MACMILLAN'S STANDARD LIBRARY ENGLISH LITERATURE ENGLISH LITERATURE BY STOPFORD A. BROOKE, M.A. WITH CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH LITERATURE (1832-1892) AND ON AMERICAN LITERATURE BY GEORGE R. CARPENTER NEW YORK GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS CbmUOHT, 1896, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. COPYRIGHT 1900, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Revised edition printed August, igoa Reprinted September, 1900; March, igoi ; March, 1909; February, 1903; October, 1904; February, May, 1906. NorfaooB $reB8 J. 8. Cnihing ft Co. Berwick ft Smith Norwood HUB. U.S.A. Annex H3 PREFATORY NOTE AT the request of the publishers and with the con- sent of Mr. Stopford Brooke, Chapters IX-XII have been added by Mr. George R. Carpenter of Columbia University. It is appropriate at this time to recall to the public the history of this remarkable little volume, which has, in a way, become an English classic. It was first issued by Macmillan and Company, in 1876, under the title of A Primer of English Literature, and won the warm approbation of Matthew Arnold, whose essay, " A Guide to English Literature " (Mixed Essays, pages 135-153), is a critical estimate of Mr. Brooke's method and results. In 1896 the volume was revised and in part rewritten by the author, and appeared under the title of English Literature. The present additions con- tinue the history of English Literature through the period ending with the deaths of Tennyson and Brown- ing, and include a brief sketch of American Literature. THE PUBLISHERS. MARCH, 1900. CONTENTS CHAPTER I FACE ENGLISH LITERATURE BEFORE THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 670-1066 i CHAPTER II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1066-1400 . 32 CHAPTER III FROM CHAUCER'S DEATH TO ELIZABETH, 1400-1558 . , 72 CHAPTER IV THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH, 1558-1603 .... 98 CHAPTER V FROM ELIZABETH'S DEATH TO THE RESTORATION, 1603- 1660 150 CHAPTER VI FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE DEATH OF POPE AND SWIFT, 1660-1745 170 vii V111 CONTENTS CHAPTER VII PACK PROSE LITERATURE FROM THE DEATH OF POPE AND SWIFT TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, AND FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE DEATH OF SCOTT, 1745-1832 . 196 CHAPTER VIII POETRY FROM 1730-1832 213 CHAPTER IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM THE DEATH OF SCOTT TO THE DEATH OF GEORGE ELIOT, 1832-1881 .... 250 CHAPTER X POETRY FROM THE DEATH OF SCOTT TO THE DEATHS OF TENNYSON AND BROWNING, 1832-1892 .... 276 CHAPTER XI PROSE LITERATURE IN THE UNITED STATES . . .281 CHAPTER XII POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES 309 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 323 INDEX ....,....*. 343 ENGLISH LITERATURE ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAPTER I WRITERS BEFORE THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 670-1066 i. The History of English Literature is the story of what great English men and women thought and felt, and then wrote down in good prose and beautiful poetry in the English language. The story is a long one. It begins in England about the year 670; it had its un- written beginnings still earlier on the Continent, in the old Angle- Land; it was still going on in the year which closes this book, 1832 ; nor has our literature lost any of its creative force in the years which have followed 1832. Into this little book then is to be briefly put the story of nearly 1200 years of the thoughts, feelings, and imagina- tion of a great people. Every English man and woman has good reason to be proud of the work done by their forefathers in prose and poetry. Every one who can write a good book or a good song may say to himself, " I belong to a noble company, which has been teaching B I 2 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. and delighting the world for more than 1000 years." And that is a fact in which those who write and those who read English literature ought to feel a noble pride. 2. The English and the Welsh. This literature is written in English, the tongue of our fathers. They lived, while this island of ours was still called Britain, in North and South Denmark, in Hanover and Friesland Jutes, Angles, and Saxons. Their common tongue and name were English; but, either because they were pressed from the inland, perhaps by Attila, or for pure love of adventure, they took to the sea, and, landing at various parts of Britain at various times, drove back, after 150 years of hard fighting, the Britons, whom they called Welsh, to the land now called Wales, to Strath- clyde, and to Cornwall. It is well for those who study English literature to remember that in these places the Britons remained as a distinct race with a distinct literature of their own, because the stories and the poetry of the Britons crept afterwards into English literature and had a great influence upon it. Moreover, in the later days of the Conquest, a great number of the Welsh were amalgamated with the English. The whole tale of King Arthur, of which English poetry and even English prose is so full, was a British tale. Some then of the imaginative work of the conquered afterwards took cap- tive their fierce conquerors. 3. The English Tongue. The earliest form of our English tongue is very different from modern English in form, pronunciation, and appearance ; but still the Ian- guage written in the year 700 is the same as that in which the prose of the Bible is written, just as much as the tree planted a hundred years ago is the same tree to-day. It is this sameness of language, as well as the sameness of national spirit, which makes our literature one literature for 1200 years. 4. Of English Literature written in this tongue we have no extant prose until the time of King ^Elfred. Men like Baeda and Ealdhelm wrote their prose in Latin. But we have, in a few manuscripts, a great deal of poetry written in English, chiefly before the days of ^Elfred. There is (i) the MS. under the name of Cadmon's Paraphrase, a collection of religious poems by various writers, now in the Bodleian. There is (2) the MS. of Beowulf and of the last three books of Judith. There is (3) the Exeter Book, a miscellaneous collection of poems, left by Leofric, Bishop of Exeter, to his cathedral church in the year 1071. There is (4) the Vercelli Book, discovered at Vercelli in the year 1822, in which, along with homilies, there is a collection of six poems. A few leaflets complete the list of the MSS. containing poems earlier than ^Elfred. All together they constitute a vernacular poetry which consists of more than twenty thousand lines. 5. The metre of the poems is essentially the same, un- like any modern metre, without rhyme, and without any fixed number of syllables. Its essential elements were accent and alliteration. Every verse is divided into two half-verses by a pause, and has four accented syllables, 4 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. while the number of unaccented syllables is indifferent. These half-verses are linked together by alliteration. The two accented syllables of the first half, and one of the accented syllables in the second half, begin with the same consonant, or with vowels which were generally different one from another. This is the formal rule. But to give a greater freedom there is often only one alliterative letter in the first half-verse. Here is an example of the usual form : And speare and him and his fellows more infinite than in this point of humour. And indeed he had little pathos. His sorrows are too loud. Nevertheless, by force of poetry, not of dramatic art, Marlowe made a noble porch to the temple which Shakespeare built. That tem- ple, however, in spite of all the preceding work, seems to spring out of nothing, so astonishing it is in art, in beauty, in conception. He himself was his only worthy predecessor, and the third stage of the drama includes his work, that of Ben Jonson's, and of a few others. It is the work, moreover, not of University men who did not know the stage, but of men who were not only men of genius, but also playwrights who understood what a play should be, and how it was to be staged. 82. William Shakespeare in twenty-eight years made the drama represent almost the whole of human life. He was baptised April 26, 1564, and was the son of a com- fortable burgess of Stratford-on-Avon. While he was still young his father fell into poverty, and an interrupted education left him an inferior scholar. " He had small Latin and less Greek ; " but he had a vast store of English. 1 1 He uses 15,000 words, and he wrote pure English. Out of every five verbs, adverbs, and nouns (e.g. in the last act of Othello) , four are Teutonic ; and he is more Teutonic in comedy than in tragedy. 134 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. However, by dint of genius and by living in a society in which every kind of information was attainable, he became an accomplished man. The story told of his deer-stealing in Charlecote woods is without proof, but it is likely that his youth was wild and passionate. At nineteen he married Anne Hathaway, more than seven years older than himself, and was probably unhappy with her. For this reason, or from poverty, or from the driv- ing of the genius that led him to the stage, he left Strat- ford about 1586-7, and came to London at the age of twenty-two years, and falling in with Marlowe, Greene, and the rest, became an actor and playwright, and may have lived their unrestrained and riotous life for some years. It is convenient to divide his work into periods, and to state the order in which it is now supposed his plays were written. But we must not imagine that the periods and the order are really settled. We know some- thing, but not all we ought to know, of this matter. 83. His First Period. It is probable that before leaving Stratford he had sketched a part at least of his Venus and Adonis. It is full of the country sights and sounds, of the ways of birds and animals, such as he saw when wandering in Charlecote woods. Its rich and over- laden poetry and its warm colouring made him, when it was published, 1593, at once the favourite of men like Lord Southampton, and lifted him into fame. But before that date he had done work for the stage by touching up old plays, and writing new ones. We seem to trace his " prentice hand " in some dramas of the time, but the first he is usually thought to have fully retouched is Ti- tus Andronicus, and some time after the First Part of Henry VI. Love's Labour's Lost, supposed to be written 1589 or 1590, the first of his original plays, in which he quizzed and excelled the Euphuists in wit, was followed by the involved and rapid farce of the Comedy of Errors. Out of these frolics of intellect and action he passed into pure poetry in the Midsummer Nighfs Dream, and mingled into fantastic beauty the classic legend, the mediaeval fairyland, and the clownish life of the English mechanic. Italian story laid its charm upon him about the same time, and the Two Gentlemen of Verona pre- ceded the southern glow of passion in Romeo and Juliet, in which he first reached tragic power. They are said to complete, with Love's Labour's Won, afterwards recast as All's Well that Ends Well, the love plays of his early period. We should read along with them, as belonging to the same period, the Rape of Lucrece, a poem finally printed in 1594, one year later than the Venus and Ado- nis, which was probably finished, if not wholly written, at this passionate time. The same poetic succession we have traced in the poets, is now found in Shakespeare. The patriotic feeling of England, also represented in Marlowe and Peele, had seized on him, and he began his great series of historical plays with Richard II. and Richard III. To introduce Richard III. or to complete the subject, he recast the Second and Third Parts of Henry VI., and ended what we have called his first period by King John about 1596, 136 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 84. His Second Period, 1596-1601. In the Merchant of Venice Shakespeare reached entire mastery over his art. A mingled woof of tragic and comic threads is brought to its highest point of colour when Portia and Shylock meet in court. Pure comedy followed in his retouch of the old Taming of the Shrew, and all the wit of the world mixed with noble history met in the first and second Henry IV., 15978; while Falstaffwas continued in the Merry Wives of Windsor. The historical plays were then closed with Henry V., 1599; a splendid dra- matic song to the glory of England. The Globe Theatre of which he was one of the proprietors, was built in 1599. In the comedies he wrote for it, Shakespeare turned to write of love again, not to touch its deeper passion as before, but to play with it in all its lighter phases. The flashing dialogue of Much Ado About Nothing was fol- lowed by the far-off forest world of As You Like It, 1599, where " the time fleets carelessly," and Rosalind's char- acter is the play. Amid all its gracious lightness steals in a new element, and the melancholy of Jaques is the first touch we have of the older Shakespeare who had " gained his experience, and whose experience had made him sad." As yet it was but a touch ; Twelfth Night shows no trace of it, though the play that followed, AIFs Well that Ends Well, 1601? again strikes a sadder note. We find this sadness fully grown in the later Sonnets, which are said to have been finished about 1602. We know that some of the Sonnets existed in 1598, but they were all printed together for the first time in 1609. They IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 137 form together the most deep, ardent, subtle, and varied representation of love in our language, and their emotion is mingled with so great a wealth of simple and complex thought that they seem to be written out of the experi- ence, not of one but of many men. Shakespeare's life changed now, and his mind changed with it. He had grown wealthy during this period, famous, and loved by society. He was the friend of the Earls of Southampton and Essex, and of William Herbert, Lord Pembroke. The queen patronised him; all the best literary society was his own. He had rescued his father from poverty, bought the best house in Stratford and much land, and was a man of wealth and comfort. Suddenly all his life seems to have grown dark. His best friends fell into ruin, Essex perished on the scaffold, Southampton went to the Tower, Pembroke was banished from the court ; he may himself, some have thought, have been slightly involved in the rising of Essex. Added to this, we may conjecture, from the imaginative pageantry of the sonnets, that he had unwisely loved, and been betrayed in his love by a dear friend. Public and pri- vate ill then weighed heavily upon him; he seems to even have had disgust for his profession as an actor; and in darkness of spirit, though still clinging to the business of the theatre, he passed from comedy to write of the sterner side of the world, to tell the tragedy of mankind. 85. His Third Period, 1601-1608, begins with the last days of Queen Elizabeth. It opens with Julius 138 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. Casar, and we may have, scattered through the telling of the great Roman's fate, the expression of Shake- speare's sorrow for the ruin of Essex. Hamlet followed, 1601-3? f r tne P oet fel^ h'ke the Prince of Denmark, that "the time was out of joint." Hamlet, the dreamer, may well represent Shakespeare as he stood aside from the crash that overwhelmed his friends, and thought on the changing world. The tragi-comedy of Measure for Measure, 1603 ? may have now been written, and is tragic in thought throughout. Othello, 1604, Macbeth, Lear, Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, 1608? Timon (only in part his own), were all written in these five years. The darker sins of men ; the unpitying fate which slowly gathers round and falls on mistakes and crimes, on ambition, luxury, and pride ; the aveng- ing wrath of conscience ; the cruelty and punishment of weakness ; the treachery, lust, jealousy, ingratitude, mad- ness of men ; the follies of the great and the fickleness of the mob, are all, with a thousand other varying moods and passions, painted, and felt as his own while he painted them, during this stern time. 86. His Fourth Period, 1608-1613. As Shakespeare wrote of these things he passed out of them, and his last days are full of the gentle and loving calm of one who has known sin and sorrow and fate, but has risen above them into peaceful victory. Like his great contemporary Bacon, he left the world and his own evil time behind him, and with the same quiet dignity sought the inno- cence and stillness of country life. The country breathes IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 139 through all the dramas of this time. The flowers Perdita gathers in Winter's Tale, the frolic of the sheep-shear- ing, he may have seen in the Stratford meadows; the song of Fidele in Cymbelinc is written by one who already feared no more the frown of the great, nor slander, nor censure rash, and was looking forward to the time when men should say of him Quiet consummation have ; And renowned be thy grave ! Shakespeare probably left London in 1609, and lived in the house he had bought at Stratford-on-Avon. He was reconciled, it is said, to his wife, and the plays now writ- ten dwell on domestic peace and forgiveness. The story of Marina, which he left unfinished, and which it is supposed two later writers expanded into the play of Pericles, is the first of his closing series of dramas. Cymbelinc, 1609? The Tempest, 1610? Winter's Tale, bring his history up to 1611, and in the next year he may have closed his poetic life by writing, with Fletcher, Henry VIII., 1612? The Two Noble Kinsmen of Fletcher, part of which is attributed to Shakespeare, and in which the poet sought the inspiration of Chaucer, would belong to this period. For some three years he kept silence 4 and then, on the 23d of April, 1616, it is supposed on his fifty-second birthday, he died. 87. His Work. We can only guess with regard to Shakespeare's life and character. It has been tried to find out what he was from his sonnets, and from his plays, I4O ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAI>, but every attempt seems to be a failure. We cannot lay our hand on anything and say for certain that it was spoken by Shakespeare out of his own personality. He created men and women whose dramatic action on each other, and towards a chosen end, was intended to please the public, not to reveal himself. Frequently failing in fineness of workmanship, having, but far less than the other dramatists, the faults of the art of his time, he was yet in all other points in creative power, in impassioned conception and execution, in truth to universal human nature, in intellectual power, in intensity of feeling, in the great matter and manner of his poetry, in the weld- ing together of thought, passion, and action, in range, in plenteousness, in the continuance of his romantic feeling the greatest poet our modern world has known. Like the rest of the greater poets, he reflected the noble things of his time, but refused to reflect the base. Fully in- fluenced, as we see in Hamlet he was, by the graver and more philosophic cast of thought of the latter time of Elizabeth ; passing on into the reign of James I., when pedantry took the place of gaiety, and sensual the place of imaginative love in the drama, and artificial art the place of that art which itself is nature ; he preserves to the last the natural passion, the simple tenderness, the sweetness, grace, and fire of the youthful Elizabethan poetry. The Winter's Tale is as lovely a love-story as Romeo and Juliet, the Tempest is more instinct with im- agination and as great in fancy as the Midsummer Nighfs Dream, and yet there are fully twenty years between IY THE ENGLISH DRAMA 14! them. The only change is in the increase of power and in a closer, graver, and more ideal grasp of human nature. In the unchangeableness of this joyful and creative art- power Shakespeare is almost alone. It is true that in these last plays his art is more self-conscious, less natu- ral, and the greater glory is therefore lost, but the power is not less nor the beauty. 88. The Decline of the Drama begins while Shake- speare is alive. At first we can scarcely call it decline, it was so superb in its own qualities. For it began with "rare BEN JONSON." With him are connected by associated work, by quarrels, and by date, Dekker, Marston, and Chapman. They belong with Shakespeare to the days of Elizabeth and the days of James I. Ben Jonson's first play, in its very title, Every Man in his Humour, 1596, enables us to say in what the first step of this decline consisted. The drama in Shakespeare's hands had been the painting of the whole of human nature, the painting of characters as they were built up by their natural bent, and by the play of circumstance upon them. The drama, in Ben Jonson's hands, was the painting of particular phases of human nature, espe- cially of his own age ; and his characters are men and women as they may become when they are completely mastered by a special bias of the mind or Humour. "The Manners, now called Humours, feed the stage," says Jonson himself. Every Man in his Humour was followed by Every Man out of his Humour, and by Cynthia's Revels, written to satirise the courtiers. The 142 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. fierce satire of these plays brought the town down upon him, and he replied to their " noise " in the Poetaster, in which Dekker and Marston were satirised. Dekker answered with the Satiro-Mastix, a bitter parody on the Poetaster, in which he did not spare Jonson's bodily defects. Silent then for two years, he reappeared with the tragedy of Sejanus, and then quickly produced three splendid comedies in James I.'s reign, Volpone the Fox, the Silent Woman, and the Alchemist, 1605-9-10. The first is the finest thing he ever did, as great in power as it is in the interest and skill of its plot ; the second is chiefly valuable as a picture of English life in high society; the third is full of Jonson's obscure learning, but its character of Sir Epicure Mammon is done with Jonson's keenest power. In 1611 his Catiline appeared, and then Bartholomew Fair. Eight years after he was made Poet Laureate. Soon he became poor and palsy- stricken, but his genius did not decay. His tender and imaginative pastoral drama, the Sad Shepherd, proves that, like Shakespeare, Jonson grew gentler as he grew near to death, and death took him in 1637. He was a great man. The power and copi- ousness of the young Elizabethan age belonged to him ; and he stands far below, for he had no passion, but still worthily by, Shakespeare, " a robust, surly, and ob- serving dramatist." THOS. DEKKER, whose lovely lyrics are well known, and whose copious prose occupies five volumes, " had poetry enough," Lamb said, " for any- thing." His light comedies of manners are excellent IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 143 pictures of the time. But his romantic poetry is better felt in such dramas as Patient Grissil, Old Fortunatus, and The Witch of Edmonton, in which, though others worked them along with Dekker, the women are all his own by tenderness, grace, subtlety, and pathos. JOHN MARSTON, whose chief plays were written between 1602 and 1605, needs little notice here. He is best known by certain noble and beautiful passages, and his finest plays were Antonio and Mellida and the Malcontent. Of the three GEO. CHAPMAN was the most various genius, and the most powerful. He illuminated the age of Elizabeth by the first part of his translation of Homer ; he lived on into the reign of Charles I. His poems (of which the best are his continuation of Marlowe's Hero and Leander, and The Tears of Peace) are ex- treme examples of the gnarled, sensuous, formless, and obscure poetry of which Dryden cured our literature. His plays are of a finer quality, especially the five tragedies taken from French history. They are weighty with thought, but the thought devours their action, and they are difficult and sensational. Inequality pervades them. His mingling of intellectual violence with intel- lectual imagination, of obscurity with a noble exultation and clearness of poetry, is a strange compound of the earlier and later Elizabethans. He, like Marlowe, but with less of beauty, "hurled instructive fire about the world." With these three I may mention Cyril Tourneur and John Day, the one as ferocious in the Atheists Trag- fdy as the other was graceful in his Parliament of Bees. 144 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. Both were poets, and both were more truly Elizabethan than Beaumont, Fletcher, or Webster. 89. Masques. Rugged as Jonson was, he could turn to light and graceful work, and it is with his name that we connect the Masques. He wrote them delightfully. Masques were dramatic representations made for a fes- tive occasion, with a reference to the persons present and the occasion. Their personages were allegorical. They admitted of dialogue, music, singing, and dancing, combined by the use of some ingenious fable into a whole. They were made and performed for the court and the houses of the nobles, and the scenery was as gorgeous and varied as the scenery of the playhouse proper was poor and unchanging. Arriving for the first time at any repute in Henry VIII.'s time, they reached splendour under James and Charles I. Great men took part in them. When Ben Jonson wrote them, Inigo Jones made the scenery and Lawes the music; and Lord Bacon, Whitelock, and Selden sat in committee for the last great masque presented to Charles. Milton himself made them worthier by writing Comus, and their scenic decoration was soon introduced into the regular theatres. 90. Beaumont and Fletcher worked together, and be- long not only in date, but in spirit, to the reign of James. In two plays, Henry VIII. and The Two Noble Kinsmen, Fletcher has been linked to Shakespeare. With Beau- mont as fellow-worker and counsellor, he wrote about a third of the more than fifty plays which go under IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 145 their names. Beaumont died, aged thirty, in 1616, Fletcher, aged fifty, in 1625. The creative power of the Elizabethan time has no more striking example than in their vast production. The inventiveness of the plays is astonishing, and their plots are almost always easily connected and well supported. Far the greater part of the work was done by Fletcher, but it has been tried to trace Beaumont's hand chiefly in such fine tragedies as The Maid's Tragedy and Philaster. In comedy Fletcher is gay, and quick, and interesting. In tragedy and comedy alike, his level of goodness is equal, but then we have none of those magnificent out- bursts of imaginative passion to which, up to this time, we have been accustomed. The Faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher is a lovely pastoral, and the lyrics which diversify his plays have even some of the charm of Shakespeare. He and his fellows represent a distinct change, and not for the better, in the drama a kind of fourth stage. Its poetry is on the whole less masculine. Its blank verse is rendered smoother and sweeter by the incessant addition of an eleventh syllable, but it is also enfeebled. This weak ending, by the additional free- dom and elasticity it gave to the verse, was suited to the rapid dialogue of comedy, but the dignity of trag- edy was lowered by it. The change is also seen in other matters. In the previous plays moral justice is done. The good are divided from the bad. Fletcher seems quite indifferent to this. In the previous plays, 146 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. men and women, save in Shakespeare, are coarse and foul enough at times, but they are so by nature or under furious passion. In Fletcher, there is a natural indecency, an every-day foulness of thought, which be- longs to the good and the bad alike. The women are, when good, beyond nature, and, when bad, below it. The situations invented tend to be studiously out of the way, beyond the natural aspects of humanity. The aim of art has changed for the worse. It strives for the strange and the sensational. Even JOHN WEBSTER lost some of the power his genius gave him by the ghastly situations he chose to dwell upon. Yet he all but re- deemed the worst of them by the intensity of his imag- ination, and by the soul-piercing power with which, in a few words, he sounds the depths of the human heart when it is wrought bv remorse, by sorrow, by fear, or by wrath to its greatest point of passion. Moreover, in his worst characters there is some redeeming touch, and this poetic pity saves his sensationalism from weari- ness, and brings him nearer to Shakespeare than others of his time. His two greatest plays, things which will be glorious forever in poetry, are The Duchess of Malfi, acted in 1616, and the White Devil, Vittoria Corrombona, printed in 1612. One other play of the time is held to approach them in poetic quality, The Changeling, by Thomas Middleton, but it does so only in parts. 91. Decay of the Drama. In the next dramatists, in the followers, if I may thus class them, of MASSINGER IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 147 and FORD, the change for the worse in the drama is more marked than in the work of those of whom we have been speaking. The poetic and creative qualities are both less, the sensationalism is greater, the foulness of language increases, the situations are more out of nature, the verse is clumsier and more careless, the composition and connexion of the plots are tumbled and confused. But these statements are only moder- ately true of Massinger and Ford. They stand at the head of the rapid decay of the drama, but they still retain a predominant part of that which made the Elizabethans great. Massinger's first dated play was the Virgin Martyr, 1620. He lived poor, and died " a stranger," in 1639. In these twenty years he wrote thirty-seven plays, of which the New Way to Pay Old Debts is the best known by its character of Sir Giles Overreach. His versification and language are flexible and strong, "and seem to rise out of the passions he describes." He speaks the tongue of real life. He is greater than he seems to be. Like Fletcher, there is a steady equality in his work. Coarse, even foul as he is in speech, he is the most moral of the secondary dramatists. Nowhere is his work so forcible as when he represents the brave man struggling through trial to victory, the pure woman suffering for the sake of truth and love; or when he describes the terrors that con- science brings on injustice and cruelty. JOHN FORD, his contemporary, published his first play, the Lovers Melancholy, in 1629, and five years after, Perkin War' 148 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAR beck, one of the best historical dramas after Shake- speare. Between these dates appeared others, of which the best are the Broken Heart and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. He carried to an extreme the tendency of the drama to unnatural and horrible subjects, but he did so with great power. He has no comic humour, but few men have described better the worn and tortured hu- man heart. A crowd of dramatists carried on the pro- duction of plays till the Commonwealth. Some names alone we can mention here Thomas Heywood, Henry Glapthorne, Richard Broome, William Rowley, Thomas Randolph, Nabbes, and Davenport. Of these "all of whom," says Lamb, " spoke nearly the same language, and had a set of moral feelings and notions in com- mon," James Shirley is the best and last. He lived till 1666. In him the fire and passion of the old time pass away, but some of the delicate poetry remains, and in him the Elizabethan drama dies. Sir John Suckling and Davenant, who wrote plays before the Common- wealth, can scarcely be called even decadent Eliza- bethans. In 1642 the theatres were closed during the calamitous times of the Civil War. Strolling players managed to exist with difficulty, and against the law, till 1656, when Sir William Davenant had his opera of the Siege of Rhodes acted in London. It was the beginning of a new drama, in every point but impurity different from the old, and four years after, at the Res- toration, it broke loose from the prison of Puritanism to indulge in a shameless license. IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 149 In this rapid sketch of the drama in England we have been carried on beyond the death of Elizabeth to the date of the Restoration. It was necessary, be- cause it keeps the whole story together. We now re- turn to the time that followed the accession of James I. ISO ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. CHAPTER V FROM ELIZABETH'S DEATH TO THE RESTORATION, 1603-1660 92. The Literature of this Period may fairly be called Elizabethan, but not so altogether. The prose retained the manner of the Elizabethan time and the faults of its style, but gradually grew into greater ex- cellence, spread itself over larger fields of thought, and took up a greater variety of subjects. The poetry, on the whole, declined. It exaggerated the vices of the Elizabethan art, and lessened its virtues. But this is not the whole account of the matter. We must add that a new prose, of greater force of thought and of a simpler style than the Elizabethan, arose in the writings of a theologian like Chillingworth, an historian like Clarendon, and a philosopher like Hobbes : and that a new type of poetry, distinct from the poetry of fan- tastic wit into which Elizabethan poetry had descended, was written by some of the lyrical writers. It was Eliza- bethan in its lyric note, but it was not obscure. It had grace, simplicity, and smoothness. In its greater art and clearness it tells us that the critical school is at hand. V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 1$I 93. Prose Literature. James I. The greatest prose triumph of this time was the Authorised Version of the Bible. There is no need to dwell on it, nor on all it has done for the literature of England. It lives in almost every book of worth and imagination, and its style, es- pecially when the subject soars, is inspired by the spirits of fitness and beauty and melody. Philosophy passed from Elizabeth into the reign of James I. with Francis Bacon. The splendour of the form and of the English prose of the Advancement of Learning, two books of which were published in 1605, raises it into the realm of pure literature, fit was expanded into nine Latin books in 1623, and with the Novum Organon, finished in 1620, and the Historia Naturalis et Experimentalis, 1622, formed the Instauratio Magna. The impulse these books gave to research, and to the true method of research, awoke scientific inquiry in England; and before the Royal Society was constituted in the reign of Charles II., our science, though far behind that of the Continent, had done some good work. William Harvey lectured on the circulation of the blood in 1615, and during the Civil War and the Commonwealth men like Robert Boyle, the chemist, John Wallis, the mathe- matician, and others, met in William Petty's rooms at Brazenose, and prepared the way for Newton. 94. History, except in the publication of the earlier Chronicles of Archbishop Parker, does not appear in the later part of Elizabeth's reign, but under James I. Camden, Spelman, Selden, and Speed continued the anti- 152 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. quarian researches of Stow and Grafton. Bacon wrote a dignified History of Henry VII., and Daniel the poet, in his History of England to the Time of Edward III., 1613-18, was one of the first to throw history into such a literary form as to make it popular. KNOLLES'S History of the Turks, 1603, and SIR WALTER RALEIGH'S vast sketch of the History of the World, show how for the first time history spread itself beyond English interests. Raleigh's book, written in the peaceful evening of a stormy life, and in the quiet of his prison, is not only literary from the impulsive passages which adorn it, but from its still spirit of melancholy thought. In 1614, John Selden's Titles of Honour added to the accurate work he had done in Latin on the English Records, and his History of Tithes was written with the same careful regard for truth in 1618. 95. Miscellaneous Literature. The pleasure of Travel, still lingering among us from Elizabeth's reign, found a quaint voice in Thomas Coryat's Crudities, which, in 1611, describes his journey through France and Italy; and in George Sandys' book, 1615, which tells his journey in the East ; while Henry Wotton's Letters from Italy are pleasant reading. The care with which Samuel Purchas embodied (1613) in Purchas his Pilgrimage (" his own in matter, though borrowed ") and in Hak- luyfs Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625), the great deeds, sea voyages, and land travels of adventurers, brings us back to the time when England went out to win the world. The painting of short "Characters" V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 153 was begun by Sir Thomas Overbury's book in 1614, and carried on in the following reign by John Earle and Joseph Hall, who became bishops. This kind of litera- ture marks the interest in individual life which now began to arise, and which soon took form in Biography. 96. In the Caroline Period and the Commonwealth, Prose grew into a nearer approach to the finished in- strument it became after the Restoration. History was illuminated, and its style dignified, by the work of Claren- don- the History of the Rebellion (begun in 1641) and his own Life, Thomas May wrote the History of the Parliament of 1640, a book with a purpose. Thomas Fuller's Church History of Britain, 1656, may in style and temper be put alongside of his Worthies of England in 1662. In Theology and Philosophy the masters of prose at this time were Jeremy Taylor and Thomas Hobbes. It is a comfort amidst the noisy war of party to breathe the calm spiritual air of The Great Exemplar and the Holy Living and Dying which Taylor published at the close of the reign of Charles I. They had been preceded in 1647 by tne Liberty of Prophesying, in which, agreeing with his contemporaries, John Hales and William Chil- lingworth, he pleaded the cause of religious toleration, and of Tightness of life as more important than correct theology. Taylor was the most eloquent of men, and the most facile of orators. Laden with thought, his books are read for their sweet and deep devotion (a quality which also belonged to his fellow-writer, Lancelot 154 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. Andrewes), even more than for their impassioned and convoluted outbreaks of beautiful words. On the Puritan side, the fine sermons of Richard Sibbes converted Rich- ard Baxter, whose manifold literary work only ended in the reign of James II. One little thing of his, written at the close of the Civil War, became a household book in England. There used to be few cottages which did not possess a copy of the Saints' Everlasting Rest. The best work of Hobbes belonged to Charles I. and the Commonwealth, but will better be noticed hereafter. The other great prose writer is one of a number of men whose productions may be classed under the title of Miscellaneous Literature. He is Sir Thomas Browne, who, born in 1605, died in 1682. In 1642 his Religio Medici was printed, and the book ran over Europe. The Enquiry into Vulgar Errors followed in 1646, and the Hydriotaphia, or Urn- Burial, in 1658. These books, with other happy things of his, have by their quaintness, their fancy, and their special charm always pleased the world, and often kindled weary prose into fresh produc- tion. We may class with them Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, a book of inventive wit and scattered learn- ing, and Thomas Fuller's Holy and Profane State and Worthies of England, in which gaiety and piety, good sense and whimsical fancy meet. This kind of writing was greatly increased by the setting up of libraries, where men dipped into every kind of literature. It was in James L's reign that Sir Thomas Bodley estab- lished the Bodleian at Oxford, and Sir Robert Cotton V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 1 55 a library now in the British Museum. A number of writers took part in the Puritan and Church contro- versies, among whom for graphic force William Prynne stands out clearly. But the great controversialist was Milton. His prose is still, under the Commonwealth, Elizabethan in style. It has the fire and violence, the eloquence and diffuseness of the earlier literature, but in spite of the praise its style has received, it can in reality be scarcely called a style. It has all the faults a prose style can have except obscurity and the commonplace. Its magnificent storms of eloquence ought to be in poetry, and it never charms, though it amazes, except when Milton becomes purposely simple in personal narrative. It has no humour, but it has almost unex- ampled individuality and ferocity. Among this tem- pestuous pamphleteering one pamphlet is almost singular in its masterly and uplifted thought, and the style only rarely loses its dignity. This is the Areopagitica, In pleasant contrast to these controversies arises the gentle literature of Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler, 1653, a book which resembles in its quaint and garrulous style the rustic scenery and prattling rivers that it celebrates, and marks the quiet interest in country life which had now arisen in England. Prose, then, in the time of James and Charles I., and of the Commonwealth, had largely developed its powers. 97. The Poetry of the Reign of James I. It is said that during this reign and the following one, poetry declined. On the whole that is true, but it is true with ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. many modifications. We must remember that Shake- speare and many of the Elizabethan poets, like Drayton and Daniel, did their finest work in the reign of James I. Yet there was decline. The various elements which we have noticed in the poetry of Elizabeth's reign, without the exception even of the slight Catholic element, though opposed to each other, were filled with one spirit the love of England and the queen. Nor were they ever sharply divided ; they are found interwoven, and modi- fying one another in the same poet, as for instance Puri- tanism and Chivalry in Spenser, Catholicism and Love in Constable : and all are mixed together in Shakespeare and the dramatists. This unity of spirit in poetry became less and less after the queen's death. The ele- ments remained, but they were separated. The cause of this was that the strife in politics between the Divine Right of Kings and Liberty, and in religion between the Church and the Puritans, grew so defined and intense that England ceased to be at one, and the poets repre- sented the parties, not the whole, of England. Then, too, that general passion and life which inflamed every- thing Elizabethan lessened, and as it lessened, the faults of the Elizabethan work became more prominent ; they were even supposed to be excellences. Hence the fan- tastic, far-fetched, involved style, which was derived from the Euphues and the Arcadia, grew into favour and was developed in verse, till it ended by greatly injuring good sense and clearness in English poetry. In the reaction from this the critical and classical school began. Again, V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 1 57 when passion lessens, original work lessens, and imitation begins. The reign of James is marked by a class of poets who imitated Spenser. Giles Fletcher in his Chris? s Victory and Triumph, 1610, owned Spenser as his master. So did his brother Phineas Fletcher, whose Purple Island, an allegory of the human body, 1633, nas both grace and sweetness. We may not say that Will- iam Browne imitated, but only that he was influenced by Spenser. His Britannia's Pastorals in two parts, 1613-16, followed by the seven eclogues of the Shepherd's Pipe, are an example in true poetry of the ever-recurring element in English poetry, pleasure in country life and scenery, which from this time forth grew through Milton, Wither, Marvell, and then, after an apparent death, through Thomson, Gray, and Collins, into its wonderful flower in our own century. These, if we include the poetry of the Dramatists, especially the Underwoods of Ben Jonson, and the poems already mentioned of Drummond and Stirling, are the poets of the reign of James I. They link back to Elizabeth's time and its temper, and it may be said of them that they have no special turn, save that which arises from their own individuality. That cannot be said of the poets of Charles I.'s reign, even though they may be classed as writing under the influence of Ben Jonson and of Donne. 98. The Caroline Poets, as they are called, are love poets or religious poets. Often, as in the case of Herrick and Crashaw, they combined both kinds into a single volume. Sometimes they were only religious like Her- 158 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. bert, sometimes only love poets like Lovelace and Suck- ling. But whatever they were, they were as individual as Botticelli, with whose position and whose contemporaries in painting they may, with much justice, be compared. The greatest of these was ROBERT HERRICK. The gay and glancing charm of The Hesperides, 1648, in which Horace and Tibullus seem to mingle ; their peculiar art which never misses its aim, nor fails in exquisite execution ; the almost equal power of The Noble Numbers, published along with the Hesperides, in which the spiritual side of Herrick's nature expressed itself, make him, within his self-chosen and limited range, the most remarkable of those who at this time sat below the mountain top on which Milton was alone. Close beside him, but more unequal, was THOMAS CAREW, whose lyrical poems, well known as they are, do not prevent our pleasure in his graver work like the Elegy on Donne. Greater in im- agination, but more unequal still, was RICHARD CRASHAW. One of his poems, The Flaming Heart, expresses in its name his religious nature and his art. He does not burn with a steady fire, he flames to heaven ; and when he does, he is divine in music and in passion. At other times he is one of the worst of the fantasticals, of those lovers of the quaint for quaintness' sake, among whom the exclusively religious poets of the time are sadly to be classed. There is GEORGE HERBERT, whose Temple, 1631, is, by the purity and devotion of its poems, dear to all. It is his quiet religion, his quaint, contemplative, vicarage-garden note of thought and scholarship which V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 159 pleases most, and will always please, the calm piety of England. He also is individual, and so is HENRY VAUGHAN, whose Sacred Poems , 1651, unequal as a whole, love nature dearly, and leap sometimes into a higher air of poetry than Herbert could attain ; " transcend our wonted themes, and into glory peep." Nor must we forget WILLIAM HABINGTON, who mingled his devotion to Roman Catholicism with the praises of his wife under the name of Castara, 1634; nor GEORGE WITHER, who sent forth, just before the Civil War began, when he left the king for the Parliament, his Hallelujah, 1641, a noble series of religious poems ; nor FRANCIS QUARLES, whose Divine Emblems, 1635, is still read in the cottages of England. These poets, with Henry More, the Platonist, and Joseph Beaumont, the friend of Crashaw and the rival of More, are far below (Wither's work being ex- cepted) both Herbert and Vaughan, and bring to an end the religious poetry of this curious transition time. I have omitted some poems of Cowley and of Edmund Waller, which appeared during the Commonwealth, be- cause both these poets belong to a new class of poetry, the classical poetry of the Restoration. Between this new kind of poetry, which rose to full power in Dryden, and the dying poetry of the transition, stands alone the majestic work of a great genius who touches the great Elizabethan time with one hand and our own time with the other. But before we speak of Milton, a word must be said of the lyrics. 99. The Songs and other Lyrical Poetry. All through l6o ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. the period between James I. and the Restoration, Song- writing went on, and was more natural and less " meta- physical " than the other forms of poetry. The elements of decay attacked it slowly ; those of brightness and pas- sion, nature and gaiety, continued to live in it. Moreover, the time was remarkable for no small number of lyrical poems, other than songs, of a strange loveliness, in which the Elizabethan excellences were enhanced by a special, particular grace, due partly to the more isolated life some of the poets led, and partly to the growth among them of a more artistic method. With regard to the Songs, a distinct set of them, on the most various subjects, are to be found in the Dramatists, from Ben Jonson to Shirley. Another set has been collected out of the many Song-books which appeared with music and words. Many arose in the court of Charles I. and among the Royalists in the country, Cavalier songs on love, on constancy, on dress, on fleeting fancies of every kind. Others were on battle and death for the king ; and a few, sterner and more ideal, on the Puritan side. The same power of song-writing went on for a brief time after the Restoration, but finally perished in the political ballad which was sung about the streets by the political parties of the Revolution. Then the song-lyric of love was almost silent till the days of Burns. With regard to the Lyrical poems, it is impossible to mention all that are worthy, but an age which produced the masques, the poems, and the Sad Shepherd of Ben V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION l6l Jonson; which heard the lyrical measures of Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess ; which read with joy Herrick's Corinna and his country lyrics ; which wished, while it had its delight in Wither's Philarete, that it was not so long ; which felt a finer thrill than usual of the imagina- tion in Marvell's Emigrants in the Bermudas and The Thoughts in a Garden ; which was caught, as it were into another world, by the Allegro, the Penseroso, the songs in Comus and the Arcades, and by the Lycidas of Milton can scarcely be called an age of decay. There was decline, on the whole. We feel what had passed away when we come to the days of the Restoration. But the Elizabethan lyrical day died in a lovely sunset. And as if to make this clear, we meet with Milton who bore the passion, the force, and the beauty of the past along with his own grandeur into the age of Dryden. 100. John Milton was the last of the Elizabethans, and, except Shakespeare, far the greatest of them all. Born in 1608, in Bread Street (close by the Mermaid Tavern), he may have seen Shakespeare, for he remained till he was sixteen in London. His literary life may be said to begin with his entrance into Cambridge, in 1625, the year of the accession of Charles I. Nicknamed the " Lady of Christ's " from his beauty, delicate taste, and moral life, he soon attained a reputation by his Latin poems and discourses, and by his English poems which revealed as clear and original a genius as that of Chaucer and Spenser. Of Milton even more than of the two others, it may be said that he was " whole in himself, and owed to none." The M 1 62 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. Ode to the Nativity, 1629, the third poem he composed, while it went back to the Elizabethan age in beauty, in instinctive fire, went forward into a new world of art, the world where the architecture of the lyric is finished with majesty and music. The next year heard the noble sounding strains of At a Solemn Music ; and the sonnet, On Attaining the Age of Twenty-three, reveals in dignified beauty that intense personality which lives, like a force, through every line he wrote. He left the university in 1632, and went to live at Horton, near Windsor, where he spent five years, steadily reading the Greek and Latin writers, and amusing himself with mathematics and music. Poetry was not neglected. The Allegro and Penseroso were written in 1633 and probably the Arcades ; Comus was acted in 1634, and Lycidas composed in 1637. They prove that though Milton was Puritan in heart his Puritanism was of that earlier type which disdained neither the arts nor letters. But they represent a grow- ing revolt from the Court and the Church. The Pen- seroso prefers the contemplative life to the mirthful, and Comus, though a masque, rose into a celestial poem to the glory of temperance, and under its allegory attacked the Court. Three years later, Lycidas interrupts its ex- quisite stream of poetry with a fierce and resolute onset on the greedy shepherds of the Church. Milton had taken his Presbyterian bent. In 1638 he went to Italy, the second home of so many of the English poets, visited Florence where he saw Galileo, and then passed on to Rome. At Naples he V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 163 heard the sad news of civil war, which determined him to return ; " inasmuch as I thought it base to be travel- ling at my ease for amusement, while my fellow-country- men at home were righting for liberty." At the meeting of the Long Parliament we find him in a house in Alders- gate, where he lived till 1645. He had projected while abroad a great epic poem on the subject of Arthur, but in London his mind changed, and among a number of subjects, tended at last to Paradise Lost, which he meant to throw into the form of a Greek Tragedy with lyrics and choruses. 10 1. Milton's Prose. The Commonwealth. Suddenly his whole life changed, and for twenty years 1640-60 he was carried out of art into politics, out of poetry into prose. Most of the Sonnets, however, belong to this time. Stately, rugged, or graceful, as he pleased to make them, some with the solemn grandeur of Hebrew psalms, others having the classic ease of Horace, some of his own grave tenderness, they are true, unlike those of Shakespeare and Spenser, to the correct form of this difficult kind of poetry. But they were all he could now do of his true work. Before the Civil War began in 1642, he had written five vigorous pamphlets against Episcopacy. Six more pamphlets appeared in the next two years. One of these was the Areopagitica ; or, Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, 1644, a bold and eloquent attack on the censorship of the press by the Presbyterians. Another, remarkable, like the Areopagitica, for its finer prose, was a tract On Educa- 164 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP tion. The four pamphlets in which he advocated con- ditional divorce made him still more the horror of the Presbyterians. In 1646 he published his poems, and in that year the sonnet On the Forcers of Conscience shows that he had wholly ceased to be Presbyterian. His political pamphlets begin when his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates defended in 1649 tne execution of the king. The Eikonoclastes answered the Eikon Basilike (a portrait- ure of the sufferings of the king) ; and his famous Latin Defence for the People of England, 1651, replied to Sal- masius's Defence of Charles /., and inflicted so pitiless a lashing on the great Leyden scholar that Milton's fame went over the whole of Europe. In the next year he wholly lost his sight. But he continued his work (being Latin secretary since 1649) when Cromwell was made Protector, and wrote another Defence for the English People, 1654, and a further Defence of Himself against scurrilous charges. ' This closed the controversy in 1655. In the last year of the Protector's life he began the Paradise Lost, but the death of Cromwell threw him back into politics, and three more pamphlets on the questions of a Free Church and a Free Commonwealth were useless to prevent the Restoration. It was a won- der he was not put to death in 1660, and he was in hid- ing and also in custody for a time. At last he settled in a house near Bunhill Fields. It was here that Paradise Los f was finished, before the end of 1665, and then pub- lished in 1667. 102. Paradise Lost. We may regret that Milton was V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 165 shut away from his art during twenty years of contro- versy. But it may be that the poems he wrote when the great cause he fought for had closed in seeming defeat but real victory, gained from its solemn issues and from the moral grandeur with which he wrought for its ends their majestic movement, their grand style, and their grave beauty. During the struggle he had never for- gotten his art. " I may one day hope," he said, speak- ing of his youthful studies, " to have ye again, in a still time, when there shall be no chiding. Not in these Noises," and the saying strikes the note of calm sublim- ity which is kept in Paradise Lost. As we read the great epic, we feel that the lightness of heart of the Allegro, that even the quiet classic philosophy of the Comus, are gone. The beauty of the poem is like that of a stately temple, which, vast in conception, is involved in detail. The style is the greatest in the whole range of English poetry. Milton's intellectual force sup- ports and condenses his imaginative force, and his art is almost too conscious of itself. Sublimity is its essential difference. The subject is one phase of the great and universal subject of high poetic thought and passion, that struggle of Light with Darkness, of Evil with Good, which, arising in a hundred myths, keeps its undying attraction to the present day. But its great difficulty in his case was that he was obliged to interest us, for a great part of the poem, in two persons, who, being inno- cent, were without any such play of human passion and trouble as we find in OEdipus, ^Eneas, Hamlet, or Alceste, 1 66 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. In the noble art with which this is done Milton is su- preme. The interest of the story collects at first round the character of Satan, but he grows meaner as the poem develops, and his second degradation after he has de- stroyed innocence is one of the finest and most consistent motives in the poem. This at once disposes of the view that Milton meant Satan to be the hero of the epic. His hero is Man. The deep tenderness of Milton, his love of beauty, the passionate fitness of his words to his work, his religious depth, fill the scenes in which he paints Paradise, our parents and their fall, and at last all thought and emotion centre round Adam and Eve, until the closing lines leave us with their lonely image on our minds. In every part of the poem, in every character in it, as indeed in all his poems, Milton's intense individu- ality appears. It is a pleasure to find it. The egotism of such a man, said Coleridge, is a revelation of spirit. 103. Milton's Later Poems. Paradise Lost was fol- lowed by Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, pub- lished together in 1671. Paradise Regained opens with the journey of Christ into the wilderness after his bap- tism, and its four books describe the temptation of Christ by Satan, and the answers and victory of the Redeemer. The speeches in it overwhelm the action, and their learned argument is only relieved by a few descriptions ; but these, as in that of Athens, are done with Milton's highest power. Its solemn beauty of quietude, and a more severe style than that of Paradise Lost, make us feel in it that Milton has grown older. V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION l6/ In Samson Agonistes the style is still severer, even to the verge of a harshness which the sublimity alone tends to modify. It is a choral drama, after the Greek model. Samson in his blindness is described, is called on to make sport for the Philistines, and overthrows them in the end. Samson represents the fallen Puritan cause, and Samson's victorious death Milton's hopes for the final triumph of that cause. The poem has all the grandeur of the last words of a great man in whom there was now " calm of mind, all passion spent." It is also the last word of the music of the Elizabethan drama long after its notes seemed hushed, and its deep sound is strange in the midst of the shallow noise of the Restoration. Soon afterwards, November, 1674, blind and old and fallen on evil days, Milton died; but neither blindness, old age, nor evil days could lessen the inward light, nor impair the imaginative power with which he sang, it seemed with the angels, the " undisturbed song of pure concent," until he joined himself, at last, with those "just spirits who wear victorious palms." 104. His Work. To the greatness of the artist Milton joined the majesty of a clear and lofty character. His poetic style was as stately as his character, and proceeded from it. Living at a time when criticism began to purify the verse of England, and being himself well acquainted with the great classical models, his work is seldom weak- ened by the false conceits and the intemperance of the Elizabethan writers, and yet is as imaginative as theirs, and as various. He has not their naturalness, nor all 1 68 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. their intensity, but he has a larger grace, a lovelier col- our, a closer eye for nature, a more finished art, and a sublime dignity they did not possess. All the kinds of poetry which he touched he touched with the ease of great strength, and with so much energy, that they be- came new in his hands. He put a fresh life into the masque, the sonnet, the elegy, the descriptive lyric, the song, the choral drama; and he created the epic in England. The lighter love poem he never wrote, and we are grateful that he kept his coarse satirical power apart from his poetry. In some points he was untrue to his descent from the Elizabethans, for he had no dra- matic faculty, and he had no humour. He summed up in himself the learned and artistic influences of the Eng- lish Renaissance, and handed them on to us. His taste was as severe, his verse as polished, his method and lan- guage as strict as those of the school of Dryden and Pope that grew up when he was old. A literary past and present thus met in him, nor did he fail, like all the greatest men, to make a cast into the future. He estab- lished the poetry of pure natural description. Lastly, he did not represent in any way the England that followed the Stuarts, but he did represent Puritan England, and the whole spirit of Puritanism from its cradle to its grave. 105. The Pilgrim's Progress. We might say that Puritanism said its last great words with Milton, were it not that its spirit continued in English life, were it not also that four years after his death, in 1678, JOHN BUN- VAN, who had previously written religious poems, and in V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 169 1665 the Holy City, published the Pilgrim's Progress. It is the journey of Christian the Pilgrim from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. The second part was published in 1684. In 1682 he had written the allegory of the Holy War, and in 1680 The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, a curious little story. I class the Pilgrim's Progress here, because in its imaginative fervour and imagery, and in its quality of naturalness, it belongs to the spirit of the Elizabethan times. Written by a man of the people, it is a people's book ; and its simple form grew out of passionate feeling, and not out of self-conscious art. The passionate feeling was relig- ious, and in painting the pilgrim's progress towards Heaven, and his battle with the world and temptation and sorrow, the book touched those deep and universal interests which belong to poor and rich. Its language, the language of the Bible, and its allegorical form, initi- ated a plentiful prose literature of a similar kind. But none have equalled it. Its form is almost epic : its dra- matic dialogue, its clear types of character, its vivid descriptions, as of Vanity Fair, and of places, such as the Valley of the Shadow of Death and the Delectable Mountains, which represent states of the human soul, have given an equal but a different pleasure to children and men, to the villager and the scholar. ENGLISH LITERATURE CttA*. CHAPTER VI FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE DEATH OF POPE AND SWIFT, 1660-1745 1 06. Poetry. Change of Style. We have seen the natural style as distinguished from the artificial in the Elizabethan poets. Style became not only natural but artistic when it was made by a great genius like Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Spenser, for a first-rate poet creates rules of art : his work is filled with laws which other men see, collect, and obey. Art, which is the just and lovely arrangement of nature to fulfil a nobly chosen aim, is then born. But when the art of poetry is making, the second-rate poets, inspired only by their feelings, will write in a natural style unrestrained by rules, that is, they will put their feelings into verse without caring much for the form in which they do it. As long as they live in the midst of a youthful national life, and feel an ardent sympathy with it, their style will be fresh and im- passioned, and give pleasure because of the strong feel- ing that inspires it. But it will also be extravagant and unrestrained in its use of images and words because of its want of art. This is the general history of the style VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE I/I of the second-class poets of the middle period of Eliza- beth's reign, and even Shakespeare affords examples of this want of art. (2) Afterwards the national life grew chill, and the feelings of the poets also chill. Then the want of art in the style made itself felt. The far-fetched images, the hazarded meanings, the over-fanciful way of putting thoughts, the sensational expression of feeling, in which the Elizabethan poets indulged, not only ap- peared in all their ugliness when they were inspired by no ardent feeling, but were indulged in far more than be- fore. Men tried to produce by extravagant use of words the same results that a passionate sense of life had pro- duced, and the more they failed the more extravagant and fantastic they became, till at last their poetry ceased to have clear meaning. This is the general history of the style of the poets from the later days of Elizabeth till the Civil War. (3) The natural style, unregulated by art, had thus become unnatural. When it had reached that point, men began to feel how necessary it was that the work of poetry should be subjected to the rules of art, and two influences partly caused and partly supported this desire. One was the influence of Milton. Milton, first by his superb genius, which, as I said, creates of itself rules of art, and secondly by his knowledge and imitation of the great classical models, was able to give the first example in England of a pure, grand, and finished style ; and in blank verse, in the lyric and the sonnet, wrote for the first time with absolute correctness. Another influence was that of the movement all over Europe towards inquiry 1/2 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. into the right way of doing things, and into the truth of things, a movement we shall soon see at work in science, politics, and religion. In poetry it produced a school of criticism which first took form in France, and the influence of Boileau, La Fontaine, and others who were striving after greater finish and neatness of expression, told on England now. It is an influence which has been exaggerated. It is absurd to place the " creaking lyre " of Boileau side by side with Dryden's " long resounding march and energy divine." Our critical school of poets have few French qualities in them even when they imi- tate the French. (4) Further, our own poets had already, before the Restoration, begun the critical work, and the French influence served only to give it a greater impulse. We shall see the growth of a colder and more correct phrasing and versification in Waller, Denham, and Cowley. Vigour was given to this new method in art by Dryden, and perfection of artifice added to it by Pope. The artificial style succeeded to and extinguished the natural, or to put it otherwise, a merely intellectual poetry finally overcame a poetry in which emotion always accompanied thought. 107. Change of Poetic Subject. The subject of the Elizabethan poets was Man as influenced by the Pas- sions, and it was treated from the side of natural feeling. This was fully and splendidly done by Shakespeare. But after a time this subject followed, as we have seen in speaking of the drama, the same career as the style. It was treated in an extravagant and sensational manner, VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1/3 and the representation of the passions tended to become unnatural or fantastic. Milton redeemed the subject from this vicious excess. He wrote in a grave and natu- ral manner of the passions of the human heart ; he made strong in English poetry the religious passions of love of God, of sorrow for sin, and he raised in song the moral passions into a solemn splendour. But with him the subject of man as influenced by the great passions died for a time. Dryden, Pope, and their followers turned to another subject. They left, except in Dryden's Dramas and Fables, the passions aside, and wrote of the things in which the intellect and the casuistical con- science, the social and political instincts in man, were interested. In this way the satiric, didactic, philosophi- cal, and party poetry of a new school arose. 1 08. The Poems in which the New School began belong in date to the age before the Restoration, but in spirit and form they were the sources of the poetry which is called classical or critical, or artificial. EDMUND WALLER, SIR JOHN DENHAM, and ABRAHAM COWLEY are the pre- cursors of Dryden. Waller remodelled the heroic coup- let of Chaucer, and gave it the precise character which made it for nearly a century and a half the prevailing form of verse. He wrote his earliest poems about 1623, in precisely the same symmetrical manner as Dryden and Pope. His new manner was not followed for many years, till Denham published in 1642 his Coopers Hill. " The excellence and dignity of rhyme were never fully known," said Dryden, " till Mr. Waller taught it, but this ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. sweetness of his lyric poetry was afterwards followed in the epic of Sir John Denham in his Cooper's Hill." The chill stream of this poem, which is neither "lyric" nor " epic," has the metrical cadence, but none of the grip and force of Dryden's verse. Cowley's earlier poems belong to the Elizabethan phantasies, but the later were, with the exception of some noble poems of personal feel- ing, cold and exact enough for the praise of the new school. He invented that curious misnomer the Pin- daric Ode which, among all its numerous offspring, had but one splendid child in Dryden's Alexander's Feast. When Gray took up the ode again, Cowley was not his master. Sir W. Davenant's Gondibert, 1651, also an heroic poem, is another example of this transition. Worthless as poetry, it represents the new interest in political philosophy and in science that was arising, and preludes the intellectual poetry. Its preface discourses of rhyme and the rules of art, and embodies the critical influence which came over with the exiled court from France. The critical school had therefore begun even before Dryden's poems were written. The change was less sudden than it seemed. Satiric poetry, soon to become a greater thing, was made during this transition time into a powerful weapon by two men, each on a different side. Andrew Marvell's Satires, after the Restoration, exhibit the Puritan's wrath with the vices of the court and king, and his shame for the disgrace of England among the nations. The Hudi- bras of SAMUEL BUTLER, in 1663, represents the fierce VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF ~POPE 1/5 reaction which had set in against Puritanism. It is justly famed for wit, learning, good sense, and ingenious drollery, and, in accordance with the new criticism, it is absolutely without obscurity. It is often as terse as Pope's best work. But it is too long, its wit wearies us at last, and it undoes the force of its attack on the Puri- tans by its exaggeration. Satire should have at least the semblance of truth ; yet Butler calls the Puritans cow- ards. We turn now to the greatest of these poets in whom poetry is founded on intellect rather than on feel- ing, and whose verse is mostly devoted to argument and satire. 109. John Dryden was the first of the new, as Milton was the last of the elder, school of poetry. It was late in life that he gained fame. Born in 1631, he was a Crom- wellite till the Restoration, when he began the changes which mark his life. His poem on the death of the Pro- tector was soon followed by the Astreea Redux, which celebrated the return of Justice to the realm in the per- son of Charles II. The Annus Mirabilis appeared in 1667, and in this his metrical ease was first clearly marked. But his power of exact reasoning expressing itself with powerful and ardent ease in a rapid succession of con- densed thoughts in verse, was not shown (save in drama) till he was fifty years old, in the first part of Absalom and Achitophel, the foremost of English satires. He had been a playwriter for fourteen years, till its appearance in 1681, and the rhymed plays which he had written enabled him to perfect the versification which is now so remarkable 176 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. in his work. The satire itself, written in mockery of the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Bill, attacked Shaftesbury as Achitophel, was kind to Monmouth as Absalom, and in its sketch of Buckingham as Zimri the poet avenged himself for the Rehearsal. It was the first fine example of that party poetry which became still more bitter and personal in the hands of Pope. It was followed by the Medal, a new attack on Shaftesbury, and the Mac Fleck- noe, 1682, in which Shadwell, a rival poet, who had sup- ported Shaftesbury's party, was made the witless successor of Richard Flecknoe, a poet of all kinds of poetry, and master of none. Then in the same year, after the arrest of Monmouth, the second part of Absalom and Achito- phel appeared, all of which, except two hundred lines, was written by Nahum Tate. These were four terrible masterpieces of ruthless wit and portraiture. Then he turned to express his transient theology in verse, and the Religio Laid, 1682, defends and states the argument for the Church of England. It was perhaps poverty that led him to change his religion, and the Hind and Panther, 1687, is a model of melodious reasoning in behalf of the milk-white hind of the Church of Rome. The Dissenters are mercilessly treated under the image of the baser beasts ; while at first the Panther, the Church of Eng- land, is gently touched, but in the end lashed with sever- ity. However, Hind and Panther tell, at the close, two charming stories to one another. It produced in reply one of the happiest burlesques in English poetry, The Country Mouse and the City Mouse, the work of Charles VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE I// Montague (Lord Halifax), and Mat Prior. Deprived of his offices at the Revolution, Dryden turned again to the drama and to prose, but the failure of the last of his good plays in 1694, drove him again from the stage, and he gave himself up to his Translation of Virgil which he published in 1697. As a narrative poet his Fables, Ancient and Modern, finished late in life, in 1699, give him a high rank in this class of poetry. They sin from coarseness, but in style, in magnificent march of verse, in intellectual but not imaginative fire, in ease but not in grace, they are excellent. As a lyric poet his fame rests on the animated Song for St. Cecilia's Day, 1687, and on Alexander's Feast, 1697. From Milton's death, 1674, till his own in 1700, Dryden reigned undisputed, and round his throne in Will's Coffeehouse, where he sat as " Glorious John," we may place the names of the lesser poets, the Earls of Dorset, Roscommon, and Mulgrave, Sir Charles Sedley, and the Earl of Rochester. The lighter poetry of the court lived on in the two last. John Oldham won a short fame by his Satire on the Jesuits, 1679; and Bishop Ken, 1668, established, in his Morn- ing and Evening Hymns, a new type of religious poetry. no. Prose Literature of the Restoration and Revolu- tion. Criticism. As Dryden was now first in poetry, so he was in prose. No one can understand the poetry of this time, in its relation to the past, to the future, and to France, who does not read the Critical Essays pre- fixed to his dramas, On the Historical Poem, on dramatic rhyme, on Heroic Plays, on the classical writers, and his 1/8 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. Essay on Dramatic Poetry. He is in these essays, not only the leader of modern literary criticism, but the leader of that modern prose in which the style is easy, unaffected, moulded to the subject, and in which the proper words are put in the proper places. Dryden was a great originator. in. Science. During the Civil War the religious and political struggle absorbed the country, but yet, apart from the strife, a few men who cared for scien- tific matters met at one another's houses. Out of this little knot, after the Restoration, arose the Royal Society, embodied in 1662. Astronomy, experimental chemistry, medicine, mineralogy, zoology, botany, vegetable physi- ology, were all founded as studies, and their literature begun, in the age of the Restoration. One man's work was so great in science as to merit his name being men- tioned among the literary men of England. In 1671 Isaac Newton laid his Theory of Light before the Royal Society ; in the year before the Revolution his Principia established, by its proof of the theory of gravitation, the true system of the universe. It was in political and religious knowledge, however, that the intellectual inquiry of the nation was most shown. When the thinking spirit succeeds the active and adventurous in a people, one of the first things they will think upon is the true method and grounds of gov- ernment, both divine and human. Two sides will be taken : the side of authority and the side of reason in Religion ; the side of authority and the side of indi- vidual liberty in Politics. VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OP POPE 179 112. The Theological Literature of those who declared that reason was supreme as a test of truth, arose with some men who met at Lord Falkland's just before the Civil War, and especially with John Hales and William Chillingworth. The same kind of work, though modified towards more sedateness of expression, and less rational- istic, was now done by Archbishop Tillotson, and Bishop Burnet. In 1678, Cud worth's Intellectual System of the Universe is perhaps the best book on the controversy which then took form against those who were called Atheists. A number of divines in the English Church took sides for Authority or Reason, or opposed the growing Deism during the latter half of the seventeenth century. It was an age of preachers, and Isaac Barrow, Newton's predecessor in the chair of mathematics at Cambridge, could preach, with grave and copious elo- quence, for three hours at a time. Theological prose was strengthened by the publication of the sermons of Edward Stillingfleet and William Sherlock, and their adversary, Robert South, was as witty in rhetoric as he was fierce in controversy. 113. Political Literature. The resistance to authority in the opposition to the theory of the Divine Right of Kings did not much enter into literature till after the severe blow that theory received in the Civil War. Dur- ing the Commonwealth and after the Restoration the struggle took the form of a discussion on the abstract question of the Science of Government, and was mingled with an inquiry into the origin of society and the ground l8o ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. of social life. THOMAS HOBBES, during the Common- wealth, was the first who dealt with the question from the side of abstract reason, and he is also, before Dryden, the first of all our prose writers whose style may be said to be uniform and correct, and adapted carefully to the subjects on which he wrote. His treatise, the Leviathan, 1651, declared (i) that the origin of all power was in the people, and (2) that the end of all power was the commonweal. It destroyed the theory of a Divine Right of Kings and Priests, but it created another kind of Divine Right when it said that the power lodged in rulers by the people could not be taken away by the people. Sir R. Filmer supported the side of Divine Right in his Patriarcha, published 1680. Henry Nevile, in his Dialogue concerning Government, and James Har- rington in his romance, The Commonwealth of Oceana, published at the beginning of the Commonwealth, con- >>ended that all secure government was to be based on property, but Nevile supported a monarchy, and Har- rington with whom I may class Algernon Sidney, whose political treatise on government is as statesmanlike as it is finely written a democracy, on this basis. I may here mention that it was during this period, in 1667, that the first effort was made after a Science of Political Economy by Sir William Petty in his Treatise on Taxes. The poll tieal pamphlet was also begun at this time by Sir Roger L' Estrange, and George Savile, Lord Halifax. 114. John Locke, after the Revolution, in 1690, fol- lowed the two doctrines of Hobbes in his treatises on VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE l8l Civil Government, but with these important additions (i) that the people have a right to take away the power given by them to the ruler, (2) that the ruler is respon- sible to the people for the trust reposed in him, and (3) that legislative assemblies are Supreme as the voice of the people. This was the political philosophy of the Revolution. Locke carried the same spirit of free in- quiry into the realm of religion, and in his Letters on Toleration laid down the philosophical grounds for lib- erty of religious thought. He finished by entering the realm of metaphysical inquiry. In 1690 appeared his Essay concerning the Human Understanding, in which he investigated its limits, and traced all ideas, and there- fore all knowledge, to experience. In his clear state- ment of the way in which the Understanding works, in the way in which he guarded it and Language against their errors in the inquiry after truth, he did almost as much for the true method of thinking as Bacon had done for the science of nature. 115. The intellectual stir of the time produced, apart from the great movement of thought, a good deal of Miscellaneous Literature. The painting of short " char- acters " was carried on after the Restoration by Samuel Butler and W. Charleton. These " characters " had no personality, but as party spirit deepened, names thinly disguised were given to characters drawn of living men, and Dryden and Pope in poetry, and all the prose wits of the time of Queen Anne and George I., made per- sonal and often violent sketches of their opponents a 1 82 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. special element in literature. On the other hand, Izaak Walton's Lives, in 1670, are examples of kind, agreeably and careful Biography. Cowley's small volume, written shortly before his death in 1667, gave richness to the Essay, and its prose almost anticipated the prose of Dry- den. John Evelyn's multitudinous writings are them- selves a miscellany. He wrote on painting, sculpture, architecture, timber (the Sylva), on gardening, com- merce, and he illustrates the searching spirit of the age. In William III.'s time Sir William Temple's pleasant Essays bring us in style and tone nearer to the great class of essayists of whom Addison was chief. Lady Rachel Russell's Letters begin the Letter-writing liter- ature of England. Pepys (1660-9), anc ^ Evelyn, whose Diary grows full after 1 640, gave rise to that class of gos- siping Memoirs which has be.n of so much use in giving colour to history. History itself at this time is little better than memoirs, and such a name may be fairly given to Bishop Burnet's History of his Own Time and to his History of the Reformation. Finally Classical Criticism, in the discussion on the genuineness of the Letters of Phalaris, was created by Richard Bentley in 1697-9. Literature was therefore plentiful. It was also correct, but it was not inventive. 1 1 6. The Literature of Queen Anne and the First Georges. Witt the closing years of William III. and the accession of Queen Anne (1702) a literature arose which was partly new and partly a continuance of that of the Restoration. The conflict between those who VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 183 took the oath to the new dynasty and the Nonjurors who refused, the hot blood that it produced, the war between Dissent and Church, and between the two parties which now took the names of Whig and Tory, produced a mass of political pamphlets, of which Daniel Defoe's and Swift's were the best ; of songs and ballads, like Lillibul- lero, which were sung in every street ; of squibs, reviews, of satirical poems and letters. Every one joined in it, and it rose to importance in the work of the greater men who mingled literary studies with their political excite- ment. In politics, all the abstract discussions we have mentioned ceased to be abstract, and became personal and practical, and the spirit of inquiry applied itself more closely to Lhe questions of every-day life. The whole of this stirring literary life was concentrated in London, where the agitation of society was hottest; and it is round this vivid -ity life that the literature of Queen Anne and the two following reigns is best grouped. 117. It was, with a few exceptions, a Party Literature. The Whig and Tory leaders enlisted on their sides the best poets and prose writers, who fiercely satirised and unduly praised them under names thinly disguised. Our " Augustan Age " was an age of unbridled slander. Per- sonalities were sent to and fro like shots in battle. Those who could do this work well were well rewarded, but the rank and file of writers were left to starve. Literature was thus honoured not for itself, but for the sake of party. The result was that the abler men lowered it by making it a political tool, and the smaller men, the fry of Grub 184 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. Street, degraded it by using it in the same way, only in a baser manner. Their flattery was as abject as their abuse was shameless, and both were stupid. They received and deserved the merciless lashing which Pope was soon to give them in the Dunciad. Being a party literature, it naturally came to study and to look sharply into human character and into human life as seen in the great city. It debated subjects of literary and scientific inquiry and of philosophy with great ability, but without depth. It discussed all the varieties of social life, and painted town society more vividly than has been done before or since ; and it was so wholly taken up with this, that country life and its interests, except in the writings of Addison, were scarcely touched by it at all. Criticism being so active, the form in which thought was expressed was now espe- cially dwelt on, and the result was that the style of English prose became even more simple than in Dryden's hands ; and English verse, leaving Dryden's power behind it, reached a neatness of expression as exquisite as it was artificial. At the same time, and for the same reasons, Nature, Passion, and Imagination decayed in poetry. n 8. Alexander Pope absorbed and reflected all these elements. Born in 1688, he wrote tolerable verse at twelve years old ; the Pastorals appeared in 1 709, and two years afterwards he took full rank as the critical poet in the Essay on Criticism (1711). The next year saw the first cast of his Rape of the Lock, the most brilliant occasional poem in our language. This closed what we may call his first period. In 1712 his sacred pastoral, VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 185 The Messiah, appeared, and in 1713, when he published Windsor Forest, he became known to Swift and to Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke. When these, with Gay, Parnell, Prior, Arbuthnot, and others, formed the Scrib- lerus Club, Pope joined them, and soon rose into great fame by his Translation of the Iliad (1715-20), and by the Translation of the Odyssey (1723-5), in which he was assisted by Fenton and Broome. Being now at ease, for he received fully gooo/. for this work, he published from his retreat at Twickenham, and in bitter scorn of the poetasters and of all the petty scribblers who annoyed him, the Dunciad, 1728. Its original hero was Lewis Theobald, but when the fourth book was published, under Warburton's influence, in 1742, Colley Gibber was en- throned as the King of Dunces instead of Theobald. The fiercest and finest of Pope's satires, it closes his second period which breathes the savageness of Swift. The third phase of Pope's literary life was closely linked to his friend Bolingbroke. It was in conversation with him that he originated the Essay on Man (1732-4) and the Imitations of Horace. The Moral Essays, or Epis- tles to men and women, were written to praise those whom he loved, and to satirise the bad poets and the social follies of the day, and all who disliked him or his party. Among these, who has not read the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot? In the last few years of his life, Bishop Warburton, the writer of the Legation of Moses and editor of Shakespeare, helped him to fit the Moral Essays into the plan of which the Essay on Man formed 1 86 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. part. Warburton was Pope's last great friend; but almost his only old friend. By 1740 nearly all the members of his literary circle were dead, and a new race of poets and writers had grown up. In 1744 he died. His Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady and the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard show how he once tried to handle the passions of sorrow and love. The mas- terly form into which he threw the philosophical prin- ciples he condensed into didactic poetry make them more impressive than they have a right to be. The Essay on Man, though its philosophy is poor and not his own, is crowded with lines that have passed into daily use. The Essay on Criticism is equally full of critical precepts put with exquisite skill. The Satires and Epistles are didactic, but their excellence is in the terse and finished types of character, in the almost cre- ative drawing of which Pope remains unrivalled, even by Dryden. His translation of Homer resembles Homer as much as London resembled Troy, or Marlborough Achilles, or Queen Anne Hecuba. It is done with great literary art, but for that very reason it does not make us feel the simplicity and directness of his original. It has neither the manner nor the spirit of the Greek, just as Pope's descriptions of nature have neither the manner nor the spirit of nature. The heroic couplet, in which he wrote nearly all his work, he used with a correctness that has never been surpassed, but its smooth perfection, at length, wearies the ear. It wants the breaks that passion and imagination naturally make. Finally, he had the VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE l8/ spirit of an artist, hating those who degraded his art, and at a time when men followed it for money, and place, and the applause of the club and of the town, he loved it faithfully to the end, for its own sake. 119. The Minor Poets who surrounded Pope in the first two-thirds of his life did not approach his genius. Richard Blackmore endeavoured to restore the epic in his Prince Arthur, 1695, and Samuel Garth's mock heroic poem of the Dispensary appeared along with John Pom- fret's poems in 1699. In 1701, Defoe's Trueborn Eng- lishman defended William III. against those who said he was a foreigner, and Prior's finest ode, the Carmen Secu- lare, took up the same cause. John Philips is known by his Miltonic burlesque of The Splendid Shilling, and his Cyder was a Georgic of the apple. Matthew Green's Spleen and Ambrose Philip's Pastorals were contempo- rary with Pope's first poetry ; and John Gay's Shepherd's Week, six pastorals, 1714, were as lightly wrought as his famous Fables. He had a true vein of happy song, and Black-eyed Susan remains with the Beggars' Opera to please us still. The political poems of Swift were coarse, but always hit home. Addison celebrated the Battle of Blenheim in the Campaign, and his cultivated grace is found in some devotional pieces. On his death Thomas Tickell made a noble elegy. Prior's charming ease is best shown in the light narrative poetry which we may say began with him in the reign of William III. In Pope's later life a new and quickening impulse came upon poetry, and changed it root and branch. It arose in Ramsay's 1 88 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. Gentle Shepherd, 1725, and in Thomson's Seasons, 1730, and it rang the knell of the manner and the spirit of the critical school. 1 20. The Prose Literature of Pope's time collects itself round four great names, Swift, Defoe, Addison, and Bishop Berkeley, and they all exhibit those elements of the age of which I have spoken. JONATHAN SWIFT was the keenest of political partisans, for his fierce and earnest personality made everything he did impassioned. But he was far more than a partisan. He was the most original prose writer of his time the man of genius among many men of talent. It was not till he was thirty years old, 1697, that he wrote the Battle of the Books, concern- ing the so-called Letters of Phalaris, and the Tale of a Tub, a satire on the Dissenters, the Papists, and even the Church of England. These books, published in 1704, made his reputation. He soon became the finest and most copious writer of pamphlets England had ever known. At first he supported the Whigs, but left them for the new Tory party in 1710, and his tracts brought him court favour, while his literary fame was increased by many witty letters, poems, and arguments. On the fall of the Tory party at the accession of George I., 1714, he retired to the Deanery of St. Patrick in Ireland, an embittered man, and the Drapier's Letters, 1724, writ- ten against Wood's halfpence, gained him popularity in a country that he hated. In 1726 his inventive genius, his savage satire, and his cruel indignation with life were all shown in Gulliver's Travels. The voyage to Lilliput VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 189 and Brobdingnag satirised the politics and manners of England and Europe ; that to Laputa mocked the philoso- phers ; and the last, to the country of the Houyhnhnms, lacerated and defiled the whole body of humanity. No English is more robust than Swift's, no life in private and public more sad and proud, no death more pitiable. He died in 1745 hopelessly insane. DANIEL DEFOE'S vein as a pamphleteer seems to have been inexhaustible, and the style of his tracts was as roughly persuasive as it was popular. Above all he was the journalist. His Review, published twice a week for a year, was wholly written by himself; but he "founded, conducted, and wrote for a host of other newspapers," and filled them with every subject of the day. His tales grew out of matters treated of in his journals, and his best art lay in the way he built up these stories out of mere sug- gestions. "The little art he is truly master of," said one of his contemporaries, " is of forging a story and impos- ing it on the world for truth." His circumstantial inven- tion, combined with a style which exactly fits it by its simplicity, is the root of the charm of the great story by which he chiefly lives in literature. Robinson Crusoe, 1719, equalled Gulliver's Travels in truthful representa- tion, and excelled them in invention. The story lives and charms from day to day. But none of his stories are real novels ; that is, they have no plot to the working out of which the characters and the events contribute. They form the transition, however, from the slight tale and the romance of the Elizabethan time to the finished novel of Richardson and Fielding. I9O ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 121. Metaphysical Literature, which drifted into the- ology, was enriched by the work of BISHOP BERKELEY. The Platonic dialogue of Hylas and Philonous, 1713, charms us even more than his subtle and elastic Sin's, 1 744. These books, with Aldphron, the Minute Philoso- pher, 1732, questioned the real existence of matter, "no idea can exist," he said, "out of the mind," and founded on the denial of it an answer to the English Deists, round whom in the first half of the eighteenth century centred the struggle between the claims of nat- ural and revealed religion. The influence of Shaftes- bury's Characteristics, 1711, was far more literary than metaphysical. He condemned metaphysics, but his phi- losophy, such as it was, inspired Pope, and his cultivated thinking on several subjects made many writers in the next generation care for beauty and grace. He, like Bolingbroke, and Wollaston, Tindal, Toland, and Collins, on the Deists' side, were opposed by Samuel Clark, by Bentley, by Bishop Butler, and by Bishop Warburton. BISHOP BUTLER'S acute and solid reasoning treated in his Sermons the subject of Morals, inquiring what was the particular nature of man, and hence determining the course of life correspondent to this nature. His Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature, 1736, endeavours to make peace be- tween authority and reason, and has become a standard book. I may mention here a social satire, The Fable of the Bees, by Mandeville, half-poem, half-prose dialogue, and finished in 1729. It tried to prove that the vices VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE igi of society are the foundation of civilisation, and is one of the first of a new set of books which marked the rise in England of the bold speculations on the nature and ground of society to which the French Revolution gave afterwards so great an impulse. 122. The Periodical Essay is connected with the names of JOSEPH ADDISON and SIR RICHARD STEELE. The gay, light, graceful, literary Essay, differing from such Essays as Bacon's as good conversation about a subject differs from a clear analysis of all its points, was begun in France by Montaigne in 1580. Charles Cot- ton, a wit of Charles II. 's time, retranslated Montaigne's Essays, and they soon found imitators in Cowley and Sir W. Temple. But the periodical Essay was created by Steele and Addison. It was at first published three times a week, then daily, and it was anonymous, and both these characters necessarily changed its form from that of an essay by Montaigne. Steele began it in the Tatter, 1 709, and it treated of everything that was going on in the town. He paints as a social humourist the whole age of Queen Anne the political and literary disputes, the fine gentlemen and ladies, the characters of men, the humours of society, the new book, the new play ; we live in the very streets and drawing-rooms of old London. Addison soon joined him, first in the Tat- ler, afterwards in the Spectator, 1711. His work is more critical, literary, and didactic than his companion's. The characters he introduces, such as Sir Roger de Coverley, are finished studies after nature. The humour is very 192 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. fine and tender ; and, like Chaucer's, it is never bitter. The style adds to the charm : in its varied cadence and subtle ease it has not been surpassed within its own peculiar sphere in England ; and it seems to grow out of the subjects treated of. Addison's work was a great one, lightly done. The Spectator, the Guardian, and the Freeholder, in his hands, gave a better tone to manners, and hence to morals, and a gentler one to political and literary criticism. The essays published every Friday were chiefly on literary subjects, the Saturday essays chiefly on religious subjects. The former popularised literature, so that culture spread among the middle classes and crept down to the country ; the latter popu- larised religion. " I have brought," he says, " philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses." THE DRAMA, FROM THE RESTORATION TO 1 780 123. The Drama after the Restoration took the tone of the court both in politics and religion, but its partisan- ship decayed under William III., and died in the reign of Queen Anne. The court of Charles II., which the plays now written represented much more than they did the national life, gave the drama the "genteel" ease and the immorality of its society, and encouraged it to find new impulses from the tragedy and comedy of Spain and of France. The French romances of the school of Calprenede and Scude"ry furnished plots to the playwriters. The great French dramatists, Corneille, VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 193 Racine, and Moliere, were translated and borrowed from again and again. The " three unities " of Corneille, and rhyme instead of blank verse as the vehicle of tragedy, were adopted, but " the spirit of neither the serious nor the comic drama of France could then be transplanted into England." Two acting companies were formed on Charles II. 's return, under Thomas Killigrew and Davenant ; actresses came on the stage for the first time, the ballet was intro- duced, and scenery began to be largely used. Dryden, whose masterly force was sure to strike the key-note that others followed, began his comedies in 1663, but turned to tragedy in the Indian Queen, 1664. This play, with the Indian Emperour, established for fourteen years the rhymed couplet as the dramatic verse. His defence of rhyme in the Essay on Dramatic Poesy asserted the originality of the English school, and denied that it fol- lowed the French. The Maiden Queen, 1667, brought him new fame, and then Tyrannic Love and the Con- quest of Granada, 1672, induced the burlesque of the Rehearsal, written by the Duke of Buckingham, in which the bombastic extravagance of these heroic plays was ridiculed. Dryden now changed, in 1678, his dramatic manner, and following Shakespeare, "disencumbered himself from rhyme" in his fine tragedy of All for Love, and showed what power he had of low comedy in the Spanish Friar. After the Revolution, his tragedy of Don Sebastian ranks high, but not higher than his brill- iantly written comedy of Amphitryon , 1690. Dryden is 194 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. the representative dramatist of the Restoration. Among the tragedians who followed his method and possessed their own, those most worthy of notice are Nat Lee, whose Rival Queens, 1667, deserves its praise; Thomas Otway, whose two pathetic tragedies, the Orphan and Venice Preserved, still keep the stage ; Thomas Southerne whose Fatal Marriage, 1694, was revived by Garrick; and Congreve who once turned from comedy to write The Mourning Bride. It was in comedy, however, that the dramatists ex- celled. Sir George Etherege originated with great skill the new comedy of England with She Would if She Could, 1668. Sedley, Mrs. Behn, Lacy, and Shadwell carry on to the Revolution that light Comedy of Man- ners which William Wycherley's gross vigour and natural plots lifted into an odious excellence in such plays as the Country Wife and the Plain Dealer. Three great come- dians followed Wycherley William Congreve, whose well-bred ease is almost as remarkable as his brilliant wit ; Sir John Vanbrugh, and George Farquhar, both of whom have quick invention, gaiety, dash, and sincerity. The indecency of all these writers belongs to the time, but it is partly forgotten in their swift and sustained vivacity. This immorality produced Jeremy Collier's famous attack on the stage, 1698; and the growth of a higher tone in society, uniting with this attack, began to purify the drama, though Mrs. Centlivre's comedies, during the reign of Queen Anne, show no love of purity. Steele, at this time, whose Lying Lover makes him the VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1 95 father of Sentimental comedy, wrote all his plays with a moral purpose. Nicholas Rowe, whose melancholy tragedies " are occupied with themes of heroic love," is dull, but never gross ; while Addison's ponderous tragedy of Cato, 1713, praised by Voltaire as the first tragedie raisonnable, marks, in its total rejection of the drama of nature for the classical style, " a definite epoch in the history of English tragedy, an epoch of decay, on which no recovery has followed." Comedy, however, had still a future. The Beggars' Opera of Gay, 1728, revived an old form of drama in a new way. Colley Gibber carried on into George II. 's time the light and the sentimental comedy ; Fielding made the stage the vehicle of criticism on the follies, literature, and politics of his time ; and Foote and Garrick did the same kind of work in their farces. The influence of the Restoration drama continues, past this period, in the manner of Goldsmith and Sheridan who wrote between 1768 and 1778; but the lambent humour of Goldsmith's Good-natured Man and She Stoops to Conquer, and the wit, almost as brilliant and more epigrammatic than Congreve's, of Sheridan's Rivals and the School for Scandal, are not deformed by the indecency of the Restoration. Both were Irishmen, but Goldsmith has more of the Celtic grace and Sheridan of the Celtic wit. The sentimental comedy was carried on into the next age by Macklin, Murphy, Cumberland, the Colmans, and many others, but we may say that with Sheridan the history of the elder English Drama closes. That which belongs to our century is a different thing. 196 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. CHAPTER VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM THE DEATH OF POPE AND OF SWIFT TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, AND FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE DEATH OF SCOTT 1745-1789-1832 124. Prose Literature. The rapid increase of manu- factures, science, and prosperity which began with the middle of the eighteenth century is paralleled by the growth of Literature. The general causes of this growth were ist, That a good prose style had been perfected, and the method of writing being made easy, production in- creased. Men were born, as it were, into a good school of the art of composition. 2ndly, The long peace after the accession of the House of Hanover had left England at rest, and given it wealth. The reclaiming of waste tracts, the increased population and trade, made better communication necessary; and the country was soon covered with a network of high- ways. The leisure gave time to men to think and write; the quicker interchange between the capital and the country spread over England the literature of the capital, and stirred men everywhere to express their VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1745 TO 1789 197 thoughts. The coaching services and the post carried the new book and the literary criticism to the villages, and awoke the men of talent there, who might otherwise have been silent. 3rdly, The Press sent far and wide the news of the day, and grew in importance till it contained the opinions and writings of men like Johnson. Such seed produced literary work in the country. Newspapers now began to play a larger part in literature. They rose under the Commonwealth, but became important when the censor- ship which reduced them to a mere broadsheet of news was removed after the Revolution of 1688. The politi- cal sleep of the age of the two first Georges hindered their progress ; but in the reign of George III., after a struggle with which the name of John Wilkes and the author of the Letters of Junius are connected, and which lasted from 1764 to 1771, the press claimed and obtained the right to criticise the conduct and measures of ministers and the king; and the further right to publish and comment on the debates in the two Houses. 4thly, Communication -with the Continent had in- creased during the peaceable times of Walpole, and the wars that followed made it still more common. With its increase two new and great outbursts of litera- ture told upon England. France sent the works of Montesquieu, of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, D'Alem- bert, and the rest of the liberal thinkers who were called the Encyclopaedists, to influence and quicken English literature on all the great subjects that belong 198 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. to the social and political life of man. Afterwards, the fresh German movement, led by Lessing and others, and carried on by Goethe and Schiller, added its impulse to the poetical school that arose in England along with the French Revolution. These were the general causes of the rapid growth of literature from the time of the death of Swift and of Pope. 125. Prose Literature between 1745 and the French Revolution may be said to be bound up with the literary lives of one man and his friends. SAMUEL JOHNSON, born in 1709, and whose first important prose work, the Life of Savage, appeared in 1744, was the last representative of the literary king, who, like Dryden and Pope, held a court in London. Poor and un- known, he worked his way to fame, and his first poem, the London, 1738, satirised the town where he loved to live. His longer and better poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes, was published in 1749, and his moral power was never better shown than in its weighty verse. His one play, Irene, was acted in the same year. He carried on the periodical essays in the Rambler, 1750-2, but in it, as afterwards in the Idler, grace and lightness, the essence of this kind of essay, were lost. Driven by poverty, Johnson undertook a greater work : the Dictionary of the English Language, 1755, and his celebrated letter to Lord Chesterfield, concerning its publication, gave the death-blow to patronage, and makes Johnson the first of the modern literary men who, independent of patrons, live by their pen and find Vli PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1745 TO 1789 199 in the public their only paymaster. He represents thus a new class. In 1759 he set on foot the Didactic Novel in Rasselas. For a time he was one of the political pamphleteers, from 1770 to 1776. As he drew near to his death his Lives of the Poets appeared as prefaces to his edition of the poets in 1781, and lifted biography into a higher place in literature. But he did even more for literature as a converser, as the chief talker of a literary club, than by writing, and we know exactly what a power he was by the vivid Biography, the best in our language, which James Boswell, with fussy devotedness, made of his master in 1791. Side by side with Johnson stands OLIVER GOLDSMITH, whose graceful and pure English is a pleasant contrast to the loaded Latinism of Johnson's style. The Vicar of Wakefield, the History of Animated Nature, are at one in charm, and the latter is full of that love of natural scenery, the senti- ment of which is absent from Johnson's Journey to the Western Isles. Both these men were masters of Miscellaneous Literature, and in that class, I mention here, as belonging to the latter half of the eighteenth century, EDMUND BURKE'S Vindication of Natural So- ciety, a parody of Bolingbroke ; and his Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, a book which in 1 75 7 introduced him to Johnson. Nor ought we to forget Sir Joshua Reynolds, another of Johnson's friends, who first made English art literary in his Discourses on Painting; nor Horace Walpole, whose Anecdotes of Painting, 1762-71, still please; 2O6 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHA. and whose familiar Letters, malicious, light as froth, but amusing, retail with liveliness all the gossip of the time. Among all these books on the intellectual subjects of life arose to delight the lovers of quiet and the country the Natural History of Selborne, by Gilbert White. His seeing eye and gentle heart are imaged in his fresh and happy style. 126. The Novel. "There is more knowledge of the heart," said Johnson, " in one letter of Richardson's than in all Tom Jones" and the saying introduces SAMUEL RICHARDSON and HENRY FIELDING, the makers of the modern novel. Wholly distinct from merely narrative stories like Defoe's, the true novel is a story wrought round the passion of love to a tragic or joyous conclusion. But the name is applied now to any story of human life which is woven by the action of characters or of events on characters to a chosen conclusion. Its form, far more flexible than that of the drama, admits of almost infinite development. The whole of human life, at any time, at any place in the world, is its subject, and its vast sphere accounts for its vast production. Pamela, 1741, appeared while Pope was yet alive, and was the first of Richardson's novels. Like Clarissa Harlowe, 1 748, it was written in the form of letters. The third of these books was Sir Charles Grandison. They are novels of Sentiment, and their purposeful morality and religion mark the change which had taken place in the morals and faith of litera- ture since the preceding age. Clarissa Harlowe is a masterpiece in its kind. Rich- Vll FROSE LITERATURE FROM 1745 TO 1789 2OI ardson himself is mastered day by day by the passionate creation of his characters : and their variety and the variety of their feelings are drawn with a slow, diffusive, elaborate intensity which penetrates into the subtlest windings of the human heart. But all the characters are grouped round and enlighten Clarissa, the pure and ideal star of womanhood. The pathos of the book, its sincerity, its minute reality, have always, but slowly, im- passioned its readers, and it stirred as absorbing an interest in France as it did in England. " Take care," said Diderot, " not to open these enchanting books, if you have any duties to fulfil." HENRY FIELDING followed Pamela with Joseph Andrews, 1742, and Clarissa with Tom Jones, 1749. At the same time, in 1748, appeared TOBIAS SMOLLETT'S first novel, Roderick Random, Both wrote many other stories, but in the natural growth and development of the story, and in the infitting of the characters and events towards the conclusion, Tom Jones is said to be the English model of the novel. The constructive power of Fielding is absent from Smollett, but in inventive tale-telling and in cynical characterisa- tion, he is not easily equalled. Fielding, a master of observing and of recording what he observed, draws English life both in town and country with a coarse and realistic pencil : Smollett is led beyond the truth of nature into caricature. Ten years had thus sufficed to create a wholly new literature. LAURENCE STERNE published the first part of Tristram Shandy in the same year as Rasselas, 1759. Tristram 2O2 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. Shandy and the Sentimental Journey are scarcely novels. They have no plot, they can scarcely be said to have any story. The story of Tristram Shandy wanders like a man in a labyrinth, and the humour is as labyrinthine as the story. It is carefully invented, and whimsically subtle ; and the sentiment is sometimes true, but mostly affected. But a certain unity is given to the book by the admirable consistency of the characters. A little later, in 1766, Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield was the first and, perhaps, the most charming, of all those novels which we may call idyllic, which describe in a pure and gentle style the simple loves and lives of country people. Lastly, but still in the same circle of Johnson's friends, Miss Burney's Evelina, 1778, and her Cecilia, in which we detect John- son's Roman hand, were the first novels of society. 127. History shared in the progress made after 1745 in prose writing, and was raised into the rank of literature by three of Johnson's contemporaries. All of them were influenced by the French school, by Montesquieu and Voltaire. DAVID HUME'S History of England, finished in 1761, is, in the writer's endeavour to make it a philo- sophic whole, in its clearness of narrative and purity of style, our first literary history. But he is neither exact, nor does he care to be exact. He does not love his sub- ject, and he wants sympathy with mankind and with his country. His manner is the manner of Voltaire, passion- less, keen, and elegant. DR. ROBERTSON, Hume's friend, was a careful and serious but also a cold writer. His histories of Scotland, of Charles V., and of America VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1745 TO 1789 2O3 show how historical interest again began to reach beyond England. EDWARD GIBBON, whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, completed in 1 788, gave a new im- pulse and a new model to historical literature, had no more sympathy with humanity than Hume, and his irony lowers throughout the human value of his history. But he had creative power, originality, and the enjoyment and imagination of his subject. It was at Rome in 1 764, while musing amid the ruins of the Capitol, that the idea of writing his book arose in his mind, and his conception of the work was that of an artist. Rome, eastern and western, was painted in the centre of the world, dying slowly like a lion in his cave. Around it and towards it he drew all the nations and hordes and faiths that wrought its ruin ; told their stories from the beginning, and the re- sults on themselves and on the world of their victories over Rome. This imaginative conception, together with the collecting and use of every detail of the arts, literature, customs, and manners of the times he described, the read- ing and use of all the contemporary literature, the careful geographical detail, the marshalling of all this information into his narration and towards his conclusion, the power with which he moved over this vast arena, and the use of a full if too grandiose a style to give importance to his subject, makes him the one historian of the eighteenth century whom modern research recognises as its master. 128. Philosophical and Political Literature. Hutch- eson, Hartley, and Reid were inferior as philosophers to DAVID HUME, who inquired, while he followed Locke, 2O4 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. into the nature of the human understanding, and based philosophy upon psychology. He constructed a science of man; and finally limited all our knowledge to the world of phenomena revealed to us by experience. In morals he made utility the only measure of virtue. The first of his books, the Treatise of Human Nature, 1 739, was written in France, and was followed by the Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals in 1751. The Dia- logues on Natural Religion were not published till after his death. These were his chief philosophical works. But in 1741-2, he had published two volumes Q{ Essays Moral and Political, from which we might infer a politi- cal philosophy ; and in 1752 the Political Discourses ap- peared, and they have been fairly said to be the cradle of political economy. But that subject was afterwards taken up by ADAM SMITH, a friend of Hume's, whose book on the Moral Sentiments, 1759, classes him also with the philosophers of Scotland. In his Wealth of Nations, 1776, by its theory that labour is the source of wealth, and that to give the labourer absolute freedom to pursue his own interest in his own way is the best means of increasing the wealth of the country ; by its proof that all laws made to restrain, or to shape, or to promote com- merce, were stumbling-blocks in the way of the wealth of a state, he created the Science of Political Economy, and brought the theory of Free Trade into practice. All the questions of labour and capital were now placed on a scientific basis, and since that time the literature of the whole of the subject has engaged great thinkers. As the VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1745 TO 1789 immense increase of the industry, wealth, and commerce of the country from 1720 to 1770 had thus stirred inquiry into the laws which regulate wealth, so now the Metho- dist movement, beginning in 1738, awoke an interest in the poor, and gave the first impulse to popular education. Social Reform became a literary subject, and fills a large space until 1832, -when political reform brought forward new subjects, and the old subjects under new forms. This new philanthropy was stirred into further growth by the theories of the French Revolution, and these theories, taking violent effect in France, roused into opposition the genius of Edmund Burke. Unlike Hume, whose politics were elaborated in the study, Burke wrote his political tracts and speeches face to face with events and upon them. Philosophical reasoning and poetic passion were wedded together in them on the side of Conservatism, and every art of eloquence was used with the mastery that imagination gives. In 1766 he defended Lord Rockingham's administration ; he was then wrongly suspected of the authorship of the Letters of Junius, political invectives (1769-72), whose trenchant style has preserved them to this day. Burke's Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, 1770, maintained an aristocratic government ; and the next year appeared his famous Speech on American Taxation, while that on American Conciliation, 1774, was answered by his friend Johnson in Taxation no Tyranny. The most powerful of his works were the Reflections on the French Revo- lution, 1 790, the Letter to a Noble Lord, and the Letters 2O6 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. on a Regicide Peace, 1796-7. The first of these, an- swered by Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, and by James Mackintosh's Vindicia Gallica, spread over all England a terror of the principles of the Revolution ; the third doubled the eagerness of England to carry on the war with France. As a writer he needed more temper- ance, but, if he had possessed it, we should probably have not had his magnificence. As an orator he ended by wearying his hearers, but the very men who slept under him in the House read over and over again the same speech when published with renewed delight. Gold- smith's praise of him that he "wound himself into his subject like a serpent" gives the reason why he sometimes failed as an orator, why he generally suc- ceeded as a writer. 129. Prose from 1789-1832. Miscellaneous. The death of Johnson marks a true period in our later prose literature. London had ceased then to be the only literary centre. Books were produced in all parts of the country, and Edinburgh had its own famous school of literature. The doctrines of the French Revolution were eagerly supported and eagerly opposed, and stirred like leaven through a great part of the literary work of England. Later on, through Coleridge, Scott, Carlyle, and others, the influence of Lessing, Goethe, of all the new literature of Germany, began to tell upon us, in theology, in phi- losophy, and even in the novel. The great English Journals, the Morning Chronicle, the Times, the Morning Post, the Morning Herald, were all set on foot between VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1789 TO 1832 2O/ 1775 and 1793, between the war with America and the war with France ; and when men like Coleridge and Canning began to write in them the literature of journal- ism was started. A literature especially directed towards education arose in the Cyclopaedias, which began in 1778, and rapidly developed into vast dictionaries of know- ledge. Along with them were the many series issued from Edinburgh and London of Popular Miscellanies. A crowd of literary men found employment in writing about books rather than in writing them, and the literature of Criticism became a power. The Edinburgh Review was established in 1802, and the Quarterly, its political op- ponent, in 1809, and these were soon followed by Eraser's and Black-wood's Magazine. Jeffrey, Professor Wilson, Sydney Smith, and a host of others wrote in these reviews on contemporary events and books. Interest in con- temporary stimulated interest in past literature, and Cole- ridge, Charles Lamb, Thomas Campbell, Hazlitt, Southey, and Savage Landor carried on that study of the Eliza- bethan and earlier poets to which Warton had given so much impulse in the eighteenth century. Literary quar- rels concerning the nature of poetry produced books like Coleridge's Biographia Literaria ; and Wordsworth's Essays on his own art are in admirable prose. DE QUINCEY, one of the Edinburgh School, is, owing to the over-lapping and involved melody of his style, one of our best, as he is one of our most various miscellaneous writers : and with him for masculine English, for various learning and forcible fancy, and, not least, for his vigor- 2O8 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. ous lyrical work and poems, we may rank WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR, who deepened an interest in English and classic literature and made a literature of his own. CHARLES LAMB'S inimitable fineness of perception was shown in his criticisms on the old dramatists, but his most original work was the Essays of Elia, in which he renewed the lost grace of the Essay, and with a humour not less gentle, more surprising, more self-pleased than Addison's. 130. Theological Literature had received a new im- pulse in 1738-91 from the evangelising work of John Wesley and Whitfield; and their spiritual followers, Thomas Scott, Newton, and Cecil, made by their writ- ings the Evangelical School. William Paley, in his Evidences, defended Christianity from the common-sense point of view ; while the sermons of Robert Hall and of Dr. Chalmers are, in different ways, fine examples of devotional and philosophical eloquence. 131. The eloquent intelligence *of Edinburgh con- tinued the Literature of Philosophy in the work of Dugald Stewart, Reid's successor, and in that of Dr. Browne, who for the most part opposed Hume's funda- mental idea that Psychology is a part of the science of life. Coleridge brought his own and German philosophy into the treatment of theological questions in the Aids to Reflection, and into various subjects of life in the Friend, The utilitarian view of morals was put forth by Jeremy Bentham with great power, but his chief work was in the province of law. He founded the philosophy of juris,-* VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1789 TO 1832 2OQ prudence, he invented a scientific legal vocabulary, and we owe to him almost every reform that has improved our law. He wrote also on political economy, but that subject was more fully developed by Malthus, Ricardo, and James Mill. 132. Biography and travel are linked at many points to history, and the literature of the former was enriched by Hayley's Cowper, Southey's Life of Nelson, McCrie's Life of Knox, Moore's Life of Byron, and Lockhart's Life of Scott. As to travel, it has rarely produced books which may be called literature, but the works of biog- raphers and travellers have brought together the mate- rials of literature. Bruce left for Africa in 1762, and in the next seventy years Africa, Egypt, Italy, Greece, the Holy Land, and the Arctic Regions were made the common property of literary men. 133. The Historical School produced Mitford's His- tory of Greece and Lingard's History of England; but it was Henry Hallam who for the first time wrote history in this country without prejudice. His Europe during the Middle Ages, 1818, is distinguished by its exhaustive and judicial summing-up of facts, and his Constitutional History of England opened a new vein of history in the best way. Since his time, history has become more and more worthy of the name of fine literature, and the critical schools of our own day, while making truth the first thing, and the philosophy of history the second, do not disdain but exact the graces of literature. But of all the forms of prose literature, the novel was the most largely used and developed. 2IO ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 134. The Novel. The stir of thought made by the French Revolution had many side influences on novel- writing. The political stories of Thomas Holcroft and William Godwin disclosed a new realm to the novelist. The Canterbury Tales of Sophia and Harriet Lee, and the wild and picturesque tales of Mrs. Radcliffe intro- duced the romantic novel. Mrs. Inchbald's Simple Story, 1791, started the novel of passion, whilst Mrs. Opie made domestic life the sphere of her graceful and pathetic stories, 1806. Miss Edgeworth in her Irish stories gave the first impulse to the novel of national character, and in her other tales to the novel with a moral purpose, 1800-47. Miss Austen, "with an ex- quisite touch which renders commonplace things and characters interesting from truth of description and sen- timent," produced the best novels we have of everyday society, 1811-17. With the peace of 1815 arose new forms of fiction ; and travel, now popular, gave birth to the tale of foreign society and manners; of these, Thomas Hope's Anastasius (1819) was the first. The classical novel arose in Lockhart's Valerius, and Miss Ferrier's humorous tales of Scottish life were pleasant to Walter Scott. It was WALTER SCOTT, however, who raised the whole of the literature of the novel into one of the great in- fluences that bear on human life. Men are still alive who remember the wonder and delight with which Waverley (1814) was welcomed. The swiftness of work combined with vast diligence which belongs to very great VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1789 TO 1832 211 genius belonged to him. Guy Mannering was written in six weeks, and the Bride of Lammermoor, as great in fateful pathos as Romeo and Juliet, but more solemn, was done in a fortnight. There is then a certain abandon in his work which removes it from the dignity of the ancient writers, but we are repaid for this loss by the in- tensity, and the animated movement, the clear daylight, and the inspired delight in and with which he invented and wrote his stories. It is not composition ; it is Scott actually present in each of his personages, doing their deeds and speaking their thoughts. His national tales and his own country was his best inspiration are written with such love for the characters and the scenes, that we feel his living joy and love underneath each of the stories as a completing charm, as a spirit that en- chants the whole. And in these tales and in his poems his own deep kindliness, his sympathy with human nature, united, after years of enmity, the Highlands to the Lowlands. In the vivid portraiture and dramatic reality of such tales as Old Mortality and Quentin Dur- ward he created the historical novel. "All is great," said Goethe, speaking of one of these historical tales, " in the Waverley Novels ; material, effect, characters, execu- tion." In truth, so natural is Scott's invention, that it seems creation even the landscape is woven through the events and in harmony with them. His comprehen- sive power, which drew with the same certainty so many characters in so many various classes, was the direct re- sult of his profound sympathy with the simpler feelings 212 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. of the human heart, and of his pleasure in writing so as to make human life more beautiful and more good in the eyes of men. He was always romantic, and his per- sonal romance did not fail him when he came to be old. Like Shakespeare he kept that to the very close. The later years of his life were dark, but the almost unrivalled nobleness of his battle against ill fortune proves that he was as great-hearted as he was great. " God bless thee, Walter, my man," said his uncle, " thou hast risen to be great, but thou wast always good." His last long tale of power was the Fair Maid of Perth, 1828, and his last effort, in 1831, was made the year before he died. That year, 1832, which saw the deaths of Goethe and Scott, is the close of an epoch in literature. vm POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 213 CHAPTER VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 135. The Elements and Forms of the New Poetry. The poetry we are now to study may be divided into two periods. The first dates from about the middle of Pope's life, and closes with the publication of Cowper's Task, 1785 ; the second begins with the Task and closes in 1832. The first is not wrongly called a time of transi- tion. The influence of the poetry of the past lasted ; new elements were added to poetry, and new forms of it took shape. There was a change also in the style and in the subject of poetry. Under these heads I shall bring together the various poetical works of this period, (i) The influence of the didactic and satirical poetry of the critical school lingered among the new elements which first modified and then changed poetry altogether. It is found in Johnson's two satires on the manners of his time, the London, 1 738, and the Vanity of Human Wishes, 1 749 ; in Robert Blair's dull poem of The Grave, 1 743 ; in Edward Young's Night Thoughts, 1 743, a poem on the immortality of the soul, and in his satires on The Universal Passion of fame ; in the tame work of 214 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHA*. Richard Savage, Johnson's poor friend ; and in the short- lived but vigorous satires of Charles Churchill, who died in 1764, twenty-one years after Savage. The Pleasures of the Imagination, 1744, by Mark Akenside, belongs also in spirit to the time of Queen Anne, and was sug- gested by Addison's essays in the Spectator on Imagi- nation. (2) The study of the Greek and Latin classics re- vived, and with it a more artistic poetry. Men like Thomas Gray and William Collins attempted to " revive the just designs of Greece," not only in fitness of lan- guage, but in perfection of form. They are commonly placed together, but the genius of each was essentially different. What they had in common belonged to the age in which they lived, and one of these elements was a certain artificial phrasing from which they found it difficult to escape. Both sought beauty more than their fellows, but Collins found it more than Gray. He had the greater grace and the sweeter simplicity, and his Ode to Simplicity tells us the direction in which poetry was going. His best work, like The Ode to Evening, is near to Keats, and recalls that poet's imaginative way. His in- ferior work is often rude and his style sometimes obscure, but when he is touched by joy in "ecstatic trial," or when he sits with Melancholy in love of peace and gentle musing, he is indeed inspired by truth and loveliness. He died too young to do much in a perfect way. Gray was different. All is clear light in his work. There is no gradual dusky veil such as Collins threw with so much vm POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 215 charm over his expression. Out of his love of Greek work he drew his fine lucidity. Out of the spirit of his own time and from his own cultivated experience he drew the moral criticism of human life which gives his poetry its weight, even its heaviness. It is true the moral criticism, even in the Ekgy, shares in the com- monplace, but it was not so commonplace in his time, and it is so full of a gentle charity that it transcends his time. He moved with easy power over many forms of poetry, but there is naturalness and no rudeness in the power. It was adorned by high ornament and finish. The Odes are far beyond their age, especially The Progress of Poesy y and each kind has its own appropri- ate manner. The Elegy will always remain one of the beloved poems of Englishmen. It is not only a piece of exquisite work ; it is steeped in England. It is contem- plative and might have been cold. On the contrary, even when it is conventional, it has a certain passion in its contemplation which is one of the marks of the work of Gray. Had he had more imagination he would have been greater, but the spirit of his age repressed nature in him. But he stands clear and bright, along with his brother, on the ridge between the old and the new. Having ascended through the old poetry, he saw the new landscape of song below him, felt its fresher air, and sent his own power into the men who arose after him. (3) The study of the Elizabethan and the earlier poets like Chaucer, and of the whole course of poetry in England, was taken up with great interest. Shakespeare 2l6 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. and Chaucer had engaged both Dryden and Pope ; but the whole subject was now enlarged. Gray, like Pope, projected a history of English poetry, and his Ode on the Progress of Poesy illustrates this new interest. Thomas Warton wrote his History of English Poetry, 1774-81, and brought the lovers of poetry into closer contact with Chaucer. Pope's, Theobald's, Sir Thomas Hanmer's, and Warburton's editions of Shakespeare were succeeded by Johnson's in 1765 ; and Garrick began the restoration of the genuine text of Shakespeare's plays for the stage. Spenser formed the spirit and work of some poets, and Thomas Warton wrote an essay on the Faerie Queene. William Shenstone's Schoolmistress , 1742, was one of these Spenserian poems, and so was Thom- son's delightful Castle of Indolence, 1748. James Beattie, in the Minstrel, 1771, also followed the stanza and man- ner of Spenser. (4) A new element interest in the romantic past was aided by the publication of Dr. Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 1765. The narrative ballad and the narrative romance, afterwards taken up and perfected by Sir Walter Scott, had already begun to strike their roots afresh in English poetry. The Braes of Yarrow and Mallet's William and Margaret were written before 1725. Men now began to seek among the ruder times of history for wild, natural stories of human life ; and the pleasure in these increased and accompanied the growing love of lonely, even of savage scenery. Even before the Reliques were published, Gray's power of VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 seeing into the right thing is seen in this matter. He entered the new paths, and in a new atmosphere, when he wrote of the Norse legends, or studied what he could learn of the poetry of Wales. The Osstan, 1762, of James Macpherson, which imposed itself on the public as a translation of Gaelic epic poems, is an example of this new element. Still more remarkable in this way were the poems of Thomas Chatterton, " That sleepless soul who perished in hit pride." He pretended to have discovered, in a muniment room at Bristol, the Death of Sir Charles Bawdin, and other poems, by an imaginary monk named Thomas Rowley, 1768. Written with quaint spelling, and with a great deal of lyrical invention, they raised around them a great controversy. His early death, at seventeen, has, by the pity of it, lifted his lyric poetry, romantic as it is, into more repute than it deserves. 136. Change of Style. We have seen how the natural style of the Elizabethan poets had passed into a style which erred against the simplicity of natural expression. In reaction from this the critical poets set aside natural feeling, and wrote according to intellectual rules of art. Their style lost life and fire ; and losing these, lost art and gained artifice. Unwarmed by natural feeling, it be- came as unnatural a style, though in a different way, as that of the later Elizabethan poets. But out of the failure of nature without art, and of art without nature, 2l8 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. and cut of the happy union of both in scattered and particular examples, the way was now ready for a style in which the art should itself be nature, and it found its first absolute expression in a few of Cowper's lyrics. His style, in such poems as the Lines to Mary Unwin, and in The Castaway, arises out of the simplest pathos, and yet is almost as pure in expression as a Greek elegy. The work was then done ; but the element of fervent passion did not enter into poetry till the poems of Robert Burns appeared in 1 786. 137. Change of Subjec*. Nature. The Poets have always worked on two great subjects man and nature. Up to the age of Pope the subject of man was chiefly treated, and we have seen how many phases it went through. There remained the subject of nature and of man's relation to it ; that is, of the visible landscape, sea, and sky, and all that men feel in contact with them. Natural scenery had been hitherto chiefly used as a back- ground to the picture of human life. It now began to occupy a much larger space in poetry, and after a time grew to occupy a distinct place of its own apart from man. Much of this was owing to the opening out of the wild country by new roads and to the increased safety of travel. It is the growth of this new subject which will engage us now. 138. The Poetry of Natural Description. We have already found in the poets, but chiefly among the lyrical poets, a pleasure in rural scenery and the emotions it awakened. But nature is only, as in the work of Shake- vni POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 219 speare, Marvell, Milton, Vaughan, or Herrick, incident- ally introduced. The first poem devoted to natural description appeared while Pope was yet alive, in the very midst of the town poetry. It was the Seasons, 1726-30; and it is curious, remembering what I have said about the peculiar turn of the Scots for natural de- scription, that it was the work of JAMES THOMSON, a Scots- man. It described the landscape and country life of Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. He wrote with his eye upon their scenery, and even when he wrote of it in his room, it was with "a recollected love." The descriptions were too much like catalogues, the very fault of the previous Scottish poets, and his style was heavy and cold, but he was the first poet who deliber- ately led the English people into that separated world of natural description which has enchanted us in the work of modern poetry. The impulse he gave was soon fol- lowed. Men left the town to visit the country and record their feelings. John Dyer's Grongar Hill, 1726, a description of a journey in South Wales, and his Fleece, I 757> are f uu< f country sights and scenes: and even Akenside mingled his spurious philosophy with pictures of the solitudes of nature. Foreign travel now enlarged the love of nature. The wilder country of England was eagerly visited. Gray's letters, some of the best in the English language, de- scribe the landscape of Yorkshire and Westmoreland with a minuteness quite new in English literature. In his poetry he used the description of nature as "its most 22O ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. graceful ornament," but never made it the subject. It was interwoven with reflections on human life, and used to point its moral. Collins observes the same method in his Ode on the Passions and the Ode to Evening. There is as yet but little love of nature entirely for its own sake. A further step was made by Oliver Gold- smith in his Traveller, 1 764, a sketch of national man- ners and governments, and in his Deserted Village, 1770. He describes natural scenery with less emotion than Collins, but does not moralise it like Gray. The scenes he paints are pure pictures, and he has no personal interest in them. The next step was made a few years later by some fourth-rate men like the two Wartons. Their poems do not speak of nature and human life, but of nature and themselves. They see the reflection of their own passions in the woods and streams, and this self-conscious pleasure with lonely nature grew slowly into a main subject of poetry. These were the steps towards that love of nature for its own sake which we shall find in the poets who followed Cowper. One poem of the time almost anticipates it. It is the Minstrel, 1771, of JAMES BEATTIE. This poem represents a young poet educated almost altogether by solitary communion with nature, and by love of her beauty ; and both in the spirit and treatment of the first part of the story resem- bles very closely Wordsworth's description of his own education by nature in the beginning of the Prelude. 139. Further Change of Subject. Man. During this time the interest in mankind, that is, in man inde- VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 221 pendent of nation, class, and caste, which we have seen in prose, began to influence poetry. One form of it appeared in the pleasure the poets began to take in men of other nations than England ; another form of it and this was increased by the Methodist revival was a deep feeling for the lives of the poor. Thomson speaks with sympathy of the Siberian exile and the Mecca pilgrim, and the Traveller of Goldsmith enters into foreign questions. His Deserted Village, Shenstone's Schoolmistress, Gray's Elegy celebrate the annals of the poor. Michael Bruce in his Lochleven praises the " secret primrose path of rural life," and Dr. John Langhorne in his Country Justice pleads the cause of the poor and paints their sorrows. Connected with this new element is the simple ballad of simple love, such as Shenstone's Jemmy Dawson, Mickle's Mariner's Wife, Goldsmith's Edwin and Angelina, poems which started afresh a de- lightful type of poetry, afterwards worked out more com- pletely in the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth. In a class apart stands the Song to David, a long poem written by Christopher Smart, a friend of Johnson's. Its power of metre and imaginative presentation of thoughts and things, and its mingling of sweet and grand religious poetry ought to make it better known. 140. Scottish Poetry illustrates and anticipates the poetry of the poor and the ballad. We have not men- tioned it since Sir David Lyndsay, for with the exception of stray songs its voice was almost silent for a century and a half. It revived in ALLAN RAMSAY, a friend of 222 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. Pope and Gay. His light pieces of rustic humour were followed by the Tea Table Miscellany and the Ever- Green, collections of existing Scottish songs mixed up with some of his own. Ramsay's pastoral drama of the Gentle Shep- herd, 1725, is a pure, tender, and genuine picture of Scottish life and love among the poor and in the country. ROBERT FERGUSON deserves to be named because he kindled the muse of Burns, but his occasional pieces, 1773, are chiefly concerned with the rude and humorous life of Edinburgh. One man, Michael Bruce, illustrates the English transition of which I have spoken. The Ballad, Scotland's dear companion, took a more modern but pathetic form in some Yarrow poems, in Auld Robin Gray and the Lament for Flodden. The peculiarities I have dwelt on already continue in this Scottish revival. There is the same nationality, the same rough wit, the same love of nature, but the love of colour has lessened. 141. The Second Period of the New Poetry. The new elements and the changes on which I have dwelt are expressed by three poets Cowper, Crabbe, and Burns. But before these we must mention the poems of WILLIAM BLAKE, the artist, and for three reasons, (i) They represent the new elements. The Poetical Sketches, written in 1777, illustrate the new study of the Eliza- bethan poets. Blake imitated Spenser, and in his short fragment of Edward III. we hear again the note of Marlowe's violent imagination. A short poem To the Muses is a cry for the restoration to English poetry of the old poetic passion it had lost. In some ballad poems VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 223 we trace the influence represented by Ossian and quick- ened by the publication of Percy's Reliques. (2) We find also in his work certain elements which belong to the second period of which I shall soon speak. The love of animals is one. A great love of children and the poetry of home is another. He also anticipated in 1789 and 1794, when his Songs of Innocence and Experi- ence were written, the simple natural poetry of ordinary life which Wordsworth perfected in the Lyrical Ballads, 1798. Moreover, the democratic element, the hatred of priestcraft, and the cry against social wrongs which came much later into English poetry spring up in his poetry. Then, he was a full Mystic, and through his mysticism appears that search after the true aims of life and after a freer theology which characterise our poetry after 1832. (3) He cast back as well as forward, and reproduced in his songs the spirit, movement, and music of the Eliza- bethan songs. The little poems in the Songs of Inno- cence, on infancy and first motherhood, and on subjects like the Lamb, are without rival in our language for sim- plicity, tenderness, and joy. The Songs of Experience give the reverse side of the Songs of Innocence, and they see the evil of the world as a child with a man's heart would see it with exaggerated horror. This small but predictive work of Blake, coming where it did, between 1777 and 1794, going back to Elizabethan lyrics and for- ward to those of Wordsworth, is very remarkable. 142. William Cowper's first poems were some of the Olney Hymns, 1 7 79, and in these the religious poetry of 224 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. Charles Wesley was continued. The profound personal religion, gloomy even to insanity as it often became, which fills the whole of Cowper's poetry, introduced a theological element into English poetry which continually increased till it died out with Browning and Tennyson. His didactic and satirical poems in 1782 link him back- wards to the last age. His translation of Homer, 1791, and of shorter pieces from the Latin and Greek, connects him with the classical influence, his interest in Milton with the revived study of the English poets. The play- ful and gentle vein of humour which he showed in John Gilpin and other poems, opened a new kind of verse to poets. With this kind of humour is connected a simple pathos of which Cowper is a great master. The Lines to Mary Unwin and to his Mother's Picture prove, with the work of Blake, that pure natural feeling wholly free from artifice had returned to English song. A new ele- ment was also introduced by him and Blake the love of animals and the poetry of their relation to man, a vein plentifully worked by after poets. His greatest work was the Task, 1785. It is mainly a description of himself and a life in the country, his home, his friends, his thoughts as he walked, the quiet landscape of Olney, the life of the poor people about him, mixed up with disqui- sitions on political and social subjects, and at the end, a prophecy of the victory of the Kingdom of God. The change in it in relation to the subject of nature is very great. Cowper loves nature entirely for her own sake. The change in relation to the subject of man is equally VIU POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 22$ great. The idea of mankind as a whole which we have seen growing up is fully formed in Cowper's mind. And though splendour and passion were added by the poets who succeeded him to the new poetry, yet they worked on the thoughts he had begun to express, and he is so far their forerunner. 143. George Crabbe took up the side of the poetry of man which had to do with the lives of the poor in the Village, 1783, and in the Parish Register, 1807. In the short tales related in these books we are brought face to face with the sacrifices, temptations, love, and crimes of humble life, and the effect of these poems in widening human sympathies was great among his readers. His work wanted the humour of Cowper, and though often pathetic and always forcible, was perhaps too unrelenting for pure pathos. He did much better work afterwards in his Tales of the Hall, His work on nature is as mi- nute and accurate, but as limited in range of excellence, as his work on man. ROBERT BLOOMFIELD, himself a poor shoemaker, added to this poetry of the poor. The Farmer's Boy, finished in 1798, and the Rural Tales, are poems as cheerful as Crabbe 's were stern, and his descriptions of rural life are not less faithful. The poetry of the poor, thus started, long continued in our verse. Wordsworth added to it new features, and Thomas Hood in short pieces like the Song of the Shirt gave it a direct bearing on social evils. 144. One element, the passionate treatment of love, had been on the whole absent from our poetry since the Q 226 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. Restoration. It was restored by Robert Burns. In his love songs we hear again, even more simply, more directly, the same natural music which in the age of Elizabeth en- chanted the world. It was as a love-poet that he began to write, and the first edition of his poems appeared in 1786. But he was not only the poet of love, but also of the new excitement about mankind. Himself poor, he sang the poor. He did the same work in Scotland in 1786 which Crabbe began in England in 1783 and Cow- per in 1785, and it is worth remarking how the dates run together. As in Cowper, so also in Burns, the further widening of human sympathies is shown in his tenderness for animals. He carried on also the Celtic elements of Scottish poetry, but the rattling fun of the Jolly Beggars and of Tarn d* Shanter is united to a life-like painting of human character which is peculiarly English. A large gentleness of feeling often made his wit into that true humour which is more English than Celtic, and the pas- sionate pathos of such poems as Mary in Heaven is con- nected with this vein of English humour. The special nationality of Scottish poetry is as strong in Burns as in any of his predecessors, but it is also mingled with a larger view of man than the merely national one. Nor did he fail to carry on the Scottish love of nature, though he shows the English influence in using natural descrip- tion not for the love of nature alone, but as a background for human love. It was the strength of his passions and the weakness of his moral will which made his poetry and spoilt his life. VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 22/ 145. The French Revolution and the Poets. Certain ideas relating to mankind considered as a whole had been growing up in Europe for some centuries, and we have seen their influence on the work of Cowper, Crabbe, and Burns. These ideas spoke of a return to nature, and of the best life being found in the country rather than in the town, so that the simple life of the poor and the scenery of the country were idealised into subjects for poetry. They spoke also of natural rights that belonged to every man, and which united all men to one another. All men were equal, and free, and brothers. There was therefore only one class, the class of man; only one nation, the nation of man, of which all were citizens. The divisions therefore which wealth and rank and caste and national boundaries had made were theo- retically put aside as wrong. Such ideas had been growing into the political, moral, and religious life of men ever since the Renaissance, and they brought with them their own emotions. France, which does much of the formative work of Europe, had for some time past expressed them constantly in her literature. She now expressed them in the action which overthrew the Bastille in 1789 and proclaimed the new Constitution in the fol- lowing year. They passed then from an abstract to a concrete form, and became active powers in the world, and it is round the excitement they kindled in England that the work of the poets from 1790 to 1832 can best be grouped. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey ac- cepted them at first with joy, but receded from them 228 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. when they ended in the violence of the Reign of Terror, and in the imperialism of Napoleon. Scott turned from them with pain to write of the romantic past which they destroyed. Byron did not express them themselves, but he expressed the whole of the revolutionary spirit in its action against old social opinions. Shelley took them up after the reaction against them had begun to die away, and in half his poetry re-expressed them. Two men, Rogers and Keats, were wholly untouched by them. One special thing they did for poetry. They brought back, by the powerful feelings they kindled in men, passion into its style, into all its work about man, and through that, into its work about nature. But, in giving the French Revolution its due weight, we must always remember that these ideas existed al- ready in England and were expressed by the poets. The French outburst precipitated them, and started our new poetry with a rush and a surprise. But the enthusiasm soon suffered a chill, and a great part of our new poetry was impelled, not by the Revolution, but by the indig- nant revolt against what followed on it. Moreover, I have already shown that fully half of the new lines of thought and feeling on which the poetry of England ran in the nineteenth century had been laid down in the century which preceded it, and they were com- pleted now. 146. Robert Southey began his political life with the revolutionary poem of Wat Tyler, 1 794 ; and between 1801 and 1814 wrote Thalaba, Madoc, The Curse of VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 229 Kehama, and Roderick the Last of the Goths. Thalaba and Kehama are stories of Arabian and of Indian mythol- ogy. They are real poems, and have the interest of good narrative and the charm of musical metre, but the finer spirit of poetry is not in them. Roderick is the most human and the most poetical. His Vision of Judgment, written on the death of George III., and ridi- culed by Byron in another Vision, proves him to have become a Tory of Tories. SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE could not turn round so completely, but the stormy enthusiasm of his early poems was lessened when in 1 796 he wrote the Ode on the Departing Year and France, an Ode, 1798. His early poems are transitional, partly based on Gray, violent and obscure in style. But when he came to live with Wordsworth, he gained simplicity, and for a short time his poetic spirit was at the height of joy and production. But his early disappointment about France was bitter, and then, too, he injured his own life. The noble ode to Dejection is instinct not only with his own wasted life, but with the sorrow of one who has had golden ideals and found them turn in his hands to clay. His best work is but little, but unique of its kind. For exquisite metrical movement and for imaginative phantasy, there is nothing in our language to be compared with Christabel and Kubla Khan. The Ancient Mariner, published as one of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798, belongs to the dim country between earth and heaven, where the fairy music is heard, sometimes dreadful, sometimes lovely, but always 23O ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. lonely. All that he did excellently might be bound up in twenty pages, but it should be bound in pure gold. 147. Of all the poets misnamed Lake Poets, William Wordsworth was the greatest. Born in 1770, educated on the banks of Esthwaite, he loved the scenery of the Lakes as a boy, lived among it in his manhood, and died in 1850 at Rydal Mount, close to Rydal Lake. He took his degree in 1791 at Cambridge. The year before, he had made a short tour on the Continent, and stepped on the French shore at the very time when the whole land was "mad with joy." The end of 1791 saw him again in France and living at Orleans. He threw himself eagerly into the Revolution, joined the "patriot side," and came to Paris just after the September massacre of 1792. Narrowly escaping the fate of his friends the Brissotins, he got home to Eng- land before the execution of Louis XVI. in 1793, and published his Descriptive Sketches and the Evening Walk. His sympathy with the French continued, and he took their side against his own country. He was poor, but his friend Raisley Calvert left him goo/, and enabled him to live the simple life he had then chosen the life of a retired poet. At first we find him at Racedown, where in 1797 he made friendship with Coleridge, and then at Alfoxden, in Somerset, where he and Coleridge planned and published in 1798 the first volume of the Lyrical Ballads. After a winter in Germany with Coleridge, where the Prelude was be- gun, he took a small cottage at Grasmere, and the VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 231 first book of The Recluse tells of his settlement in that quiet valley. It tells also of the passion and intensity of the young man who saw infinite visions of work before him, and who lived poor, in daily and unbroken joy. It was in this irradiated world that he wrote the best of his poems. There in 1805-6 he finished the Prelude. Another set of the Lyrical Ballads appeared in 1800, and in 1807 other poems. The Excursion belongs to 1814. From that time till his death he produced from his home at Rydal Mount a long suc- cession of poems. 148. Wordsworth and Nature. The Prelude is the history of Wordsworth's poetical growth from a child till 1806. It reveals him as the poet of Nature and of Man. His view of nature was entirely different from that which up to his time the poets had held. Words- worth conceived, as poet, that nature was alive. It had, he imagined, one living soul which, entering into flower, stream, or mountain, gave them each a soul of their own. Between this Spirit in nature and the mind of man there was a prearranged harmony which enabled nature to communicate its own thoughts to man, and man to reflect upon them, until an absolute union be- tween them was established. This was, in fact, the theory of the Florentine Neo-Platonists of the Renais- sance. They did not care for nature, but when Words- worth either reconceived or adopted this idea, it made him the first who loved nature with a personal love, for she, being living, and personal, and not only his 232 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. reflection, was made capable of being loved as a man loves a woman. He could brood on her character, her ways, her words, her life, as he did on those of his wife or sister. Hence arose his minute and loving ob- servation of her and his passionate description of all her life. This was his poetic philosophy with regard to nature, and bound up as it was with the idea of God as the Thought which pervaded and made the world, it rose into a poetic religion of nature and man. 149. Wordsworth and Man. The poet of nature in this special way, Wordsworth is even more the poet of man. It is by his close and loving penetration into the realities and simplicities of human life that he him- self makes his claim on our reverence as a poet. He relates in the Prelude how he had been led through his love of nature to honour man. The shepherds of the Lake hills, the dalesmen, had been seen by him as part of the wild scenery in which he lived, and he mixed up their life with the grandeur of nature and came to honour them as part of her being. The love of nature led him to the love of man. It was exactly the reverse order to that of the previous poets. At Cambridge, and afterwards, in the crowd of London and in his first tour on the Continent, he received new impressions of the vast world of man, but nature still remained the first. It was only during his life in France and in the excitement of the new theories and their ac- tivity that he was swept away from nature and found himself thinking of man as distinct from her and first VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 in importance. But the hopes he had formed from the Revolution broke down. All his dreams about a new life for mankind were made vile when France gave up liberty for Napoleon; and he was left without love of nature or care for man. It was then that his sister Dorothy, herself worthy of mention in a history of litera- ture, led him back to his early love of nature and restored his mind. Living quietly at Grasmere, he sought in the simple lives of the dalesmen round him for the founda- tions of what he felt to be a truer view of mankind than the theories of the French Revolution afforded. And in thinking and writing of the common duties and faith, kindnesses and truth of lowly men, he found in man once more an object of delight, Of pure imagination and of love. With that he recovered his interest in the larger move- ments of mankind. His love of liberty and hatred of oppression revived. He saw in Napoleon the enemy of the human race. A series of sonnets followed the events on the Continent. One recorded his horror at the attack on the Swiss, another mourned the fate of Venice, an- other the fate of Toussaint the negro chief; others cele- brated the struggle of Hofer and the Tyrolese, others the struggle of Spain. Two thanksgiving odes rejoiced in the overthrow of the oppressor at Waterloo. He became conservative in his old age, but his interest in social and national movements did not decay. He wrote, and 234 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. badly, on Education, the Poor Laws, and other sub- jects. When almost seventy he took the side of the Carbonari and sympathised with the Italian struggle. He was truly a poet of mankind. But his chief work was done in his own country and among his own folk ; and he is the foremost singer of those who threw around the lives of homely men and women the glory and sweet- ness of song. He made his verse " deal boldly with sub- stantial things " ; his theme was " no other than the very heart of man " ; and his work has become what he de- sired it to be, a force to soothe and heal the weary soul of the world, a power like one of nature's, to strengthen or awaken the imagination in mankind. He lies asleep now among the people he loved, in the green churchyard of Grasmere, by th* side of the stream of Rothay, in a place as quiet as hi, life. Few spots on earth are more sacred than his grave. 150. Sir Walter Scott was Wordsworth's dear friend, and his career as a poet began with the Lay of the Last Minstrel, 1805. But before that he had collected, inspired by his revolt from the Revolution to the re- gretted past, the song>> and ballads of the Border. Marmion was published in 1808, and the Lady of the Lake in 1810. These were his best poems; the others, with the exception of some lyrics which touch the sad- ness and exultation of life with equal power, do not count in our estimate of him. He brought the narrative poem into a new and delightful excellence. In Mar- mion and the Lady of the Lake his wonderful inventiveness VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 235 n story and character is at its height, and it is matched by the vividness of his natural description. No poet, and in this he carries on the old Scottish quality, is a finer colourist. Nearly all his natural description is of the wild scenery of the Highlands and the Lowland moorland. He touched it with a pencil so light, grace- ful, and true, that the very names are made forever romantic ; while his faithful love for the places he de- scribes fills his poetry with the finer spirit of his own tender humanity. 151. Scotland produced another poet in Thomas Campbell. His earliest poem, the Pleasures of Hope, 1799, belonged in its formal rhythm and rhetoric, and in its artificial feeling for nature, to the time of Thomson and Gray rather than to the newer time. He will chiefly live by his lyrics. Hohenlinden, the Battle of the Baltic, the Mariners of England, are splendid specimens of the war poetry of England ; and the Song to the Evening Star and Lord Ullirfs Daughter, full of tender feeling, mark the influence of the more natural style that Wordsworth had brought to excellence. 152. Rogers and Moore. The Pleasures of Memory, 1792, and the Italy, 1822, of Samuel Rogers, are the work of a slow and cultivated mind, and contain some laboured but fine descriptions. The curious thing is that, living apart in a courtly region of culture, there is not a trace in all his work that Europe and England and society had passed during his life through a convulsion of change. To that convulsion the best poems of THOMA 236 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAR MOORE may be referred. They are the songs he wrote to the Irish airs collected in 1796. The best of them have for their hidden subject the struggle of Ireland against England. Many of them have lyrical beauty and soft melody. At times they reach true pathos, but their lightly lifted gaiety is also delightful. He sang them himself in society, and it is not too much to say that they helped by the interest they stirred to further Catholic Emancipation. 153. We turn to very different types of men when we come to "Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Of the three, LORD BYRON had most of the quality we call force. Born in 1788, his Hours of Idleness, a collection of short poems, in 1807, was mercilessly lashed in the Edinburgh Review. The attack only served to awaken his genius, and he replied with astonishing vigour in the satire of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers in 1809. Eastern travel gave birth to the first two cantos of Childe Harold, 1812, to the Giaour and the Bride of Abydos in 1813, to the Corsair and Lara in 1814. The Siege of Corinth, Par- isina, the Prisoner of Chilian, Manfred, and Childe Harold were finished before 1819. In 1818 he began a new style in Beppo, which he developed fully in the successive issues of Don Juan, 1819-24. During this time he published a number of dramas, partly historical, as his Marino Faliero, partly imaginative, as the Cain. His life had been wild and useless, but he died in trying to redeem it for the sake of the freedom of Greece. At Missolonghi he was seized with fever, and passed away in April, 1824. Vin POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 237 154. The Position of Byron as a Poet is a curious one. He is partly of the past and partly of the present. Some- thing of the school of Pope clings to him ; yet no one so completely broke away from old measures and old man- ners to make his poetry individual, not imitative. At first, he has no interest whatever in the human questions which were so strongly felt by Wordsworth and Shelley. His early work is chiefly narrative poetry, written that he might talk of himself and not of mankind. Nor has he any philosophy except that which centres round the problem of his own being. Cain, the most thoughtful of his productions, is in reality nothing more than the representation of the way in which the doctrines of original sin and final reprobation affected his own soul. We feel naturally great interest in this strong personality, put before us with such obstinate power, but it wearies us at last. Finally it wearied himself. As he grew in power, he escaped from his morbid self, and ran into the opposite extreme in Don Juan. It is chiefly in it that he shows the influence of the revolutionary spirit. It is written in bold revolt against all the conventionality of social morality and religion and politics. It claimed for himself and for others absolute freedom of individual act and thought in opposition to that force of society which tends to make all men after one pattern. This was the best result of his work, though the way in which it was done can scarcely be approved. As the poet of nature he belongs also to the old and the new school. Byron's sympathy with nature is a sympathy with himself 238 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. reflected in her moods. But he also escapes from this position of the later eighteenth century poets, and looks on nature as she is, apart from himself; and this escape is made, as in the case of his poetry of man, in his later poems. Lastly, it is his colossal power and the ease that comes from it, in which he resembles Dryden, as well as his amazing productiveness, which mark him specially. But it is always more power of the intellect than of the imagination. 155. In Percy Bysshe Shelley, on the contrary, the imagination is first and the intellect second. He pro- duced while yet a boy some worthless tales, but soon showed in Queen Mab, 1813, the influence of the revolu- tionary era, combined in him with a violent attack on the existing forms of religion. One half of Shelley's poetry, and of his heart, was devoted to help the world towards the golden year he prophesied in Queen Mab, and to denounce and overthrow all that stood in its way. The other half was personal, an outpouring of himself in his seeking after the perfect ideal he could not find, and, sadder still, could not even conceive. Queen Mab is an example of the first, Alas for of the second. The hopes for man with which Queen Mab was written grew cold, and he turned from writing about mankind to describe in Alastor the life and wandering and death of a lonely poet. But the Alastor who isolated the poet from man- kind was, in Shelley's own thought, a spirit of evil, and his next poem, the Revolt of Islam, 1817, unites him again to the interests of humanity. He wrote it with the VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 239 hope that men were beginning to recover from the apathy and despair into which the failure of the revolutionary ideas had thrown them, and to show them what they should strive and hope for, and destroy. The poem itself has finer passages in it than Alas tor, but as a whole it is inferior to it. It is far too formless. The same year Shelley went to Italy, and never returned to England. He then produced Rosalind and Helen and Julian and Maddalo; but the new health and joy he now gained brought back his enthusiasm for mankind, and he broke out into the splendid lyric drama of Prometheus Unbound. Asia, at the beginning of the drama separated from Pro- metheus, is the all-pervading Love which in loving makes the universe of nature. When Prometheus is united to Asia, the spirit of Love in man is wedded to the spirit of Love in nature, and all the world of man and nature is redeemed. The marriage of these two, and the distinct existence of each for that purpose, is the same idea as Wordsworth's differently expressed ; and Shelley and he are the only two poets who have touched it philosophi- cally, Wordsworth with most contemplation, Shelley with most imagination. Prometheus Unbound is the finest example we have of the working out in poetry of the idea of a regenerated universe, and the fourth act is the choral song of its emancipation. Then, ShdJey, having expressed this idea with exultant imagination, turned to try his matured power upon other subjects. Two of these were neither personal nor for the sake of man. The first, the drama of the Cenci, is as restrained in 24O ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. expression as the previous poem is exuberant : yet there is no poem of Shelley's in which passion and thought and imagery are so wrought together. The second was the Adonais, a lament for the death of John Keats. It is a poem written by one who seems a spirit about a spirit, and belongs in expression, thought, and feeling to that world above the senses in which Shelley habitually lived. Of all this class of poems, to which many of his lyrics belong, Epipsychidion is the most impalpable, but, to those who care for Shelley's ethereal world, the finest poem he wrote. Of the same class is the Witch of Atlas, the poem in which he has personified divine Imagination in her work in poetry, and imaged all her attendants, and her doings among men. As a lyric poet, Shelley, on his own ground, is easily great. Some of the lyrics are purely personal ; some, as in the very finest, the Ode to the West Wind, mingle together personal feeling and prophetic hope for man- kind. Some are lyrics of pure nature ; some are dedi- cated to the rebuke of tyranny and the cause of liberty ; others belong to the indefinite passion he called love, and others are written on visions of those " shapes that haunt Thought's wildernesses." They form together the most sensitive, the most imaginative, and the most musi- cal, but the least tangible lyrical poetry we possess. As the poet of nature, he had the same idea as Words- worth, that nature was alive : but while Wordsworth made the active principle which filled and made nature to be Thought, Shelley made it Love. The natural VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 world was dear then to his soul as well as to his eye, but he loved best its indefinite aspects. He wants the closeness of grasp of nature which Wordsworth and Keats had, but he had the power in a far greater degree than they of describing the cloud-scenery of the sky, the doings of the great sea, and vast realms of landscape. He is in this, as well as in his eye for subtle colour, the Turner of poetry. What he might have been we cannot tell, for at the age of thirty he left us, drowned in the sea he loved, washed up and burned on the sandy spits near Pisa. His ashes lie beneath the walls of Rome, and Cor cordium, " Heart of hearts," written on his tomb, well says what all who love poetry feel when they think of him. 156. John Keats lies near him, cut off like him before his genius ripened ; not so ideal, but for that very reason more naturally at home with nature than Shelley. In one thing he was entirely different from Shelley he had no care whatever for the great human questions which stirred Shelley ; the present was entirely without interest to him. He marks the close of that poetic movement which the ideas of the Revolution had crystallised in England, as Shelley marks the attempt to revive it. Keats, seeing nothing to move him in an age which had now sunk into apathy on these points, went back to Spenser, and especially to Shakespeare's minor poems, to find his inspiration ; to Greek and mediaeval life to find his subjects, and established, in doing so, that which has been called the literary poetry of England. Leigh 242 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAr. Hunt, his friend and Shelley's, did part of this work. The first subject on which Keats worked, after some minor poems in 1817, was Endymion, 1818, his last, Hyperion, 1820. These, along with Lamia, which is, on the whole, the finest of his longer poems, were poems of Greek life. Endymion has all the faults and all the promise of a great poet's early work, and no one knew its faults better than Keats, whose preface is a model of just self-judgment. Hyperion, a fragment of a tale of the overthrow of the Titans, is itself like a Titanic torso. Its rhythm was derived from Milton, but its poetry is wholly his own. But the mind of Keats was as yet too luxuriant to support the greatness of his subject's argument, and the poem dies away. It is beautiful, even in death. Both poems are filled with that which was deepest in the mind of Keats, the love of loveliness for its own sake, the sense of its rightful and pre-eminent power ; and in the singleness of worship which he gave to Beauty, Keats is especially the ideal poet. Then he took us back into mediaeval romance, and in this also he started a new type of poetry. There are two poems which mark this revival Isabella, and the Eve of St. Agnes. Mediasval in subject, they are modern in manner ; but they are, above all, of the poet himself. Their magic is all his own. In smaller poems, such as the Ode on a Grecian Urn, the poem To Autumn, to the Nightingale, and some sonnets, he is the fairest of all Apollo's children. He knew the inner soul of words. He felt the world where ideas and their forms are one, where nature and VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 243 humanity, before they divide, flow from a single source. In all his poems, his painting of nature is as close as Wordsworth's, but more ideal ; less full of the imagina- tion that links human thought to nature, but more full of the imagination which broods upon enjoyment of beauty. He was not much interested in human questions, but as his mind grew, humanity made a more and more impera- tive call upon him. Had he lived, his poetry would have dealt more closely with the heart of man. His letters, some of the most original in the English language, show this clearly. The second draft of Hyperion, unpublished in his lifetime, and inferior as poetry to the first, accuses himself of apartness from mankind, and expresses his resolve to write of Man, the greatest subject of all. Whether he could have done this well remains unknown. His career was short; he had scarcely begun to write when death took him away from the loveliness he loved so keenly. Consumption drove him to Rome, and there he died, save for one friend, alone. He lies not far from Shelley, on the " slope of green access," near the pyramid of Caius Cestius. He sleeps apart ; he is him- self a world apart. 157. Modern English Poetry. Keats marks the ex- haustion of the impulse which began with Burns and Cowper. There was no longer now in England any large wave of public thought or feeling such as could awaken the national emotion and life out of which poetry is naturally born. We have then, arising after the deaths of Keats, Shelley, and Byron, a number of pretty little 244 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. poems, having no inward fire, no idea, no marked char- acter. They might be written by any versifier at any time, and express pleasant, indifferent thought in pleas- ant verse. Such were Mrs. Hemans' poems, and those of L. E. L., and such were Tennyson's earliest poems, in 1830. There were, however, a few men who, close to 1820 and 1822, had drunk at the fountain of Shelley, and who, for a very brief time, continued, amid the apathy, to write with some imagination and fervour. T. L. Bed- does, whose only valuable work was done between 1822 and 1825, was one of these. George Barley, whose Sylvia earned the praise of Coleridge, was another. They rep- resent in their imitation of Shelley, in their untutored imagination, the last struggles of the poetic phase which closed with the death of Byron. When Browning imitated or rather loved Shelley in his first poem, Pauline, it was to bid Shelley farewell ; when Tennyson imitated Byron and was haunted by Keats in his first poems, it was also to bid them both farewell. Then Tennyson and Browning passed on to strike unexpected waters out of the rocks and to pour two rivers of fresh poetry over the world. For with the Reform agitation, and the twofold religious movement at Oxford, which was of the same date, a novel national excitement came on England, and with it the new tribe of poets arose among whom we have lived. The elements of their poetry were also new, though we can trace their beginnings in the previous poetry. This poetry took up, so far as Art could touch them, the theological, social, and even the political ques- viil POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 245 tions which disturbed England. It came, before long, moved by the critical and scientific inquiries into the origins of religion and man and the physical world, to represent the scepticism of England and the struggle for faith against doubt. It gave itself t metaphysics, but chiefly under the expression and analysis of the characters of men and women. It played with a vast variety of subjects, and treated them all with a personal passion which filled them with emotion. It worked out, from the point of view of deep feeling, the relation of man to God, and of man to sorrow and immor- tality. It studied and brought to great excellence the Idyll, the Song, and the short poem on classic subjects with a reference to modern life. It increased, to an amazing extent, the lyrical poetry of England. The short lyric was never written in such numbers and of such excellence since the days of Elizabeth. It recapt- ured and clothed in a new dress the Arthurian tale, and linked us, back through many poets, to the days of legend and delight. It re-established for us in this new time, as the most natural and most emotional subject of English poetry, England, her history, her people, and her landscape, so that the new poets have described not only the whole land but the natural scenery and histori- cal story, the human and animal life of the separate counties. Our native land, as in the days of Elizabeth, has been idealised. Nor did this new impulse stay in England only. It went abroad for its subjects, and especially to Italy. It 246 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. strove to express the main characteristics of periods of history and of art, of the origins of religions and of Chris- tianity, of classic and Renaissance thought at critical times, and of lyric passion in modern life. Indeed, it aimed at a universal representation of human life and at a subtle characterisation of individual temperaments. Thus, it was a poetry of England, and also of the larger world beyond England. Apart from the main stream of poetry, there were separate streams which represented distinct passages in the general movement. The Sonnets of Charles Tenny- son Turner, which began in 1830, stand by their grace and tenderness at the head of a large production of poetry which describes with him the shy, sequestered, observant life of the English scholar and lover of nature, of country piety and country people. One man among them stands alone, William Barnes, of Dorsetshire. The time will come when the dialect in which he wrote will cease to prevent the lovers of poetry from appreciating at its full worth a poetry which, written in the mother- tongue of the poor and of his own heart, is as close to the lives and souls of simple folk as it is to the woods and streams, the skies and farms of rustic England. Among them also is Coventry Patmore, who, though alive, belongs to the past. What Barnes did for the peasant and the farmer, Patmore did for the cultivated life which in quiet English counties gathers round the church, the parsonage, and the hall, the lives and piety of the English homes that are still the haunts of ancient VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 247 peace. His work, with its retired and careful if over- delicate note, is a true picture of a small part of English life. But it has the faults of its excellences. The High Church and Broad Church movements, as they were called, produced two sets of poetical writers who also stand somewhat apart from the main line of English poetry. The first is best represented by John Keble, whose Christian Year, in 1827, with its poetry, so good within its own range, so weak beyond it, was the source of many books of poems of a similar but inferior char- acter. On the other hand the impulse towards a wider theology was combined in some poets with a laxer moral- ity than England is accustomed to maintain, and Bailey's Festus, 1839, was the first of a number of sensational poems which painted the struggles of the spirit towards immortal life, and of the senses towards mortal love with equal effervescence. A noble translation of Omar Khayyam by Edward Fitzgerald, and the fine ballad-songs and Andromeda of Charles Kingsley, may also be said to flow apart from the main stream in which poetry flowed. Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning (whose wife will justly share his fame) began to write between 1830 and 1833, and continued their work side by side for fifty years, when they died, almost together. Both of them were wholly original, and both of them, differing at every point of their art, kept with extraordinary vitality their main powers, and were capable of fresh invention, even to the very last. They passed through a long period of change and development, during which all the existing 248 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. foundations of faith and knowledge and art were dug out, investigated, tested, and an attempt made to reconstruct them, an attempt which still pursues its work. They lived and wrote in sympathy with the emotions which this long struggle created in the minds of men, and ex- pressed as much of these emotions as naturally fell within their capability and within the sphere of poetry. And this they did with great eagerness and intensity. Their love of beauty and of their art was unbroken, and they had as much power, as they had desire, to shape the thought and the loveliness they saw great poets who have illuminated, impelled, adorned, and exalted the world in which we live. At first the great inquiry into the roots of things dis- turbed the next generation of poets, those who stepped to the front between 1850 and 1860 ; and as Arthur Hugh Clough expressed the trouble of the want of clear light on the fates of men and their only refuge in duty, so Matthew Arnold, more deeply troubled, embodied in his poetry, even in his early book of 1852, the restlessness, the dimness, the hopelessness of a world which had lost the vision of the ancient stars and could cling to nothing but a stoic conduct. But he did this with keen sorrow, and with a vivid interest in the world around him. Then about 1860 the poets grew weary of the whole struggle. Theology, the just aim and ends of life, science, political and social questions, ceased on the whole to awaken the slightest interest in them. Exactly that which took place in the case of Keats now took place. The poets sought VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 249 only for what was beautiful, romantic, of ancient heroism, far from a tossed and wearied world, far from all its tiresome questions. Dante G. Rossetti, whose sister, Christina, touched the romantic and religious lyric with original beauty, was the leader of this school. He, and others still alive, found their chief subjects in ancient Rome and Greece, in stories and lyrics of passion, in mediaeval romance, in Norse legends, in the old England of Chaucer, and in Italy. But this literary poetry has now almost ceased to be produced, and has been suc- ceeded as in 1825 by a vast criticism of poetry, and by a multitudinous production, much inspired from France, of poetry, chiefly lyrical, which has few elements of endur- ance and little relation to life. What will emerge from this we cannot tell, but we only need some new human inspiration, having a close relation to the present, and bearing with it a universal emotion, to create in England another school of poetry as great as that which arose in the beginning of this century, and worthy of the tradi- tions which have made England the creator and lover of poetry for more than 1200 years. 2$O ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. CHAPTER IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM THE DEATH OF SCOTT TO THE DEATH OF GEORGE ELIOT (1832-1881) 158. The Growth of the Reading Public. It has been pointed out (page 196) that, with the middle of the eighteenth century, there began in England a period of rapid increase in manufactures, science, and prosperity, which was paralleled by a remarkable growth in litera- ture. This increase in material welfare has continued throughout the nineteenth century. Science has made greater progress within a hundred years than within the five preceding centuries, and the discoveries of science have affected in a most wonderful way the lives of men. The greater part of the population of Great Britain, even people of the smallest means, may live in accordance with nature's laws, supplied with proper food, water, clothing, and shelter, and free from dangerous epi- demics. Laws have given greater liberty to the indi- vidual, have mitigated the lot of the poor and unfortunate, and have helped to reform the vicious. Improvements in machinery, the growth of commerce, and the colonisa- tion of new lands, have aided in the greater diffusion of IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO l88l 2$ I wealth among the people; and, though various industrial and economic causes still tend to crowd the poor into unhealthy districts of large cities, and deprive them of the full rewards of their labour, it is, in the main, true that, in point of material welfare, the average English- man has at his command far more means towards health and happiness than he would have had a century ago. Education, too, is more widely spread: we all know more of the essential facts of history and principles of science, have a truer idea of what life means, and are thus better prepared to enjoy and appreciate literature. This increase in material prosperity has been accom- panied by a remarkable growth in population. In 1800 the population of Great Britain and Ireland was about 15,000,000. In 1899 it is about 40,000,000. If, moreover, we would estimate the present extent of the English-speaking race, we must add to these 40,000,000 the even greater population of the United States, as well as the English-speaking population of the colonies and possessions of Great Britain in various parts of the world. The total would probably exceed 125,000,000. With this growth of English-speaking people in many separate lands, it has come about that each of the large bodies of the race has developed, to some extent, its own special literature; and within a century it will probably be necessary to discuss, not only the literature of England itself, but that of Canada and Australia, just as, in subsequent chapters, we find it necessary to treat briefly of literature in the United States of America, or, 252 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. as it is loosely called, American literature. For the present we can afford to neglect, in a sketch of English literature, the literature of the British colonies; but it is important that we should remember that the boundaries of the reading public are no longer those of the times of Addison, when there was little writing outside of Lon- don, and authors there felt that they were addressing largely their own immediate circle of friends and fellow- citizens. For, though no one book, except the Bible, can be known to even a majority of the great total referred to, any book in English may, according to the degree to which it is fitted to instruct and entertain the people, reach the hands of multitudes of men, women, and children, not only in England, but wherever the English tongue is spoken. The English language, too, has become so important that it is understood by many cultivated people of other nationalities, so that an Eng- lish book of merit may also be read in all civilised countries. The city-audience of the beginning of the eighteenth century has thus, at the end of the nineteenth century, become almost a world-audience. Many changes, similar to those mentioned in pages 196-98, have also come about in the tastes and needs of the wide public to whom the literature of this century is addressed : (i) As has been explained above (page 196), a good prose style has been inherited from the eighteenth cen- tury and has been perfected in this century. Educated men are born, as it were, into a good school of compo- IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO l88l sition, and, profiting by the experience of their prede- cessors, do not now have to discover for themselves how to make their meaning clear and their style effective. (2) The increase in health, wealth, and comfort on the part of the people at large has given us leisure to read and means to purchase books, while the extraordi- nary development of railways and of postal and tele- graph systems has, in many respects, made each of the English-speaking nations almost a unit in feeling, and has greatly increased the bonds of sympathy and under- standing between them. The whole race may know almost immediately what is known and felt by any large body of individuals in it. The common interests of the race are thus emphasised, and the thought of any indi- vidual stimulated and broadened by his acquaintance with the experience of his brothers. (3) The same and similar causes have given a great impetus to the press. Not only are many more books printed than formerly; not only have newspapers in- creased rapidly in numbers and circulation; but there has arisen a host of periodicals, published weekly or at longer intervals, devoted less to news than to literature, which together reach a large part of the reading public. It may even be doubted whether the reading of people, at the end of the century, does not consist less of books than of periodicals of various sorts, including news- papers. This enormous growth of periodical literature has been rendered possible by the inventions that make printing less costly and more rapid, and by the fact thr.t 254 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. periodicals receive for the advertising of merchandise large sums which may be drawn upon for the payment of authors and artists. Books and periodicals have become cheaper, and, through the better organisation of the publishing trade, more easily obtainable. It is now possible to procure, for a comparatively small sum, a library which even fifty years ago would have been beyond the means of any but the rich. (4) It has been remarked (page 197) that in the eighteenth century communication with the continent of Europe increased, so that English literature stimu- lated that of other European nations, and was in turn stimulated by them. This process still continues. The civilised world has in some respects become a single body, for purposes of culture; and ideas or works of art that appeal strongly to one nation have their influ- ence upon all. With regard to English literature more particularly, it is noteworthy that a similar process has tended to remove the barriers between different classes of the reading public. The reduction in the price of printed matter; the increase in the amount; the growth of rapid communication; the consequent increase in knowledge, on the part of each individual or commu- nity, of what is thought and done by other individuals or communities; the industrial and legal changes that have tended to obliterate the differences in experience and opportunity between rich and poor; the decay of social distinctions; the increase in education among all classes, all these have assisted in bringing about a IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO 1881 2 55 remarkable unity of sentiment. An author may feel not only that he addresses a large audience, but that he is, to a great degree, in sympathy with large and appar- ently diverse portions of that audience. Nor is he addressing men alone, for, from the eighteenth century on, with new opportunities for education, women have constituted an increasingly large part of the English reading public, which is now composed of both sexes and of all classes, in many lands. The expansion of the reading public, which is char- acteristic of this century and which has been described above, and the accompanying increase in the production of printed matter, make it exceedingly difficult to sum- marise the history of English literature in this century. We must limit ourselves by speaking, with only the rarest exceptions, of men no longer living, and of English authors who have exerted a strong influence on the more thoughtful parts of this public. We must necessarily omit many such authors, but we must be careful not to include authors whose works, though they were widely circulated and became favourites with large numbers of people, have failed to exert a permanent influence, and, with slight changes of the popular taste, have passed into oblivion. 159. The Victorian Age. The period of prosperity which dawned upon England at about the time of Queen Victoria's accession to the throne, and which has lasted throughout the century, has been attended by an intel- lectual and emotional awakening of the nation, of which 2 $6 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. the growth of the reading public is merely a sign. In the fine arts, in the industrial arts, in pure and applied science, in all branches of human activity, the period has been one of continuous development. The literature of the period has been remarkable for its variety and excellence, not only in poetry, but in the several branches of prose. It has been lacking only in the drama, which has been so inconspicuous that we need not again refer to it. This lack seems to be mainly due to the fact that, following the line of Scott's suc- cesses, authors have cultivated the novel, which has throughout the century been the most profitable branch of literature, and to the fact that until recently it has been possible for the managers of theatres to please their audiences by the translation or adaptation of clever French plays. 1 60. The Romantic School in Prose. The romantic school in poetry has been clearly described in the pre- ceding chapter (pages 213-18). From the middle of the eighteenth century on, men had been turning away from the more formal classic models, and had been increas- ingly influenced by earlier English poetry, by the quaintness and romance of mediaeval life, by a desire to make use of the more impressive elements of verse, and, especially, by a growing sympathy for that in life which had the greatest emotional value. Under such influences the poetry of the nineteenth century became, in many respects, radically different from that of the eighteenth. The same influences were working to trans- IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO 1881 257 form prose literature, both in matter and in style. As to matter, it will be noticed that in this century writers have been deeply interested in the emotional life of the past and the present, tending in novels to the narration of stirring incidents or the portrayal of striking types, and, in other forms of prose, to whatever moved the hearts of the people through beauty, sympathy, sense of contrast, or the embodiment of vigorous ideals. They have been anxious to draw on all material that would incite us to tears or laughter, or that would fill us with enthusiasm, or that seemed to involve impressive or impelling truths. This impulse has been, to a great extent, shared by the other great European literatures. It has persisted throughout the century, and is still, in a somewhat modified form, a dominant force. 161. The Scientific Movement. Less easily recog- nised, less often flowering into great literature, there runs throughout the period a strong impulse towards research and observation, towards the accurate and dis- passionate statement of the full truth in all branches of human knowledge. In science, men who appreciated the grandeur and dignity of their calling have made efforts to make clear to the common people the results of organised investigation; in history and economics, to make clear the real purport of past and present events and the principles of human action involved; and in philosophy, theology, and kindred subjects of enquiry, to learn the truth at all costs and to reproduce it faith- fully. In the novel a similar impulse, common to most 8 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. modern literatures, has led some writers to a more de- tailed observation of the facts of life, and to the presen- tation of them in a less fanciful fashion. This method is called " realism." It was at first feared that the whole scientific movement would tend to weaken the power of the imagination in literature; but there seems to be room in our hearts for both interests, that in life as portrayed by the skilled observer and that in life as portrayed by the man of imagination, and it is grow- ing clearer that the two can often be combined. 162. Prose Style in the Nineteenth Century. By the middle of the eighteenth century a good prose style had already been formed. It was clear and orderly, the courteous language of accomplished gentlemen, and was free from the intricacy and eccentricity of earlier periods. In Goldsmith it was simple and flowing; in Johnson, dignified, if not pompous; in Burke and Gib- bon, sonorous. In the nineteenth century the essential qualities of clearness and dignity have been perpetuated; but we have also learned to expect, in prose literature, a certain melody or singing quality, as if the writer were appealing to the ear even more than to the eye; and, even when this is absent, at least an earnest eloquence, as is appropriate when the appeal is to the emotions as well as to the intellect. 163. The Novel. From Defoe to Scott the hold of the novel on the public grew stronger. Each great novelist, moreover, added something to the development of his art. Defoe taught his skill in arousing curiosity; IX Richardson, the use of detail and of sentiment; Field- ing, the creation of characters that have all the sem- blance of reality; Smollett, the force of rough humour and the sketching of whimsical characters; Miss Austen, the building up of characters through minute observa- tion. Scott first gave the modern public the taste for the rapidly moving tale of romantic adventure. Dickens succeeded Scott as a popular favourite, but before taking him up we must speak of several novelists of less importance in the early part of the century. FREDERICK MARRYAT followed Smollett in his rough tales of sea life, the best of which are Peter Simple (1834) and Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836). Full of eccentric characters, practical jokes, and amusing incidents, they portrayed so admirably the bluff and hearty side of active life as long to keep their freshness and charm. CHARLES LEVER, an Irishman, in Charles O'Malley (1841) and many other tales of the same sort, did for the army what Marryat did for the navy. His novels are weak in plot, but full of dashing adventure and bubbling over with merriment. BENJAMIN DISRAELI, Earl of Beaconsfield, the great Tory statesman, was the author of many novels dealing with fashionable life, of which the best are perhaps Coningsby (1844) and Sybil (1845), which have in common the motive of explaining the principles and ideals on which he based the reconstruction of his party. Loose in plot, but brilliant in style, they won the public partly through their cleverness, partly because they dealt 26O ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. with the rich and the great, and partly because they are mainly biographies, as it were, of ardent, impression- able, and ambitious minds. They are likewise remark- able because in them, for the first time in English literature, were revealed the brilliance and wisdom of the Jewish race. Edward Lytton Bulwer, Lord Lytton, more commonly known as BULWER- LYTTON, wrote a long series of novels with the definite purpose of entertaining the public. They were of many sorts, as became his versatile genius, and were received with favour partly because, like Disraeli's, they drew many of their charac- ters from high life, of which the growing multitude of readers heard with delight, but chiefly because they often dealt with mystery and crime, and because, again like Disraeli's tales, they followed Byron's narrative poems in presenting, in an heroic light, men of great ambition, whether for good or for ill. Romanticism worshipped the individual whose spirit was high and whose will was strong. The novel of Bulwer-Lytton's that retains its interest most permanently is The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), which is fortunate in having as its theme one of the most tragic events in all history. GEORGE BOR- ROW'S intimate acquaintance with the Gypsies and his experiences as a colporteur in Spain gave him material for The Bible in Spain (1843), Lavengro (1851), and other volumes of romantic adventure. To CHARLOTTE BRONTE belongs the distinction of having produced per- haps the most typical English novel of the Romantic school, Jane Eyre (1847), the heroine of which conceals IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO 1881 26 1 an indomitable will under the exterior of a quiet and plain governess, on whom is centred the fiery passion of a grim hero of higher station. The real successor of Scott, however, was CHARLES DICKENS, who, from Pickwick Papers (1837) to Our Mutual Friend (1865), poured forth a series of re- markable novels, which were read wherever the English tongue was known, and which made their author beloved from the palace of the prince to the camp of the Cali- fornian miner. If Scott was the Wizard of the North, Dickens was the Wizard of the South. He had Scott's genius for story-telling; he knew the way to the hearts of the people; and, at a time when the uniformity of modern life was beginning to do away with many of the external differences between persons and places, he fol- lowed Smollett in creating a host of odd characters, taken largely from the ranks of the poor and the humble. These fantastic figures he produced in such numbers and with such vitality that they form a little world of their own; and we often say of odd people that they look as if they had stepped from the pages of Dickens. His tales all appeal strongly to the emotions, sometimes by humour, sometimes by horror or pathos. They all have a strong dramatic element, are now farcical, now melodramatic, and, at their best, delightful comedies. His queer characters have the semblance of life, but we feel them to be creatures of the fancy, who could not exist in an actual world. In spite of this, he was a man who knew well what English life was, especially among 262 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. the poorer classes, and earnestly tried to make it better by picturing its evils; and his tender heart and the won- derful power of his fancy made him one of the great English story-tellers. Equally great as a master of tears and gentle laughter was WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, who, though less widely popular than Dickens, was, and is, on the whole, a greater favourite with readers of more social expe- rience. Of gentler birth, breeding, and education, Thackeray began his career by dabbling both in art and in letters; and it was only in 1848, when Vanity Fair appeared, that the public realised that a new and great interpreter of life had arisen. Vanity Fair was followed by Pendennis (1850), Esmond (1852), The Newcomes (1855), and The Virginians (1859), as well as by two volumes of lectures, English Humourists (1853) and The Four Georges (1860). A just idea of Thackeray's merits can be obtained by contrasting his work with that of Dickens. (i) In the field of the creative imagination they are both great, but Thackeray's char- acters belong largely to the so-called upper classes. (2) Thackeray's characters, like those of Fielding, impress one less as odd than as real, less as what we could fancy ourselves as being than as what we are. (3) Thackeray does not so much tell a rapid and exciting tale as follow a curious form of confidential address, as if he were actually speaking directly to the reader. His style and his matter are full of the personal qualities of a man who, by sympathy and experience, IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO 1881 263 knew the life of the social world, and presented his views, without exaggeration, in the careless but modu- lated voice of a gentleman in conversation. The absence of melodrama in his writings, and his habit of gently railing at cant and hypocrisy in all its forms, have some- times brought on him the reproach of cynicism; but it is now more apparent that his zeal was always for truth and honour. He felt stirring in his own heart the im- pulses that led now to virtue, now to vice, and was too candid to represent life as other than it was; too full of sympathy with all his brother-men to represent them otherwise than as compounded of the clay of which we all are fashioned. His Henry Esmond is generally agreed to be, of all historical novels in English, that which most faithfully reproduces the life of a vanished epoch, and may profitably be contrasted, in its methods, with Dickens' Tale of Two Cities. Marian Evans, who wrote under the name of GEORGE ELIOT, was a country girl of great power of mind and much learning, who reached middle life before she realised that she had a natural talent for the creation of character and the telling of tales. In her first stories and novels, Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), she revealed her talent, and displayed also, in dealing with simple and earnest characters and with country life, much power of humour, of pathos, and even of tragedy, and especially a deep feeling for moral problems. In her later works, . Tom's Cabin (1852), a novel which has probably had a larger circulation than any other book of the century, and of which Lincoln said, only half in jest, that it had brought about the Civil War. Mrs. Stowe wrote many other books, some of which give quaint pictures of rural life in New England, but none of them equalled her romance of slav- ery, which was translated into many tongues and read everywhere by the poor and oppressed, as well as by all who sympathised with them. It owed its extraordinary power, not to graces of style or peculiar skill in narrative, though the author possessed such skill to a consider- able degree, but to the fact that the subject involved was then burning in the hearts of men, and to the fact that, as no one had foreseen, the strongest possible argu- ments against slavery were not those derived from the Constitution or from any theory as to the abstract rights of man, but the elemental feelings aroused by this artless tale of a country clergyman's wife, who, busied with her housework and her babies, had yet time to brood over the wrongs done by law to the helpless and the innocent. Poe died in 1849, Cooper in 1851, Irving in 1859, Haw- thorne in 1864. When the Civil War was over and there was again a surplus of energy to devote to fiction, the last of the earlier generation of story-tellers in America had passed away. Slowly there grew up a new genera- tion, but it had other subjects and other ways. The effect of the war had been to break down in many ways the barriers to complete understanding and sympathy between different parts of the country, and to allow us to 3d PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 29? form stronger ties of association with other nations. The bitter experience of the tragedy of national and individual life gained through the great conflict had swept away many national and local absurdities, and brought us into the full current of modern thought and feeling. The results of this clarifying process were two : we gained interest in ourselves, and we were in a position to appre- ciate the contemporary movements of European thought. Up to 1870 no one had written well of modern American life. Cooper had confined himself largely to colonial and revolutionary times, Hawthorne and Foe lived in a world of dreams. But from the Luck of Roaring Camp (1870) in which FRANCIS BRET HARTE depicted, some- what after the manner of Dickens, the rough but sterling characters of the extreme West, to the end of the cen- tury, the trend of fiction was towards the portrayal of characters distinctive of special parts of the country, scarcely any section of which is not now well represented in current literature. Though romance has happily not died out from American life or American fiction, there has also been a strong trend towards realism in fiction, the leaders in this movement, WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS and HENRY JAMES, following, with important variations, the general method of the strong European school, from which England has to a great degree held herself aloof (page 265). It is also interesting to notice the promi- nent part played in the literature of this period by the short story, which, from Poe and Hawthorne on, has been a favourite with American authors, and which has proved 298 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. an excellent vehicle for the studies of local character, towards which, as has just been said, prose fiction so strongly tended. 177. Statesmen. A democratic government is by nature prolific in political orators, who arouse the people to the appreciation of whatever is essential in matters under public discussion, and who, addressing large and representative audiences, and taking for their themes national issues, are themselves incited to their fullest powers by the magnitude of the interests involved, and the fact that they stand face to face with those to whom they appeal, and do not address the impersonal reader through the medium of the printed page. In the United States, the period between the War of 1812 and the Civil War was especially rich in such orators, particularly in the Senate, where for forty years debate centred on the most vital questions, affecting the unity and welfare of the young republic. Of these statesmen the greatest was DANIEL WEBSTER, whose penetrating intellect, magnificent voice, grand presence, sincere devotion to the cause of national unity, and extraordinary power of marshalling facts and principles so as to produce conviction, have caused him to be ranked among the great orators of the world, and made him one of the strongest forces in that slow process by which the inhabitants of many federated states came to feel themselves one nation. The work of ABRAHAM LINCOLN began as that of Web- ster closed, and it has become plain that the work of both was part of the same great task of awakening a nation. XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 2Q9 Great minds, like those of Hamilton and Webster, had long held forth the idea of complete national unity. With Hamilton the idea was a political abstraction. Webster was the voice that taught the concept to the people. Lin- coln, born of the very heart of the people, self-taught, and growing spontaneously towards the right, was the token that the mass of the people had unconsciously made that concept their own, and became the great instrument by which that concept became realised. A less powerful orator than Webster, who spoke after the fashion of Demosthenes and Cicero, he uttered his plain thoughts only in the homely speech of the people. Not much of what he said and wrote belongs to literature, but those few words, as in the Address at Gettysburg (1863) and the Second Inaugural Address (1865), sank into the hearts of men, for he spoke in the name of the nation and as its good genius. 1 78. Historians. The first American historian who was also a man of letters was undoubtedly Cotton Mather, whose conception of the Magnalia Christi Americana was that it should record all that was essential in the history of the church, which was to him what our country is to us. But it was destined that more than a century and a half should pass before a writer of equal power should attempt to deal with any important part of our history. We may except Irving's biographies of Colum- bus and Washington, works of solid merit, whose real value has been obscured by their author's reputation as a writer of stories. But Irving was not a historian of the 3OO ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP first rank, and WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT and JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY, who were, chose foreign themes. Prescott was fascinated by the romance of Spanish dis- covery. His Conquest of Mexico (1843) an ^ Conquest of Peru (1847) were the result of elaborate and pains- taking research, a task made more onerous by the fact that he was nearly blind. The entrancing theme and his firm but somewhat cold style made his works widely read, and it is to be regretted that the science of archaeology was then so little advanced as to allow him to form an altogether false conception of the primitive people of whom he wrote. Motley, equally attracted by Spanish history, chose for a theme the struggle with the Nether- lands and the establishment there of a democratic gov- ernment, a subject which he investigated with equal thoroughness, and treated, in his Rise of the Dutch Re- public (1856) and History of the United Netherlands (i 86 1-68), in a noble and impassioned style, and with sympathy for the cause of political and religious freedom. FRANCIS PARKMAN, superior to both as a historian and a man of letters, chose the struggle between France and England for supremacy in the New World, an epic theme, which, though partly disabled by ill health, he treated in full in a series of works, beginning with the Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851) and closing with A Half- Century of Conflict (1892). Parkman's mastery of his subject was complete, and his style, clear, pure, supple, and brilliant, though less sonorous than that of Gibbon, has not been surpassed by that of any historian. The XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES $01 history of the United States has been attempted, in whole or in part, by many excellent writers, among whom should be mentioned GEORGE BANCROFT, and has been made the subject of much detailed research, but no one has yet treated it in such a fashion that his work has become literature. 179. The New England Group of Essayists. As we have said, it was in New England that the life of the in- tellect and of the spirit was the most intense in the seven- teenth and the eighteenth centuries. The same statement holds true of the nineteenth century, up to, at least, the time of the Civil War. The Puritan inheritance was a remarkable one. On generation after generation it had impressed the immense importance of the soul and its relation to a personal God, thereby awakening to an ex- traordinary degree the consciousness of the individual. It had, moreover, kept the eyes of man open to the mys- terious side of existence, teaching him to watch for mani- festations of God and the devil. On the other hand, the narrowness and bigotry of the sect had sealed all the aesthetic senses of man, forcing him to fix his attention alone upon his own sins and the just anger of an avenging God, and rendering greater his torments on earth by teaching, explicitly or implicitly, that his doom or his pardon had been predestined from all eternity. As time passed by, this grim conception of life became modified. The New England colleges had gone steadily on with their work of education. More important still, the com- mon sense of the people awoke, touching life with humour 3O2 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. and sagacity. Beginning in the early years of the nine- teenth century, there arose what might be called a human- istic or humanitarian movement, both within and without the church, which insisted less on man's innate moral de- pravity and more on his power, in many ways, to lay him- self open to spiritual influences, and by high resolve and earnest effort to make himself and the world better. Cutting itself adrift from the church sometimes, the move- ment showed itself in strange and transient sects and in wild schemes for the better organization of society, and produced swarms of fanatic reformers. It was also closely associated with political and literary movements. It was the mother of abolitionism, and it led directly to the tran- cendental theories that were the basis of Emerson's phil- osophy. Slowly the reticent New England mind, so cold and grim, so closed to aught but God, opened also to man, and the result was, for half a century, an outpouring of the heart in prose and song that constitutes the major part of American literature. Of the writers we have mentioned, Webster, Hawthorne, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman were New Englanders, and of those whom we have still to mention, Emerson, Thoreau, Holmes, Lowell, Bryant, Longfellow, and Whittier. Most of them, too, came of Massachusetts stock, and are associated with the north-eastern part of that state, where the Puritan civi- lisation put out its deepest roots, and where the humani- tarian movement found its chief seat. The humanitarian movement may then be in general defined as an awakening to a sense of human relations. XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 303 In this literary and philosophical movement the chief figure for many years was RALPH WALDO EMERSON, who combined the two strains of New England thought repre- sented by Cotton Mather and by Franklin. For two centuries one group of minds had been mystics, and another the incarnation of common sense ; one stood for the priesthood, the other for the people. Emerson's fathers had long been clergymen, and he began his career by preaching. His mind instinctively turned to the un- seen. His philosophy, best expressed perhaps in Nature (1836), was that of the German idealists, that all vis- ible is but a form of the spirit, a manifestation of God ; that man himself is another division of that same spirit, having knowledge of God, its source, through innate ideas. But though his thought ran at times to the extreme of mysticism, it had that singular characteristic which we find in Franklin and in Lincoln, and which makes us feel them American. He loved simple things and ways and people. He saw into the hearts of men with eyes not distorted by erudition or dogma, and read there the es- sential elements of human action. More like Montaigne than any other European author, he loved to be the voice of wisdom and to utter in the homeliest manner the most vital truths. He lectured much and wrote much, in- fluencing men strongly in both ways. His Essays (1841, 1844), Representative Men (1850), and Conduct of Life (1860), were great forces in awakening the people, for, whatever subject he treated, he preached freedom of thought, nobility of mind, and high resolution. 3O4 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Emerson's friend and fellow- townsman, published only two books during his lifetime, A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers (1848), and Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), though since his death several other volumes have been compiled from his papers. Thoreau was a man of education, but he preferred to support himself by the work of his own hands. He was an expert pencil-maker, an excellent surveyor, and by the intermittent exercise of these em- ployments, as well as by farm labour, he earned enough for his simple needs. Much of his time was spent in the open air, either in the woods and fields about his native place, or in occasional longer journeys through New England. His ruling passions were his deep and constant delight in nature and his love of simplicity and independence. Both passions were most completely and naturally grati- fied when he passed more than two years in a little hut which he built by Walden pond near Concord, tilling a small plot of ground, and depending for sustenance and for enjoyment almost entirely on his own resources. His books are the reflection of a singularly quiet and beautiful character, self- poised and self- controlled like that of a stoic, but full of a sympathy with nature that became at times almost mystic. No one has known nature in New England better than he, or approached him in the description of it, or given better expression to the type of New England feeling that finds content and high thoughts in a quiet and simple country life. Few contrasts can be greater than that between Emer- XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 305 son and Thoreau, with their gentle and thoughtful country ways, and OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, long professor of anatomy at the Harvard Medical School in Boston. Holmes said jestingly of his city that it was the hub of the solar universe, but it is plain that in his heart he felt this to be true, for neither his subjects nor his sympathies often allow him to stray far beyond the city borders. His genius had in it no touch of the mystic ; he was not greatly impressed by nature ; he did not love solitude ; his social and professional connections held him aloof from the common folk ; he was essentially an aristocrat. But his intellect, if little touched by the imagination, was keen, and his wit brilliant ; and he was a shrewd observer of human nature. Of his verse we shall speak later ; it was by his prose that he caught the ear of the people. In the first volume of the Atlantic Monthly, destined to contain for a period so much of the best in American literature, appeared his Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858), and this was followed by The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1860), and The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872). They are essay-novels, and begin quite after the fashion of Tristram Shandy. The novel ele- ment, though slight, is worth taking account of, in that it is so complete a foil to the work of Hawthorne. Holmes takes the types of a Boston boarding-house as his charac- ters. He throws no veil of glamour over them, as Haw- thorne would have done, but judges them as a physician might, with an accurate knowledge of their physical and mental peculiarities. The shrewd estimates of people, f 3O6 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. the pretty little romances he imagines about them as a man might imagine such things for his own amusement pleased everyone ; and everyone was also pleased by the essay elements, the wise and witty opinions of men and things, the humour, the pathos, the fashion all his own, in which, as it were, he turned inside out the gar- ment of life, allowing men to smile at the oddities re- vealed, but showing them also, by this whimsical method, something more of its true shape than they would other- wise have known. Most of the writers whom we have mentioned in this chapter were graduated from Harvard College, which in the first half of the century performed a unique service in firing the ambition of young men in letters at the same time that she trained their judgment and moulded their taste. GEORGE TICKNOR, the historian of Spanish litera- ture, held the famous professorship of belles-lettres from 1820 to 1835, and was succeeded by Longfellow, and he in his turn, in 1855, by JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, who, like his predecessor, was already a poet, and who was also to become the first critic in the land. Lowell had many accomplishments. He had a wide knowledge of the romance languages and literatures, and of English prose and poetry. He was for years editor of the Atlantic Monthly and of the North American Review, and he served as ambassador both to Spain and to England. But his most conspicuous service to his country and to literature were his critical essays, which deal almost invariably with great literature and are the fruit of long XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 307 reading and study. Lowell had a genius for criticism. His style was rich and buoyant, abounding in happy fancies and striking turns of expression. Less dogmatic than Arnold, and less occupied with the foundation of a critical method, he wrote with more enthusiasm as well as with greater knowledge. With all his interest in foreign literature, a sound knowledge of which he did much to make possible in America, he was a lover of his own country and our own letters. He was of the stock that made New England, and he never lost his deep affection for her peculiar characteristics, her idiosyncra- sies of language and temper, and the great principles which she has done so much to establish in American life. The chapter would be incomplete were we to omit mention of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known under his pseudonym, MARK TWAIN, whose works have perhaps been more widely read than those of any other English author of this century. He may be classed as a novelist. Huckleberry Finn (1884) and its sequels, as well as other stories, are, apart from their ludicrous side, of great value as fiction, for they portray with great vividness and accuracy phases of American life before the Civil War, particularly in the Mississippi valley. But his wide fame is chiefly due to his Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), and A Tramp Abroad (1880), which not only provoked hearty laugh- ter but served also to mould the thought of the nation. Beneath all his extravagance and whimsicality 3O8 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. of statement, beneath apparent irreverence and (some- times) even coarseness, there lurks a serious and a high motive. Mark Twain, like Franklin and Lincoln, came of the people, and he represents, in much the same way that Lincoln did, the mass of the people, their native ideals, their real temper, their impatience of mere learn- ing and mere convention and mere fancy. And so his own laughter was echoed by theirs whenever he touched on vital questions of character and conduct, showing, for example, as he did in Innocents Abroad, the foolishness of that form of European travel that cultivates affectation, mock appreciation, and the worship of the mere acci- dents of antiquity, which civilisation has long justly discarded. A deadly foe of sham and cant in all their forms, strong in his sanity and in his reliance upon the beliefs and principles of the people, he has been as brave a soldier for the cause of humanity as was Heine. XII POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES 309 CHAPTER XII POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES 1 80. Prose rather than poetry has been the natural form of expression in American literature, a form wholly consonant with our national mood, that of clear- headed, well-ordered aspiration. The part of literature which we call poetry is great in importance, but very limited in its field. Only ideas of certain sorts can be expressed by it. Its production is dependent, to a large degree, on a state of society in which an author is free to live a life of resolute leisure like that of Tennyson or Shelley, free from all that would divert his fancy or his imagination from communion with his dreamlike ideals. Such opportunities the American social system rarely fur- nishes. Our thoughts have been of necessity immediately concerned with the present, with what has been done, with what must now be done. Prose is, therefore, our characteristic language, the language of debate, and discussion, and explanation, the language of the orator, the statesman, the historian, the critic, the novelist. It must not be forgotten, however, that there are three elements in American life that have had a great influence JIO ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. in moulding the national character, and which have, to some degree, given to our poetry traits peculiarly Ameri- can. These are, first, the influence of American scenery, BO wild, so dominating, so long free from the touch of man; second, the religious influence of the forms of dissenting Christianity most wide-spread among us, all of which have tended to awaken an intense interest in the inner life, the life of the soul, with its subtle hopes and fears, with its tenderness of conscience, its sympathy with human frailty, its reliance on the unseen ; third, the pervading influence of a well-assimilated democracy, in which there was long little difference in comfort, edu- cation, and refinement between the rich and the poor, the great and the humble, and where each individual and each household knew the joys of homely living. These elements the attentive student will find running throughout American verse. Unlike the prose of our century, it has not been in volume and value com- parable with that produced by some other great nations, and particularly by England, but it has yet had its modest glories. 181. Early American Verse. There is little early American verse worth mentioning. Between the landing of the Pilgrims and Bryant's Thanatopsis (1817) there had passed two centuries in which no melodious voice was heard. Religion had stifled poetry ; the trend of life had been away from it. If we had been a primitive race we might have had our epics and ballads ; but we were too old for these, and too young, too distracted by toil, XII POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES 311 to sing in a new fashion of a new life. What verse there was followed European models, feeble imitations, in the seventeenth century, of Donne and Quarles and Du Bartas ; and, in the eighteenth, of Butler and Pope. The first sign of quickening spirit was the swarm of political and satirical ballads in Revolutionary times, of which survives only the rollicking tune and bantering words of Yankee Doodle. After the establishment of the Repub- lic, we have, in addition, a few poems endeared to us by tradition as the first lispings of patriotic verse, Hail Co- lumbia (1798) and the Star Spangled Banner (1814). Then came more ambitious, but still artless attempts to sing of New World stuff, such as those made by PHILIP FRENEAU, who, before Cooper, saw the romance of the Indian, of whom his fathers had thought only as a danger- ous beast ; or by JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE, who wrote the American Flag, the best piece of patriotic verse in the early century, and the Culprit Fay (1835), in which the birds and beasts and 'flowers of our own land begin to appear in our poetry ; or by his friend, FITZ-GREENE HALLECK, who wrote so tenderly of his death. Nor must we omit mention of JOHN HOWARD PAYNE, whose Home, Sweet Home (1823) touched deeply the hearts of a land where men migrate so freely. 1810. Bryant. American poetry, however, begins with William Cullen Bryant. Born in 1794, in the Berk- shire highlands, he shared as a boy in the austere life of early New England, where, though few knew want, every farmer's boy was hardened to fatigue and cold, and $12 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. taught stern lessons of frugality by tasks that bred reso- luteness and self-control. The terrors of inexorable fore- ordination and punishment were ceasing somewhat to haunt men's minds, but there was little innocent mirth and spontaneous joy. Life was work, and work against odds. Bryant spent the years of his manhood in New York, where he became a distinguished journalist, but his best verse, Thanatopsis, To a Water-Fowl, The Death of the Flowers, was either written in his boyhood or is wholly removed hi spirit from his later urban life. It breathes a high spirit of austerity and stoic resignation, and is the song of men who, escaped from the haunting terrors of superstition, look anew on nature, and see in it only what is cold and dark and silent the stern, unsetting stars, the silent beauty of the wilderness, the desolate sea, but are still " sustained and soothed by an unfaltering trust." 182. Longfellow and Whittier. The best-known name in American poetry is that of HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, whose first experiments in verse were pub- lished as early as 1826. His ambition from boyhood was to enter the then entirely unprofitable field of litera- ture, but his interests were fortunately in part those of the student and teacher. His work as instructor in mod- ern languages at Bowdoin College attracted attention, and after several years of study and travel abroad he suc- ceeded George Ticknor in the now famous professorship of belles-lettres at Harvard College. Longfellow's work as a teacher was of great service to the cause of letters in America, for no one in his time did more to diffuse the XII POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES 313 knowledge and appreciation of what was best in European literature. As a poet, a part of his influence lay along the same lines. He translated much foreign verse, always with grace and fidelity, setting the seal on his labours by his memorable rendering of the Divine Comedy (1867). But his influence was greater than that of a translator. The Golden Legend (\%$i} and almost num- berless minor pieces, bred of his own fancy or based on foreign originals, reproduced the inner spirit of mediaeval times, at least on its gentler side, the glamour and romance alike of southern climes and of the north. A close student of European literature and sensitive to literary movements, he conceived in his apprentice days the idea of creating new forms in American literature, by applying to native material the methods already common elsewhere. The idea was a natural one and the execution was admirable. His two early attempts at native ballads, The Skeleton in Armor and The Wreck of the Hesperus, were entirely successful, and his later attempts at the pastoral and the epic Evangeline (1847), after the manner of Goethe's Her- mann and Dorothea, and Hiawatha (1855), in the metre of the Finnish Kalevala, were not only im- mensely popular, serving their purpose in awakening the country to the romance of its own soil, but must remain permanent monuments of our literature. Though Long- fellow was a master pioneer in this way, he was most loved by the people for the gentle moralising of his verse. A kindly man, devoted to his work and to his family and 314 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHA*. friends, he cared little for the great contemporary move- ments in thought and politics. He loved the outward aspects of nature, without passion or mysticism, and drew from them, with the quaintness of the early German romanticists, little lessons, as in The Rainy Day. He was not a great thinker, and his work, like his life, held aloof from great or intricate problems ; but he sang sweetly and gently, his heart was pure, his sympathy strong, and he lived a simple life. He was the first to reveal to us the magic of foreign poetry and to show us that American subjects had as much romance as those of Europe. He appealed to the young and old, to men and women, and he was the greatest household poet of the century. An almost exact contemporary of Longfellow was JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, born in 1807, in Haverhill, Massa- chusetts, of a family that had been permanently settled in that vicinity since the early days of the seventeenth century. His early life was that of the ordinary farmer's lad, full of labour and hardship, and free from affectation. His formal education was slight, but he knew men and good books, and his skill as a rhymster and his interest in public affairs led him into journalism and politics. By 1832 he had won a name for himself in both fields, and seemed likely to represent his district in Congress, but his delicate health forced him to give up his ambitions in either direction, and he retired to his native county, where he spent, with slight exceptions, the remainder of his long life. Whittier was first known by his political verse. XII POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES 31$ A Quaker, with the spirit of a reformer, he early joined the anti-slavery party, and became one of the leading abolitionists, and certainly the great poet of the move- ment. His verses were efficacious in moulding the opinions of all ranks of society in the North and West, from the President and his Cabinet to the lowest soldier or tax-payer; but they were instruments in a transient struggle, the product of discord and sectional feeling, and cannot perhaps be expected to remain permanently in the national memory. Whittier's religious verse is much more national in character. His Quaker tolerance, his life of moral ear- nestness, his gentle, unspotted character, and his simple way of taking the world, made him a fitting spokesman in verse of the more liberal religious feeling of the day. It is, however, by his verses on country life, as in Snow- Bound (1866) and The Tent on the Beach (1867), rather than by his political or religious poetry, that Whittier will be remembered. A bachelor and an invalid, not bound by the ties that commonly blind men to wider thoughts than society and ambition, following pursuits that gave ample leisure for meditation, he lived, with Quaker and Puritan frugality, a life full of reminiscence of boyhood days and of the country ways that had never ceased to be his. And this reminiscence and this sympathy became the voice of a whole multitude, East and West, that still toiled in the fields, or turned gladly back in spirit from city counting-houses to the orchards and brooks of their early years. Without Longfellow's learning and cultiva- 3l6 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAR tion, he rivalled him too on his own field, reviving inci- dents of early New England life after a less bookish fashion, and one truer alike to the facts and to the temper of the time, in ballads that are among the best in modern English literature. 183. Emerson, Holmes, and Lowell. Longfellow was closely connected with the group of New England prose- writers described in the preceding chapter; Whittier, owing to his country life and retiring habits, stood some- what outside of it. Hawthorne and Thoreau were not poets; but EMERSON, HOLMES, and LOWELL, the three remaining figures in what might be called the Boston or Cambridge school, were poets as well as prose-writers, though their fame in the former field is not so great as in the latter. In prose, EMERSON'S glory was that by his noble phi- losophy he thrilled the young and earnest with the desire to live lives self-controlled, self-reliant, hopeful, simple; and his voice was the first in America to rouse such enthusiasm in the hearts of the aspiring, and to teach such noble lessons. In verse Emerson's influence was not different. Indeed, poetry and prose seemed to him closely akin. His imagination once kindled and finding vent in words, it was merely a matter of throwing them into groups of one kind or another, or of so altering them at times that they fell into a simple rhythm or made simple rhymes or assonances. His ear was not keen in either respect, and it is said that at times he scarcely knew whether what he had written was prose or verse. XII POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES 317 Yet such was the naked power of his imagination that, as in the case of the Hebrew poets, we find a simple art the fitting medium for thoughts of singular simplicity and remarkable power. The thought of the essays is in large measure that of the poems, which are mainly gnomic or didactic, the sage's aphorisms, pregnant with deep sug- gestion, as in his mystical and beautiful Brahma. Some- times, however, he undertook historical subjects, as in the famous Concord Hymn, or was moved to give utter- ance to the emotion caused by his own personal experi- ence, as in the most touching of his poems, // is Time to Be Old and the Threnody. But his best-known work has perhaps been his nature poems, The Humble-Bec, Monadnock, and The Snow-storm, where his art is more like that of Whittier, and stamps them both as men who had seen nature face to face, with the eyes of simple humanity, and not through library windows. HOLMES was the city member of the little group, and his verse has the urban qualities that remind us of Pope and Queen Anne's London. He was only about twenty when his spirited lines on the proposed destruction of the old frigate Constitution (1830) were on everyone's lips. His first volume of poems (1836) showed the quali- ties that remained his throughout life. He had the gift of broad and farcical humour, the more delicate art of wit, and a vein of genuine pathos and serious thought, the last at its best in the Last Leaf and the Chambered Nau- tilus. But it was wit, the pun, the sparkling jest, the neatly turned and salient thought, that made him the 3l8 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. favourite poet at public or private gatherings in his native state ; and though little of his verse on trivial topics and occasions now no longer memorable can ultimately sur- vive, it is astonishing how much of it retains its interest. He was less an imitator of Pope than a belated member of Pope's own school, with equal wit and skill in epigram, and a power over Pope's favourite metre that has not been equalled except by Pope. Like Holmes, LOWELL was a wit, and it was by clever satire and humorous criticism that he first won favour in his Biglow Papers (1848 and 1867) and his Fable for Critics (1848). He differs from Holmes, however, in that his talent is that of the brilliant improvisatore rather than that of the somewhat mechanical artist, and that he dealt with larger subjects. Holmes had an eighteenth century heart, tolerant and kindly, but at bottom coldly observant of human nature and incapable of devotion to a cause. Lowell was made in a later and larger mould. His heart was set on the welfare of his country, and so, scholar and Yankee that he was, he gave his political satire the flavour of rustic speech and jest, as only one could do who was learned in antiquarian lore and bred in the stronghold of the New England spirit. His best serious verse was The Vision of Sir Launfal (1848), a mediaeval tale, in the manner of Longfellow, with a prelude and interlude which are accurately descriptive of nature in New England, and the noble Commemoration Ode (1865). 184. Poe. We now leave the New England school of poets, passing to POE, who was the only writer outside XII POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES 319 of New England who was contemporary with them, and to later poets. Poe published thin volumes in 1827, 1829, and 1831, containing, at least in germ, many of his best poems ; and his last volume of collected verse appeared in 1845. It must therefore be kept in mind that he wrote before any of the preceding writers, except Bryant, had done work that would justify their present reputation. Poe had closer affinities with Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats than had any other American poet, and is our soli- tary figure on that side of the romantic school. He ab- horred didacticism in verse, and loved the form of poetry which by rhythm and melody appeals exclusively to the imagination. What he wrote was short, exquisite in form, and ethereal in matter, the artistic expression of moods that are allied to madness, moods in which death con- quers all, and ghosts and demons and evil harbingers are on every hand. This unreal world he sung in a melody more piercingly sweet, more haunting, more mystically sad and terrible than that of any other American poet, and the peculiarities of his genius and of his art have caused him rightly to be hailed, in his limited field of pure fancy, as the greatest that has arisen among us. 185. Whitman and Later Poets. Emerson had de- clared that men must look into their own hearts and on nature for inspiration and solace, and that Americans must find the stimulus for their own literature hi their own national and personal experiences. As if in response to his call and his example, Hawthorne, Longfellow, and Whittier were doing, in the sixth decade of the century, 32O ENGLISH LITERATURE CHA*. their most characteristic work ; and in the same decade appeared a thin volume entitled Leaves of Grass (1855), by WALT WHITMAN. This, with succeeding productions of the same character, have been much read, and, espe- cially in Europe, have been thought typical of the ideas of a great democracy. Whitman's manner was that of the rhapsodist, who, deeply moved and despising con- vention, uttered his thought in language depending largely for its effect on its irregular rhythm, usually without the aid of rhyme. Like Whittier, and with him almost alone among our poets, Whitman knew the life of the people. But it was the old New England farming folk with which Whittier was familiar. Whitman knew the humbler city folk, firemen and drivers and mechanics, more typical even than farmers of the men whose political judgment or caprice determines the destinies of our municipalities or the nation. These men, as symbols of democracy, he idolised, seeing in them the nobility of active and healthy life. He felt himself their brother, the type of the race. He sang of them, of his joy in comradeship with them, of their wondrous diversity of toil, of a commonwealth based on honest living and plain thinking, of the joy of mere physical existence, of the great panorama of nature spread before us, of national ideals, of our heroes. His song was full of uncouth words and rough thoughts, and not free from affectation, and the people of whom he wrote have not understood him ; but others have, and the grandeur of his conception and the majestic sweep of his verse entitle him to a place among our poets. XU POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES 321 Poe died young, in 1849, but the other poets mentioned in this chapter lived singularly long and happy lives. Even the venerable Bryant lived until 1878; Longfellow and Emerson, until 1882; Lowell, until 1891; Whittier and Whitman, until 1892 ; and Holmes, until 1894. The men who began American poetry have, then, survived almost until the end of the century. Of these men, the New England poets formed a group by themselves, whose tendencies and habits of thought give our verse its chief characteristics, namely, simplicity and a love for the di- dactic. In the first respect they differ greatly from the contemporary English school, who, from Keats to Ten- nyson, have depended to a large degree on the exquisite finish which they gave to their verse. In the second respect, the American school followed the lead of Words- worth. Whitman may, on the whole, be regarded as a member of the New England school in spirit, and as merely push- ing to an extreme the methods of Emerson and Thoreau, though it must be confessed that it is easier to put him in a class by himself. At all events, he has had no prominent disciples, and his influence, wherever felt, has served merely to add to the simplicity of our verse and its disregard of the more intricate conventions of form. Poe's influence, on the contrary, has led towards greater care for form and interest in the craftsman's side of poetry. The influence of the school of the Pre-Raphael- ites, which would have worked in the same direction, has scarcely been felt in America Since the Civil War only v 322 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. XII two tendencies have been distinguishable in our poetry. The first is parallel to the tendency noted in the novel and short story (see page 297), namely, towards verse dealing with the humours and peculiarities of life in certain localities, usually in dialect, the best example of which is perhaps to be found in the poems of BRET HARTE. The other is that towards craftsmanship, best shown in the verse of SIDNEY LANIER, poet and musician, the intricate melody and charm of whose lyrics and odes make him the only other poet of the century whom it would be appropriate to mention here. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE A.D. 449 .... English History begins in Britain. The Jutes land in Thanet. 597 .... Christianity brought into England by Augustine; 627 .... And into Northumbria by Paulinus. 635, et seq. . The Celtic Missionaries evangelise Northumbria. 664 .... The Synod of Whitby. 670-80 . . The poems of Csedmon. 669-71 . . School of Canterbury; Archbishop Theodore. A x 680 7-709. . The literary work of Ealdhelm. (Born 656.) \ 690 (cir.) . The laws of Inc. J y 674-82 . . Wearmouth, Jarrow, and their libraries, founded by Benedict Biscop. 673 .... Baeda, Benedict's scholar, born. 731. . . . Bseda's Ecclesiastical History. (Death of Bseda, 735.) 735 .... Ecgberht, Archbp. of York, establishes the School of York and the Library. (Died 766.) 766-82 . . jEthelbert and Alcuin make York the centre of European learning. 782-92 . . Alcuin carries the learning of York to Europe. 793 .... The first Viking raid on Northumbria. Cynewulf (born about 720) wrote his poems prob- ably in the latter half of this century. 800 .... Charles the Great crowned emperor. 830 . . . = About this date the " Heliand," an Old Saxon poem, was written. 3 2 3 324 ENGLISH LITERATURE A.D. 867-76 . . The final destruction of the seats of learning in Northumbria by " the Army." 8fi .... The accession of Alfred. 886 (cir.) . Alfred begins his literary work. The English Chronicle is first carefully edited in this reign. 901 .... Death of vElfred. 913. . . . Rolf settles in Normandy. 937 .... Song of Battle of Brunanburh, in the Chronicle. 961-88 . . Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury. 964, et seq. . King Eadgar, with ^thelwold and Oswald, Bishops of Winchester and Worcester, revives English monachism in Wessex and East Anglia. 971 .... Blickling Homilies. 991 .... Song of the Battle of Maldon. 991-96 . . ^Elfric's Homilies; after 1005, his Treatise on the Old and New Testament. (Died 1020-25.) 1031 . . . Swegen of Denmark becomes King of England. 1042-65 . . Reign of Edward the Confessor. England's first contact with French Romance. Latin translation of a late Greek Romance, Apol- lonius of Tyre, and of two small books belonging to the Alexander Saga. 1066 . . . The Lay of Roland is brought to England. 1066 . . . William I. 1070 . . . Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury. The " Charlemagne," Norman poem, before the end of the nth century. 1071 . . . The Exeter Book given by Leofric, Bishop of Exe- ter, to his Cathedral. 1085 . . . The Domesday Book. 1087 William If. crowned by Lanfranc. 1093 Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury. 1095 . . . The beginning of the Crusades. The stories of the East soon come to the West. zioo . . . Henry I. 1109 . . . University of Paris rises into importance with Wil- liam of Champeaux and Peter Abelard. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 325 A.D. i no . . . Miracle play of St. Catherine. 1118 . . . End of Florence of Worcester's Chronicle. 1 1 20 . . . End of William of Malmesbury's Historia regum Anglorum. 1126-43 William of Malmesbury's Historic novelise. 1129 . . . End of Simeon of Durham's Chronicle. 11 35-54 Henry of Huntingdon's History of England. 1135 . . . Stephen. 11 3 2 ~35 Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Britonum. Final form, 1147. 1154 . . . English Chronicle ends. Gesta Stephani. Hexham Chroniclers. At the end of reign of Henry I. and during Stephen's reign the Cistercians brought about a religious revival. The Abbeys founded in the North. 1154 . . . Henry II. 1155 . . . Wace's Geste des Bretons (Brut d'Engleterre). 1 1 60 . . . Benoit de Sainte More's Roman de Troie. 1156-59?. . John of Salisbury's Polycraticus. 1160-70 . . Walter Map's De Nugis curialium; Golias. (cir.) The Lais of Marie de France; written in Eng- land. 1160-70 . . Robert de Boron's Le petit Saint Graal. 1170 . . . Wace finishes his Roman de Rou. 1170-90 . . Le Grand Saint Graal; Queste de Saint Graal; Lancelot du Lac, by Walter Map? 1180-90? . . Chrestien de Troye's Conte de Graal (Percevale). Chronicle of Benedict of Peterborough, continued by Roger of Howden. Ranulf de Glanvill's work on English law. Richard Fitz Nigel's Dialogus de Scaccario. Gerald de Barri (Giraldus Cambrensis) Itinera- rium; Journey in Wales; Conquest of Ireland written in this and the two following reigns. j iSg . . . Richard I. 1198 . . . William of Newborough's Chronicle. 326 ENGLISH LITERATURE In the middle of the 1 2th century the troubadour poetry of Southern France rose into its fine flower in the work of Bernart de Ventadorn. He had been preceded by Guilhem de Poitiers, the first troubadour of whom we know. Bertrand de Born, Geoffrey Rudel, Pierre Vidal are famous troubadours of this cen- tury. The lyrics of Northern France, those of the trouveres, grew out of this Provengal poetry. No lyrical poetry in England in this century. The chansons de geste of the last century in France were largely added to in this. Great literary activity prevailed in Wales from the middle of this century down to the death of Llewellyn in 1282. The epic of the Cid was shaped about 1160-70 out of ballads that had sung the border battles of Moors and Spaniards. In Germany the Minnelieder arose in the middle of the century, and Wolfram von Eschenbach introduced his new conception of Parzival into the Arthurian legend. Also in the middle of this century the Niebelungen Lied was cast into its form. Italian poetry began with Ciullo d'Alcamo in Sicily, and Folca- chiero of Siena, in the years 1172-78. In this century also the mediaeval tales from India were cast into the History of the Seven Sages, and into the Disciplina Clericalis. These materials were moulded into various shapes by the French poets, and afterwards in England. A.D. //99 . . . John. Chronicle of Richard of Devizes. Annals of Barn- well. Chronicle of Jocelyn of Brakelond, and others. 1150-1200 . Sayings of Alfred. 1200-30 . . Roman de la Rose (Part I.) by Guillaume de Lorris. 1205 . . . Loss of Normandy. 1205 (cir.) . Layamon's Brut. 1215 . . . TheOrmulum. The Great Charter. 1210-50 . . Reign of Frederick II. Italian poetry in Sicily. 1216 . . . Henry III. Chronicle of Roger of Wendover at St. Albans. 1235-73 Matthew Paris' Greater Chronicle; History of England; Lives of earlier abbots. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 327 A.D. 1220-76 . . Guide Guinicelli. Father of new national litera- ture in Italy. 1 220 (cir.) . Owl and Nightingale (Dorsetshire). 1220 (cir.) . Ancren Riwle (Dorsetshire). 1221 . . . Coming of Black Friars to England (Dominicans). 1224 . . . Coming of Grey Friars (Franciscans). 1225 ... St. Francis of Assisi's Song to the Sun. 1225-35?. . The Bestiary. 1230-40 (cir.) King Horn. 1 2 35-53 Robert Grossetete (Bp. of Lincoln). Chastel d'amour. 1250 (cir.) . Genesis and Exodus. 1258 . . . Provisions of Oxford, Proclamation of King's adhesion to them in English as well as French. 1262 . . . Miracle plays acted by the Town Guilds. 1264 . . . Battle of Lewes Ballad. 1264 . . . Corpus Christi Day appointed; fully observed, 1311. 1268 . . . Roger Bacon's Opus Majus. After Lewes and its war-ballad, the Love Lyric begins in such verse as the Throstle and the Nightingale and the Cuckoo Song. Also the religious lyric in such verse as the Sorrows of Christ and the Lullaby, and the Love Song of Thomas de Hales, a Franciscan. Also the satirical lyric, such as the Land of Cockayne. In this reign Adam Marsh (De Marisco) has a famous Franciscan school at Oxford. The Harrowing of Hell, first dramatic piece in English, belongs to this reign. Northumbria begins again to write in second half of century. 7.27.2 . . . Edward I. The Alexander Romance in English in this reign. The Tristan Story is also widely spread. Romances arise in Northumbria. Many war-ballads. 1280-87 Guido delle Colonne's (a poet of Sicily, born 1250) Historia Destructionis Trojae. Visited England and wrote Historia de regibus et rebus Angliae. 1290-93 . . Dante's Vita Nuova. 1300 (cir.) . Gesta Romanorum. 328 ENGLISH LITERATURE A.D. 1300 (cir.) . Havelok the Dane. 1303 . . . Robert Manning of Brunne's Handlyng Synne. His Chronicle finished 1338. 1300-05 . . Roman de la Rose (Part II.), by Jean de Meung. 1307 . . . Edward II. 1303-21 . . Dante's Divine Comedy. 1324 . . . Court of Love at Toulouse. 1320-30 . . Cursor Mundi (Northumbrian). William Shore- ham's Poems (Kentish). A Cycle of Homilies, Legend Cycle (both Northumbrian) are now worked at. Sir Tristrem; Sire Otuel; Guy of Warwick; Bevis of Hampton; all now in English. 1327 . . . Edward III. 1330 . . . Pilgrimage of Human Life, a French poem by Guillaume de Delguileville. Legenda Aurea, by Jacobus a Voragine, Bishop of Genoa. Guillaume de Machault.(B. I282(cir.); d. I37o(cir.).) 1340 (cir.) . Richard Rolle of Hampole's Pricke of Conscience. 1340 . . . Dan Michel of Northgate's Ayenbite of Inwyt. 1341 . . . Petrarca crowned laureate at Rome. 1345 . . . Death of Richard Aungerville, Bishop of Durham, writer of Philobiblion ; leaves library to Oxford. 1333-52 . . Songs of Laurence Minot on King Edward's wars. 1350, et seq. . Collections of books, and University foundations in England now begin to serve literature. 1350-53 . . Decameron of Boccaccio. 1341, LaTeseide. 1348, Filostrato. 1350 (cir.) . Romances are now written on the Welsh marches in alliterative Old English verse ; subject and mise-en-scene French, verse and diction national. Among first of these, Joseph of Arimathie and two fragments of an Alexander Romance. 1355 William of Palerne. 1350? Tale of Gamelyn. 1355 (cir.) . Anturs of Arthur at the Tarnawathelan. 1360-70 (cir.) Sir Gawayne and the Grene \ Perhaps by the Knight, Pearl, Cleanness > "philosophical and Patience. J Strode." CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 329 A.D. 1 362-63 . . Langland's Vision of Piers the Plowman. (A-Text.) 1366-70 . . Chaucer's first poems. Book of the Duchess, 1369. 1373 Petrarca's Griselda. 1375 . . . Harbour's Bruce. *377 Richard II. 1377 . . . B-Text of Piers the Plowman. 1378? . . . Wyclif's Summa in Theologia. 1379 . . . New College, Oxford; Latin School at Winchester founded by William of Wykeham. 1380 . . . Wyclifs translation of the Bible. 1 380-83 . . Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida. 1382-85 . . Chaucer's Parlement of Foules, Hous of Fame, Legend of Good Women. 1383 (cir.) . Wyclif's Trialogus. (Died 1384.) 1385-89 . . Chaucer's Prologue and many of the Canterbury Tales. 1393? Gower's Confessio Amantis. 1395 Chrysoloras comes to Florence to teach Greek. Guarino Guarini teaches Greek at Venice, Florence, Ferrara. (Born 1370; died 1460.) 1398? . . . C-Text of Piers the Plowman. From Boccaccio to the middle of the i6th century a great mass of Italian Novelle were produced ; used in England for plays, stories, &c. /j>99 . . . Henry IV. 1400 . . . Death of Chaucer and Langland. 1411-12 . . Hoccleve's Gouvernail of Princes. 1413 . . . Henry V. 1415 . . . Eustache Deschamps dies. Alain Chartier and Christine de Pisan, his contemporaries. 1421 . . . Lydgate's Troy Book. 1424-25, Story of Thebes. 1422 . . . Henry VI. 1422 . . . James I. of Scotland : The King's Quair. 1422 . . . Paston Letters begin ; end 1509. 1423 . . . John Aurispa brings from Greece to Italy more than 200 MSS. 1424-25 . . Lydgate's Falles of Princes. 330 ENGLISH LITERATURE A.D. 1427 . . . Filelfo, laden with MSS., returns from Greece to Florence. Pletho, Bessarion, Gaza have diffused the spirit of ancient learn- ing in Italy by 1440. Universities at Pavia, Turin, Ferrara, Flor- ence, &c. Eight hundred MSS. left by Niccolo Niccoli to Florence, in 1436; cradle of the Laurentian Library. 1449 . . . Pecock's Represser of Overmuch blaming of the Clergy. 1453 . . . Fall of Constantinople. 1450 (cir.) . Invention of Printing. 1460-80 . . Poems of Robert Henryson. 1461 . . . Ed-ward IV. 1470 . . . Malory's Morte Darthur. 1474-76 . . Caxton sets up printing press at Westminster. 1481 . . . Luigi Pulci's Morgante Maggiore. 1483 . . . Edward V. Richard IIL 1483 . . . Henry VII. 1495? . . . Boiar do's Orlando Inamorato begun. 1501 . . . Gawin Douglas' Palace of Honour. 1503 . . . Dunbar's Thistle and Rose. 1504 . . . Sannazaro's Arcadia. 1506 . . . Hawes' Pastime of Pleasure. 1507 . . . Skelton's Bowge of Court; Boke of Phyllip Sparowe. 1507-08 . . Dunbar's Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins. 7/09 . . . Henry VIII. 1509 . . . Erasmus: Praise of Folly. 1513 . . . Gawin Douglas : Translation of the ^Eneid. 1513? . . . Sir Thos. More's Life of Edward V. and History of Richard III. written. 1515 . . . Trissino's Sofonisba; first use of blank verse in Italy. 1516 . . . Ariosto's Orlando Furioso begun; the rest in 1532. 1516 . . . Sir Thos. More's Utopia, written in Latin. 1518? . . . Skelton's Colin Clout. 1518? . . . Amadis de Gaul translated into English. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 331 A.D. 1524 . . . Ronsard born. (Died 1586.) 1527 . . . Tyndale's translation of the New Testament. 1528 . . . Lyndsay's Dreme. 1520-40 . . Heywood's Interludes. 1532, et seq. , Rabelais' Gargantua, &c. 1535 . . . Lyndsay's Satire of the Three Estates. 1540 . . . Cranmer's Bible. 1541? . . . Ralph Roister Doister, first English comedy, printed 1566. 1545 . . . Ascham's Toxophilus. 1547 . . . Ed-ward VI. 1549 . . . Latimer's Sermon on the Ploughers. 1549-52 . . English Prayer Book. 1551 . . . Ralph Robinson's translation of More's Utopia into English. 1553 . . . Mary. 1553 . . . Lyndsay's Monarchic. 1557 . . . To ttel's Miscellany ; poems by Wyatt and Surrey. 1558 . . . Elizabeth. 1559 . . . Sackville's Mirror for Magistrates. 1561-62 . . Gorboduc, the first English Tragedy. Printed as Ferrex and Porrex, 1571. 1562 . . . Phaer's Virgil. Many other translations of the classics before 1579. 1563 . . . Foxe's Book of Martyrs. 1563 . . . Sackville's Induction to Mirror for Magistrates. 1570 . . . Ascham's Scholcmaster. 1571 . . . R. Edward's Damon and Pithias printed. 1575 . . . Comedy of Gammer Gurton's Needle printed. Play of Apius and Virginia printed. 1576 . . . Paradise of Dainty Devices; 1578, Gorgeous Gal- lery of Gallant Inventions; 1584, Handfull of Pleasant Delights all Poetical Miscellanies. 1576 . . . Three theatres built in London ; Blackfriars, the Curtain, the Theatre. 1576 . . . Gascoigne's Steele Glas. (First verse satire.) 1577 . Holinshed's Chronicle. 332 A.D. 1579-So ^579 1580-81 . 1580-88 . 1581 . . 1582? . . 1583-1625? 1584-92 . 1584-98 . 1586 . . 1587 . . 1588-90 . 1588-90 . 1588-90? . 1589 1590 . . 1593 1593 1594 1593-96 . ^595 1596, et sfq. 1594-96 . 1597 . . 1597-98 . 1598 . . 1598-99 . 1596-98 . 1599 . . 1600 . . 1600 ENGLISH LITERATURE Lyly's Euphues. 1580-1601 (cir.) his dramas. Spenser's Shepheards Calendar. North's Plutarch's Lives. Sidney's Arcadia and Apologie for Poetric. Montaigne's Essaies. Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata. Watson's Hecatompathia or Passionate Century. Pamphleteers : Greene, Lodge, G. Harvey, Nash, Dekker, Breton. Dramas of Greene. 1583, et sej., Tales in prose. Dramas of Peele. Warner's Albion's England. Marlowe's Tamburlaine acted. (Printed 1590.) Marlowe's Faustus, Jew of Malta, Edward II. Series of Martin Marprelate Tracts. Love's Labour's Lost. Hakluyt's Voyages. Spenser's Faerie Queene (Books i.-iii. I596,iv.-vi.). Harrington's translation of Ariosto's Orlando. Donne's Satires (died 1626). Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity (Bks. i.-iv. 1597, v.). Many collections of Sonnets. Daniel's Hist, of Civil Wars of York and Lancaster. Ben Jonson's Dramas. (Died 1637.) Merchant of Venice. Bacon's Essays. (First set.) Hall's Satires. Chapman's Homer (First part). Sylvester's trans- lation of Du Bartas. Marston's Satires. Drayton's Barons' Wars and England's Heroical Epistles. The Globe Theatre built. England's Helicon; England's Parnassus; Belve- dere; all poetical Miscellanies. Fairfax's translation of Tasso. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 333 A.D. 1600 . . . Lope de Vega began his dramas about 1590, and continued writing till his death in 1635. 1600-81 . . Calderon, who had a large influence on the French Drama of the xyth and i8th centuries, on the English Restoration Drama, and on the Italian, German and English poetry of i8th and igth centuries. 1603 (cir.) ? . The Return from Parnassus. 1603 . . . Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essays. 1603 . . . James I. 1603 . . . Knolles' History of the Turks. 1604 . . . Authorised Version of the Bible. 1605 . . . Bacon's Advancement of Learning (Books i. and iL). 1 606-16 . . Cervantes' Don Quixote. 1609 . . . Shakespeare's Sonnets published. 1610-25 (cir.) Dramas of Beaumont and Fletcher. 1610 . . . Giles Fletcher's Christ's Victory. 1611 . . . Speed's History of Great Britain. 1612 . . . Webster's first drama, The White Devil (printed). 1612-20 . . T. Shelton's Translation of Don Quixote. 1613-14 . . Drayton's Polyolbion. 1613-16 . . Browne's Britannia's Pastorals; 1614, The Shep- herd's Pipe. 1613 . . . Purchas his Pilgrimage. 1613 . . . Wither's Abuses Stript and Whipt. 1613 . . . Drummond of Hawthornden's first poem. (D. 1649.) 1614 . . . Raleigh's History of the World. 1615 . . . Sandys' Travels. 1615 . . . Wither's Shepherd's Hunting. 1616 . . . Chapman's Homer finished. Shakespeare dies. 1621 . . . Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. 1622 . . . Massinger's Virgin Martyr. (Died 1639.) 1623 . . . Webster's Duchess of Malfi (printed). 1623 . . . Waller's first poems. 1623 . . . The " First Folio " of Shakespeare. Chapman, Tourneur, Middleton, and other drama* lists wrote during this reign. 334 ENGLISH LITERATURE A.D. 1625 . . . Charles I. 1628 . . . Harvey's De Motu Sanguinis. 1629 . . . Milton's Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity. 1631 . . . George Herbert's Temple. 1635? . . . Sir Thos. Browne's Religio Medici (pub. 1642). 1632-37 . . Milton's Allegro, Penseroso, Comus, Lycidas. 1633 . . . Phineas Fletcher's Purple Island. 1634 . . . Ford's historical play of Perkin Warbeck. 1636 . . . Corneille's first tragedy, the Cid. His last play, 1675. 1636 . . . French Academy founded. 1640 . . . Thomas Carew's poems. 1641 . . . Milton's first pamphlet. 1641 . . . Evelyn's Diary begins (ends 1697; published 1818). 1642 . . . Theatres closed. 1642 . . . Fuller's Holy and Profane state. 1642 . . . Denham's Cooper's Hill. 1642 . . . Hobbes' De Give. 1644 . . . Milton's Areopagitica. 1645 Waller's poems. 1645 Meetings held which lead to formation of the Royal Society. 1646 . . . Crashaw's Steps to the Temple. 1647 . . . Jeremy Taylor's Liberty of Prophesying. 1647 . . . Cowley's Mistress. Davideis, 1 641(7). 1647-48 . . Herrick's Noble Numbers; Hesperides. 1648 . . . J. Beaumont's Psyche or Love's Mystery. 1648 . . . Suckling's Fragmenta Aurea. 1649 Lovelace's Lucasta. 7649 . . . Common-wealth. 1650 . . / Baxter's Saints' Rest. 1650 . . . Milton's Defensio pro Populo Anglicano. 1650-52 . . MarvelPs Garden poems written. 1650-56 . . Vaughan's Silex Scintillans. 1650-57 . . Pascal's Provincial Letters. 1651 . . . Hobbes' Leviathan. 1653 . . . Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler. 1653 . . . Moliere's first play. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 335 A.D. 1656 . . . Harrington's Oceana. 1659 . . . Dryden's Stanzas on the Death of Cromwell. 1659 . . . Corneille's Essay on the Three Unities. 1659-60 . . Pepys' Diary begins (finished 1669; published 1825). 1660 . . . Boileau's first satire. /66o . . . Charles II. 1660 . . . Re-opening of the theatres by Davenant and Killigrew. 1662 . . . Royal Society incorporated. 1663 . . . Dryden's first play, the Wild Gallant. 1663 . . . Butler's Hudibras (Part I.). 1663 . . . Algernon Sidney's Discourses concerning Govern- ment, published 1698. 1663 . . . The London Public Intelligencer. (Becomes the London Gazette, 1666.) 1663-67 . . Playsof Racine. Esther, 1689 (?),Athalie, 1 690(?). 1664 ... La Fontaine's first book of Contes. 1667 . . . Dryden's Annus Mirabilis; Essay on Dramatic Poesy. 1667 . . . Cowley's Essays. 1667 . . . Milton's Paradise Lost. 1667 . . . Petty 's Treatise on Taxes. 1668 . . . La Fontaine's first book of Fables. (Died 1695.) 1670 . . . Izaak Walton's Lives. 1670 . . . Pascal's Les Pensees. 1671 . . . Paradise Regained. Samson Agonistes. 1671-77 . . Dramas of Wycherley. 1672 . . . Dryden's Essay on Heroic Plays. 1674 . . . Boileau's Art of Poetry. 1678 . . . Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. (Part I.) 1678 . . . Dryden's All for Love. (In blank verse.) 1678 . . . Cud worth's Intellectual System of the Universe. 1680 . . . Filmer's Patriarcha. 1 68 1 . . . Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel. (First part.) 1682 ... Dryden's Medal, MacFlecknoe, Religio Laici. 1684 . . . Pilgrim's Progress. (Part II.) Clarendon's History of the Great Rebellion written during this reign. (Published 1707.) 336 ENGLISH LITERATURE A.D. 1683 . . . James II. 1687 . . . Newton's Principia. 1687 . . . Defoe's first tract. 1687 ... La Bruyere's Les Caracteres. i688-Sg . . The Revolution. William III. 1690 . . . Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding. 1692 ... Sir Win. Temple's Miscellanea, Vol. ii. 16931700 . Congreve's dramas. 1694 . . . Dryden's Last Play. 1697-1705 . Dramas of Vanbrugh. 1698 . . . Collier's Short View of the Immorality of the Stage* 1698-1707 . Dramas of Farquhar. 1700 . . . Dryden's Fables. (Nov. 1699.) 1700 . . . Prior's Carmen Seculare. 1702 . . . Anne. 1702 . . . Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana. 1702-05 . . Steele's Plays. (1722. Comedy of the Conscious Lovers, his last play.) 1704 . . . Swift's Tale of a Tub, Battle of the Books. (Writ- ten by 1596-97.) 1704 ... Addison's Campaign. Rosamond (opera), 1706. 1704-13 . . Defoe's Review. 1709 . . . Mat Prior's Poems. 1709-11 . . TheTatler. 1 709-44 . . Writings of Bishop Berkeley. 1709 . . . Pope's Pastorals. (Written 1704-05.) 1711-12-14 . The Spectator. 1712 . . . Pope's Rape of the Lock. (Final form 1714.) 1713 . . . Addison's Cato. 1714 . . . Gay's Shepherd's Week. 77/4 . . . George I. 1715-20 . . Pope's Homer's Iliad. 1715, et seq. . Le Sage's Gil Bias. 1719 . . . Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. 1720-25, Other novels. 172434 . . Bp. Burnet's History of my own Times published. 1725 . . . Allan Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd. (First form 1723.^ 1726-30 . . Thomson's Seasons. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 337 AD. 1 726-27 1727 . 1728 . 1728 . 1730 . 1732-34 1 732-48 1 735 1736 . 1737 . 1738 . *739 1 740 . 1741 . 1740-41 1742 . 1742-69 1 744 . 1 744 . 1746 . 1748 . 1748 . 1748 . 1749 . 1749 . 1750-52 1751-52 1754 . 1754 . 1754-61 1755 . 1756 . 1757 . 1758 . Swift's Gulliver's Travels. George II. Gay's Fables. 1728, Beggar's Opera. Pope's Dunciad. (First form. Others in 1729-42-43.) Voltaire's Henriade. Marivaux: Lejeudel'amour etduhasard. (D. 1763.) Pope's Essay on Man. Moral Essays, 1732-35. Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac. Johnson's Translation of Lobo's Voyage to Abys- sinia. (His first work.) Butler's Analogy of Religion. Shenstone's Schoolmistress. (Final form, 1742.) Johnson's London. Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. Richardson's Pamela. 1 748, Clarissa Harlowe. Warburton's Divine Legation. Hume's Essays. Fielding's Joseph Andrews. 1749, Tom Jones. Gray's Poems. (Collected edition 1768.) Johnson's Life of Savage. Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination. Collins' Odes. Smollett's Roderick Random. Thomson's Castle of Indolence. Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois. Diderot's Encyclopedic begun. Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes; Irene. Johnson's Rambler. Hume's Principles of Morals and Political Discourses. Richardson's Sir Chas. Grandison. Edwards' Freedom of the Will. Hume's History of England. Johnson's Dictionary. Burke's Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful; Vin- dication of Natural Society. Hume's Natural History of Religion. Robertson's History of Scotland. 1769, Charle V. 338 ENGLISH LITERATURE 1758 . . . Lessing's Litteraturbriefe. *759 Johnson's Rasselas. 1759 . . . Adam Smith's Moral Sentiments. 1759 . . . Sterne's Tristram Shandy. (Vols. I and 2.) 1 7S9-9 Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses on Art. 7760 . . . George III. 1760 . . . Rousseau's Nouvelle Helolse. 1760 . . . Sterne's Tristram Shandy. (2 vols.; finished 1765.) 1760-65 . . Macpherson's Ossian. 1761-64 . . Poems of Churchill. 1762 . . . Falconer's Shipwreck. 1764-70 . . Chatterton's Poems. 1765 ... Goldsmith's Traveller. 1765 . . . Bishop Percy's Reliques of English Poetry. 1 765 . . . H. Walpole's Castle of Otranto. 1766 . . . Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield. (Written 1762?) 1766 . . . Lessing's Laokoon. 1768-78 . . Plays of Goldsmith and Sheridan. 1769 ... Burke's Present State of the Nation. 1769-72 . . Letters of Junius. 1770 . . . Burke's Thoughts on the Present Discontents. 1770 . . . Goldsmith's Deserted Village. 1771-74 . . Beattie's Minstrel. 1773 . . . Ferguson's Poems. 1774 . . . Burke's Speech on American Taxation. 1774 . . . Goethe's Werther. *775 Beaumarchais : Le Mariage de Figaro. 1775 . . . Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America. 1776 . . . Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. 7776 . . . Declaration of Independence. 1776 . . . Paine's Common Sense. 1777-81 . . T. Warton's History of English Poetry. 1 776-88 . . Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 1 777 . . . Robertson's History of America. 1778 . . . Frances Burney's Evelina. 1779-81 . . Johnson's English Poets. 1781 . . . Schiller's Die Rauber. 339 A.0. 1783 ... Crabbe's Village. 1783 . . . Blake's Poetical Sketches. 1785 . . . Cowper's Task. 1786 . . . Samuel Rogers' Poems. 1786 . . . Burns' first Poems. 1789 . . . Blake's Songs of Innocence. 1794, Songs of Experience. 1789 . . . White's Natural History of Selborne. 1790 . . . Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1791-92 . . Paine's Rights of Man. 1 794-95, Age of Reason. 1791 . . . Boswell's Life of Johnson. 1792-94 . . Arthur Young's Travels in France. 1793 . . . Godwin's Enquiry concerning Political Justice. 1793 . . Wordsworth's Evening Walk ; Descriptive Sketches. 1794 . . . Coleridge and Southey's Fall of Robespierre. 1796 . . . Poems; by Coleridge and Lamb. 1796 . . . Scott's translation of Burger's Lenore. 1796-97 . . Burke's Letters on a Regicide Peace. 1 797 ... Poems by Coleridge, Lamb, and Lloyd. 1797 . . . Poetry of the Anti- Jacobin. 1798 . . . Lyrical Ballads; by Coleridge and Wordsworth. 1798 . . . Malthus' Essay on the Principles of Population. 1798 . . . Landor's Gebir and other Poems. 1798 . . . Ebenezer Elliott's Vernal Walk. 1 799 . . . Scott's translation of Gotz von Berlichingen. 1799 . . . Campbell's Pleasures of Hope. 1800 . . . Coleridge's translation of Schiller's Wallenstein. 1801 . . . Southey's Thalaba. (He continued writing till 1 843.) 1802 ... Scott's Border Minstrelsy. 1802 . . . The Edinburgh Review. 1805 ... Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel. 1807 . . . Byron's Hours of Idleness. 1807 . . . Wordsworth's Poems in 2 vols. 1807 . . . T. Moore's Irish Melodies begun. 1807-08 . . Lamb's Specimens of Dramatic Poetry. 1808 . . . Scott's Marmion. 1 8 10, Lady of the Lake. 1809 . . . The Quarterly Review. 34O ENGLISH LITERATURE A.D. 1809 . . . Byron's English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. 1810 . . . Allan Cunningham's first published poems. (0.1842.) 1811-18 . . Novels of Jane Austen. 1812-18 . . Byron's Childe Harold. 1813 . . . Shelley's Queen Mab. 1816, Alastor. 1814 . . . Scott's Waverley. (His novels continue till 1831.) 1814 . . . Wordsworth's Excursion. 1814 . . . H. Gary's Translation of Dante. 1816 . . . Coleridge's Christabel ; Kubla Khan. 1816? . . . Leigh Hunt's Story of Rimini. 1817 . . . Byron's Manfred. i8i8,Beppo; 1819-23, Don Juan. 1817 . . . Coleridge's Biographia Literaria. 1817 . . . Keats' first poems. 1817 . . . Bryant's Thanatopsis. i8i7,etseg. . Hazlitt's Dramatic and Poetical Criticisms. (Died 1830.) 1818 . . . Hallam's View of the State of Europe during the Mid- dle Ages. 1827, Constitutional Hist, of England. 1819 . . . Irving's The Sketch-Book. i8ao . . . George IV. 1820 . . . Keats' Hyperion and other Poems. 1820 . . . Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. 1821 . . . Byron's Cain and other dramas. 1821 . . . DeQuincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater. 1821 . . . Shelley's Adonals and Epipsychidion. 1821 . . . Cooper's The Spy. 1821-23 . . Lamb's Essays of Elia. 1822 . . . T. L. Beddoes' Bride's Tragedy. 1822 . . . Rogers' Italy. 1822-33 Prof. Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae. (In Blackwood.) 1824 . . . Carlyle's translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. 1825 . . . Macaulay's Essay on Milton. 1826 . . . Poems by Two Brothers. (Chas. and Alfd. Tennyson.) 1827 . . . Disraeli's Vivian Gray. 1827 . . . Keble's Christian Year. 1827 . . . Bulwer Lytton's Pelham. 1827 . . . Poe's Tamerlane and other Poems. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 34! A.D. 1830 . . . William IV. 1830 . . . Alfred Tennyson : Poems. 1830 . . . Moore's Life of Byron. 1830 . . . Mrs. Hemans' Songs of the Affections. 1831, et seq. . Ebenezer Elliott's Corn Law Rhymes. 1831 . . . Robert Browning's Pauline; published 1833. 1832 . . . Death of Sir Walter Scott. Death of Goethe. 1834 . . . Carlyle's Sartor Resartus. 1836 . . . Dickens' Pickwick. 1836 . . . Emerson's Nature. 1836 . . . Holmes' Poems. 183? . . . Victoria. 1837 . . . Carlyle's French Revolution. 1837 . . . Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales. 1838 . . . Whittier's Poems. 1838 . . . Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. 1839 . . . Longfellow's Voices of the Night. 1841 . . . Newman's Tracts for the Times, No. xc. 1842 . . . Browning's Dramatic Lyrics. 1843 . . . Ruskin's Modern Painters. (Vol. i.) 1847 C. Bronte's Jane Eyre. 1848 . . . Arnold's Strayed Reveller and other Poems. 1848 . . . Macaulay's History of England. (Vol. I.) 1848 . . . Thackeray's Vanity Fair. 1848 . . . Lowell's Biglow Papers (first series). 1848 . . . Thoreau's Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers. 1849 . . . Parkman's California and Oregon Trail. 1850 . . . Mrs. Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. 1850 . . . Tennyson's In Memoriam. 1852 . . . Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. 1855 . . . Whitman's Leaves of Grass. 1856 , . . Froude's History of England. (Vol. I.) 1856 . . . Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic. 1858 . . . George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life. 1858 . . . Morris' Defence of Guinevere and other Poems. 1858 . . . Tennyson's Idylls of the King. 342 ENGLISH LITERATURE A.D. 1858 . . . Holmes' Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. 1858 . . . Fitzgerald's Translation of Omar Khayyam. 1859 . . . Darwin's Origin of Species. 1859 . . . Mill's On Liberty. 1862 . . . Spencer's First Principles. 1863 . . . Huxley's Man's Place in Nature. 1864 . . . Lowell's Fireside Travels. 1865 . . . Meredith's Rhoda Fleming. 1865 . . . Arnold's Essays in Criticism (first series). 1866 . . . Swinburne's Poems and Ballads. 1866 . . . Whittier's Snow-Bound. 1869 . . . Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad. 1870 . . . Rossetti's Poems. 1870 . . . Bret Harte's Luck of Roaring Camp. 1872 . . . Howells' Their Wedding Journey. 1873 . . . Pater's Studies in the Renaissance. 1875 . . . James' A Passionate Pilgrim. 1882 . . . Stevenson's New Arabian Nights. INDEX BORN. DIKD 1672 Addison, Joseph, 182, 183, 187, 191, 193, 195. . . . 1719 849 JElfred, King, 3, 15, 19, 23, 24, 27 901 Fl. 1006 .ffilfric (Grammaticus), 29 Fl. 1005 JElf tic (Bata) ,29 908? /Ethelwold, Bishop, 28 984 1721 Akenside, Mark, 214, 219 1770 735 Alcuin, 27 804 Alexander, Sir W. (see Stirling, Earl of) Fl. 1420 Andrew of Wyntoun, 91 1555 Andrewes, Lancelot, 153, 154 1626 1667 Arbuthnot, Dr. John, 185 1735 1822 Arnold, Matthew, 248, 271, 279 1888 1515 Ascham, Roger, 84, 99 1568 1775 Austen, Jane, 210 1817 1561 Bacon, Sir Francis, 104, 108, 109, 123, 144, 152. . 1626 673 Baeda, 3, 7, 14, 15, 25, 26 735 1826 Bagehot, Walter, 272 1877 1816 Bailey, Philip, 247 1316? Barbour, John, 91 1395 1475? Barclay, Alexander, 88 1552 1820 Barnes, William, 246 1886 1630 Barrow, Isaac, 179 1677 1615 Baxter, Richard, 154 1691 1735 Beattie, James, 216, 220 1803 1584 Beaumont, Francis, 144-145 1616 1616 Beaumont, Joseph, 159 1699 1803 Beddoes, Thomas, 244 1849 1640 Behn, Aphra, 194 1689 343 344 ENGLISH LITERATURE BORN. DIED. 628? Benedict, Biscop, 26 690 1748 Bentham, Jeremy, 208 1832 1662 Bentley, Richard, 182, 190 1742 1685 Berkeley, Bishop, 188, 190 1753 1388? Berners, Juliana, 75 1467 Berners, Lord, 83 1532 1650? Blackmore, Sir Richard, 187 1729 1699 Blair, Robert, 213 1746 1757 Blake, William, 222-224 ^27 Fl. 1470-1492 Blind Harry, 91 1766 Bloomfield, Robert, 225 1823 1545 Bodley, Sir Thomas, 154 1613 1678 Bolingbroke, Lord, 185, 190, 199 1751 1803 Borrow, George, 260 1881 1740 Boswell, James, 199 1795 1627 Boyle, Robert, 151 1691 1816 Bronte, Charlotte, 260 1855 1554 Brooke, Lord (Pulke Greville) ,123 1628 Broome, Richard, 148 1652? 1689 Broome, William, 185 1745 1778 Brown, Thomas, 208 1820 1771 Brown, Charles Brockden, 291 1810 1605 Browne, Sir Thomas, 154 1682 1591 Browne, William, 157 1643 1809 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 278 1861 i8ia Browning, Robert, 224, 244, 247, 277 1889 1730 Bruce, James, 209 1794 1746 Bruce, Michael, 221, 222 1767 1794 Bryant, William Cullen, 311 1878 1628 Buckingham, George Villiers, Duke of, 176, 193 1687 1822 Buckle, Henry Thomas, 270 1862 1628 Bunyan, John, 168 1688 1729 Burke, Edmund, 199, 205 1797 1643 Burnet, Bishop, 179, 182 1715 1752 Burney, Prances (Madame D'Arblay), 202 1840 1759 Burns, Robert, 90, 222, 226, 243 1796 1577 Burton, Robert, 154 1640 1692 Butler, Bishop, 190 1752 1612 Butler, Samuel, 174, 181 1680 1788 Byron, Lord, 236, 237, 243, 244 1824 INDEX 345 BORN. DIED. Fl. 670 Caedmon, 3, 12-19 1831 Calverley, Charles Stuart, 279 1834 1551 Camden, William, 151 1623 1777 Campbell, Thomas, 207, 235 1844 Temp. Hen. VI . .Campeden, Hugh de, 75 Campion, Thomas, 108 1619 1770 Canning, George, 207 1827 1393 Capgrave, John, 75 1464 1598? Carew, Thomas, 158 1639? 1795 Carlyle, Thomas, 206, 268 1881 1422? Cazton, William, 77, 78, 86, 87 1491? 1748 Cecil, Richard, 208 1810 1667? Centlivre, Susannah, 194 1723 1780 Chalmers, Dr., 208 1847 1559? Chapman, George, 117, 141-143 1634 1619 Charleton, Walter, 181 1707 1752 Chatterton, Thomas, 217 1770 1340 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 34, 52, 61-70, 78, 86, 88, 90, 91, 94, 216 1400 1514 Cheke, Sir John, 82 1557 Fl. 1430 Chestre, Thomas, 75 1602 Chillingworth, William, 150, 153, 179 1644 1731 Churchill, Charles, 214 1764 1671 Cibber, Colley, 185, 195 1757 1609 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of, 150, 153 1674 1675 Clarke, Samuel, 190 1729? 1835 Clemens, Samuel L. (Mark Twain), 307 1819 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 248 1861 1772 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 122, 166, 206-208,227, 229, 230 1834 1467? Colet, John, 82, 104 1519 1650 Collier, Jeremy, 194 1726 1676 Collins, Anthony, 190 1729 1721 Collins, William, 157, 214, 220 1759 1732 Colman, George (elder), 195 1794 1762 Colman, George (younger), 195 1836 1670 Congreve, William, 194, 195 1729 1562 Constable, Henry, 119, 156 1613 1789 Cooper, James Penimore, 293 1851 1577? Coryat, Thomas, 152 1617 1630 Cotton, Charles, 117, 191 1687 ENGLISH LITERATURE BORM. 1571 Cotton, Sir Robert, 154 1631 1488 Coverdale, Miles, 85 1568 1618 Cowley , Abraham, 159, 172, 173, 182, 191 1667 1731 Cowper, William, 90, 213, 222-225, 243 l8o 1754 Crabbe, George, 222, 225 1832 1489 Cranmer, Thomas, 85 1556 1613? Crashaw, Richard, 7, 157, 158 1649 1617 Cudworth, Ralph, 179 1688 1732 Cumberland, Richard, 195 1811 Fl. 8th century. . Cynewulf , 5-7, 12, 15, 19, 21, 22, 48, 49 1562 Daniel, Samuel, 108,119, 121,152 1619 I79S Barley, George, 244 1846 1809 Darwin, Charles, 274 1882 1606 Davenant, Sir William, 148, 174, 193 1668 Fl. 1623 Davenport, Robert, 148 1569 Davies, Sir John, 123 1636 Fl. 1606 Day, John, 143 1661? Defoe, Daniel, 183, 187-189 1731 1570? Dekker, Thomas, 141, 142 1641? 1615 Denham, Sir John, 172, 173 1669 1785 De Quincey, Thomas, 207 1859 1812 Dickens, Charles, 261 1870 1804 Disraeli, Benjamin, 259 1881 1840 Dobson, Austin, 279 1573 Donne, John, 124, 157 1631 1637 Dorset, Charles Sackville, Earl of, 177 1706 1474? Douglas, Gawin, 90, 93 1522 1795 Drake, Joseph Rodman, 311 1820 1563 Drayton, Michael, 119, 121, 123 1631 1585 Drummond, of Hawthornden, William, 124, 157. 1649 1631 Dryden, John, 68, 159, 168, 172-174, 178, 181, 184, 193, 198, 216, 238 1700 Do Jon, Francis (see Junius) 1465? Dunbar, William, 90, 92-94 1530? 924 Dunttan, Archbishop, 28 988 1700? Dyer, John, 219 1758 640? Ealdhelm, Abbot of Malmesbury, 3, 18 709 1601? Earle, John, 153 1665 Kcgberht, Archbishop, 27 766 INDEX 347 BOM. DIED. 1767 Edgeworth, Maria, 210 1849 1703 Edwards, Jonathan, 288 1758 1490? Elyot, Sir Thomas, 83 1546 1803 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 303, 316 1882 1467 Erasmus, 82, 87 1536 1635? Etherege, Sir George, 194 1691 1819 Evans, Marian (George Eliot), 263 1880 1620 Evelyn, John, 182 1706 Fairfax, Edward, 116 1635 1678 Farquhar, George, 194 1707 1683 Fenton, Elijah, 185 1730 1750 Fergusson, Robert, 222 1774 1782 Ferrier, Susan, 210 1854 1707 Fielding, Henry, 195, 201 1754 Filmer, Sir Robert, 180 1653 1459? Fisher, Bishop, 82 1535 1809 Fitzgerald, Edward, 247, 279 1883 Flecknoe, Richard, 176 1678? Flemming, Robert, 80 1483 1588? Fletcher, Giles, 157 1623 1579 Fletcher, John, 139, 144, 145, 161 1625 1582 Fletcher, Phineas, 157 1650 Florence of Worcester, 39 1118 1553? Florio, John, 117 1625 1720 Foote, Samuel, 195 1777 Fl. 1639 Ford, John, 147 1394? Fortescue, Sir John, 77 1476? 1516 Foze, John, 101 1587 1706 Franklin, Benjamin, 289 1790 1823 Freeman, Edward Augustus, 270 1892 1818 Froude, James Anthony, 269 1894 1608 Fuller, Thomas, 153, 154 1661 Fl. 1140? Gaimar, Geoffrey, 41 1717 Garrick, David, 195, 216 1779 1661 Garth, Sir Samuel, 187 1719 1525? Gascoigne, George, 99, 124 1577 1810 Gaskell, Mrs., 264 1865 1685 Gay, John, 185, 187, 195, 222 1732 mo? Geoffrey of Monmouth, 40, 44, 71 1154 348 ENGLISH LITERATURE BORN. Dim 1737 Gibbon, Edward, 203 1794 Fl. 1639 Glapthorne, Henry, 148 Gloucester, Humphrey, Duke of , 79 1446 1756 Godwin, William, 210 1836 1536? Golding, Arthur, 100 1605? 1728 Goldsmith, Oliver, 195, 199, 202, 206, 220, 221. .. .1774 1540 Googe, Barnaby, 101 1594 1555 Gosson, Stephen, 108 1624 1325? Gower, John, 58, 59, 69, 79 1408 Grafton, Richard, 102, 152 1572? 1716 Gray, Thomas, 157, 174,215-216,219-221,235. ..1771 1837 Green, John Richard, 269 1883 1696 Green, Matthew, 187 1737 1560? Greene, Robert, no, 131, 132, 134 1592 Greville, Fulke (see Brooke, Lord) Grey, William, Bishop of Ely, 80 1478 2519 Grimoald, Nicholas, 97 1562 1446? Grocyn, William, 82 1519 1794 Grote, George, 270 1871 Gunthorpe, John, Dean of Wells, 80 1498 1605 Habington, William, 159 1654 1552? Hakluyt, Richard, 109 1616 1584 Hales, John, 153, 179 1656 1651 Halifax, Charles Montague, Lord, 177 1715 1574 Hall, Joseph, Bishop of Norwich, 124, 153 1656 1764 Hall, Robert, 208 1831 1777 Hallam, Henry, 209 1859 1790 Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 311 1867 1757 Hamilton, Alexander, 291 1804 1677 Hanmer, Sir Thomas, 216 1746 1378 Harding, John, 75 1465? i$6i Harington, Sir John, 116 1612 1611 Harrington, James, 123, 180 1677 1839 Harte, Francis Bret, 297, 322 1705 Hartley, David, 203 1757 1545? Harvey, Gabriel, 101, 108, no 1630 1578 Harvey, William, 151 1657 Hawes, Stephen, 86 1523? 1804 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 295 1864 1745 Hayley, William, 209 1820 INDEX 349 BORK. DIBD. 1778 Hazlitt, William, 207 1830 1793 Hemans, Felicia, 244 1835 1084? Henry of Huntingdon, 40 1155 1430? Henryson, Robert, 92 1506? IS93 Herbert, George, 157, 158 1633 1591 Herrick, Robert, 157-160, 219 1674 1497? Heywood, John, 128 1580? Heywood, Thomas, 100 1650? Higden, Ranulf, 70 1364 1588 Hobbes, Thomas, 123, 150, 153, 180 1679 1370? Hoccleve, Thomas, 73 1450? 1745 Holcroft, Thomas, 210 1809 Holinshed, Raphael, 192 1580? 1809 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 305, 317 1894 1799 Hood, Thomas, 225 1845 1554? Hooker, Richard, 109 1600 1770? Hope, Thomas, 210 1831 1837 Howells, William Dean, 297 1711 Hume, David, 202-205, 2 8 *77 6 Hunnis, William, 120 1597 1784 Hunt, Leigh, 241, 242 1859 1694 Hutcheson, Francis, 203 1746 1825 Huxley, Thomas, 275 1895 1753 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 210 1821 1783 Irving, Washington, 292, 299 1859 1394 James I. of Scotland, 91 1437 1843 James, Henry, 297 1743 Jefferson, Thomas, 290 1826 1773 Jeffrey, Francis, 207 1850 Fl. 1387 John of Trevisa, 70, 78 1709 Johnson, Samuel, 197, 198, 205, 213, 216 1784 1573? Jonson, Ben, 109, 133, 141, 142, 144, 157, 160. . . . 1637 1589 Junius (Francis du Jon), 16 1677 i8th century " Junius " (writer of the "Letters," 1769-1772), I97.20S 1795 Keats, John, 117, 228, 240-244 1821 1792 Keble, John, 247 1866 1637 Ken, Thomas, Bishop, 177 1711 35O ENGLISH LITERATURE BORN. 1819 ............ Kingsley, Charles, 247, 265, 279 ............... 1875 1550? ........... Knolles, Richard, 152 ......................... 1610 1557? ........... Kyd, Thomas, 131 ............................ 1595? ............ Lacy, John, 194 .............................. i58i 1775 ............ Lamb, Charles, 123, 148, 207, 208 .............. 1834 1802 ............ Landon, Letitia Elizabeth (" L. E. L."), 244. . . 1838 1775 ............ Landor, Walter Savage, 207, 208 .............. 1864 1735 ............ Langhorn, Dr. John, 221 ...................... 1779 1330? ........... Langland, William, 49, 52-58, 101 ............. 1400 1842 ............ Lanier, Sidney, 322 .......................... 1881 1485? ........... Latimer, Hugh, Bishop of Worcester, 86 ...... 1555 Fl. 1200 ......... Layamon, 33, 34,41-43,48 .................... 1757 ............ Lee, Harriet, 210 ............................. 1851 1653? ........... Lee, Nat, 194 ................................ 1692 1750 ............ Lee, Sophia, 210 ............................. 1824 1506? ........... Leland, John, 83 .............................. 1553 ............ Leofric, Bishop of Exeter, 3 .................. 1072 1616 ............ L'Estrange, Sir Roger, 180 ................... 1704 1806 ............ Lever, Charles, 259 ........................... 1872 ............ Lichfield, William, 75 ........................ 1447 1468? ........... Lilly, William, 82 ............................ 152* 1809 ............ Lincoln, Abraham, 298 ....................... 1865 1771 ............ Lingard, John, 209 ........................... 1851 1633 ............ Locke, John, 123, 180 ......................... 1704 1821 ............ Locker-Lampson , Frederick, 279 .............. 1895 1794 ............ Lockhart, John Gibson, 209, 210 ............... 1854 1558? ........... Lodge, Thomas, no, 120, 124 ................. 1625 1807 ............ Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 312 ........... 1882 1618 ............ Lovelace, Richard, 158 ........................ 1658 1819 ............ Lowell, James Russell, 306, 318 ............... 1891 1370? ........... Lydgate, John, 47, 72, 73, 78, 99, 101 ........... 1451? 1554? ........... Lyly, John, 106, 131 .......................... 1606 1490 ............ Lyndsay, Sir David, 94, 95, 22r ............... 1555 1803 ............ Lytton, Edward G. E. L. Bulwer, 278 ......... 1873 1800 ............ Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 267, 279 ....... 1859 1765 ............ Mackintosh, Sir James, 206 ................... 1832 1697 ............ Macklin, Charles, 195 ........................ 1797 1736 ............ Macpherson, James, 217 ...................... 1796 1772. .... ....... McCrie, Thomas, 209 ......................... 1835 INDEX 351 Bonn. DIBD. 1705? Mallet, David, 216 1765 Fl. 1470 Malory, Sir Thomas, 77 1766 Malthus, Thomas, 209 1834 1670? Mandeville, Bernard, 190 1733 Fl. 1288-1388 Mannyng, of Brunne, Robert, 38, 51 Fl. 1200 Map, Walter, 45 1564 Marlowe, Christopher, 119, 120, 131, 133, 143, 222 1593 1792 Marryat, Frederick, 259 1848 1575? Marston, John, 124, 141, 142 1634 1621 Marvell, Andrew, 157, 161, 174, 175, 219 1678 1583 Massinger, Philip, 146 1640 1663 Mather, Cotton, 287, 299 1728 Matthew Paris, 39 1259 i4th century . . . . Maundevile, Sir John, 70 1595 May, Thomas, 153 1650 1828 Meredith, George, 265 1808 Merivale, Charles, 270 1893 1735 Mickle, William, 221 1788 1570? Middleton, Thomas, 146 1627 1773 Mill, James, 209 1836 1806 Mill, John Stuart, 274 1873 1791 Milman, Henry Hart, 270 1868 1608 Milton, John, 16, 90, 96, 144, 155, 161-168, 171, 173, 219, 224 1674 1300? Minot, Laurence, 51 1352? 1744 Mitford, William, 209 1827 Montague, Charles (see Halifax, Lord) 1779 Moore, Thomas, 209, 236 1853 1614 More, Henry, 159 1687 1478 More, Sir Thomas, 40, 82, 83 1535 1834 Morris, William, 279-280 1896 1814 Motley, John Lothrop, 300 1877 1649 Mulgrave, John Sheffield, Earl of, 177 1721 1727 Murphy, Arthur, 195 1805 Fl. 1638 Nabbes, Thomas, 148 1567 Nash, Thomas, 108, 131 1601 Fl. 1375 Nassington, William of , 75 1620 Nerile, Henry, 180 1694 7801 Newman, John Henry, 273 1890 352 ENGLISH LITERATURE BORM. DIED. 1642 Newton, Sir Isaac, 178 1727 1725 Newton, John, 208 1807 Fl. 1250 Nicholas of Guildford, 50 Fl. 1390 Nicholas of Hereford, 57 1535? North, Sir Thomas, 117 1601? 1532 Norton, Thomas, 75, 129 1584 1653 Oldham, John, 177 1683 1769 Opie, Amelia, 210 1853 1075 Ordericus Vitalis, 39 "43? Fl. 1200 Orrmin, 42 Oswald of Worcester, 28 972 1652 Otway, Thomas, 194 1685 1581 Overbury, Sir Thomas, 153 1613 1737 Paine, Thomas, 206, 291 1809 1540? Painter, William, 102 1594 1743 Paley, William, 208 1805 1504 Parker, Archbishop, 151 1575 1823 Parkman, Francis, 300 1893 1679 Parnell, Thomas, 185 1718 1839 Pater, Walter, 272 1894 1823 Patmore, Coventry, 246 1896 1791 Payne, John Howard, 311 1852 1395? Pecock, Reginald, 77 1460? 1558? Peele, George, no, 131, 135 *597? 1633 Pepys, Samuel, 182 1703 1729 Percy, Thomas, Bishop, 216, 223 1811 1623 Petty, Sir William, 151, 180 1687 1510? Phaer, Thomas, 100 1560 1675 Phillips, Ambrose, 187 1749 1676 Phillips, John, 187 1709 Phreas, John, 80 1465 1809 Poe, Edgar Allan, 294, 318 1849 1667 Pomfret, John, 187 1702 1500 Pole, Reginald, 104 1558 1688 Pope, Alexander, 173, 175, 176,181, 184-188, 190, 198, 200, 213, 216, 219, 222 1744 1802 Praed, Winthrop Mackworth, 279 1839 1796 Prescott, William Hickling, 300 1859 1664 Prior, Matthew, 177, 185, 187 1725 INDEX 353 BORN. DIED. 1600 Prynne, William, 155 1669 1577 Purchas, Samuel, 152 k 1626 Fl. i5th century. Purvey, John, 57 After 1427 1530? Puttenham, George, 107 1600? 1592 Quarles, Francis, 159 1644 1764 Radcliffe, Ann, 210 1823 1552 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 114, 115, 152 1618 1686 Ramsay, Allan, 187, 221, 222 1758 1605 Randolph, Thomas, 148 1634 1814 Reade, Charles, 264 1884 1710 Reid, Thomas, 203 1796 1723 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 199 1792 1772 Ricardo, David, 209 1823 1689 Richardson, Samuel, 200 1761 Ripley, George, 75 1490 Fl. 1295 Robert of Gloucester, 44 1721 Robertson, William, 202 1793 Fl. 1551 Robinson, Ralph, 83 1647 Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of, 177 1680 1509? Rogers, John, 85 1555 1763 Rogers, Samuel, 228, 235 1855 Rolle, of Hampole, Richard, 38 1349 1634 Roscommon, Dillon Wentworth, Earl of, 177. . 1684 1828 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 249, 279 1882 1830 Rossetti, Christina, 249, 279 1894 1674 Rowe, Nicholas, 195 1718 Fl. I7th century.. Rowley, William, 148 Roy, William, 85 1531 1819 Ruskin, John, 270 1900 1836 Russell, Lady Rachel, 182 1723 1536 Sackville, Thomas, Lord Buckhurst, 95, 96, 99, ico, 129 1608 St. John, Henry (see Bolingbroke, Lord) 1577 Sandys, George, 152 1644 1697 Savage, Richard, 214 1743 Savile, George (see Halifax, Lord) 1747 Scott, Thomas, 208 1821 1771 Scott, Sir Walter, 90, 206, 210-212, 216, 328, 234. 1832 1639 Sedley, Sir Charles, 177, 194 1701 2A 354 ENGLISH LITERATURE BOMC. DIED. 1584 Selden, John, 151, 152 1654 Sellynge, William, 80 1640 Shadwell, Thomas, 176, 194. . .' 1692 1671 Shaftesbury, Anthony, Earl of, 190 1713 1564 Shakespeare, William, 82, 90, 96, 98, 117-121, 130-142, 161, 170-172, 193, 212, 216, 218 1616 1792 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 22, 228, 236, 238-244. . . 1822 1714 Shenstone, William, 216, 221 1763 1751 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 195 1816 1641 Sherlock, William, 179 1707 1596 Shirley, James, 148, 160 1666 Fl. 1440 Shirley, John, 78 1577 Sibbes, Richard, 154 1635 1622 Sidney, Algernon, 180 1683 1554 Sidney, Sir Philip, 102, 106-108, in, 115, 119. . 1586 Fl. nth and ) , ,. | ..Simeon of Durham, 39 I2th centuries ) 1460? Skelton, John, 79, 87, 88, 95 1528? 1722 Smart, Christopher, 221 1771 1723 Smith, Adam, 204 1790 1512 Smith, Sir Thomas, 82 1577 1771 Smith, Sydney, 207 1845 1721 Smollett, Tobias, 201 1771 1633 South, Robert, 179 1716 1660 Southerne, Thomas, 194 1746 1774 Southey, Robert, 207, 209, 227-229 1843 1560? Southwell, Robert, 118 1595 1552 Speed, John, 151 1629 1562 Spelman, Sir Henry, 151 1641 1820 Spencer, Herbert, 275 1552? Spenser, Edmund, 91, 95,99, 107, 110-117,119, 122, 157, 170, 216, 222 1599 1672 Steele, Sir Richard, 191, 192 1729 1713 Sterne, Laurence, 201, 202 1763 1850 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 266 1894 1753 Stewart, Dugald, 208 1828 1635 Stillingfleet, Edward, T79 1699 1567? Stirling, Sir William Alexander, Earl of, 124, 157 1640 1525 Stow, John, 102, 152 1605 1811 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 295 1896 INDEX 355 BORN. DIED. 1609 Suckling, Sir John, 148, 158 1642 1516? Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of, 86, 88, 95-97. .1547 1667 Swift, Jonathan, 183, 185, 188, 189, 198 1745 1837 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 279 1613 Taylor, Jeremy, 153 1667 1628 Temple, Sir William, 182, 191 1699 1809 Tennyson, Alfred, 5, 7, 20, 41, 67, 224, 244, 246, 247, 276 1892 1 8 1 1 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 262 1863 1688 Theobald, Lewis, 185, 216 1744 1797 Thirwall, Connop, 270 1875 1225? Thomas of Erceldoune, 91 1300? 1700 Thomson, James, 94, 157, 188, 219, 235 1748 1817 Thoreau, Henry David, 304 1862 1686 Tickell, Thomas, 187 1740 1891 Ticknor, George, 306 1871 1630 Tillotson, John, Archbishop, 179 1694 1656 Tindal, Matthew, 190 1733 1670 Toland, John, 190 1733 Fl. 1551 Tottel, Richard, 97, 100 Fl. 1600-1613.... Tourneur, Cyril, 143 1815 Trollope, Anthony, 264 i88a 1530? Turbervile, George, 101, 102 1594? 1808 Turner, Charles Tennyson, 246 1879 Turpin, Archbishop, 45 1526? Tusser, Thomas, 97 1580 1484? Tyndale, William, 83, 84 1536 1820 Tyndall, John, 275 1893 1505 Udall, Nicholas, 129 .1556 1580 Ussher, Archbishop, 15 1656 1666? Vanbrugh, Sir John, 194 1726 1621 Vaughan, Henry, 159, 219 1693 1 1 20? Wace, 41 1184? 1822 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 274 1605 Waller, Edmund, 159, 172, 173 1687 1616 Wallis, John, 151 1703 1717 Walpole, Horace, 199 1797 356 ENGLISH LITERATURE BORN. DIED 1676 Walpole, Sir Robert, 197 1745 1593 Walton, Izaak, 155, 182 1683 1698 Warburton, William, Bishop, 185, 190, 216. . . . 1779 1460 Warham, Archbishop, 82 1532 1558? Warner, William, 121 1609 1722 Warton, Joseph, 220 1800 1728 Warton, Thomas, 207, 216, 220 1790 1732 Washington, George, 290 1799 Fl. i6th century. Webbe, William, 107 1582? Webster, John, 144, 146 1652? 1782 Webster, Daniel, 298 1852 1708 Wesley, Charles, 224 1788 1703 Wesley, John, 208 1791 1714 Whitfield, George, 208 1770 1720 White, Gilbert, 200 1793 1819 Whitman, Walt, 320 1892 1807 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 314 1892 1727 Wilkes, John, 197 1797 1095? William of Malmesbury, 39 1142? Fl. 1327 William of Shoreham, 38 Fl. 13th century. William of Waddington, 38 1785 Wilson, Professor John (Christopher North), 207 1854 1520? Wilson, Thomas, 97 1581 1588 Wither George 157, 159, 161 1667 1659 Wollaston, William, 190 1724 Worcester, John Tiptoft, Earl of, 79 1470 1770 Wordsworth, William, 92, 118, 207, 221, 223, 225, 227, 230-234, 239, 243 1850 1568 Wotton, Sir Henry, 92, 123, 152 1639 Fl. 1002-1023. . . . Wulfstan, Archbishop, 29 1503 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 86, 88, 95, 96 1542 1640? Wycherley, William, 194 1715 1320? Wyclif, John, 52, 53, 57 1384 1681 Young, Edward, 2x3 1765 INDEX TO FOREIGN AUTHORS BORN. DIBD. 1474 Ariosto, 1 10, 116 1533 1313 Boccaccio, 61, 62,74, 80,99 1375 1434 Boiardo, no 1494 1636 Boileau, 172 1711 Calprenede, 192 1663 1424 Chalcondylas, 82 1511 Fl. nth century. .Chrestien of Troyes, 44 IO&B.C Cicero, 94, 100 43 B.C. Contarini, 104 1550 1606 Corneille, 192 1684 1717 D'Alembert, 197 1783 1265 Dante, 61, 62, 70 1321 Dares Phrygius, 47 385 B.C Demosthenes, 100 322 B.C. Dictys Cretensis, 47 1713 Diderot, 197 1784 1749 Goethe, 198, 206, 211 1832 i3th century Guido delle Colonne, 47 Homer, 117, 143, 186, 224 65 B.C Horace, 163 8 B.C. 1621 La Fontaine, 172 1695 1729 Lessing, 192, 205 1781 1496 Marot, in 1544 1280? Meung, Jean de, 59 357 ENGLISH LITERATURE BORN. Dixo. 1623 Moliere, 193 1673 1533 Montaigne, 117,191 1593 1689 Montesquieu, 197, 202 1755 43 B.C. Ovid, 94, 100 17 A.D. 1304 Petrarca, 58, 61, 80, 96, 116 1374 427 B.C Plato, 96 347 B.C. Fl. 50-100 Plutarch, 100 1639 Racine, 193 1699 Fl. i2th century. .Robert of Boron, 44 17 1 2 Rousseau, 197 1778 1458 Sannazaro, 102 1530 1759 Schiller, 198 1805 1 60 1 Scudery, 192 1667 Fl. 930 Skallagrimsson, Egil, 24 45? Statius, 47 96? 1544 Tasso, no, 116 1595 70 B.C. Virgil, 7, 47, 93, 96, 100, 177 19 B.C. 1694 Voltaire, 132, 135, 195, 197, 202 1778 A 000 161 721 6 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. m JUL 21 1971 Form L9-Series 444