Outlines of English and American Literature / An Introduction to the Chief Writers of England and America, to the Books They Wrote, and to the Times in Which They Lived

by William J. Long

Dryden. Life by Saintsbury (E. M. of L.). Gosse, From
Shakespeare to Pope.

Thomas Browne. Life, by Gosse (E. M. of L.). Essays, by L.
Stephen, in Hours in a Library; by Pater, in Appreciations.

FICTION AND POETRY. Shorthouse, John Inglesant; Scott, Old
Mortality, Peveril of the Peak, Woodstock; Blackmore, Lorna Doone.
Milton, Sonnet on Cromwell; Scott, Rokeby; Bates and Coman, English
History Told by English Poets.

CHAPTER VI

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold:
Alike fantastic if too new or old.
Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

Pope, "An Essay on Criticism"

HISTORY OF THE PERIOD. The most striking political feature of the times was the rise of constitutional and party government. The Revolution of 1688, which banished the Stuarts, had settled the king question by making Parliament supreme in England, but not all Englishmen were content with the settlement. No sooner were the people in control of the government than they divided into hostile parties: the liberal Whigs, who were determined to safeguard popular liberty, and the conservative Tories, with tender memories of kingcraft, who would leave as much authority as possible in the royal hands. On the extreme of Toryism was a third party of zealots, called the Jacobites, who aimed to bring the Stuarts back to the throne, and who for fifty years filled Britain with plots and rebellion. The literature of the age was at times dominated by the interests of these contending factions.

The two main parties were so well balanced that power shifted easily from one to the other. To overturn a Tory or a Whig cabinet only a few votes were necessary, and to influence such votes London was flooded with pamphlets. Even before the great newspapers appeared, the press had become a mighty power in England, and any writer with a talent for argument or satire was almost certain to be hired by party leaders. Addison, Steele, Defoe, Swift,—most of the great writers of the age were, on occasion, the willing servants of the Whigs or Tories. So the new politician replaced the old nobleman as a patron of letters.

[Sidenote: SOCIAL LIFE]