William Cowper, notwithstanding his fastidiousness and over-refinement, was a poet of a high and genuine order. He let nature have its way in such exquisite poems as the Lines to His Mother’s Picture and the Loss of the “Royal George,” while any humorist might envy the delightful abandonment of John Gilpin. His larger poems are severer in style, yet many of their pictures, testifying to a reverent love of nature, remain imprinted on the memory; and they are full of happy phrases and turns of expression.
The new life infused into Scottish poetry was heralded by Michael Bruce, a sweet singer who died at twenty-one, and by Allan Ramsay, whose pastoral drama of the Gentle Shepherd affords one of the most beautiful and tender pictures of Scottish rural life. The ballad acquired a new pathos and interest in such productions as Lady Anne Barnard’s Auld Robin Gray.
But the poetic genius of Scotland found its ripest and fullest expression in Robert Burns. His love songs have the freshness and fervor of the Elizabethan lyrics; his poems of man and of nature, like those of Cowper, reveal the highest aspirations for the welfare of humanity; his humorous compositions are as lifelike in their character-painting as they are full to overflowing of fun; and his serious poems reveal a pathos which has never been excelled. Nature seemed to put on new beauties when Robert Burns chanted her praises, and the daisy can never again seem commonplace since he immortalized it. The poor at length acquired their laureate in this sweet singer of the North.
Historical and philosophical literature attained a high level at this period. Edward Gibbon, though lacking human sympathy, had great creative power and originality, and his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is one of the most massive of historical conceptions, worked out with stately eloquence. David Hume, whose History of England does not take such high rank, was more original in his philosophical speculations, referring all actual knowledge to experience, and making utility the standard of virtue.
Adam Smith, by his Wealth of Nations, established his claim to be regarded as the founder of the modern system of political economy, and one of the benefactors of his [768] species. All questions of labor and capital were placed by this work on a scientific basis, and it paved the way for the doctrine of free trade.
Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution caused a revulsion of feeling against France, while his Letters on a Regicide Peace increased the war fever in England. The former work was answered by Thomas Paine in his Rights of Man, and the latter by Sir James Mackintosh in his Vindiciæ Gallicæ. Burke’s philosophical works are models of eloquence and construction. William Paley, in his Evidences of Christianity and other works, skillfully defended revealed religion against the attacks of its enemies.
Towards the close of the century the newspaper press received a strong impetus by the establishment of The Times and other important journals; knowledge likewise began to be condensed and methodized in Cyclopædias; while criticism took a wider as well as a more popular range in the first decade of the nineteenth century by the foundation of the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews.
We cannot pass from the eighteenth century without noticing the remarkable development in hymnology. George Wither issued the earliest English hymn-book in 1623, Hymns and Songs of the Church; but the first hymn-book of the modern type was published by John Wesley for use in the Church of England in 1737. Among the hymnologists of the eighteenth century whose compositions remain in general use until this day may be mentioned A. M. Toplady, John Newton, the Wesleys, Isaac Watts, William Cowper, and Philip Doddridge.
Romanticism and the Early Nineteenth Century.—The literature of the nineteenth century is almost overwhelming in its magnitude and variety. In nearly every branch it has attained a higher level than in the preceding century, and in nothing is this more noticeable than in poetry. Although the century opened when Crabbe, the reporter of rural life, was painting his Dutch-like pictures, we soon pass on to higher things. There was a great revival in imaginative poetry before 1820.
Byron, with his precociousness in love and genius, took a high flight in his Childe Harold, and although all his works—Don Juan, Manfred, Cain, etc.—were impressed by his own gloomy personality, he yet made living verse.