" (1753), the adventurous son of a suttler and murderess, is not a much worse man than Peregrine, but, in place of Trunnion and Pipes, we are entertained with a queer attempt at romance in the loves of Rinaldo and Monimia, who meets her lover as he weeps over her empty tomb. "Sir Lancelot Greaves," a modern Don Quixote, armour and all, was preferred by Scott to "Jonathan Wild," and, despite the patent absurdity of the armed knight, is really a much more agreeable story. In 1763 Smollett visited Italy, and his grumbling hypochondriacal narrative of his tour was ridiculed by that more sentimental traveller, Sterne. His "Adventures of an Atom" (1769) is a scurrilous political satire. On the other hand his "Humphry Clinker" (1771), a narrative, in letters, of a journey by English travellers in Scotland, is both more good-humoured and more amusing than any of his other stories—Matthew Bramble is a favourable study of his later self; Lieutenant Lismahago is a kind of Dugald Dalgetty, born more than a century later than the laird of Drumthwacket, and the spelling and innocent good-hearted absurdity of Winifred Jenkins endear her to every reader, as a contrast to Tabitha Bramble, a bad kind of old maid. Here we meet Ferdinand, Count Fathom, as a sincerely converted character!

Smollett is not only remarkable for variety, humour, vigour, as a social observer: he strongly influenced both Fanny Burney and Dickens. His History of England has been justly described by Sir Pitt Crawley as less interesting but less dangerous than that by Hume. Smollett, revisiting Italy, died at Monte Nero, near Leghorn, in the early autumn of 1771.

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[CHAPTER XXXI.]

GEORGIAN PROSE.

II.

Samuel Johnson.

We could scarcely understand how Dr. Johnson gained his immense influence and acknowledged chiefship in literature if we had only his works of various kinds before us. But he had a friend and biographer, James Boswell, Esq. (younger of Auchinleck in Ayrshire), and "Bozzy," by showing Johnson as he was and talked, explains his supremacy. In an age when classical learning counted for something, Johnson was, especially in Roman literature, vastly learned. In a time when people who could tear themselves from cards, took little exercise, but sat and talked, over wine or over tea, or as they slowly sauntered, Johnson was probably the best and certainly the best reported of the talkers. While politicians like Burke, and painters like Sir Joshua Reynolds, and musicians like Burney (Fanny Burney's father), were men of letters, critics, talkers, a scholar and author who could talk like Johnson was certain of his reward, was sure to be at the front. Though he confessed himself not specially partial to clean linen; though he did not eat in a neat and cleanly fashion; though he had the strange tricks which we know so well; though if his pistol missed fire in argument he knocked you down with the butt; though he had curious prejudices, was at heart a Jacobite, and could be extremely rude, yet the excellence of his heart, his large sagacity, his immense knowledge and readiness, his humour, all of him that is immortally delightful to read about in Boswell's Life, won his forgiveness and his welcome from the most refined of men and women. He thought himself a lady's man, he said, and a man of the world, and he was thoroughly a man's man, with heart, and tongue, and hands, if that were necessary.

As a playwriter, he had not great success, and his friend Goldsmith's comedies keep the stage, unlike Johnson's tragedy. Johnson's tale "Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia," has wisdom and humour enough, "wit enough to keep it sweet," but it never did nor ever can share the popularity of Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield".

Johnson's essays, in "The Rambler" and "The Idler," may still be but are seldom read: they are far less alive than the essays of Addison and Steele, and are weighed down by the ponderous harmonies of the Latinised style.

Of his books, "The Lives of the Poets," written in his old age, are, to some, we may hope to many, readers, entrancing. Here we find the Johnson of conversation. He is not, indeed, a scientific biographer, a searcher among old letters and old records. But his memory was rich in anecdotes of the half century before his own; his style contains many a humorous comment, and his criticism is often acute, and always honest, and unaffectedly tinged, especially when he writes of the republican and puritan Milton, or of the dainty, yet, in poetry, revolutionary Gray, with all the literary and political prejudices that gave salt to his conversation. There may have been more enlightened critics, but none was ever more entertaining.

If his literary biographies are not of the most exact, they are occasionally minute enough. "Pope's weakness was so great, that he constantly wore stays, as I have been assured by a waterman (of Twickenham) who, in lifting him into his boat, had often felt them." Again, "Pope once slumbered at his own table while the Prince of Wales was talking of poetry". In his "Life of Swift" Johnson is by no means friendly, and publishes an anecdote which was indignantly denied. His life of his friend, Richard Savage, a most detestable person, is an example of Johnson's loyalty and tolerance. Supposing that Savage was the son of the Countess of Macclesfield, and was persecuted by her with incredible cruelty, yet his conduct in most ways was detestable, though Johnson, who candidly narrates the facts, good-humouredly condones them. The conversation of Savage must, apparently, have won the heart of "the great Lexicographer". Even the Dictionary of the Doctor contains several of his good sayings, and perhaps the learning and persevering industry which Johnson displayed as a "drudge" increased his reputation, and won for him friends and admirers, as much as his more literary works.

The outlines of his life are too well known to need more than a brief summary. His family was matter of interest to the Highlanders when he visited them, was he a MacIan of Glencoe or a Johnston of the Border? He was born at Lichfield (18 September, 1709), his father was a bookseller. His Oxford career, at Pembroke College, was embittered by poverty, but he retained a great affection for his college and University, which delighted to honour him. He kept a school without much profit, and, coming to London with Garrick in 1737, lived the life of Grub Street, doing translations, writing for Cave's "Gentleman's Magazine," compiling parliamentary debates in which he "took care not to let the Whig dogs have the best of it". Of his doings in 1745 Boswell could learn nothing, and there was a fancy that he was inclined to take part in what he called "a gallant enterprise," that of Prince Charles.

His "London," an imitation of Juvenal, was well thought of by Pope, and Scott took more pleasure in no modern poem than in Johnson's manly, resolute, and mournful "Vanity of Human Wishes," also based on Juvenal's satire (1749). The "Rambler" and "Idler," were his next works (with the Dictionary), and in 1759 he rapidly wrote "Rasselas," to pay the expenses of his mother's funeral. In 1762 he accepted, from a King who "gloried in the name of Briton," a pension of £300 yearly. He lived much, after this date, at the house of Mrs. Thrale and her husband, "my Master" as she called him, the rich brewer. Here he was happy in the society of many wits, of the beautiful Sophy Streatfield, "with nose and notions à la Grecque," and of Fanny Burney, blessed in the success of "Evelina". Mrs. Thrale and Miss Burney have left many reminiscences of him which complete the account by his young Scottish adorer and butt, Boswell.

Johnson founded the Club, and such was his influence that the Club did not blackball Bozzy. With him Johnson made his difficult journey to the Western Islands of Scotland; so happily described both by Boswell and himself; stayed at Dunvegan Castle, was entertained by Flora Macdonald, met a learned minister in Skye who was a sceptic about Homer, inquired into the Second Sight; stayed at Inveraray Castle with the Duke of Argyll; and at St. Andrews was told that at Oxford they had nothing like the St. Andrews University Library. On hearing this Dr. Johnson, for once, made no reply.

His "Lives of the Poets" was written in 1779-1781, when he was 70 years of age and more. His cruel last illness was nobly borne; he died on 13 December, 1784, one of the best, greatest, wisest, and most humorous of Englishmen.

His "Lives," and the Life of him are among the works which time cannot stale; read ten times over they please the more, and more excellencies are discovered. No man of times past is known so well, and none was so well worth knowing. His critical tastes and rules are not ours, and perhaps even in his own day were falling out of fashion; but they are none the less historically valuable.

Oliver Goldsmith.

Dr. Johnson carried all his set with him into renown, and though Oliver Goldsmith was a writer of versatile and charming genius, but for his friendship with Johnson he would have been much less successful in life, and less well loved and remembered after his death.

Like several great writers born in Ireland, Goldsmith was of an English family, but they had been so long settled in Ireland that they had become "more Irish than the Irish". Goldsmith's father had the care of Protestant souls at Pallasmore, County Longford, where (10 November, 1728) the poet was born. The father obtained a cure worth more than the "forty pounds a year" at Lissoy in West Meath, and Lissoy contributes some features to the Auburn of the "Deserted Village," an ideal village, in an ideal state of desertion. His father, according to Goldsmith's poetry and prose, was a most excellent man; more capable of teaching his family how to spend large fortunes in benevolence than how to earn a maintenance,

More skilled to raise the wretched than to rise.

He was the generous host of "all the vagrant train," of "the long-remembered beggar," an Irish Edie Ochiltree, of "the ruined spendthrift," who "claimed kindred," and came to "scorn," and of "the broken soldier".

Careless their merits or their faults to scan
His pity gave ere charity began.

This pity was Goldsmith's own characteristic. When an exceedingly poor scholar at Trinity College, Dublin, his feats of charity matched those of St. Francis or St. Martin of Tours. He is said to have given away his blanket, and slept in the ticking of his bed.

A love of fine clothes was no less part of his nature than love of his neighbours, while he liked "the cards," and the bowl and tavern talk. He took his bachelor's degree in February, 1749: idled away a year or two at home, learned to play the flute, failed to take holy orders, and, as a medical student, went to Edinburgh University (1752-1754) lived on the benevolence of an uncle, Contarine, and, on his way to Leyden, was taken in the company of five or six Scottish gentlemen in French service, who had been recruiting for King Louis in the Highlands. Alan Breck may have been in this adventure. Throughout 1755-1756, Goldsmith roamed about the Continent, supporting himself by his flute, and entertained by the hospitality of the Universities.

"Sir," said Johnson, "he disputed his way through Europe," as the Admirable Crichton had done, a hundred and seventy years earlier. At Padua, it is thought, if anywhere, he obtained his Doctor's degree: his adventures later gave him materials for essays, for the wandering scholar in "The Vicar of Wakefield," and for his poem, "The Traveller". "He was making himself all the time."

Returning to England in 1756, he lived as an usher in a small school; as a corrector for the press; as a kind of indentured reviewer and general hack to Griffiths the publisher; failed to pass as a naval surgeon; wrote with Smollett's literary gang, conducted a weekly booklet or magazine, "The Bee," for a few numbers (1759); and published "An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe". He was much more successful (1760) with letters in "The Public Ledger," in the assumed character of a Chinese visitor to London.

In the former work Goldsmith complains that young genius effervesces at college and is unrewarded, while dull plodders fatten. "The link" between "the great" and the literary "now seems entirely broken". "An author" is a thing only to be laughed at. "His person, not his jest, becomes the mirth of the company." Indeed Goldsmith's person was quaint, his attire, when in funds, was that of the bird of paradise; while his wit flowed from his pen, not from his tongue; his repartee was not ready; eager he was but apparently absent-minded in company. As for the publisher, "it is his interest to allow as little as possible for writing, and of the author to write as much as possible". Writers for the stage suffer from the competition of the dead. Like two or three men of genius of our day, Goldsmith asks "who will deliver us from Shakespeare?" from "these pieces of forced humour, far-fetched conceit, and unnatural hyperbole which have been ascribed to Shakespeare." Here is scepticism! Managers make new authors wait some years before giving their plays a chance: a malady most incident to managers; and Garrick believed that he was attacked.

The not unnatural acrimony of a neglected man appears in some of the Chinese Letters (published in book form as "The Citizen of the World"), notably in the visit to Westminster Abbey. Goldsmith had a spite against the patronage, given to the art of painting, and made his Chinaman share it. The same critic looks on Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" as a lewd compound of pertness, vanity, and obscene buffoonery.

The Chinaman also attacked the brutality of the criminal law (that of his own country being so mild), and generally inveighed against the state of society. The Letters are an unflattering picture of the times. By 1761 Johnson had made the acquaintance of Goldsmith, and henceforth Goldsmith had not to complain of neglect from wits and authors. In 1764 he published his moral and contemplative poem "The Traveller"; with his "Deserted Village" it is perhaps the last good thing of the old school of poems in rhymed heroic couplets. The dedicatory preface to the author's brother, the Rev. Henry Goldsmith, tells us that, as society becomes refined, painting and music "offer the feeble mind a less laborious entertainment" than poetry, which they supplant, while "what criticisms have we not heard of late in favour of blank verse, and Pindaric Odes, anapests (sic) and iambics, alliterative care and happy negligence! Every absurdity has now a champion to defend it!"

Goldsmith, in social matters rather a Socialist, is, in poetry, opposing the slowly dawning freedom, and upholding the school of Pope. But there is, in both of his longer poems, a kind of softness in the versification, and of sincerity in the sentiments and descriptions of Nature, which we miss in Pope, while each piece, as the man said of "Hamlet," "is made up of quotations," of lines which live in many memories like household words. The pictures of the parish clergyman, of the schoolmaster, of the harmless old rustic ale-house, in the "Deserted Village," may be called imperishable; and Goldsmith cries "back to the land" and denounces "landlordism," and forced migration to North America,

Where crouching tigers wait their hapless prey.

Goldsmith, in fact, never revisited "the decent church," "the hawthorn bush," the harmless pot-house, and other scenes of his infancy: in his poem he blends an ideal Irish with an ideal English village, and ascribes the result to a tyrannical, landlord with admirable pathetic success.

Of his other poems "The Haunch of Venison," imitated from Horace, and the witty and kind raillery of "Retaliation," in which his pen supplies the wit that often failed his tongue in the wit-combats of "the Club," are both in "anapests" and are the most important. The "Lament for Madame Blaise" is a lively adaptation from the French, and the "Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog" is a most vivacious piece. As a ballad "Edwin and Angelina," though popular, is too unballad-like.

The works on which Goldsmith's fame depends are not his essays, histories, or view of "Animated Nature," genially unscientific, but his "Vicar of Wakefield" (written earlier, but sold by Johnson for while Goldsmith was in a sponging house in 1764), and his two plays "The Good Natured Man," and "She Stoops to Conquer" (1768, 1773).

"The Vicar of Wakefield" drew the highest possible praise from Goethe, and the most furious of attacks from the critical pen of Mark Twain. Nobody says that it shines in construction, but its humour and sweetness, the goodness, the simplicity, the true wisdom, and the learned foibles of the Vicar, with the humours of his wife, daughters, and wandering scholar son, an usher, a dweller in Grub Street, make "The Vicar of Wakefield" a book to be read once a year. "Finding that the best things had not been said on the wrong side, I resolved to write a book that should be wholly new... the learned world said nothing to my paradoxes, nothing at all, sir." In the son's narrative Goldsmith has his usual flout at art and amateurs of art, and Pietro Perugino.

The plays are too well known for comment, with Croaker and Lofty, the Bailiffs, Tony Lumpkin, Mrs. Hardcastle, the revellers at the Three Pigeons, and young Marlow, they are at least as familiar on the amateur as on the professional boards. They brought to Goldsmith fame, some money and more credit, but he was still a drudge, still working for booksellers, and deep in debt, when his death on 4 April, 1774, made Reynolds for once lay down his brush, saddened the Club, and filled the stairs of his chambers in Brick Court with poor weeping women to whom he had been kind,—their only friend. "Nullum fere scribendi genus non tetigit, nullum quod tetigit non ornavit," wrote Johnson in his epitaph, adding a new phrase to Latin proverbial philosophy.[1]

Edmund Burke.

"It seems probable," says Burke's biographer, Lord Morley, "that Burke will be more frequently and more seriously referred to within the next twenty years" (from 1899) "than he has been within the whole of the last eighty." Yet we do not find many references to Burke, who, living, speaking, and writing through some thirty years of discontents and revolutions (the American and the French) and bringing to problems like our own a masculine judgment, and a lucid and energetic style, might seem worthy of general study.

In a sketch of the history of literature space for the works of Burke, saturated with politics as they are, and only to be understood in the light of ample historical knowledge, cannot be provided. The speeches of most successful orators are brilliant, and persuasive for the hour, with crowds who wish to be persuaded. The speeches of Burke are sometimes, when his pity and indignation are stirred (as by the fate of Marie Antoinette, or the alleged infamies of Warren Hastings), rich in floral components, in impassioned rhetoric. But, as a rule, his best orations required to be read if they were to be appreciated; they are too full of thought and knowledge and too logically built to be generally effective at the moment.

Whatever our political opinions may be, we cannot but find Burke's "Speech on Moving His Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies" (22 March, 1775) a very great and noble literary work. For its purpose it was futile; fierce peoples are not to be guided by all the eloquence and all the wisdom of the wise. "We are called upon, as it were by a superior warning Voice, again to attend to America; to attend to the whole of it together; and to review the subject with an unusual degree of care and calmness. Surely it is an awful subject; or there is none so on this side of the grave."

It was an awful subject; but it was also a party question. Knowledge, care, and calmness were, therefore, put out of action. On an infamous proposal to "reduce the high aristocratic spirit of Virginia and the southern colonies" by proclaiming the freedom of the black slaves and raising a servile war, Burke said: "Slaves as these unfortunate black people are, and dull as all men are from slavery, must they not a little suspect the offer of freedom from that very nation which has sold them to their present masters? from that nation, one of whose causes of quarrel with those masters is their refusal to deal any more in that inhuman traffic?"—the Slave Trade. The idea of sending, in the same ship, samples of fresh "black ivory" and a proclamation of freedom for all blacks, not unreasonably seemed absurd, to Burke.

This speech, so moving to the reader, is said to have driven members out of the House; the gestures of the orator being clumsy, his tones harsh, and his delivery hasty. Johnson said that his wit was "blunt"; Goldsmith, on the other hand, that he "cut blocks with a razor". He "to party gave up what was meant for mankind," but, save through party, mankind is not to be helped by the politicians.

To glance at the main facts of Burke's life, he appears to have been, as far as his name shows, of Norman but long Hibernicised stock on his father's side; of native Irish blood on that of his mother, a Miss Nagle, a Catholic. He was born in Dublin, apparently on 12 January, 1729. His father was a solicitor. After two years at a small school kept by a learned Quaker, Burke went to Trinity College, Dublin, where he showed eager intellectual appetites, without paying much heed to the academic round of studies. In 1750 he went to London, to the Middle Temple, and studied law, but did not practise. In 1755 his father cut off his allowance, in 1756 he married. He cannot have made money by his "Vindication of Natural Society" (1756), written in the rhetorical manner of Bolingbroke. The book is an ironical reply to Bolingbroke's argument for "natural" against "revealed" religion. Transfer the view to society: our religion may have its anomalies, yet our society has far more and worse. Do you propose, therefore, to return to "natural society"? "Natural" society was then supposed by the wise and learned to be a happy go-as-you-please innocent communism. In fact, if savage society be "natural" society it is emmeshed in the strangest and most artificial, cruel, and filthy set of laws and customs: the marriage laws, when carried (as they sometimes are) to their logical conclusion, make marriage impossible! All this was not understood, but Burke, while arguing against a sudden and violent break-up of society, did perceive and state brilliantly, the glaring injustices of our society, as Goldsmith did in "The Deserted Village".

Burke's "Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful" (1756) is a study in the science of "Æsthetics," a science which, if it has reached no very conspicuous results, is now pursued with instruments and by a method not extant in Burke's day. He only sought for "the Origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful". He went into the psychology of pain and pleasure, and found Beauty to be "some quality in bodies acting mechanically upon the human mind by the intervention of the senses". But what is the quality and why does it automatically produce the effect? The qualities which automatically excite in the mind the apperception of the beautiful are comparatively small, smooth, varied without angularity, delicate, and in colour clear and bright, but not strong or glaring. But a mountain, or fire, is beautiful yet—does not present the six qualities. Consequently we must not call a huge rough mountain beautiful but sublime.

Burke does not pretend to know "the ultimate cause" of the emotions produced in the mind, and he censures the daring of Sir Isaac Newton in accounting for things by Ether. But Ether seems to prosper in modern scientific thought.

We cannot follow Burke into metaphysics, but the ordinary reader may test, by experience, his description of a lover in the presence of the beloved. "As far as I could observe," says Burke, "the head reclines something on one side; the eyelids are more closed than usual, and the eyes roll gently with an inclination to the Object; the mouth is a little opened, and the breath drawn slowly, with now and then a low sigh; the whole body is composed, and the hands fall idly by the side." Thus it seems probable "that beauty acts by relaxing the solids of the whole system". On the other hand, the Sublime ought to string up the solids, and we do hear of sublime objects which "petrify" the percipient. Burke sought, at all events, for the answer to his problem in the nature of man, in psychology.

The nature of Burke's financial resources, beyond what he made by writing in the new "Annual Register" (1759,—a hundred a year from Dodsley the publisher) is as mysterious as the address of his fellow-countryman, The Mulligan, in Thackeray's book. In 1759 the so-called "Single Speech Hamilton" employed him; in 1761 he went to Ireland with Hamilton, who was secretary to Lord Halifax. Hamilton treated him badly, and in 1765 he became secretary to the Marquis of Rockingham, entered Parliament as member for Wendover, a pocket borough, made his mark at once; wrote "Observations on the Present State of the Nation" (1769), and the admirable "Thoughts on the Present Discontents," a book always in season. How Burke, in 1768, contrived to buy Beaconsfield in Bucks (£22,000) and to live at a rate of £2500 a year, the rental being £500, is a mystery deeper than that of "The Man in the Iron Mask". Apparently there was a suffering Marquis in the background: at least Burke owed large sums to Lord Rockingham, who forgave the debt. No discreditable source of Burke's fairy gold can be conjectured or conceived, as Goldsmith said he was

Too nice for a statesman, too proud for a wit,

"too nice" meaning "too scrupulous".

Burke did not hold office, save for one year (1782-1783). Though a Whig and a "Pro-American," Burke never liked, never approved of the French Revolution. Early in 1790, he spoke in Parliament, breaking away from those enthusiasts for Liberty in her wildest mood, Fox and Sheridan.

His "Reflections on the French Revolution" (1790) had a large sale and wide influence. People will judge Burke's influence, conduct and eloquence, at this time, in accordance with their politics and prejudices; his "Letters on a Regicide Peace," and other work of his last years cannot be discussed without partisanship. He died on 9 July, 1797. "The age of chivalry is gone," is one of Burke's best-remembered phrases. When was there an age of chivalry? If no swords leaped from their sheaths for Marie Antoinette, in 1793, not one was drawn for Jeanne d'Arc in 1431, not one for Mary Stuart in 1587.

The Revival of the Ballad.

Throughout the eighteenth century, despite the dominance of Pope and his followers, and the poetry of the Town; despite the sturdy resistance of Johnson; despite Goldsmith's complaints against Odes and "anapests" and "blank verse" and "happy negligence," there were streams of tendency making for literary freedom. Addison had lovingly praised both the blank verse of Milton, and the purely popular art of the ancient ballads. Men were beginning to look back with personal interest at antiquity; not only at Spenser, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, but at all the art and poetry of times past. As early as 1706-1711 Watson's "Choice Collection" of old Scottish poems was published: and Allan Ramsay gave old things mixed with new in his "Evergreen," and "Tea Table Miscellany" between 1724 and 1727; others appeared in d'Urfey's "Pills to Purge Melancholy" (1719), others in "Old Ballads" (1723).

We have seen the antiquarianism of Gray, in his translations from the Norse, and his interest in Macpherson's so-called "Ossian" (1760-1763). Though there was no written Highland epic in existence, there were, and are, "Ossianic ballads" in Gaelic, late popular survivals of Irish poetry. Working in his own way on these, and on prose legends, apparently, Macpherson led men's fancies back to the racing "sounds" of the north; back to the Highland beliefs that had already fascinated Collins; and emancipated poetry from the chatter of the coffee-house and the tavern. The charlatanism of Macpherson disgusted Johnson; any one could write Ossianisms, he said, who abandoned his mind to it, but Macpherson, at least, pleased thousands, including so enthusiastic a student of Homer as Napoleon Bonaparte, and stimulated Gaelic researches.

In 1765 the publication of an old and famous manuscript folio by Bishop Percy ("The Reliques") not only gave a new and popular source of pleasure in ballads and old relics, but caused a noisy controversy, which, again, led to close research. Percy "restored," altered, added to, and omitted from his materials as taste and fancy prompted; arousing the wrath of the crabbed antiquary, Joseph Ritson, who denied that the manuscript folio existed. Had Percy published it as it stood (which Furnivall and Hales at last succeeded in doing) the book would have been unread except by a few antiquaries. Arranged by Percy, the ballads became truly popular. They were followed, from 1774, by Thomas Warton's "History of English Poetry," the work of an Oxford Professor of Poetry (1757-1767) who, in a lazy University, was a serious student.

Nothing is more ruinous to literature than ignorance, excitedly absorbed in the momentary present. In the manner briefly described, men's minds became awake to the merits of the English literature of many remote ages, and even to the interest of chivalry and chivalrous romance, to the beauty of all art that had been discredited as "Gothic" and "barbarous".

Horace Walpole.

A man who, if in an amateur and dandified way, assisted the advance in literature, was the son of the famous and far from literary Whig Minister of George I. and George II., Sir Robert Walpole. Born at the end of September, 1717, Horace Walpole went to Eton in 1727, where he won the friendship of Gray and prided himself on avoiding cricket and fights with bargees. For Conway (Marshal Conway) and George Selwyn, famous later as an eccentric wit, he had a life-long affection. From Eton, Walpole went to King's College, Cambridge, where he studied French, Italian, and painting, being congenitally incapable of the mathematics, like Tennyson and Macaulay. His letters were already witty and amusing. He began his tour with Gray in 1739, and, at Rome, was "far gone in medals, lamps, idols, prints, etc. ... I would buy the Coliseum if I could". Though he wrote fleeringly of his own tastes, he was, in fact, far in advance of his age in appreciation of the best old art, whether of classical Greece and Rome or of the early Italians. To collect, to study society, to write his famous correspondence with Horace Mann and many others—an informal social, political, and literary history of his time,—was the business of Walpole's long life. He gave himself dandified airs; he knew that he was not in the strict sense a scholar, but he had an eagerly inquiring mind, and we owe more to him than to Mr. Pepys. He practically began neo-Gothic architecture—with all its faults he meant well,—by the building of his Villa, Strawberry Hill, and "in a concatenation accordingly" wrote the earliest pseudo-historic novel of supernatural terror, "The Castle of Otranto" (1764). Like stories of R. L. Stevenson, and Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," the tale is based on a dream. The author found himself in a Gothic castle, and "on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour". The rest, with its odd horrors and comic interludes of the servants, Walpole wrote without plan: making his characters natural, not "heroic," his events as much "supernatural" as he could.

From this fantasy came the novels of Mrs. Radcliffe (whose habit of explaining the supernatural away Walpole derided), and, from Mrs. Radcliffe, in part, came the impulse of Scott, and the moody heroes of Byron. From the mustard seed of "Otranto" grew "a tree with birds in all its boughs".

Walpole's play "The Mysterious Mother," was even morbidly romantic in conception (1768). His "Historic Doubts" on Richard III. show a new spirit of historic scepticism, and a desire to trace accepted historical ideas to their ultimate sources of evidence. Such minute inquiry was not common, when Hume and Smollett were our historians. Walpole, who had succeeded to the Earldom of Orford, died on 2 March, 1797.

His "Anecdotes of Painting" and "Royal and Noble Authors" are all they aimed at being; his Letters, in extent, observation, inner knowledge of society, and wit, have no rivals in English, but his real position in literature and taste is that of a pioneer. The true, the essential Horace was very unlike Macaulay's splenetic portrait of him, and did not deserve Thackeray's nickname "Horace Waddlepoodle".

Under his many affectations he was a true friend and a good patriot, a delightful wit and an agency in the advance of literature and taste. Between him and Dr. Johnson, of course, there was a gulf that neither man dreamed of trying to cross.

Laurence Sterne.

Laurence Sterne can scarcely be ranged in any species of writers. He was not a novelist, though his most humorous and exquisitely finished characters, Mr. Shandy, Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Obadiah, Dr. Slop, Yorick, and Mrs. Shandy appear in what professed to be a kind of novel, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy," Gent (1760-1767). These characters are really studies like those of Addison, but they appeared in a long succession of volumes which obtained their great vogue first of all, perhaps, by wild eccentricity—with blank pages, asterisks, erasions, and even pages of marbled paper; next, now by an undercurrent, now by an overflow, of indecent or indecorous story or suggestion; thirdly, by the fact that these were the recreations of a country parson. These allurements, were the first and transient causes of Sterne's popularity, these and a quantity of odd anecdotes, often borrowed wholesale from Burton's then forgotten "Anatomy of Melancholy," as the lewd anecdotes were taken from French collections of the sixteenth century. But while these baits, this "merriment of a parson," allured the town, every reader of taste had the noblest excuse for reading the book. It contained the grave and logical humours and exquisite intellectual caprices of Shandy the father; the patient, kind, dull tolerance of Mrs. Shandy (whose unexpected associations of ideas resemble those of Mrs. Nickleby), the gallantry, simplicity, and noble goodness of Uncle Toby (a person not wholly unlike a Colonel Newcome of the eighteenth century), the similar qualities of his more chivalrous Sancho, Corporal Trim; the wiles of the Widow Wadman; and, what is pleasing to reflective minds, the Curse of Ernulphus, bestowed "on him, Obadiah". "Our men swore terribly in Flanders," said Uncle Toby, but the ancient formulæ of Catholic curses went far beyond our men. For the sentimental there was the death of Lefevre, which, in school reading books, but ineffectually appealed for tears to men now old.

Thus much of "Tristram Shandy" is as good as good can be, and might be collected, with explanatory passages, and exhibited without harm or offence to any reader. But, so presented, it would lose the attraction on which Sterne deliberately counted; the intermixture of insinuation and buffoonery with character and sentiment. Great parts of "Tristram Shandy," once, it seems, essential to its success, are now detrimental to its general diffusion: all the more because the high and low tumbling is that of a clergyman.

The author (born 1713) was English by family and descent, grandson of a Cavalier English clergyman of the Great Rebellion, and Archbishop of the Restoration. We meet his father, Roger Sterne, an ensign in a regiment of foot, in Thackeray's "Esmond," where, in his wild way, he makes a very sensible remark, when the exiled King, fighting for France, rides up to the English lines. For several years, Laurence Sterne followed the drums of his father's regiment, till, at 10 years old, a kinsman sent him to school at Halifax (1723), and the life of a camp where men swore terribly inspires his pictures of soldiers, but was not the most chaste school for a little boy.

In 1733, rather old, he went to Jesus College, Cambridge, and made the friendship of John Hall (Stevenson) of Skelton Castle. A humorist, a reckless liver, he had a great and unholy influence on Sterne, who took orders and two small livings in Yorkshire, and (1741) married a lady of some property, after a sentimental wooing. Sentiment did not last; Sterne, an accomplished philanderer, became "passing weary of her love," and the pair were only kept together by Sterne's affection for his daughter, Lydia.

Not till 1760 did the first volume of "Tristram Shandy" appear: born of a casual spite against Dr. Slop (Dr. Burton, a Jacobite physician of York), "Tristram" instantly made Sterne a "lion" in London, a friend of the great, and a diner-out. In winter he wrote more "Shandy," and published sermons on the strength of his success; in the summer he worked at home, till a consumptive tendency sent him to the least desirable parts of Southern France (by way of Paris where he met everybody), and, later, to Italy. He died in London, alone (1768) save for the lodging-house keeper, and a footman, a Macdonald of the Keppoch branch, whose father followed Prince Charlie, and whose own childish adventures, in 1745, as he has described them, were a subject made for the hand of the expiring humorist.

He had kept on publishing, with varying success, new volumes of "Tristram Shandy" almost to the end, when he had the happy thought of beginning his "Sentimental Journey," with its bewildering mixture of the old favourite matter with pretty vignettes of southern scenes and manners, pictures with the prettiness and other qualities of the French painter, Greuze. Here we have both the admired hungry donkey, fed by Sterne with macaroons, and the sentimentalized dead donkey, which provoked the scepticism of Mr. Samuel Weller. Sterne sketched the French as Hogarth did, but with infinitely more sensibility and sympathy, he is a classic in France, no less than in England. Sterne's letters and "Journal to Eliza," a very characteristic piece, are collected in Mr. Lewis Melville's "Life and Letters of Sterne". His biographer (Mr. H. D. Traill, 1882) says that Sterne "undergoes, I suspect, even more than an English classic's ordinary share of reverential neglect". If this be so, Sterne himself, with his acrobatic clowning, is to blame, but the loss lies on the readers of mature age who neglect this contemplator of human life, this creator of characters, this painter of manners irrevocably past.[2]

David Hume.

David Hume, a younger son of the laird of Ninewells in Berwickshire, was born in April, 1711. He attended lectures in the University of Edinburgh at a very early age, and, when about 17, devoted himself entirely to solitary study, classical, poetical, and philosophic. The ruling passion of his life was the desire of literary fame, of which, with all his success, he never obtained more than he wanted. Various attempts in other professions ended in his return to his studies; he was only 25 when he wrote his "Treatise of Human Nature," he published it in 1739; was disappointed by its reception; affected to disavow it, but reproduced, in more finished literary form, many of its doctrines in his later essays. The earlier essays, of 1741-1742, were successful: the Philosophical Essays (1748), were attacked by orthodox divines, whom the "Essay on Miracles" (of which the central idea occurred to Hume while arguing with a Jesuit in France) was not apt to conciliate. Some essays he left for posthumous publication; he was in evil odour on account of his opinions, and obtained no better post in Scotland than the keepership of the Advocates' Library. But in Scotland his geniality, good humour, and practical wisdom, made him dear even to those who thought his opinions dangerous. By great frugality he made himself independent of the great, while his "History of England" begun in 1754, though, like most honest histories it at first offended all parties, proved not unprofitable and greatly increased his reputation. In 1765, he was made Secretary of Legation in Paris; later he obtained the post of Under-Secretary for Home Affairs; and finally returned to Edinburgh "in opulence," as he said, with £1000 a year. He had many friends among the preachers of "the Moderate party," and died in 1776, contented, and not without some parade, Dr. Johnson thought, of his philosophic fearlessness. In Paris he was highly popular; but, though England had done much for him, he used to express great dislike of the English. He laboured, none the less, to purge his style of Scotticisms, of which he drew up a list—"allenarly" and "alongst" are to be avoided; and he determined to write "a pretty girl enough" in place of "a pretty enough girl". Hume's philosophical ideas belong to the history, not of literature, but of philosophy. His position, in a continuation of Locke, was sceptical, and had immense influence in causing a reaction and a closer criticism, first in Germany, then in England. Professor Huxley, Hume's biographer, has exposed many of the fallacies in his "Essay on Miracles," and others are glaring. Of "The Natural History of Religion" he wrote unembarrassed by much knowledge of the subject, for early men, as far as we know, often reasoned otherwise than Hume thought that they would necessarily reason. Philosophy and history are always in a state of flux, through the influence of criticism, of new discoveries, and of historical documents, with which Hume had little acquaintance. But a study of modern metaphysics must still begin with the works of Hume, though no one can go to his History for full and accurate information. Unable, or reluctant, to speak his mind quite freely, he adopted the ironical method, without the sometimes elephantine frivolity of Gibbon. Like his fellow-countryman, Dr. Robertson, he was no enthusiastic worshipper of the heroes of the Reformation; and, though nothing less than a Jacobite, he was Tory enough to be tolerant of the Stuart Kings, or rather to study them in the light of the conditions under which they lived. It is in the same light that Hume and his philosophy must be regarded. His letters are among his most interesting works, and his attack on Macpherson's "Ossian," with his defence of the "Epigoniad," the Theban epic of his friend Professor Wilkie, in themselves give a correct and rather amusing view of his tastes and limitations.

Robertson.

William Robertson (1721-1793) the son of a parish minister in Midlothian, was also a minister of the Church of Scotland, and the leader of the moderate party, as against the enthusiastic spiritual descendants of the Covenanters. The moderates aimed at taste, learning, and the acquisition of a style free from Scottish idioms. This style Robertson displayed (1759) in his history of Scotland. A topic could scarcely be more unpopular than his, the publisher said, but his book had a very wide success south of the Border, and his later works on the reign of Charles V. and on American history were not less popular. His manner is calm, reflective, and studiously destitute of enthusiasm. Both he and Hume viewed the religious history of their country with a critical tranquillity very unlike the spirit introduced by Carlyle. His defect lay, not in the art of clear and definite presentation, but in limited knowledge of original documents.

Edward Gibbon.

"The old reproach, that no British altars had been erected to the Muse of History, was recently disproved," says Gibbon, "by the first performances of Robertson and Hume, the histories of Scotland and the Stuarts.... The perfect composition, the nervous language, the well-turned periods of Dr. Robertson, inflamed me to the ambitious hope that I might one day tread in his footsteps: the calm philosophy, the careless inimitable beauties of his friend and rival" (Hume) "often forced me to close the volume with a mixed sensation of delight and despair." After ten years' work by Gibbon at his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" "a letter from Mr. Hume" (1776) "overpaid the labour, but I have never presumed to accept a place in the triumvirate of British historians."

The fondness of Caledonian patriotism cannot accept the compliment paid to Robertson and Hume by the modesty of the author of "The Decline and Fall". The works of the two Scottish historians, though still very readable, and distinguished in style, are superseded by histories much more learned and based on documents not accessible to the Scots. But the monumental edifice of Gibbon is "a possession for ever".

Born at Putney, early in May, 1737, Edward Gibbon came of an ancient though not historically distinguished family, whose wealth was impaired by the connexion of his grandfather with the South Sea Bubble, and by his father's lack of economy. Gibbon's health, in boyhood, was bad, and his education irregular: he was a sufferer in an age when "the schoolboy may have been whipped for misapprehending a passage" (in Phædrus) "which Bentley could not restore, and which Burman could not explain". Thus he writes in his Autobiography: in this work he affects to compose with artless effort, but the rounded periods of his great book come unbidden to his pen, or rather, he devoted elaborate care to the six drafts of his memoirs.

In two years passed at Westminster School, Gibbon did not master Greek and Latin. His next three years were passed in wide desultory reading, in translation of the classics, and in modern history, which from boyhood was his passion. Going to Magdalen College, Oxford, before he was 15, "with a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed," he was disgusted by the indolent ignorance of the Fellows of his college, "decent easy men," at whose table as a gentleman commoner he dined. In close grammatical study under his tutor he found neither profit nor pleasure; he lived in or out of Oxford as he pleased; read Catholic books, professed himself a Catholic—"the offence," says Blackstone, "amounts to High Treason". It amounted to petty treason; Gibbon's father removed him from Magdalen to the tuition of Mallet, a free-thinker, and thence he was carried to Lausanne and the house of a Calvinist minister, who in two years brought him within the Presbyterian fold. After such a series of theological adventures it is not strange that Gibbon's aversion to Christianity declares itself wherever he has a chance of sneering at that religion. He returned to England in 1758, after sighing as a lover and obeying as a son, when his father commanded him to resign his passion for Mademoiselle Curchod, later Madame Necker, the mother of Madame de Staël. At Lausanne he had studied very widely and with elaborate organization of his work: in England he still read, "never handled a gun, seldom mounted a horse," but devoted himself to his duties as an officer in the Hampshire militia. Here he acquired some practical knowledge of military affairs which was valuable to him in his remarks on the discipline of the Roman Army: he meditated several historical topics; returned to the Continent, and at Rome (15 October, 1764) conceived, as he has told us in imperishable words, the idea of writing "The Decline and Fall," "as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter". The distractions of society, and of politics, for he had a seat in Parliament, and belonged to White's, Boodle's, Brooks's and The Club of Dr. Johnson, did not draw Gibbon from his great ambition. He had studied style till, in conversation, "his polish was occasionally finical... he moved to flutes and hautboys". George Colman the Younger has left a portrait of Gibbon in verse, which is corroborated, as far as his manner in conversation went, by a letter of his own (1764).

His person looked as funnily obese
As if a Pagod, growing large as Man,
Had rashly waddled off its chimney-piece,
To visit a Chinese upon a fan.
Such his exterior, curious 'twas to scan!
And oft he rapped his snuff-box, cocked his snout,
And ere his polished periods he began,
Bent forwards, stretching his forefinger out,
And talked in phrase as round as he was round about.

Roundness, meditated balance, are the characteristics of Gibbon's style. "Before he wrote a note or a letter he arranged completely in his mind what he wished to express." He says: "It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it in my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of my pen till I had given the last polish to my work". As one consequence, "my first rough manuscript, without any intermediate copy, has been sent to the press". Gibbon's History, in the vast whole, as well as in each sentence, was thus premeditated, under his ruling philosophic idea of what such a history should be. He had completely assimilated his mass of materials, and each topic was reduced to its proper dimensions, without encumbering details, while all marched to the flutes and hautboys of his rounded music. We may think it occasionally monotonous, and marvel that so many periods should conclude with a clause introduced by the preposition "of". But this is a trifling criticism, he had chosen his vehicle; and, though we should not imitate his style, yet a style it is, admirably adapted to its purpose. His reading was enormous in every branch of learning, including the science of coins; he constantly refers "to the medals as well as the historians". It may be curious to note that while he devotes four pages to the criticism of the iron cage of Bajazet (1402) he neglects to mention that such cages or huches were commonly used for the safeguarding of important prisoners of war by the contemporary chivalry of France and England.

It is, of course, impossible, it would not be easy for the most learned of historians, to criticize in a few words a historical work of such vast survey, and concerned with so many and such various topics, with the affairs of so many races and religions, throughout so many centuries. The faults which have been chiefly criticized are Gibbon's total inability to be generous towards Christianity; and the bad taste of some of his notes; which appear to be the refreshments of a natural fatigue. In his day, he says, "History was the most popular species of composition," and he "is at a loss how to describe the success of the work, without betraying the vanity of the writer". He ended his task, and he has described his emotions when all was done, on 27 June, 1787, at Lausanne, the place of his boyish exile and of his solitary affair of the heart. He died in 1794, having been mainly busy with the drafts of his Autobiography. These drafts, with his most interesting letters, have been published by the piety of the Earl of Sheffield, the grandson of his devoted friend, John Holroyd, first Lord Sheffield. In his early letters Gibbon is no purist, "I tipped the boy with a crown," he says, an early use of a familiar modern term.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816), like Burke and Goldsmith, was an Irishman by birth; his family provided Prince Charles, in Sir Thomas Sheridan, with a most inefficient tutor, and an unfortunate comrade in war. Sheridan's own family was Protestant, his grandfather was a friend of Dean Swift in Ireland, and a humorist. His son, though in Dr. Johnson's set, was regarded by the great lexicographer as a prodigy of natural dullness, highly cultivated and improved by art. Educated at Harrow, young Richard never gave any cause for the complaint that he was dull. At twenty-one he eloped from Bath with the beautiful Miss Linley, a charming singer, the Saint Cecilia of Reynolds's painting. In 1775, Sheridan produced "The Rivals" at Covent Garden; one of the few plays of the eighteenth century which still live on the stage, and perhaps can never cease to amuse, thanks to Mrs. Malaprop's exquisitely well-chosen derangement of epithets, and the unexpected variety of her parts of speech. Malapropisms may be styled a mechanical form of humour, but Mrs. Malaprop's own are happily expressive of her character. To know Lydia Languish is to love her; and Sir Lucius O'Trigger scarcely caricatures the ideas of his duelling fellow-countrymen; whilst Bob Acres is the most sympathetic of all the comic poltroons of the stage, though too sanguine in his belief that "damns have had their day". Sir Anthony Absolute is a delightful variation on the stock character of the Angry Father; and these diverting figures make the sentimental parts of the serious lovers, Falkland and Julia, rather ungrateful. "The School for Scandal" may be called conventional in the contrast of hypocrisy and reckless goodness of heart in Joseph and Charles Surface; but convention is permitted to the stage, while Sir Peter and Lady Teazle, with the happy high spirits of the whole farcical comedy, and the varieties in the candour of the scandal-mongers, make the play at least the rival of "The Rivals," as it is far more provocative of mirth than the wit of Congreve. "The Critic," again, in its delicious nonsense and satire of authors, actors, and critics—Sir Fretful Plagiary is as diverting as realistic—infinitely surpasses its old model, "The Rehearsal". We laugh aloud as we read, and are convulsed as we look on when the piece is acted. Who forgets the nod of Lord Burleigh in the drama of the Armada, and the exquisite reason for which the characters cannot behold the galleons of Spain, and the romantic demeanour of the two Tilburinas, and the Governor who remains fixed, while the Father is moved? Of Sheridan's other plays "St. Patrick's Day" is not seen on the stage, while "The Duenna" does not "attain unto the first Three".

As manager and owner of Drury Lane Theatre, Sheridan proved himself to be not more skilled in finance than Balzac; in debt always, he somehow kept afloat. You would have said that "he was not the stuff they make Whigs of"; any more than Charles Fox. In Parliament, however (1780), he attached himself to that statesman's party; attacked Warren Hastings, and amused the Prince of Wales (George IV.) who certainly appreciated literary genius, from Sheridan and Scott to Miss Austen.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

Born a Pierrepont, daughter of the Earl of Kingston (1689-1762) and wife of Edward Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary, a toast at eight, lived through the great age of Anne and Pope, her absurd admirer before he was her shameless satirist. She was equally celebrated for her beauty, her wit, and her introduction of inoculation against small-pox, from Constantinople, where her husband was English ambassador (1716). Her light verses are sparkling and malicious; her fame rests on her letters, from the East, from England among the wits, to her sister (who married the Jacobite Earl of Mar, and lived in France), and, in later life, to Lady Bute, from Avignon, with its Jacobite colony, and from Italy, where she read and remarked on the great novelists of the day. Even Walpole's letters are scarcely more entertaining, and more brilliant records of society in the eighteenth century do not exist. Lady Mary was not sentimental, and laughed at Pope's lightning-stricken lovers; or rather at the artificiality of Pope's sentiment concerning them.

Junius.

Stat Nominis Umbra. Because we do not know who wrote the letters of political invective signed "Junius," and published by Woodfall in "The Public Advertiser" (1768-1773), much has been written about the mystery of the author's identity. From Sir Philip Francis (who seems to be the favourite, like Matthioli for the Man in the Iron Maskship) to the wicked Lord Lyttelton and Edward Gibbon, there have been about a score of candidates. Matthioli was certainly not the Man in the Iron Mask, and perhaps Sir Philip Francis was not Junius, who gives himself—very cleverly if he were Sir Philip,—the air of being some great one. The letters, except to the professed historian, are repulsive. The worst quality of satire, spite masquerading as virtuous indignation, is their chief characteristic, their style is that of antithetical rhetoric, highly inflated; their subject is party politics and personal invective.

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[1] There was scarce a literary form which he did not touch, none which he touched did he fail to adorn.

[2] The writer observes that Sterne is unmentioned in Mr. Pancoast's "Introduction to English Literature," Third Edition, Enlarged, New York, 1907. "Alas, poor Yorick!"

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[CHAPTER XXXII.]