cumstances which moulded his career and determined the course and progress of his magnum opus. The other work referred to, which preceded the Autobiography by a few years, is Boswell's Life of Johnson, which also remains typical in its class, since it is the highest praise of any new biography to bring it within measurable distance of Boswell's book. Yet it may be doubted whether, except under analogous conditions in regard to author and subject, its success could ever be exactly repeated. The peculiar relations of biographer and biographee; the strongly-marked individu- | ality of Johnson and the extraordinary quality of his conversation; the mimetic faculty which enabled Boswell, given the heads or minutes of an interview, to reproduce that interview with a fidelity more characteristic than shorthand, just as selective Art is more convincing than the camera-all these things, combined with a patience, an enthusiasm, and a devotion that no obstacle could daunt, produced a result which, seeing that it is impracticable to reproduce it without similar advantages, must always remain sui generis.

In an age favourable to prose, and withal exceptionally leisured and unhurried, it is not surprising that what was somewhat pompously described as Epistolary Correspondence should be found to flourish. And, as a fact, the development of Letter Writing is one of the manifest features of the period. Not only Maids of Honour who could spell,-to vary Swift's jibe, but Maids of Honour who could not, resorted freely to this means of communication; and before Swift was an old man he recorded a considerable advance. The ladies in general,' he told Mrs Delany, were 'extremely mended both in writing and reading since he was young' and he goes on to speak of a woman of quality, formerly his correspondent, who scrawled and spelt like a Wapping wench.' Hardly a month now passes by without some testimony in the shape of Diary or Miscellaneous Correspondence (the recent Francis Letters are an excellent case in point) to the activity with which Our ancestors plied their pens under Anne and the Georges

an activity which modern appliances and modern manners have long since diverted into different channels. And if the OldWorld in general was given to letter writing, literary men and women were also given to it. Swift himself, in the diary to Esther Johnson, commonly known as the Journal

to Stella, has left a series of utterances which remain, and must remain, unapproached as examples of the chronique intime. Pope, too, has a goodly budget of epistles; but they are, in general, too artificial, and too obviously arranged for the public eye, to serve as models. Goldsmith's legacy, on the other hand, is too slender, since the few examples which have been preserved have all the simple charm and fluency of his other work. Steele, Gray, Johnson, Sterne, Burke, Gibbon, and many minor authors, all wrote voluminously-the letters of Gray and Sterne especially being hall-marked with their particular idiosyncrasies. But the epistolary reputation clings chiefly to one or two authors, who, like Madame de Sevigné, either did nothing but write letters, or at all events did that best. One of the first of these is Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose dispatches from abroad reveal not only her own shrewd impressions of travel, but her absolutely honest and unvarnished views of contemporary society and literature as she knew them. Another who is best remembered by his letters is Lord Chesterfield. The curious strand of moral insensibility which runs through them has seriously prejudiced their other merits, for, apart from this, and the fact that their main doctrine is the converse of Esse quam videri, they are everywhere packed with a very varied criticism of life, and a close, if cynical, observation of human nature. After these, and ranging over sixty years of the century, comes the correspondence of Horace Walpole. If Chesterfield dictates the conduct of life, Walpole exhibits the practice of it. Never was there a wittier, a more vivacious, a more amusing, a more original chronicler; never (as Thackeray says) 'such a brilliant, jigging, smirking Vanity Fair as that through which he leads us.' Lastly must be mentioned the admirable, and in some respects more admirable, letters of Cowper, the most natural, most unfeigned, most easy of English letter-writers. In the art of shedding a sedate playfulness over the least promising themes, in magnifying the occurrences of his 'set gray life' into incidents worthy of record, in communicating to his page all the variations of mood that sweep across him as he writes, he has no equal. But these qualities will doubtless be treated at large hereafter, and it is time to turn more to the poets.

once

It was in the year 1764-the year when Walpole wrote the Castle of Otranto-that

Gibbon had planned his Decline and Fall, and it was not until 1788 that the last three of its eight volumes made their appearance. By that time Pope had been dead for more than fourand-forty years. His influence was still felt, and continued to be felt; but it was an influence that was gradually expending itself, while, side by side with it, other influences were gathering strength and volume. Slowly and almost imperceptibly at first, men were beginning to discard the gradus-epithet and the formal phrase, to substitute blank verse for the machine-made heroic couplet, to exercise themselves tentatively in older and long-neglected stanzaic forms, to write Odes and Elegies and Sonnets, and above all to exhibit an enfranchised proclivity towards romantic expression and the imitation of nature. That this was done systematically or all at once is not to be advanced. But that it existed is manifest from the attitude of such of those conservatives in poetry as still clung to the practice and teaching of Pope. In Goldsmith's first book, the Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe, he is found condemning blank verse as a 'disagreeable instance of pedantry,' and as a measure which 'nothing but the greatest sublimity of subject can render pleasing.' In the Dedication to the Traveller, he returns to the charge. The art of poetry, he says, is in danger from 'the mistaken efforts of the learned to improve it.' 'What criticisms have we not heard of late in favour of blank verse, and Pindaric odes, choruses, anapests, and iambics, alliterative care and happy negligence!' Elsewhere he falls foul of the fashion set by Gray's Elegy, which he regarded as 'overloaded with epithet,' and seriously proposed to amend by 'leaving out an idle word in every line;' while of Pope he writes that he 'carried the language to its highest perfection; and those who have attempted still farther to improve it, instead of ornament, have only caught finery.' These last lines were written in 1764, and it is clear that, in the opinion of the author of the Traveller, which appeared in the same year, a considerable change had already come over the spirit of English poetry since Pope's death.

The change, in reality, had begun before that date, with the solemn-paced blank verse-then second only to that of Milton-and with the accurate nature-painting of Thomson's Seasons, and his revival in the Castle of Indolence of the Spenserian Stanza. After Thomson comes

Young, who, beginning as a Popesque satirist, | proceeded, long after middle age, as the unrhyming author of those sombre and declamatory Night Thoughts which at once reflected and dominated the brooding unrest of the age. To Thomson followed the 'oaten stop' and 'pastoral song' of Collins, whose Persian Eclogues and Odes, with their clear-toned and varied music, brought new harmonies into English metre-harmonies which were farther elaborated by the patient art of Gray's undying Elegy and his wonderful Pindaric Odes. These since the lesser names may be here omitted-were, save for the spasmodic outbreak of post-Popian satire in the hectoring couplets of Churchill's Rosciad, the dominant influences in English poetry until the date of Goldsmith's Traveller, which (like his later Deserted Village) was in the old manner, reflected through a medium more modern than its author imagined. Then, stirring men's minds with portentous cloud-form and shadowy suggestion, came the mysterious utterances of Macpherson's Ossian; to be succeeded by those Reliques of Percy, which opened to English poetry so much of unlessoned art and primitive simplicity; by the medieval forgeries of Chatterton; and by the revelation, in Warton's History, of the neglected riches hidden in the barbaric and half-lit past which lay behind Dryden. All these things, with their searchings and unveilings, were 'prologue to the omen coming on,' and 'harbingers preceding still the fates' of that splendid advent, with the approaching century, of the new-risen spirit of Romance. There were still writers, the Whiteheads and Hayleys and Sewards and Darwins, who clung feebly and ineffectually to the passing classic fashion; but of those who fill worthily the space between the epoch-making Ossian of 1763 and the still more epoch-making Lyrical Ballads of 1798, the greatest names are Cowper and Burns and Crabbe and Blake. The first two belonged to the Eighteenth Century as defined at the outset of this paper; the last two far outlived it. Owing nothing to each other, distinct in gifts and speech, and having only in common their poetical sincerity, it is sufficient to say of them here that Cowper and Crabbe, more or less, but in a manner coloured strongly by an altered environment, preserved the old tradition, while Blake and Burns are too original and individual to be discussed except with that larger treatment which they will hereafter receive in this volume. But those who wish to estimate

the immense distance between 1700 and 1800, measured poetically, will do well to contrast a passage of the Essay on Criticism with such a lyric as Robert Burns's 'O, my luve's like a red, red rose,' or the 'Tiger, Tiger burning bright' of William Blake.

Turning to the Drama of the time, it must be confessed that the field is not a rich one, either for crop or diversity of product. When Anne came to the throne, the Comic Dramatists of the Restoration, as Macaulay styles them, were reduced to two. Wycherley had ceased to write for the stage; Congreve's last play, The Way of the World, had been played; and Vanbrugh and Farquhar were the only members of the group who were still in practice as playwrights. For many years to come their successors were only minor artists. Steele, in two or three average comedies, endeavoured honestly to purify the theatre in the sense of the precepts of Jeremy Collier, while Lillo, in George Barnwell and the Fatal Curiosity, seemed to promise a something which was not afterwards performed. Fielding maintained the Congreve tradition in its indecency only; and Cibber, Garrick, Macklin, Murphy, the elder Colman, Hoadly, Foote, and a number of lesser writers, purveyed the acted but now unreadable comedies and farces of the day. The chief novelties in stage composition which the Eighteenth Century contributed to dramatic art were the alreadymentioned Ballad-opera of Gay and his imitators; and the semi-serious genre, which, based upon the comédie larmoyante of Voltaire and Diderot in France, became, for a brief season, the Sentimental Comedy of England. This latter, which has been not inaptly described as a 'mulish production, with all the defects of its opposite parents, and marked with sterility,' professed to deal with the virtues and distresses of private life rather than with the vices and faults which had hitherto been regarded as the legitimate quarry of the Comic. Muse.

Cumberland's West Indian and Kelly's False Delicacy are the most successful examples in this short-lived kind. Then, as a protest against the Comedy of Tears, and in avowed imitation of the poets of the last age,' Goldsmith endeavoured to lead the public taste once more back to Nature and Humour. He followed up his Good Natur'd Man by his inimitable She Stoops to Conquer, to whose perennial qualities in vis comica, dialogue, plot, and character its stage popularity even to this hour abundantly testifies. His only competitor

is Sheridan, whose three best plays, The Rivals, The School for Scandal, and The Critic, by their unflagging wit and brilliancy, reach a point of excellence which has never since been attained.

For nearly forty years after the Guardian of 1713, at which date we interrupted our account of the Essay, no successor of any importance assumed the mantle of Addison and Steele. Imitators there were in plenty; but, with the exception of the Champion of Fielding, more memorable by its author than its matter, none deserves a record until we reach the Rambler and Idler of Johnson. But even the Rambler and Idler, vigorous and weighty as is their writer's style, follow the Queen Anne model 'as a pack horse would do a hunter'-to use Lady Mary's illustration; and the same must be said of the Adventurer of Johnson's disciple, Hawkesworth. In the World and the Connoisseur, where the touch was lighter, and the pens those of wits like Walpole and Chesterfield, the Essay regained a certain buoyancy and verve. But the high-water mark of the midcentury examples in this species of writing is reached by Goldsmith's Citizen of the World, which, in its first form, appeared in the columns of Newbery's Public Ledger. After this, there is nothing which deserves serious record. The mention of the Public Ledger, however, serves to remind us once more of the extraordinary increase which, in spite of prohibitive stamp-duties and other obstacles, had taken place in the periodical press since the first establishment of the Daily Courant in 1702. In 1756 began the London Chronicle, that

folio of four pages, happy work, Which not e'en critics criticise-

and for which Johnson wrote the 'Introduction' (at about twopence a line); in 1760 the Public Ledger. In 1772 followed the Morning Post; in 1788, the Times; and these were a few only of the daily papers. Another fruitful feature of Journalism was the Monthly Magazine, which, from the issue by Edward Cave in January 1731 of the first number of the Gentleman's Magazine; or, Monthly Intelligencer, grew and flourished vigorously to the end of the century. Mr Urban's purpose, according to the preface to his first volume, was 'to give Monthly a View of all the Pieces of Wit, Humour, or Intelligence, daily offer'd to the Publick in the News-Papers' (of which he estimates that 'no less than 200 Half-sheets

lingering decline of the development which had marked former decades. Until after the opening of the new century we have to do mainly with the old men, or at least the old forms of art. Dryden remains the great central figure, and indeed it is only in this period, after his dismissal from the laureateship and the decay of his worldly prosperity, that he attains his acknowledged place as the first dictator of English letters. Much of the best of his poetical work -the translation of Virgil, Alexander's Feast, and the Fables-as well as five of his plays, was produced after the Revolution. These plays are generally grouped among examples of the 'Restoration drama,' and this classification of them, as well as of the other plays of the same period, is accurate enough so far as concerns their intrinsic character. Yet it is noteworthy that much of the Restoration drama is really post-Revolution in its date. All the plays of Congreve and Vanbrugh were produced after 1689, and so were many of Southerne's and Shadwell's, while Farquhar came still later, and did his best work in the days of Queen Anne. Yet it was all essentially a bequest of the Restoration period, and, in spite of its brilliance, the drama after the Revolution was really on the decline. Doubtless it suffered from the loss of court patronage, and the substitution of an alien monarch, who cared nothing about literature, for a race of artistic amateurs like the Stuarts. Its grossness also grew offensive to the taste of the nation, or rather of the town, which was slowly recovering from the Restoration debauch. Jeremy Collier's famous Short View (1697) has been often regarded as the death-blow of the later Stuart drama; but in truth it was rather a sign of the prevalent tendency than itself that tendency's

cause.

The poetry of the age, however, bore far more evident marks of decline than its drama. The veteran Dryden, as has been said, was the solitary great poet, and the only hopeful new man was Matthew Prior, who followed up his clever parody of the Hind and the Panther with occasional verses like those on the death of Queen Mary and the recapture of Namur. Shadwell and Nahum Tate were the laureates, and Sir Richard Blackmore, the court physician, began to dose the public with the first of his six slumbrous epics in 1695. Garth's Dispensary appeared in 1699. Pope all the

while was a child in his father's home in London, and Addison was writing negligible trifles at Oxford, with a whole decade and more between him and the Campaign. Nothing foreshadowed the Augustan age. Never perhaps in all our history have the prospects of English poetry been darker than in the interval when Dryden was making way for Pope.

The attention of Englishmen, indeed, was given to other things than pure literature in the years when the British Constitution and the Protestant Succession were first on their trial. The discussion of the problems involved in the settlement of Church and State necessarily produced a shoal of tracts and pamphlets, which seldom rose to the level of literature, and have left us nothing of permanent interest save the treatises on Toleration and Government (1689-92) by Locke. The questions of toleration and comprehension exercised the pens of the clergy, as also did the Nonjuring schism, which had as one of its consequences the keen Trinitarian controversy (1692) between Sherlock and South. These two divines, along with Stillingfleet, Tillotson, Patrick, and others, are to be numbered among the ornaments of the Revolution Church; but in reality the great days of the Anglican pulpit were over. The old questions were becoming exhausted; the polemic battle with Rome was virtually fought out; and it is significant of the drift of the time that the reign of William saw the appearance of Toland (1696) and Tindal, and the beginning of that 'Deistical' movement which was to be so potent, in one development or another, in the next century. Significant is it, too, that the one great philosophical work of the time, Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding (1690), is held to mark the starting-point of that century's characteristic speculation. The national mind, indeed, was beginning to transcend those speculative limits which had been imposed by the great conflict between Romanism and Protestantism a century and a half before. The inevitable results of the civil and religious struggle of the last sixty years were beginning to be felt. Something like a foreshadowing of the Broad Church' movement is seen in the career and work of Gilbert Burnet, who, however, did better service by his History of his Own Time than by his narrative of the Reformation in England or his exposition of the Thirty-nine Articles.

Unquestionably, one of the reforms by which