The aim of Addison was "to temper wit with morality and to enliven

morality with wit," and he succeeded so well that, to this day, if

one opens a volume of "The Spectator" for any reason, one cannot

lay it down. The spectacle of that world comes before us in all its

aspects--toy shops, theatres, streets, coffee-houses, masquerades:

there are allegories, sportive or serious, reflections at the opera,

or among the monuments of the dead at Westminster Abbey; there are

letters, real or "done in the office," asking for advice on points

of etiquette; there are musical strains of solemn prose, or passages

of exquisite banter; there are creations of character, Sir Roger de

Coverley, Will Wimble, and the rest. There are criticisms, as of

Milton, which led taste back from the fantasies of the Restoration to

that great poet who lived lonely, fallen on evil days and evil tongues.

Even the folk-poetry of the past, "songs and fables that are come from

father to son, and are most in vogue among the common people of the

countries through which I passed," give Addison "a particular delight,"

he says, in his paper on Chevy Chase, "the favourite ballad of the

common people of England". In our time, a critic would fall back on the

history of the ballad, showing how "Chevy Chase" is a later version of

"Otterbourne," a poem common, with patriotic variations, to England

and Scotland. For Addison "Chevy Chase" is an heroic poem: as such he

treats it, and shows how touches of Nature make it akin to Homer and

Virgil.

Here we are far away from the Restoration, and the age of conceits;

we are on the way to the romantic movement, to Scott and "The Lay of

the Last Minstrel". In quite another style take Addison's musings

on a "lady's library," mixed with "a thousand odd figures in China

ware," Japanese lacquer, and old silver. Leonora has "all the Classic

Authors--in wood," dummies! "A set of Elzevirs," small classic volumes

of the famous Dutch press, "by the same hand"--the cabinetmaker's.

There are several of the huge wandering heroic French romances,

and "Locke of Human Understanding, with a paper of patches in it":

"Clelia, which opened of itself in the place that describes two lovers

in a bower." Most of the books were bought, not "for her own use," but

"because the lady had heard them praised, or because she had seen the

authors of them".

Addison, it must be confessed, did not take the learning of the sex

very seriously. Now the learning of many of them is serious indeed;

but, we ask, are either men or women more seriously inclined, on

the whole, to study than they were in Queen Anne's day? Addison,

says Thackeray, "walks about the world watching women's pretty

humours--fashions, follies, flirtations, rivalries, and noting them

with the most charming humour". It was not he, but Steele, who found in

a lady's society "a liberal education". But it was Addison whom Lady

Mary Wortley Montagu proclaimed to be "the best companion in the world".

There is still no better companion: we can still hear him "sweetly talk

and sweetly smile" in his Essays. He knows so much, and he is never

tedious in giving information. Like Coleridge in talk with Keats, he

deals in ghost stories: and this child of an age of reason does not

scout them. He makes the judicious remark that Lucretius, the Roman

materialist, does not believe that the soul can exist apart from the

body, yet "makes no doubt of the reality of apparitions, and that

men often appeared after their death... he was so pressed with the

matter of fact, which he could not have the confidence to deny...." He

explains by "one of the most absurd unphilosophical notions that was

ever started"--in a different way of statement this theory of Lucretius

has lately been revived.

What a variety of themes Addison illustrates and adorns! His writings

are like better conversation than was ever held save in the Fortunate

Islands by the happy Dead.

The humour and the drawing of character in the papers on Sir Roger

de Coverley, have a delicacy, a minuteness, a happy humour, which we

scarcely meet again in our literature till they reappear, a century

later, in the novels of Miss Austen. It must be admitted that Addison's

manner of writing _sent son vieux temps_, is not "up to date," but this

only lends an agreeable quaintness. Nobody, to-day, in writing of the

scene in the "Odyssey" where the hero beholds, in the next world, "the

far-renowned brides of ancient song," would speak of them as "a circle

of beauties," "the finest women". Nor, when the hero says "each of them

gave me an account of her birth and family," would a critic now say

"this is a gentle satire upon female vanity"! To give such an account

is the universal practice in Homer, when strangers meet, whether men or

women.

"The Spectator" was dropped after running for about two years, not

before Addison had praised in his paper Pope's "Essay on Criticism".

Steele introduced Pope to Addison; perhaps they never were very

attached friends, for a man of Addison's sense could not but be

watchful of himself in the company of the vain and irritable little

satirist. Pope's jealousy and suspicions produced a coldness, and,

after Addison was dead, Pope emitted his venom in the poisonous

character of "Atticus":--

Blest with each talent and each art to please,

And born to live, converse, and write with ease;

yet,

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

and so forth. Nothing that inspired skill and spite can do is better

than this satire; had Addison been alive when it was given to the world

he could not have hit a return blow, for cruelty was not in his nature,

and Pope was so sensitive that any retort on him was cruel.

In 1715 Addison conducted for six months another paper, "The

Freeholder," in the Whig interest; was made one of the Commissioners

for Trade and the Colonies, and married the Dowager-Countess of

Warwick. He died in 1719, "three years after that splendid but dismal

union," says Thackeray. A dowager-countess is not usually splendid,

and we really have no reason to think that the union was "dismal".

Addison's position as Secretary of State was sufficiently good, not to

speak of his fame, popularity, and genius. In 1719 Addison was matched

against Steele in a newspaper controversy: Steele probably was not

welcome to Lady Warwick at Holland House, but the two men, says Steele,

"still preserved the most passionate concern for their mutual welfare.

When they met they were as unreserved as boys...."

Addison with Steele, founded a school of essayists of merit, who never

came near the supremacy of their masters: Addison not only delighted

his world, but left it better than he found it; not by preaching

violent sermons, not by "lashing the vices of the age," but by sensibly

lowering the tyranny of the fashion which insisted on the duty of being

vicious.

Swift.

Concerning the genius, character, and career of Jonathan Swift there

are interesting varieties of opinion, but nobody denies that the genius

was great or that the career was sad, strange, even mysterious. In an

old-fashioned comedy of Humours, Swift would have been cast for the

part of Wycherley's Captain Manly in "The Plain Dealer"; the man of

tender heart who hates an age and a society that do not come up to his

ideals. Swift had, indeed, depths of affection, and a noble capacity

for friendship, but, unlike Captain Manly, he would never have made

Fidelia, or any other woman, happy. He lived in this world the life of

a flogging schoolmaster. He expresses a hope, at about the age of 26,

that, in his poems,

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

He hopes, at the same hopeful period, that

My hate, whose lash just heaven has long decreed,

Shall on a day make Sin and Folly bleed.

He lashed away, but Sin and Folly remained "more than usual calm,"

they did not hear, they did not heed him; and the presentable part of

his most comprehensive and ferocious satire of humanity, the one book

published by him which is still generally known, "Gulliver's Travels,"

has been an innocent source of amusement to many generations of

children.

At about the age of 37, Swift, in a private letter, wrote thus of his

own case, "I envy very much your prudence and temper, and love of peace

and settlement: the reverse of which has been the great uneasiness

of my life, and is like to continue so". He recognizes one source of

his sorrows. As to "prudence," Swift had even too much of it, if

"prudence" were the motive which made him put off marriage with the

woman ("Stella," Esther Johnson) whom he loved, and who loved him. But

for "peace and settlement," he had no partiality; and his temper was no

better than he deemed it.

The curses of Swift were, first, his just consciousness of powers far

superior to those of the great politicians who adulated, and used, and

failed to reward him. With their wine, and their amours, and their

bitter, petty jealousies, they let the great opportunity go by, and,

lo! Harley is in the Tower; and Bolingbroke, a fugitive, drinks, and

loves, and intrigues in France, vituperating the Prince whose cause he

has helped to ruin; while Swift eats out his own heart in that Ireland

which he hated.

Another curse was that he had attached himself as a priest to the

Church of England; while the author of "The Tale of a Tub," however

loyal he might be in practice, certainly cannot have been "a trusty

and undoubting Church of England man". Of all the creeds, of all the

Churches and Sects, in his heart he thought like the Jupiter of his

poem,

_You_, who in various Sects were shamm'd,

And come to hear each other damn'd.

This bleak lucidity of soul, this consciousness of being able "to

see forward with a fatal clearness," this knowledge of the greatness

of his own genius,--thwarted by poverty, driven wild by servitude,

lacerated by the torments of a mysterious disease, crushed by terrible

forebodings of the appointed end; these things drove Swift to cut

himself among the tombs, and to curse in the wilderness.

Though born in Dublin (30 Nov. 1667) Swift was no Irishman: his father

belonged to an old Yorkshire, his mother to an old Leicestershire

family. But on his father's death, his mother being left ill-provided,

Swift's was the position of a poor relation. His training at Kilkenny

school and Trinity College, Dublin, was paid for by his uncle, Godwin

Swift, who was either poor or penurious. Men like Swift seldom yield

much attention to their tutors; and Swift, though he did well in Greek

and Latin, failed in physics and took no pains with his Latin essay.

He was, however, allowed to pass. In 1688 he went to England, to his

mother at Leicester, and in the following year entered the household of

Sir William Temple, a politician and diplomatist, retired from active

life, busy with literature and gardening, but in friendly relations

with William III and with men of affairs.

Sir William Temple (1628-1699) was himself a writer admired for his

style, especially in his Essay on Poetry. His periods, though long,

are graceful and well balanced, but seldom have such brief melancholy

cadences as this reflection "when all is done, human life is, at the

greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played

with and humoured a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and

then the care is over".

Swift's position, at first, was between those of a secretary and an

upper servant; he left Temple's house for Ireland, in 1690; returned in

1691: next year obtained a degree at Oxford; and in 1694, in Ireland,

took Orders, and received a small benefice, Kilroot, near Belfast,

where the people were Presbyterians, and he had no congregation worth

mentioning. He entangled himself with a Miss Waring (Varina) and wrote

"Pindaric" poems. Dryden, a remote cousin of his, told him that he

would never be a poet, and no other reason has been discovered for

Swift's flouts and jeers at Dryden's reputation. The anecdote may be

untrue, and, as a Catholic, Dryden would be disapproved of by Swift.

In 1696 Swift was reconciled with Temple, and during the next two years

was treated with more favour, met politicians, met the King; educated

Stella, an inmate of Temple's house, then a girl of 15; read much in

Temple's library, and was about to attach himself to the double-dyed

traitor, Sunderland, when Sunderland was dismissed from office. Swift

went back to Ireland, held a living at Laracor, lived much with Lord

Berkeley at the Castle, Dublin; wrote lively verses of the lighter

sort, wrote a political pamphlet which was successful, and showed

leanings towards the Whig party. In London (1704) his "Tale of a Tub"

was published anonymously: it had been composed in 1696-1697.

In "An Apology" (1709) Swift, still, as always, anonymous, writes

"the book seems calculated to live as long as our language and our

taste admit no great alterations". In taste great alterations have

been admitted. Though excellent judges still applaud this whimsical

allegory, few readers who approach it with high expectations are

likely to escape disappointment. The allegory of Peter (Rome) Martin

(Anglicans and Lutherans) and Jack (Presbyterians and all other

Protestant sects), is utterly incoherent. At present no self-respecting

person would write of the religions of Islam and Buddha in such

terms and such temper as Swift wrote about the Churches and sects

of Christianity. Whatever we may think of Transubstantiation and

Vestments, we do not make uproarious fun of them.

Already Swift indulges his half-insane delight in malodorous

references; the wit of the dirty schoolboy scrawling on the walls. Few

things in the work are more witty than this on Dryden: "he has often

said to me in confidence, that the world would never have suspected him

to be so great a poet, if he had not assured them so frequently in his

prefaces, that it was impossible they could ever doubt or forget it".

Thackeray remarks, "I think the world was right, and the Bishops who

advised Queen Anne not to appoint the author of 'The Tale of the

Tub' to a Bishopric, gave perfectly good advice". James IV did not

give Dunbar a benefice: the line must be drawn somewhere. Swift, in

his "Apology," denied that he had attacked religion: be it so, he

had written on matters ecclesiastical with amazingly bad taste. His

"Argument against Abolishing Christianity" (1708) is not the sort of

argument that we expect from a bishop-postulant, but its irony seems as

charming and dexterous now as it did two centuries ago. In "The Tale of

a Tub," on the other hand, we seldom find a passage that wins a smile,

except in "those fine curses" which Peter spoke, and in some of the

gambols of Jack. The apologue, in feet, is heavy-handed; the author

does not clearly know where he is making for; the perfect clearness of

his later style is absent. (These observations, entirely candid, are at

odds with the usual applause of "The Tale of a Tub".)

With "The Tale of a Tub" was published, in the same volume, "The

Battle of the Books," written about 1697; this was a now belated

contribution to the controversy as to the relative merits of the

Ancients and the Moderns, begun in France by Charles Perrault, the

author of our most familiar fairy tales. As it happened, Temple, in

an essay, had taken up the cause of the Ancients, and had chosen,

as proofs of superiority of the oldest books, the Fables ascribed

to Æsop, and the Letters attributed to Phalaris, the half-mythical

tyrant of Agrigentum. The matter of the fables is prehistoric, but

the crooked slave, Æsop, did not contribute their _form_; and the

Letters of Phalaris were a literary exercise composed long after the

tyrant's date. Wotton, with some help from the greatest scholar of his

day, Richard Bentley, King's Librarian, and (1700) Master of Trinity,

Cambridge, replied to Temple, and Charles Boyle, of Christ Church,

Oxford, introduced a personal squabble with Bentley. The Christ Church

wits, including the formidable Atterbury, sided with Boyle,--there

was a war between elegant scholars, on Boyle's side; and the nascent

science of the Royal Society allied with perfect scholarship and

Bentley, on the other. Boyle did not insist that the Letters of

Phalaris were genuine; Bentley displayed his sagacious learning in

his proof that they were not. Temple was discreetly silent, but Swift

espoused the cause of the wits in "The Battle of the Books". The Books

in the King's Library, Ancient and Modern, meet in a parody of a fight

in Homer. The goddess, Dulness, befriends the Moderns, as Aphrodite, in

Homer, protects Paris and Æneas. The mock-Homeric manner was not then

outworn, and it amused; while Swift heaped personal scorn on Bentley,

and, of course, on Dryden, who is ridiculed for being old. Bentley,

crooked-legged and hump-backed, is armed with a flail, and "a vessel

full of ordure". Boyle transfixes Bentley and Wotton as a cook spits a

brace of woodcocks--and that is the humour of it.

Infinitely more amusing were Swift's predictions of the death of a

prophetic almanac-maker, Partridge (1708), and the sequel of that jest.

Swift styled himself Isaac Bickerstaff, and lent the name to Steele,

for use in his new paper "The Tatler". He lived in close friendship

with Addison, Steele, Congreve, and Prior; and began his love affair

with Miss Vanhomrigh, the unfortunate Vanessa, rival of Stella. Like

Lord Foppington, Swift probably coveted nothing less than her heart,

which she gave, and his difficulty was "to get rid of the rest of her

body".

After a visit to Ireland, Swift returned to find the Tories in power,

"a new world" (September, 1710). He met Harley (Lord Oxford), took

service under him, and for three years was the Achitophel of the

Tories, writing for them lampoons and political pamphlets which

"were cried up to the skies". For half a year (1710-1711) Swift's

papers appeared in "The Examiner". Swift dined with Harley and St.

John--they called him, "Jonathan"; he snubbed their attempts to treat

him as a mere gentleman of the Press; and in the delightful pages of

his familiar "Journal to Stella," he paints the age, and himself,

triumphant, adulated, powerful, but "seeing all his own mischance"; "I

believe they will leave me Jonathan as they found me".

Among the pamphlets of this period are "The Hue and Cry after Dismal"

(Lord Nottingham,'ancestor of Horace Walpole's "black funereal

Finches"), and the more important "Conduct of the Allies". By 1713

Swift hoped "that the present age and posterity would learn who were

the real enemies of the country". The old question of Tory Short and

Whig Codlin! But he had cruelly offended the Duchess of Somerset by

"The Windsor Prophecy"; and the Queen could not endure the author of

"The Tale of a Tub". He asked for his reward, and with much trouble

obtained the Deanery of St. Patrick's, Dublin (June, 1713). He went to

Ireland, but he could not get rid of Vanessa. Her letters pursued him;

other letters called him to town--Harley and St. John were at odds, and

he was needed. He engaged in a paper war with Steele, now an enemy;

he wrote "The Public Spirit of the Whigs"; he offended the Scottish

members, and the Duke of Argyll, the hero of Malplaquet, an ill man

to meddle with. He was consoled by the friendship of Pope, Gay, and

Arbuthnot, a good man and a great humorist. They founded the Martinus

Scriblerus Club, for the writing of facetious papers: but politics went

ill, Harley and St. John quarrelled in the Queen's presence: her death

was near; Harley was overthrown by St. John; St. John had no courage,

and, on the death of Anne, was checked by Argyll and his regiment.

Bishop Atterbury would have proclaimed the King, King James over the

Water; the laymen dared not back him; the Elector of Hanover occupied

the throne; and of Swift's great friends St. John fled to France, and

Harley was imprisoned in the Tower; while Swift, hooted by the pressmen

whom he had bullied, made for Ireland. The Jacobite Cause was lost,

and we cannot here ask, would Swift (as St. John says in "Esmond")

have accepted the Primacy of England from _la bonne cause_, the young

Catholic King?

My life is now a burden grown

To others, ere it be my own,

Swift wrote. He corresponded (1716) with Atterbury, and Atterbury was

at the head of the Jacobite party in England. In 1719 Swift dedicated

to a Swedish diplomatist, Count Gyllenborg, a History of England. "My

intention was to inscribe it to the King, your late Master, for whose

great virtues I had ever the highest admiration, as I shall continue

to bear to his memory." This King, Charles XII, in 1716 meant to land

in Britain with an army in support of the Jacobites, and Gyllenborg,

his ambassador, managed the plot in England. Charles had invited Swift,

at an earlier date, to Sweden: now Swift dwells "in a most obscure

disagreeable country" (Ireland), "and among a most profligate and

abandoned people".

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

The years 1719-1723 saw the completion of Swift's ambiguous poem,

"Cadenus and Vanessa," and the arrival of Vanessa in Swift's

neighbourhood. "In vain he protested, he vowed, he soothed and bullied;

the news of the Dean's marriage to Stella at last reached her; and it

killed her,--Vanessa died of that passion" (Thackeray). The marriage is

still matter of controversy.

In 1724 Swift, who hated the English Government if he did not love

Ireland, wrote the famous "Drapier's Letters" against a job in copper

currency, and gained high popularity.

In 1726 he gave to the world the most famous of his books, "Gulliver's

Travels," in which his gift of narrative, his amazing power of being

truthful in the minutest details of the most extravagant imaginations,

his misanthropy, his irony, and his delight in unsavoury things,

are all carried to the highest perfection. In 1729 came the "Modest

Proposal" for eating Irish children; in 1738 his "Polite Conversation"

and "Directions to Servants," with the same merit of humour, and the

same inveterate fault.

In visits to London (1726, 1727) Swift had enjoyed the society of

his old friends and comrades in letters; and hoped there, perhaps,

to find a Fountain of Youth. He felt himself slipping into the vice

of hoarding; and rusting in a second-rate society. Bolingbroke had

been allowed to return from exile; the banished King had found him

worthless as a statesman: he had said his worst against the banished

King; nobody wanted Bolingbroke and nobody was afraid of him. He played

the philosopher, and Swift did not believe in his affectation of

philosophy. Arbuthnot, Swift loved, Pope he had always admired; and he

tried to protect Gay from his own reckless improvidence. He ridiculed,

in "Gulliver," the proofs brought against Atterbury as a Jacobite

agent: if Swift was not convinced by the evidence he must have shut his

eyes very hard.

In January, 1728, Stella died: Swift tried to fill the gap in his life

by activity in Irish politics. His disease, apparently some malady of

the ear which gradually affected the brain, became more unendurable,

but he had still to write some of his most powerful satires in

verse. Then his memory began to fail, and he drifted slowly into the

half-unconscious dotage of his last five years, dying on 19 October,

1745, unconscious, probably, of the meteoric adventure of Prince

Charles.

The failure of his party, of his political ambition, and measureless

hopes of greatness, gave Swift the retirement and the leisure to

produce his greatest works. If fortune had "bantered us" as Bolingbroke

said, he turned and bantered Fate and mankind. In the long array of his

volumes, so seldom opened, are many brief flights, in verse and prose,

which are full of entertainment, of wild fancy, orderly and gravely

presented; and there is the "Journal to Stella," with its infinite

tenderness of affection; and the Letters, the confidences of the wits

from romantic Charles Wogan, who rescued from prison the bride of a

King, and died as Governor of the appropriate province of La Mancha,

to those of Pope and Arbuthnot and Gay. The works of Swift are a

library in themselves.

De Foe.

"One man in his time plays many parts," and no man played more parts

than Daniel Foe or De Foe. The son of a butcher in St. Giles's, born

in 1661, he received at a Nonconformist school an education that was

a sufficient basis for literary undertakings, but not tending to

such "classical" flights as led young University men to profitable

sinecures under Government. He is said to have been out under Monmouth

in 1685. He betook himself to commerce of various kinds, thus acquiring

little or no money (in 1692 he "broke," like Mr. Badman), but a

competent knowledge of the currents of trade, and the courses of

financial speculation, exhibited in his "Essay on Projects," projects,

educational and social as well as financial (1698). In 1701 his "True

Born Englishman," showing in the interest of William III that the

English are a mixed race, was successful.

In 1702 his famous "Shortest Way with the Dissenters" was discovered

to be, not a candid plea for the Church of England, but an irritating

parody of High Church pretensions, nearly as serious as Swift's

apology for cannibalism. De Foe was pilloried, but not pelted, and

imprisoned for his waggery; was released, probably through the agency

of Harley, Lord Oxford, the wavering and enigmatic "Dragon" of Swift's

correspondence; and while editing and indeed writing a weekly "Review,"

the precursor in its social columns of Steele's "Tatler," De Foe served

Harley in divers subterranean ways. In Scotland, in the autumn of 1706,

he acted as Harley's spy and newsagent: his letters to Harley contain

an admirable picture of the struggles for and against the Union of

Scotland and England, and of De Foe's own versatile, acute and daring

character. He made himself "all things to all men," could talk to

each citizen as a member of his own trade, explained all the economic

conditions of the country, understood, and did not revere, the Kirk,

and the preachers; and, by securing the services of that lively and

humorous rogue and sham-fanatic, Ker of Kersland, broke up an unholy

alliance between the extreme "Cameronians" and the Jacobite gentry and

clansmen of Perthshire and Angus. They had intended to break up the

Parliament; but the wild Whigs did not keep tryst.

It is plain that Harley treated De Foe very ill, and that, like most

spies, he was underpaid. Still he was working for a cause which he had

at heart; as he was later, when, to all appearance, playing the part of

journalist in the Tory or even Jacobite interest under Government.

The needy De Foe was a man of dark corners, an absolute "Johannes

Factotum". Swift called him "a grave, sententious, dogmatical rogue".

He professed that he received assistance from "The Divine Spirit".

No man who wrote so much and so variously has written so well. His

favourite topic, if we may judge by the frequency with which he handled

it, was "psychical research". Like Glanvill, Henry More, and other

writers in the sceptical age of the Restoration, he collected, and

told in his own inimitable manner, many current anecdotes of wraiths,

death-warnings, second sight, and phantasms of the dead. The most

prominent merit of De Foe, in fiction, is his power of convincing the

reader by the minute and sober realism of his details. Some of his

novels, in autobiographic form, have caused disputes as to whether they

be romances, or actual memoirs.

"A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal, on September 8,

1705" (published in 1706) has been described as "the first instance of

De Foe's wonderful lies like truth". "This relation is matter of fact,"

said De Foe in the Preface. Sir Walter Scott, a ghost-hunter himself,

explained the "fact" by saying that De Foe invented and wrote the story

as a puff of Drelincourt "On Death," which the appearance of Mrs. Veal,

on the day after her death recommended to her friend (who believed her

to be alive), Mrs. Bargrave.

But Mr. George Aitken has proved "that the piece was, as De Foe said,

'a true relation of matter of fact,'" that is, De Foe merely wrote the

story as told by Mrs. Bargrave--"the percipient"--the person who saw

and conversed with the dead Mrs. Veal about her gown--"a scoured silk,

newly made up". Mr. Aitken found a manuscript note of 21 May, 1714, by

some one who had interviewed Mrs. Bargrave, and for whom Mrs. Bargrave

made three or four minute additions. As for Mrs. Veal herself, she

died on 7 September, appeared on 8 September to Mrs. Bargrave, and we

have the record of her burial on 10 September, in the register of St.

Mary's, Dover.

In another case, "The Botethan Ghost," told in an appendix to De Foe's

"Duncan Campbell," the tale was really written, as De Foe says, not by

himself, but by one of the people who saw the spectre, the Rev. Mr.

Ruddle of Launceston in Cornwall, in June, 1665; the narrative was

written on 4 September of the same year.

Thus De Foe's extraordinary gift of making things fictitious seem true

has caused him to be charged with inventing stories which he merely

retold, or printed from the manuscript of another.

De Foe was 60 years of age, and had suffered from apoplexy, when he

wrote the masterpiece which made him immortal, "Robinson Crusoe"

(1719). New editions appeared in May, June, and August; a sequel

followed which few read; still more scarce are readers of De Foe's

"Serious Reflections and Vision of the Angelic World" (1720). The

"metapsychical" world was always very near De Foe, practical and shrewd

man as he was.

"Crusoe" is based on Captain Rogers's narrative of the adventures of

Alexander Selkirk, a mariner of Largo, in Fife, marooned (1704) on the

Island of Juan Fernandez. An allegory of De Foe's own life has been

suspected, the idea is unimportant.

It is superfluous to dilate on the sterling merits of "Robinson

Crusoe". Before he published it a critic had recognized "the little

art he is truly master of, of forging a story, and imposing it on the

world for truth". The style is as simple as Swift's, and more "homely".

The tale of love was not De Foe's trade, any more than "the moving

accident" was Wordsworth's. "Moll Flanders," and "Roxana" are no doubt

meant to have a moral influence; but their readers are looking for

something else: like the readers of the edifying Monsieur Zola.

De Foe was one of the fathers of journalism, and almost "the only

begetter" of the story of adventure, the desert island romance, and,

in "Memoirs of a Cavalier," and "A Journal of the Plague Year," of

the historical autobiographical novel. "It was about the beginning of

September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard, in

ordinary discourse, that the plague was returned again in Holland...."

That keynote reverberates in scores of the historical romances of

1885-1900.

The modern novelist, of course, avoids De Foe's strict statistical

method. De Foe's story reads precisely like a historical document, and

the modern reader dislikes nothing more than that sort of reading. De

Foe's hero saw a number of people looking at "a ghost walking on a

grave stone". Less fortunate Mr. Pepys "went forth, to see (God forgive

my presumption!) whether I could see any dead corpse going to the

grave, but, as God would have it, did not".

By a truly realistic touch De Foe's contemplative saddler closes his

journal with "a coarse but sincere stanza of my own,"

A dreadful plague in London was

In the year sixty-five,

Which swept an hundred thousand souls

Away; yet I alive!

The modern reader finds that De Foe's fictions are too like facts, and,

often, in the moral and religious reflections, too like tracts, for his

taste. On the other hand, to a contemplative mind, "Robinson Crusoe,"

carefully read, and compared with its descendants in fiction, is a

source of delight. De Foe, at the age of 60, must have been, while he

wrote it, as happy as his innumerable readers. For example, we compare

Robinson's felling of a cedar tree "five feet ten inches diameter at

the lower part..." and his construction of a vessel "fit to carry

twenty-six men," a vessel quite unlaunchable, with the practicable

coracle, the most "home-made" of things in "Treasure Island". We

compare the trial trips of the two crafts (Robinson's _second_ boat);

we see that R. L. Stevenson has produced the less impossible narrative

of the twain, and that both rejoice the heart.

The mass, and the variety, of what must be called the "pot-boilers" of

De Foe are unequalled. In better conditions of authorship he would have

been a rich man, but he died poor, in distress, and under a cloud, in

1731.

A history of literature is not necessarily a history of philosophical,

metaphysical, and theological speculation. In such speculation the age

was rich that saw the volcanic eruption of sects and heresies during

the religious frenzy of the Civil War, and also beheld the reaction

from all "enthusiasm" to the passion for common sense and for science

as "organized common sense" which came in with the Restoration.

Hobbes's works did not encourage religious "enthusiasm," or mysticism,

or belief in the ineffable spiritual experiences of devout men, from

John Bunyan with his visions, to Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688), an

Anglican divine, with his Neoplatonic hints at Union with the Absolute

("True Intellectual System of the Universe," "Eternal and Immutable

Morality"). The learned and the unlearned wrote books on either side,

sceptical or in favour of belief.

The Royal Society impartially included Joseph Glanvill (16361680)

with his "Vanity of Dogmatising," and his "Sadducismus Triumphatus,"

the pioneer of Psychical Research, with its tales of _Poltergeists_,

wraiths, and levitations, some of them fairly well authenticated. The

Royal Society also gave a place to the far more famous philosopher of

liberal common sense philosophy, John Locke (1632-1704). Locke's first

eighteen years were passed under the shadow of the Great Rebellion,

and at Christ Church, Oxford, under a Head who was an Independent

divine. He did not like the new freedom, in which he found the old

slavery, but after the Restoration he found liberty for discussion,

in which "enthusiasm" was not permitted to enter. His attitude

towards mental philosophy was not unlike that of Bacon. He disliked

Aristotelianism as then held at Oxford, thinking that words usurped

the place of facts, and in his "Essay on the Human Understanding" he

employed that plain style which the Royal Society enjoined. The work

was written at intervals during seventeen years, disturbed when as a

friend of Shaftesbury, Dryden's Achitophel, the turbulent patron of

Titus Oates, he was sent into exile. The burden of the essay, which

appeared in 1690, is opposition to the theory of "innate ideas"--the

terms need defining--and insistence that we derive our ideas from

the presentations of our senses. "Average common sense was always

kept in his view," and "he wrote for the most part in the language

of the market-place". He wanted man to think as a human being very

limited in his faculties, "to distinguish between what is, and what

is not comprehensible by us," and his treatise had the most potent

and enduring effects on continental as well as on English Philosophy.

He was a friend of his junior, Berkeley, whose philosophic fancy

took a wider and more audacious range. His "Treatise on Government"

and "Thoughts on Education" followed rapidly. He obtained a place as

Commissioner of Trade and Plantations (Colonies), and advised England

to anticipate Scotland in founding an emporium at Darien, in Spanish

territory, as the Scots were to discover.

We have not space for much more than the names of other prose writers

of this great age. John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), a Scot in London, was

an admirable humorist, a great physician, and the friend of all the

wits; himself a good-humoured Swift in prose satire. Bishop Atterbury

(1662-1732) excited an enthusiastic devotion in Pope, who proposed

to accompany this clerical conspirator into exile, after his great

Jacobite plot was crushed in 1723. Atterbury was an accomplished

general writer, while the great scholar and Master of Trinity,

Richard Bentley (1662-1742), gave to his classical criticism of the

forged "Epistles of Phalaris" the merit of vigorous literature.

His conjectural various readings in Milton's text are now and then

comical, and seem a parody of classical criticism. The Viscount

Bolingbroke, Henry St. John (1678-1751), was a wit among politicians,

the patron, friend, and inspiration of the wits; he had his fame as

an eloquent rhetorician in his life, and as a daring thinker, but

he really wrote best when he wrote simply and humorously, as in his

satire of his Jacobite allies, "The Epistle to Windham" (1716). His

"Ideal of a Patriot King" also preserves his literary reputation

(1738). Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), was

an elegant philosopher, a thinker of taste; while George Berkeley,

Bishop of Cloyne (born at Kilkenny 1685, died 1753), was an idealistic

philosopher and man of science ("The Theory of Vision") whose style,

in grace and irony, is akin to the manners of Plato and of Pascal. The

best and most delightful of his works is the dialogue "Alciphron, or

the Minute Philosopher," directed against the Sceptics, and deistical

writers. Berkeley's character was not less admirable than his works.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

GEORGIAN POETRY.

I.

Edward Young.

"Is it to the credit or discredit of Young, as a poet, that of his

'Night Thoughts' the French are particularly fond?" So asks Croft, the

sardonic author of a notice on Young in Dr. Johnson's "Lives of the

Poets". The preference is certainly not to the credit of the French!

Born in Hampshire in 1683, the son of a clergyman, Young lived till

1765: writing much verse, and more prodigal of praises to "the Great"

than any other poet of any age.

Young's father, in 1703, appears to have been poor, for the son, to

save expense, was hospitably entertained in the lodges of the Warden of

New College and the President of Corpus. A Fellowship was found for him

at All Souls', and as he was chosen to make and speak the Latin oration

at the founding of the fine Codrington Library, it may be supposed

that, at All Souls', he was held to be more than _mediocriter doctus_

(the qualifications for a Fellow were said to be "well born, well

dressed, moderately learned").

Young's earlier poems, and his dedications always, seem bids for

patronage and preferment. In his "Last Day" (1710),

An archangel eminently bright

From off his silver staff of wondrous height

Unfurls the Christian flag, which waving flies

And shuts and opens more than half the skies.

Angels are asked, on the annihilation of the universe, to say where

Britannia is now?

All, all is lost, no monument, no sign,

Where once so proudly blazed the great machine.

In the Dedication, which Young later suppressed, nothing was left but

Queen Anne, whom the poet distinctly saw floating upwards, and leaving

the fixed stars behind her. The clever but eccentric and unfortunate

Jacobite Duke of Wharton was a patron of Young, and the defender of

Atterbury. The Duke died, under arms for the exiled James III, or

Chevalier de St. George, at Lerida; he was then composing a tragedy on

Mary, Queen of Scots. Young suppressed, in later years, the dedication

to Wharton of his successful tragedy, "The Revenge" (1721).

In 1725-1726 Young published his Satires, "The Universal Passion". They

read like a poor imitation of Pope's satires, but in point of time they

precede the "Dunciad".

Why slumbers Pope, who leads the tuneful train,

Nor hears that Virtue, which he loves, complain?

Pope was not slumbering, he was counting every groan of Virtue, to whom

he was so devoted, and was about to lash Vice with the best of them.

The Universal Passion which Young flogs, is the Love of Fame. Every one

is the fool of Fame except this earl or that, at whom Young dedicates

his strings of epigrams which remind us of Pope, with a difference.

Sloane and Ashmole are derided for their Museums. Young even dedicated

a satire to Sir Robert Walpole; _he_ must smile, "or the Nine inspire

in vain". He also adulated the Duke of Newcastle in 1745, when

a pope-bred princeling crawled ashore,

meaning,

The Prince who did in Moidart land

With seven men at his right hand,

And all to conquer kingdoms three.

Oh, he's the lad to wanton me!

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

Holles! immortal in far more than fame!

In 1727 Young became a clergyman, at the ripe age of 44. His "Night

Thoughts" in blank verse, are of 1741-1742, in Nine Nights

My song the midnight raven has outwinged,

and the midnight owl was outshrieked.

From short (as usual) and disturbed repose

I wake, how happy they who wake no more!

Yet that were vain, if dreams infest the grave.

We remember

In that sleep of death what dreams may come!

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

An undevout astronomer is mad.

There are good passages, here and there, but long sermons in a kind of

blank verse which "does not overstimulate" are not immortal. "Young

has the trick of joining the turgid with the familiar... but with all

his faults he was a man of genius and a poet." He was not, as people,

misled by the existence of one William Young, foolishly supposed, the

original of Fielding's Parson Adams in "Joseph Andrews", But Young may

be the original of Robert Montgomery, who added to the piety of Young

the ebullitions of an unprecedented genius for nonsense.

James Thomson.

Romance secured a firm footing in English literature, after the

artificialities of the eighteenth century had sunk into dotage, through

the genius of a Borderer, Sir Walter Scott. But another Borderer, long

before, had seen glimmerings and had heard strains of the fairy world

and the fairy songs. This was James Thomson, son of the parish minister

of Ednam in Roxburghshire. The father was presently translated to

Southdean, in the Cheviots, and on the old line of Scottish marches: by

that way they rode, as Froissart shows, to Otterbourne fight. Thomson's

father died while trying to lay a ghost in a house near Southdean,

when the son was at the University of Edinburgh. The haunted house was

demolished. Thomson studied divinity, but abandoned the prospective

pulpit for poetry, and went to London to seek his fortune in 1725. He

lost his letters of introduction, and he needed a pair of shoes; his

only resource was the manuscript of his "Winter," in "The Seasons". A

dedication brought to Thomson twenty guineas: the piece was praised by

Aaron Hill and Malloch (or Mallet, Malloch is a Macgregor name); the

poem was liked; "Spring" and "Summer" followed, and Thomson dallied

over "Autumn" till 1730.

In 1730 he Had been successful with the moral tragedy of "Sophonisba":

though in opposition to the Court party, Thomson had obtained several

noble patrons, and they did their best for his drama. A long poem on

Liberty was not a triumph: but the Prince of Wales gave the author a

pension of £100 yearly. His tragedy of "Tancred and Sigismunda" was

popular (1745), and a patent place brought to the poet £300 a year,

which he did not long enjoy, dying on 27 August, 1748. Thomson was

notoriously indolent, and his last, perhaps his best, work is "The

Castle of Indolence" in the Spenserian stanza.

"The Seasons" are in blank verse, a welcome change from the eternal

rhyming couplets, and prove that Thomson, unlike his contemporaries,

wrote "with his eye on the object". He had been bred in "the wide

places of the shepherds," among the lonely Border moors and hills; he

had not always been a man of towns. In the sunless winter day

scarce

The bittern knows his time, with bill ingulpht

To shake the sounding marsh; or from the shore

The plovers when to scatter o'er the heath,

And sing their wild notes to the listening waste.

This was a new voice. Being a Borderer, Thomson was an angler, and

describes fly-fishing well, though not better than Gay.

In that old theme of the Middle Ages "the symphony of spring," the

songs of birds, he shows knowledge of their ways, and if he makes the

hen nightingale the singer, so does Homer, following the myth. In

"Summer," Thomson describes, with wonderful tact, sultry climes in

which he never breathed, and adds the little idyll of Musidora.

"Autumn" includes a picture of fox-hunting, a sport which James

probably did not indulge in, and celebrates the Argyll of Malplaquet

and Duncan Forbes of Culloden, and the water of Tweed,

Whose pastoral banks first heard my Doric reed.

Despite his power of rendering nature, the artificiality of his age is

still strong with Thomson, and it cannot be said that "The Seasons" are

very attractive to modern readers.

"The Castle of Indolence," by virtue of the poet's return to the

measure of an author in his day despised, Spenser, yields a welcome

change from the eternal rhymed couplets.

A pleasant land of drowsyhead it was.

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

And when a shepherd of the Hebrid isles,

Set far amid the melancholy main

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

slightest sympathy with

The Knight of arts and industry,

And his achievements fair;

That by his castle's overthrow

Secur'd and crowned were.

The castle is a very good castle, it is good to be there, where no

cocks disturb the dawn, no dogs murder sleep, "no babes, no wives, no

hammers" make a din,

But soft-embodied Fays through airy portals stream.

William Collins.

"The grandeur of wildness and the novelty of extravagance, were always

desired by Collins, but not always attained," says Dr. Johnson. After

half a century of tame poets, we are happy to meet with one who did

not cultivate the trim parterre, and who sometimes did attain to being

"exquisitely wild".

Collins was born at Chichester on Christmas Day, 1721, was educated at

Winchester, and at Oxford was a "demy," or scholar of Magdalen, like

Addison. About 1744 he came to London with many literary projects in

his mind, and very little money in his pockets. Johnson met him, while

"immured by a bailiff". Collins cleared his debt with money advanced

by a confiding bookseller on the credit of a contemplated translation

of Aristotle's "Poetics," with a commentary. A legacy of £2000 from

an uncle, Colonel Martin, was "a sum which Collins could scarcely

think exhaustible, and which he did not live to exhaust". His mind

weakened: he died in 1759: sane, but incapable of composition. His

Odes (1746-1747) are the firm base of his renown: the little volume is

extremely scarce; Collins is said to have burned, in disappointment,

the greater part of the edition.

Of his "Persian Eclogues" (1742) Collins said that they were his "Irish

Eclogues," being inadequately Oriental in local colour. The brief "Ode"

(1746) "How Sleep the Brave" (of Fontenoy and Culloden) in ten lines

has the magic of an elder day, and of all time. The "Ode to Evening,"

where the poet sees

hamlets brown and dim discovered spires

And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all

Thy dewy fingers draw

The gradual dusky veil,

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

Keats.

There are fine free passages in "The Ode to the Passions," and the

"Dirge in Cymbeline" is not unworthy of its place. The "Ode on the

Popular Superstitions of the Highlands," was long lost, and did not

receive the poet's final touches. He obtained his knowledge of the

Second Sight from John Home, author of "Douglas," who was a Hanoverian

volunteer in the Forty-five, and inspired in Collins an unfulfilled

desire to visit Tay and Teviotdale and Yarrow. The conventions of his

age sometimes disfigure Collins's poems, but his face was set towards

the City of Romance. Tastes still vary as to the relative merit of

Collins and Gray: Matthew Arnold being the advocate of Gray; Swinburne

of Collins. There is no way of settling such disputes; each writer, at

his best, was truly a poet; neither, at his best, is staled or dimmed

by time; both were almost portentous exceptions, when really inspired,

to the conventional rules of their age in England.

Thomas Gray.

Nature occasionally brings into the world pairs of men destined to be

distinguished in literature, and, without their own consent, to be

pitted against each other as rivals. We have Scott and Byron, Dickens

and Thackeray, Tennyson and Browning, and Collins and Gray. Gray was

the elder, born in 1716 (Collins was born in 1721). If Collins's

father was a hatter, Gray's mother was a bonnet-maker, if milliners

make bonnets. Collins went to Oxford, after being at Winchester; Gray,

before going to Peterhouse, Cambridge, was at Eton. Both poets wrote

little: the health of Collins broke down; Gray, from his boyhood,

was of a gentle morbid melancholy, and had humour enough to laugh

at himself. Collins was neglected; Gray died, later, at the age of

54, beyond competition or dispute the foremost of English poets at

the moment. Both men had their faces set to the North as the home

of old poetry and poetic beliefs. Collins wrote his Ode on Highland

Superstitions; Gray was delighted (at first) by Macpherson's "Ossian,"

he translated ancient Norse poems, visited Scotland, and appreciated

the Highlands, and the lakes that Wordsworth was to make famous. Both

men were scholars: Collins meant to translate Aristotle's "Poetics";

Gray meant to write a history of English Poetry. Both broke away from

the tyranny of the rhymed heroic couplet; both especially cultivated

the Ode.

There is no doubt as to which of the two is and always has been the

more popular. Eton has made Gray her own. The great General Wolfe,

before falling in the arms of Victory at Quebec, recited the "Elegy

in a Country Churchyard" to one of his officers, saying, "I would

prefer being the author of that poem to the glory of beating the French

to-morrow".

It is not easy to criticize Gray, because so many of his lines are

household words, and have been familiar to us from childhood. It may

perhaps be said that Gray never attains to the magical effect of

Collins's "How Sleep the Brave," and of the "Ode to Evening". But there

are cadences in "The Elegy," and sentiments noble, pure, pious, and

modest in his poems which lend to them an unspeakable charm, while

the ideas are such as come home to men's bosoms. It is true that his

habit of personifying abstract ideas is an unfortunate survival of the

weary allegorical company of the "Romance of the Rose," and no more

than Collins does he escape from the mannerisms of his age. But like

Collins, and indeed like his friend Horace Walpole, he was passing

towards the kingdom of Romance.

At Eton he acquired Walpole's friendship; and if, after leaving

Cambridge, he and Walpole quarrelled in Italy, Walpole confessed that

he was to blame, made the first steps to reconciliation, and cherished,

admired, and at last regretted Gray with all the ardour of a heart

devoted and constant in friendship.

For the rest, Gray's life was passed quietly, and in a melancholy way,

at Cambridge, which he reckoned a bear garden, and a home of Indolence;

and, with his mother and aunt at Stoke Pogis, where he wrote the Elegy.

His poems distilled very slowly from his genius: the Eton Ode appeared,

and was unnoticed, in 1747. In the same year were written, to Horace

Walpole, the rather hard-hearted lines on Walpole's handsome cat,

'Twas on a lofty vase's side.

The Eton Ode was _composed_, with a beautiful sonnet commemorating a

private sorrow, in 1742:--

In vain to me the smiling mornings shine.

Earlier in the same year the "Ode to Spring," marked "to be sent to

Fav,"--to West, his friend commemorated in the sonnet,--had been

written, "not knowing he was then dead". Again, in October, 1742,

another death prompted "The Elegy," which lay unfinished for about

eight years. Grief had shaken Gray out of causeless melancholy, and

1742 was his great poetic year. In 1750 he wrote the light and bright

"Long Story," on an unexpected visit from some poet-hunting ladies. In

1753, Walpole had Gray's "Six Poems" published, in twenty-one pages,

with illustrations by Bentley. In 1754 he began the "Pindaric Odes," of

which "The Progress of Poesy" is the noblest, and displays most of

the pride and ample pinion

That the Theban eagle bear

Sailing with supreme dominion

Thro' the azure deep of air.

To compose "The Bard" (the Welsh Bard) took two years and a half, and

neither the style nor the ideas of the Odes were thought pleasing,

or comprehensible, by the public and Dr. Johnson. In his demure way

the little poet was a rebel, and Dr. Johnson knew it. Gray never

practised the adulation of "the great" that was customary; he asked

for no places, he refused the Laureateship. Late in life a sinecure

Professorship at Cambridge was given to him. The professor never

lectured: not to lecture was the convention, and against this happy

convention Gray did not rebel. He studied, made notes, learned Norse,

translated, visited haunted Glamis, with the chamber where Malcolm II

was murdered, visited the Lakes, wrote the most delightful letters, and

died at 54 in 1771, the year of the birth of Sir Walter Scott, the year

of Burns's twelfth birthday.

Gray had genius--not a great, but a new genius, and had many

accomplishments. His satires were surprisingly sharp and fierce. He

had the light French touch of the day in verses of society. There is

something of the noble pensiveness and mysteriously appealing music

of Virgil in his best poems: if he be "a second-rate poet" (an unkind

way of saying that he is not a Shakespeare or Homer), he shares with

first-rate poets the power of moving all readers; he is not the poet

of a set of refined amateurs. He who moved and soothed the heart of

James Wolfe in the crisis of his fortunes, and who has charmed every

generation of the English race since Wolfe and Montcalm gloriously

fell, has done more than enough for fame.

The Wartons.

Gray's taste for ancient Scandinavian poetry, itself a symptom of the

tendency to study all poetry, however old, exotic, and unconscious

of the rules of the eighteenth century, was not a new thing. We are

apt to think of Swift's patron, Sir William Temple, as an example of

mere gentlemanly and conventional ideas, though happy in the gift

of a pure and sometimes exquisite style in prose. But Temple in his

essay "Of Heroic Virtue" shows that he was capable of taking sincere

pleasure in old Norse poetry, though he knew it only through the Latin

translations "by Olaus Wormius in his 'Literatura Runica' (who has very

much deserved from the commonwealth of learning, and is very well worth

reading by any that love poetry); and to consider the several stamps

of that coin, according to several ages and climates". Temple speaks

of "The Death Song" of Ragnar Lodbrog as a "sonnet" and applauds "An

Ode of Scallogrim" (Skalagrim); but his remarks, "I am deceived if in

this sonnet and ode there be not a vein truly poetical, and in its

kind Pindaric, taking it with the allowance of the different climates,

fashions, opinions, and languages of such different countries," though

well meant, show a curious idea of the nature of the sonnet.

Here we have, before the end of the seventeenth century, the essence

of historical comparative criticism of literature; and admiration

for a kind of poetry as remote as possible from the standards of

the eighteenth century. Temple handed on the torch to the elder

Thomas Warton, Professor of Poetry at Oxford in his day, who himself

translated from the Latin, as "a Runic ode," two stanzas of the Death

Song of Regnar Lodbrog.[1]

One of Warton's sons, Thomas (born 1728), was Professor of Poetry, at

Oxford (1757-1767), and, from 1774 onwards (he died in 1790), published

a History of English Poetry, which may be unsystematic, but is both

interesting and erudite. Warton had to read the earlier and later

mediaeval poets, French and English, in the manuscripts, and he quoted

profusely from sources then scarcely known. "Partly through the store

of new matter that is provided for 'the reading public,' partly through

the zest and enthusiasm of its students--the spirit of adventure which

is the same in Warton as in Scott"--his book "did more than any theory

to correct the narrow culture, the starved elegance, of the preceding

age". The elder brother of Thomas, Joseph Warton, born 1722, was a

schoolfellow of Collins, and published "Odes" in the same year as he

(1746). In his preface he boldly said that "the fashion of moralizing

in verse has been carried too far," and "he looks upon invention and

imagination to be the chief faculties of a poet". He preached what

Collins practised; he wrote good criticism in Dr. Johnson's paper, "The

Adventurer"; in his essay on Pope he tried "to impress on the reader

that a clear head and acute understanding are not sufficient alone to

make a Poet," "that it is a creative and glowing imagination... and

that alone, that can stamp a writer with this exalted and very uncommon

character...." These were to be the watchwords of the Romantic movement,

into which Warton, dying in 1800, did not live to enter.

John Dyer.

Of John Dyer we know from his most famous poem, "Grongar Hill," that,

on a certain occasion, he

Sate upon a flowery bed

With my hand beneath my head.

If he had lain upon a flowery bed the posture would have been more

poetical. In blank verse, deserting Grongar Hill, he found

Lo, the resistless theme, imperial Rome.

His "Ruins of Rome" are less impressive than Spenser's sonnets

translated from Du Bellay. His "Fleece," an instructive epic of the

wool trade, though praised by the illustrious Akenside, proved no

golden fleece to its publisher. The prose summaries are pleasing.

"Disputes between France and England on the coast of Coromandel,

censured".

Dyer, at his best, is less successful than Thomson. He was born in

1700, son of an eminent solicitor of Carmarthen, was educated at

Westminster, attempted the painter's art, visited Italy, took holy

orders, published "The Fleece," in 1757, and died in 1758.

Briefer notes must suffice for the Rev. Mr. Blair of Athelstaneford

(1699-1746) who wrote "The Grave," later recommended to amateurs by

Blake's illustrations; and Matthew Green, who wrote "The Spleen"

(1696-1737), a somewhat lively subsatirical effort.

William Shenstone.

Shenstone was one of the many poets who owe their reputation to their

luck in being contemporaries of their biographer, Dr. Johnson. No

Johnson could keep records of all the versifiers of the nineteenth

century who have occasionally written good things. William Shenstone

was born in November, 1714, at the Leasowes, in Halesowen. His life

was much devoted to landscape gardening; and his harmless taste made

him a noted character in his day. "He learned to read of an old dame,"

and pleasantly described her, or some other old dame, in "The School

Mistress," an agreeable idyll in the Spenserian measure.

In 1732 Shenstone went to Johnson's college, his "nest of singing

birds," Pembroke, in Oxford. He took no degree, he rhymed, printed his

rhymes, and "The School Mistress" appeared in 1742. Thenceforth he

landscape-gardened, being so little of an angler that he was indignant,

says Johnson, when asked if there were any trout in his purely

ornamental water. His expenses in gardening brought the haunting forms

of bailiffs into his groves, but Johnson informs us gravely that "his

life was unstained by any crime". He died in February, 1763. Several of

his innocent poems, such as

I have found out a gift for my fair,

I have found where the wood pigeons breed,

are still familiar to many memories: they are from the "Pastoral

Ballad". He perceived the demerits of the rhyming heroic couplet (as

it was then written), as "apt to render the expression either scanty

or constrained," and preferred the verse of four lines with alternate

rhymes. Thus, on the death of Pope

Now sadly lorn, from Twit'nam's widow'd bow'r

The drooping muses take their casual way,

And where they stop a flood of tears they pour,

And where they weep, no more the fields are gay.

Of such matter are Shenstone's Elegies composed: his ballad on Jemmy

Dawson, a martyr of the Jacobite cause, was celebrated and popular;

poor Jemmy's lady-love died of grief and horror at his execution.

[1] Posthumously published in 1748. See Mr. W. P. Ker's "Warton Lecture

on English Poetry," "Proceedings of the British Academy," Vol. IV.

CHAPTER XXIX.

GEORGIAN POETRY.

II.

Thomas Chatterton.

The name of Thomas Chatterton, the youngest and most short-lived of

English poets, is curiously connected with that of Horace Walpole.

Born, at Bristol, on 20 November, 1752, under the shadow of the

beautiful old church of St. Mary Redcliffe, Chatterton from infancy

became, as it were, possessed by the charm of the edifice and of

the Middle Ages. Members of Chatterton's family had for more than a

century been associated with the church as sextons; probably they had

never given a thought to its beauty and historical associations, but

these haunted their descendant, and the story of his childhood reads

like a fantasy by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Among the clergy and people

of Bristol the spirit of the eighteenth century, indeed the natural,

usual contempt for things old, beautiful, and not understood, was

complacently active. The chests which contained the archives of the

church had been broken into by the Vestry, and quantities of old

parchment documents, some of them illuminated, had been thrown about.

Chatterton's father (died 1752), a schoolmaster, had taken as much of

the stuff as he chose, and manuscripts in the house of the boy's mother

were used for domestic purposes. The little boy, till the age of 6,

had been curiously lethargic (and far from truthful); the sight of

the illuminated parchments awakened his intellect; he stored all that

he could find in a den of his own, and became a voracious reader. In

1760 he was sent to Colston's Hospital, a school resembling Christ's

Hospital in London. He was soon, at the age of 10, a versifier, his

Muse was first the sacred, then the satiric; but already, by the age

of 11, he had made for himself, as some children do, a society of

"invisible playmates," notably "T. Rowlie, a secular priest," of the

age of Henry VI and Edward IV, and already he was writing, in a kind

of old English made up out of glossaries, poems which he passed off as

Rowlie's, found by himself in the derelict archives of the church.

In short, Chatterton might have seemed to be a victim of "split

personality," and to be now Rowlie, and a number of other secondary

selves, now the actual Chatterton, apprentice to an attorney. His

conduct was almost as abnormal as his genius was precocious, and his

passion for fame or notoriety was not quite sane. But, in fact, he

knew very well what he was about, and, in December, 1768, attempted

to dispose of "Rowley's ancient poems," including "The Tragedy of

Aella," to Dodsley, the publisher. The success of Percy's ballads

from the Old Folio (1765) may have suggested his scheme to the boy,

but Dodsley was not tempted. Horace Walpole had published the first

edition of "The Castle of Otranto" at the end of 1764. He used the

conventional device (already familiar to the Greek romancers in the

third century A.D.) of pretending to have found the tale in

an ancient manuscript. Chatterton had proclaimed his discoveries in

manuscripts in the summer of 1764, when he was 12 years old; in Horace

Walpole he recognized, in 1769, a kindred spirit, and offered to show

Walpole not only poems by Rowlie, but a history of English painters

by the same learned divine. Walpole replied very courteously and

gratefully, but "I have not the happiness of understanding the Saxon

language". In a reply Chatterton explained his circumstances; his youth

and position; and Gray had assured Walpole that the manuscripts sent

were forgeries. Walpole therefore advised Chatterton to adhere to his

profession, adding that experts were not convinced of the genuineness

of the papers. He took no notice of several letters from Chatterton,

and, after receiving a curt and angry note (24 July, 1769), sent back

the manuscripts without further comment, and thought no more of the

matter till he heard from Goldsmith, at a dinner of the Royal Academy,

that Chatterton had committed suicide in London. After an attempt to

support himself by hackwork, political and other, the poor boy, whose

pride could not stoop to soliciting charity, had poisoned himself on

the night of 24 August, 1770. Six weeks earlier he had been buying

and sending presents of porcelain, fans, and snuff, to his mother and

sister; twelve days before his death he had written that he intended to

go abroad as a surgeon's mate.

Even when he wrote in ordinary English, Chatterton showed rare

precocity. When he wrote in "Rowleian," in an invented dialect as

remote from real English of any day as the language of the planet

Mars, evolved by Mlle. Hélène Smith, is remote from French, Chatterton

often produced lyrics of great charm as in "The Tragedy of Aella,"

and he invented a curious form of the Spenserian stanza. His touches

in descriptions of Nature are sometimes charming. But he never quite

escapes, as is natural, from the conventions of the eighteenth century;

and his best inspiration is derived from Percy's "Reliques". What he

might have been and might have done, in happier circumstances, it is

impossible to conjecture. Genius he had, with more than the wonted

abnormality of genius.

William Cowper.

The overlapping of styles in poetry and of tastes in poetry is

pleasantly illustrated in the case of Cowper. He was born in 1731,

Scott was born in 1771, and in Miss Austen's "Sense and Sensibility"

we find the sensible Marianne Dashwood hesitating between the rival

charms of Cowper and Scott; Byron, it appears, had not yet reached her

fair hands. Cowper is a bridge between Thomson and Wordsworth. He was

averse to the Popeian couplet; in his translation of Homer he preferred

a blank verse which, at best, is not rapid. In writing of Nature he

"had his eye on the object". His exit from the triumphant common

sense of the eighteenth century was by way of spiritual religion,

the Evangelical Revival promoted by Wesley, Whitefield, and their

followers. They made appeal to the souls, not to the passions, of the

populace; and Cowper's own sympathy with their bodies, with their

poverty, like his love of retirement, and of newspapers, makes him akin

to Wordsworth.

Born of the powerful Whig family of Cowper, the poet was the son of the

rector of Great Berkhampstead; his mother, whom he lost when he was 6

years of age, yet ever remembered daily with intense affection, was of

the name and lineage of Donne. He was cruelly bullied in childhood at

a preparatory school. The innate savagery of boys of fifteen sometimes

wreaks itself on a single small child, and we might think that his

sufferings had their share in depressing the spirits of Cowper, did he

not tell us that, at his public school, Westminster, he was eminent

in cricket, which Horace Walpole and Gray despised at Eton. His

master, "Vinny" Bourne, a Latin poet, was dear to him; he made many

clever and lively friends, and, despite his attack on public schools

in "Tirocinium" (1784), he seems to have been reasonably happy at

Westminster, though he learned no more in one way than to write "lady's

Greek without the accents

"Tirocinium" is a vigorous satire in Pope's metre. But Cowper, despite

the vices and brutalities of school life, confesses his affection for

the old place. The clergy at large come under Cowper's birch,

The parson knows enough who knows a Duke!

Behold your Bishop I well he plays his part,

Christian in name and infidel in heart.

In denouncing emulation for prizes, Cowper hit a blot that seems to

have vanished, for anything like ungenerous emulation of this kind

appears to be a lost vice. No boy studies

Less for improvement than to tickle spite.

Macaulay's victims, Warren Hastings and Elijah Impey, were at school

with Cowper. He went to no University, but was articled to a solicitor;

and idly "giggled and made giggle" with his cousins, Theodora and

Harriet. He was in love with Theodora, but was disappointed, Harriet

(Lady Hesketh) was one of his best friends. At the age of 32 (1763)

hypochondria or hysteria shattered' his life; in a private asylum he

was suddenly converted, and recovered, and religion was henceforth,

now his joy and happiness, now, when the black cloud came over him,

the cause of his despair. At Huntingdon, and later, at the uninviting

village of Olney, he lived retired, the friend of Mrs. Unwin ("My

Mary") and of a clerical ex-slave-trader, the Rev. John Newton. With

Newton, Cowper wrote hymns, the ladies encouraged him to occupy himself

with moral poems, "Table Talk," "Truth," "The Progress of Error,"

"Retirement," "Charity," "Hope," all in the metre of Pope; and all more

or less satirical. Kings, in "Table Talk," are the first to suffer: one

of the speakers in the dialogue is rather revolutionary. Indeed the

mild tea-drinking Cowper, with his denunciations of "the great," the

clergy, and the unthinking squires, preludes to the French Revolution,

which he took very calmly. After politics comes talk of poetry: and the

well-known lines on Pope occur; he

Made poetry a mere mechanic art,

And every warbler has his tune by heart.

Of poets in his own age Cowper prefers the reckless satirist,

Churchill; of Gray and Collins nothing is said. In "The Progress

of Error" the much-enduring Nimrod is attacked, in company with

the well-graced popular preacher; and novelists are assailed as

"flesh-flies of the land," while men who study art in Italy come home

worse dunces than they went, and finally the deist and atheist are

publicly birched.

It is not for his satires that Cowper is remembered: they were

suggested to him, in the interests of religion and morals, by Mrs.

Unwin, while Lady Austen, a lively person of quality, appointed to

Cowper "The Task," or rather gave him the subject of "The Sofa," out of

which grew "The Task". The poet ambles, in an essay in blank verse, as

much at his ease and as fond of digressions as Montaigne, from the days

when man squatted on the ground, to his invention of a three-legged

stool, the addition of a fourth leg, cushions, arm-chairs, the settee,

finally the sofa. The sofa pleases the gouty; never may the poet have

gout; he has done nothing to deserve it; in boyhood he

Has fed on scarlet and strong haws,

The bramble, black as jet, and sloes austere.

This introduces a rural digression.

Here Ouse, slow winding through a level plain

Of spacious meads with cattle sprinkled o'er,

Conducts the eye along his sinuous course,

Delighted.

We think of

a river winding slow

By cattle, on an endless plain;

The ragged rims of thunder brooding low

With shadow streaks of rain.

How different are the methods of the two painters in words! The poet,

finding geologists in the course of his wanderings, pities them, truth

disclaiming them. Like Wordsworth he praises "retirement," welcomes the

newspaper, and welcomes tea. In the charming lines, "The Retired Cat,"

temporarily shut up in a drawer lined "with linen of the softest kind,"

he seems to smile at his own cosy retirement; the teacups, the happy

listening ladies. He is full of human kindness, of love for children,

cats, and his own tame hares; he sets out to gather flowers, he says,

and comes home laden with moral fruits, and religious reflections,

and with his sketch book full of landscapes like Gainsborough's, and

studies of cattle like Morland's. "The Task" won for the poet countless

friends who never saw his face; and, though we have become attuned to

blank verse of many beautiful modulations which he never dreamed of

(though now and then they were attained by Thomson), "The Task" may

still be read with sympathy and pleasure.

Many of Cowper's shorter poems, grave or gay, are in all memories:

"The Wreck of the Royal George," as spirited and sad as a ballad; the

ringing notes of "Boadicea"; the idyllic sweetness of

The poplars are felled, farewell to the shade

And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade;

the lines, "Addressed to a Young Lady," brief and beautiful as the

most tender epigrams of "The Greek Anthology," from which Cowper's

translating hand gathered a little garland. Of these "The Swallow,"

"Attic Maid with Honey Fed," are worthy of the original, as is "The

Grass-hopper". Cowper shone in occasional verses on trifling matters

such as "The Dog and the Water-lily"; and pretty kindly compliments,

such as "Gratitude" (to his cousin, Lady Hesketh), and things tender

and touched with the sense of tears in mortal things, as in the

"Epitaph on a Hare," and the "To Mary" (of 1793). His "John Gilpin" is

an unusual frolic.

The translations, in blank verse, of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" could

not displace those of Pope, who, in Cowper's opinion, had done all that

could be done in rhyme. Blank verse, especially that of Cowper, cannot

convey, as Pope does, the sense of the speed of the great epic; nor was

Cowper's scholarship exempt from curious errors. He was overworked;

Mrs. Unwin fell into the condition described in "To Mary," his terrible

melancholy returned, but his last original verses, "The Cast-away"

(1798), are penned by no "maniac's hand," nor can a poet have written

them without pleasure in his own genius. Cowper died in 1800.

His letters are reckoned among the best in our language, and their

delightful wit and gaiety fortunately assure us that there was much

happiness in a life so blameless.

Literature in Scotland (1550-1790).

Before approaching the great northern contemporary of Cowper, Robert

Burns, it is necessary to cast a backward glance at his predecessors

in Scottish letters. We left them in the reign of James V, when Sir

David Lyndsay was the reigning poet of the Court and of the people. It

is not easy to fit some remarks on Scottish literature after Sir David

Lyndsay into a chronological sequence parallel with the development

of literature in England. The Scottish writers under James VI and I

produced no effect on their English contemporaries: the King's "Reulis

and Cautelis" in poetical criticism, and his "Basilikon Doron," a

treatise on king-craft, with his "Counterblast to Tobacco," and

his "Demonology" are the work of a clever general writer, but now

only interest the curious. Alexander Scott and Alexander Montgomery

continued to practise in Scots, the style of Dunbar, though Scott

shone most in love lyrics, often musical, while Montgomery survives

in an allegory of the old sort, "The Cherry and the Slae"; and an

old-fashioned "flyting". Sir Robert Ayton (1570-1638) lived in London

with the wits of the time, and, like the Earl of Stirling (died in

1640) and William Drummond of Hawthornden, deserted for English the

Scots vernacular. The most distinguished of these poets William

Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649) entertained Ben Jonson at his

beautiful house, and has left brief notes of Ben's rather crabbed

criticisms of his great contemporaries. In the previous year, when

James, "with a salmonlike instinct" (1617) revisited his native

country, Drummond celebrated the event in "Forth Feasting," a panegyric

in fairly regular rhymed heroic couplets. Some of his sonnets have

charm and are not forgotten; but the times darkened, and Drummond

(who showed common sense and public spirit when Charles I unjustly

persecuted Lord Balmerino (1633), advising the King to read George

Buchanan's book on the Royal power in Scotland), was unlikely to find

an audience for his learned verse during the subsequent troubles. His

"Cypress Grove," a meditation in prose on death, is poetic in phrasing

and cadences, while the periods are not over-long and over burdened.

But the brief years in which Scottish wits might have learned many

lessons from the great contemporary literature of England soon went by;

and Scottish writers for nearly a century were confined to wranglings

over theology and sermons, and to bitter tracts and pamphlets, valuable

to the historical but not to the literary student.

The great Marquis of Montrose is credited with one charming Cavalier

lyric, "My dear and only love, I pray," and with verses sincere but

rugged and full of conceits on his own death and his King's, but he

"tuned his elegies to trumpet sounds". The favourite measure of Burns

was kept alive by Sempill of Beltrees, in his vernacular elegy over a

piper,

On bagpipes now no body blaws

Sen Habbie's dead.

The translation of Rabelais (1653) by the learned, militant, and

eccentric Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty (1611?-1660) is an

imperishable monument of the author's amazing wealth of strange

vocabularies, and vigour of appropriate style. The task of making

Rabelais talk in English seemed little fit for a Scottish Cavalier who

fought at Worcester, but Urquhart, aided by Rabelais, won a kind of

immortality by his success. His translation is final and decisive; in

which it stands alone. Of the preachers and controversialists, bitter

or humorous, there is no space to speak, but the saintly character

and gentle eloquence of Archbishop Leighton (1611-1684) live in his

Commentary on the First Epistle of St. Peter and his other expository

writings. The historical works of Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715), Bishop of

Salisbury, are English, except in their occasional Scotticisms, as much

of his life was spent in England. He had seen much of the inner wheels

and springs of politics, was fond of talking of himself and of his part

in great affairs, and, like Leighton, represents the Scottish divine,

politician, and author, who has been Anglicized out of the Presbyterian

precision and acerbity, and is as English as he can make himself.

His very conceit, and his almost incredible want of tact, make this

"Scotch dog," as Swift loves to call him, a most entertaining gossip.

His "History of My Own Times" was judiciously kept from publication

till after his death. Burnet cannot be relied on as a safe authority

either in what he insinuates most basely, against William III, or

states, without an atom of corroboration, against James II. In the

latter case, however, Macaulay has accepted and given circulation to

Burnet's narrative.

By far the greatest man of letters of the Restoration, north of

Tweed, is "that noble wit of Scotland," in Dryden's phrase, Sir

George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh (1636?-1691). Beginning with a "heroic

romance," "Aretina," influenced by Sidney's "Arcadia" (1660), and the

French school of heroic romances, and with verses, in which he did not

shine, Mackenzie, in the "Religio Stoici" (1663) shows that he, like

R. L. Stevenson, has been "the sedulous ape" of Sir Thomas Browne.

He has many admirably harmonious sentences, a very lively wit, and a

becomingly pensive air of disenchantment. "The scuffle of drunken men

in the dark," the bloodshed and bitterness of the wars of the Covenant,

have saddened him, and left him an enthusiast for Montrose,

At once his country's glory and her shame.

But political and professional ambitions carried Mackenzie away from

pure literature into dark and tortuous paths. His work on the Criminal

Law of Scotland has considerable literary as well as great legal merit;

his observations on the persecution of witches are of great interest;

and the worst of his "Memoirs of the Affairs of Scotland" is the

fragmentary condition of the manuscript. Mackenzie was the cause of the

foundation of the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh: after the Revolution

of 1688 he retired to Oxford, where he was hospitably welcomed.

The Rev. Robert Wodrow (1679-1734) a country clergyman, would gladly

have taken all knowledge for his province; his was a most inquiring

mind, and perhaps no man so assiduous in his parochial duties ever

left behind him so huge a mass of unpublished manuscript. His great

work is "The History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland from

the Restoration to the Revolution". He was, of course, a partisan,

but an honest partisan; he consulted all accessible documents, and

often printed them at full length; he occasionally makes errors in the

direction of his bias, but never makes them consciously. He neglects

not one of the humblest of the sufferers, and, as he did not belong to

the extreme left of the Covenanting party, he was savagely criticized

by its members. He is a most serviceable writer, and his "Analecta,

or Materials for a History of Remarkable Providences" (published long

after his death), is a delightful collection of ghost-stories, and

tales of witches. The evidence for the ghosts is extremely frail.

Wodrow was in frequent correspondence with an American divine, as

simple, learned, and credulous as himself, the Rev. Cotton Mather.

Wodrow, after 1714, saw the beginnings of "Latitudinarianism,"

or "Moderatism," in the Kirk: young ministers began to study the

"Characteristics" of that polite philosopher, the third Earl of

Shaftesbury (1671-1713); to doubt whether virtuous heathens and

Catholics must inevitably be excluded from salvation; to wander from

the Calvinism of John Knox; to aim at rhetorical airs and graces; and

to regard the chief end of religion as the promotion of virtue. These

Moderates despised "enthusiasm," and while the fiercer Presbyterian

leaders separated themselves from the Kirk, the abler Moderates

attempted, sometimes with much success, to distinguish themselves in

secular studies, and took part in secular amusements, being patrons of

the stage.

To understand the new Georgian revival of polite letters among the

clergy and laity of Scotland, we should study the writings and life

of Professor Francis Hutcheson of Glasgow University (1694-1746)

a follower of Shaftesbury, and a writer on æsthetics and on moral

philosophy. But for a true, lively, and Humorous picture of ministers

who loved society, the stage, and the company of the wits, in London

and in Edinburgh, we should read the autobiography, posthumously

published, of the Rev. Dr. Alexander Carlyle, minister of Inveresk

(1722-1805). In youth he had revelled and drunk deep with the wicked

Lord Lovat, and that stern Presbyterian, dear to Wodrow, Lord Grange,

well remembered for his energy in packing off his termagant wife to

seclusion on the Isle of St. Kilda. Carlyle had seen the rout of Sir

John Cope at Prestonpans; he had amazed Garrick, at his villa on the

Thames, by the accuracy of his driving at golf; he had championed his

brother minister, John Home, when Home offended the Kirk by writing

the once famous play of "Douglas"; and he lived to be the acquaintance

of Sir Walter Scott. Carlyle, called "Jupiter Carlyle" from his noble

presence, knew every one worth knowing in Scotland; and if we think him

a kind of good-humoured pagan, he is nevertheless reported to have been

an excellent parish minister. "For human pleasure" in the reading, the

memoirs of this most unspiritual of divines are the best thing that the

literary revival in Scotland has bequeathed to us. Very few Scottish

writers had paid attention to the graces of composition, except in the

period of the tenure by James I of the English Crown, and in the cases

of Sir George Mackenzie and Archbishop Leighton during the Restoration.

But the papers of Addison and Steele, "The Tatler" and "The Spectator,"

went everywhere, were eagerly read in Scotland, and provoked imitation

in the matter of style. Literary clubs met in Edinburgh taverns: and

men corresponded with Berkeley on philosophical subjects, as Mackenzie

had corresponded on literature with John Evelyn. In addition to the

literary clubs a centre of interest in poetry and prose was the shop

of Allan Ramsay (1686-1758) who passed from the trade of a wigmaker

to that of a bookseller. In 1724 he published "The Evergreen," a

collection of old Scots verses from the manuscript made by George

Bannatyne (1545-1608) during a visitation of the plague (1568).[1]

Ramsay's "Tea-table Miscellany" (1724-1727) was a medley of old Scots

and new songs and lyrics: the new made by Ramsay and his disciples to

be sung to the old Scots tunes. The old verses were the basis of the

new, which are a mixture of the simple ancient matter with that of

the eighteenth century. Hamilton of Gilbertfield, who, by modernizing

Blind Harry's "Wallace," produced a book very inspiring to Burns, was a

contemporary of Ramsay: they wrote to each other "epistles" in verse,

in the manner continued by Burns. Ramsay's "Gentle Shepherd" (1725)

contains matter more true to Scottish shepherd life than is common in

pastoral poetry: and Ramsay's elegies, in Burns's favourite metre,

on such personages as Maggy Johnstoun, an ale-wife, were models for

Fergusson and Burns. Allan was no friend of the more rigid Presbyterian

party, and once, at least, in the pretty song of "The Blackbird," he

showed the colours of the Jacobite. Another poet, Hamilton of Bangour

(1704-1754) was actually out with Prince Charles in 1745; his slim

volume of 1744, "Poems on Several Occasions," contains little that

dwells in the memory except the beautiful and melancholy song of Yarrow,

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

In this little renaissance, whose poets always had their eyes on the

romantic past, Lady Wardlaw (1677-1727) produced what was taken for

an old ballad, "Hardyknute," the first, Scott said, that he ever

learned, the last that he would ever forget. But it needed "a poetic

child" to find so much merit in "Hardyknute". Ladies like Lady Grizel

Baillie (1665-1746) with "Were na my heart licht I wad dee," and Miss

Jean Elliot of Minto, with "The Flowers of the Forest," a lament for

Flodden, were surpassed in the number, and equalled in the merit of

their songs by Lady Nairne (an Oliphant of Gask, and a hereditary

Jacobite) (1766-1845). She was the best of the known and named poets of

the Cause which has had so many singers; and her strains were continued

by the last of these lady minstrels and musicians, Lady John Scott, a

Spottiswoode (1810-1900). The new day was dawning in Scotland, thus

early in the eighteenth century, and the birds were singing prelusive

to Burns, Scott, and Hogg. Indeed, Lady Nairne's "Will ye no come back

again?" and "The Auld House," and "Wi' a Hundred Pipers and a,'" and

"The Land o' the Leal," are far better remembered than the poems of

Robert Fergusson (1750-1774) who died so young, the harmless, hapless

Villon of St. Andrews and Edinburgh, and, in certain poems, the model

of Burns.

These poets were not more determined to be Scots (though Ramsay and

Fergusson also wrote in English) than the wits who attempted prose

were set on speaking English with the English accent, and on avoiding

Scotticisms. The Select Society (1754) was a debating society whose

members were taught to speak English by an Irishman, the father of the

famous author of "The School for Scandal". The results were matter of

admiration. They produced an "Edinburgh Review" which survived into

two numbers: it had intended to appear every six months, but expired,

though Edinburgh was full of _literati_, including the Rev. Hugh

Blair, a once celebrated preacher, and Hume's friend, the Rev. John

Home (1722-1808) whose tragedy, "Douglas," "gave the clergy cause for

speculation". Hume declared that Home possessed "the true theatric

genius of Shakespeare and Otway, refined from the unhappy barbarism of

the one, and licentiousness of the other". Posterity has not confirmed

Hume's verdict, but Home is the one "mellow glory" of the Scottish

stage.

The Rev. Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), as chaplain of the Black Watch,

went in at Fontenoy with the claymore. "Remember your commission, Sir,"

shouted his colonel. "D-- my commission, Sir!" shouted the chaplain.

His "History of Margaret, otherwise called Sister Peg" (1760), is a

humorous and valuable sketch of the antipathy between England and

Scotland in 1760-1770. These men, and many others,--Lord Kames, Lord

Monboddo, Lord Hailes, a serviceable critical historian, Beattie, the

poet of "The Minstrel," and the satirist of the dead Churchill,--kept

alive the interest in all forms of literature. The great men of the

time, to be treated in a later chapter, alas! fall under the censure of

Charles Lamb, that their "books are no books," but Charles's sympathy

with Scotland was confessedly imperfect.

Out of this medley of new and old, of the vernacular Scots with the

affected English of Edinburgh, out of the ancient ballads and old

frolicsome rural ditties, arose the style of Burns.

Robert Burns.

The place of Burns in poetry may be called unique. His genius was

the incarnation, as it were, of his country people's through many

centuries, generations, from the one musical stanza on the death of

Alexander III (1285) to the simplest song that the milkmaids crooned

at their work. In literary poetry, as we have seen, the part played

by Scotland had been partly derivative. The greatest poets, those of

the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, were professed followers

of Chaucer: Drummond of Hawthornden was a lyrist and sonneteer under

Italian and Elizabethan influences. Of Barbour and Blind Harry, Burns

had little but the burning patriotism: his real predecessors were the

many named or nameless popular song-makers, and makers of lays of

rural merriment; and the music of the Scottish tunes to which their

words were wedded. Of the popular ballads, romantic or historical, he

professed no high esteem: no "white plumes were dancing in his eye,"

chivalry was not his subject: his matter was rural life and Nature;

and he had the true Scottish love of the rivers and burns of his

country. In the furnace of his genius all the ancient poetic material,

all the folk-song (but not "the fairy way of writing") was recast and

refashioned in forms singularly varied, vivid, and real: while, to

pursue the metaphor, the furnace was fanned by all the winds of his

age--now of democracy; now of loyalty to "a man undone," and a dying

dynasty; now of patriotic resistance to "haughty Gaul," and her threats

of invasion.

In the fire of his nature and of his passions Burns resembled Byron,

but his humour was kindlier, his ear more tuneful, and his gift of

creating character was infinitely more varied. He had the eye of

Molière or of Fielding for a hypocrite; and combined the delusion that

the Covenanters were the friends of freedom, with a scornful contempt

of the discipline and doctrines of the successors of the Covenanters.

In affairs of the heart he exhibits the usual pastoral morality, that

of the shepherds and goatherds of Theocritus, with little of the

Sicilian grace and charm.

The life of Burns is so familiarly known that the briefest survey must

suffice. Born on 25 January, 1759, in a clay bigging in the parish of

Alloway, in Ayrshire, he was the son of a small labouring farmer of

the class whence so many of the martyrs and stout fighting men of the

Covenant sprang. His father, a "grave liver" and devout, like them,

managed to obtain for Burns, and out of every book which came in his

way Burns picked-up for himself, a fair literary education. He owed

much, especially many opportunities of reading, to a young tutor, Mr.

Murdoch. He never was such a bookish man as Hogg, neglected as Hogg's

education was in youth, but he acquired a knowledge of French, and

studied Molière. The hardships of a poor farmer, in a cold soil, under

a heartless "factor," the severest struggles for existence were known

to Burns, but he also had his fill of dancing and "daffing," and the

consequent "Kirk discipline". On this aspect of his life and adventures

what is best to say has been said by Keats, in a letter written from

Burns's country.

Entanglements of love affairs, and despair of success in life, caused

Burns to contemplate emigration to the West Indies, but first he

published at Kilmarnock (July, 1786), a collection of his songs and

verses which instantly made him famous. Invited to Edinburgh, he passed

a winter there in learned, noble, and festive society, carrying the

celebrated Duchess of Gordon "off her feet," as she said, but winning

far more admirers and boon companions than serviceable friends.

The Earl of Glencairn, whom Burns immortalized in sincere and glowing

verse, died young; the age of Harley and Bolingbroke, of pensions and

places for poets, was long dead. Burns met Scott, then a boy of 15;

Scott later said that he was unworthy to tie Burns's shoes, but had the

men been of equal age, better work would have been found for Burns

than the perilous and bitterly uncongenial task of the exciseman (1789).

Not successful as a farmer at Ellisland (his capital was no more than

the scanty profits of his poems), Burns settled in the pretty little

town of Dumfries. Here his wit and genius made him the guest of the

town and country, of lairds and tourists, and tradesmen. A constitution

naturally robust, though injured by early privation, broke down; he had

not the energy to continue in the vein of "Tam o' Shanter"; but poured

out his songs, original, or re-creations of old popular ditties, till

his death on 21 July, 1796.

Burns was singular as a poet, in one point: he needed, as it were, to

have a key-note struck for him, and he prolonged and glorified the note

which had inspired him. Far from concealing the fact, he acknowledged,

with perfect candour and generosity, his debt to Robert Fergusson. This

poet, born in Edinburgh (1750), and educated at the University of St.

Andrews, died, after an interval of madness, in 1774. He, like Burns,

had been too welcome a guest of more seasoned convivialists for the

sake of his wit. His verses in English are commonplace, but his lyrics,

in Burns's favourite measure, on the rude pleasures of Edinburgh tavern

life, his "Leith Races," "The Farmer's Ingle," "Ode to the Gowdspink,"

and other pieces, gave Burns the needed key-note for "The Cottar's

Saturday Night," "The Holy Fair" (the sacramental meeting in the open

air, a relic of Covenanting days), and, perhaps, for the poems on

"The Mouse," and "The Mountain Daisy". Burns has so entirely eclipsed

Fergusson that he is scarcely remembered, even in Scotland.

"Poor Mailie's Elegy" had a much older predecessor; and, generally,

Burns's songs start from an old tune, to which, through the ages, new

verses had been set in new generations. There was a Jacobite "Auld Lang

Syne," there was a Jacobite "For a' that," there was a very improper

"Green grows the Rashes, o'" and so on, endlessly. But Burns, in many

cases, transfigured his original. That he shone more in Scots than in

English is admitted--but the best verses in his "Jolly Beggars" are in

English, and there is only one word spelled in the Scots fashion in

Had we never lov'd sae kindly,

Had we never lov'd sae blindly,

Never met or never parted--

We had ne'er been broken hearted.

The same song contains the conventional lines--

Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,

Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee.

The vigour and variety, the humour, the pity, the scorn, and the

sentiment of Burns were all entirely new when he wrote, and his variety

enabled him to please the most widely different tastes. Critics who

were horrified by "The Jolly Beggars," and "The Holy Fair," and the

reckless song to Anna found consolation in "The Cottar's Saturday

Night," and the lament for "Highland Mary"

Thou ling'ring star with lessening ray,

in English. Poems in the manner of these two last are sometimes spoken

of as "sentimental," but the sentiment was as real a mood, while it

lasted, as the scorn, or the revelry.

Of Burns it may be said that, beloved as he has been, not always for

his best qualities, by the uncritical, he has been no less admired by

the greatest poets of the age that followed his own, Keats, Scott,

and Wordsworth. No poet ever was more truly national; none had more

of the genius of the popular past, and the aspirations of the popular

future; none was more essentially and spontaneously lyrical; none was

more at home with Mature, with human society (with the life of the

animal world, too, as in "The Twa Dogs"), and, in the humorous tale,

none has excelled "Tam o'Shanter". No poet wears better in the changes

of circumstance and taste. His letters, though of capital biographical

interest, are sometimes of a comic complexion; "the style of the

Bird of Paradise" prevails, now and then, in his English prose. But

his English verse, as Scott found to be the way with his countrymen

when they had, in passionate moments, "gotten to their English," is

sometimes the natural vehicle of high reflection or of sincere grief.

Charles Churchill.

Satire is the least worthy kind of poetry; for it is almost never

sincere. The writer is always in a fatiguing state of virtuous

indignation about matters for which he really cares very little,

except when his virulence is brewed out of personal spite. Satire,

in fact, is only tolerable when combined with the smiling humour of

Horace, the occasional majesty of Juvenal, the grace, wit, and finish

of Pope, or the airy contempt and sonorous lines of Dryden. Charles

Churchill had little of the qualities of these poets, yet was, no

doubt, the most popular writer of satire in the rhymed heroic couplet

between Pope and Byron. He was born in 1731, the son of the Rector at

Rainham; was at Westminster School a contemporary of Cowper and Warren

Hastings; did not study at either University, though he was admitted to

Trinity, Cambridge; married at 18, and married unwisely; took orders,

and returned to lay costume and pursuits, and in 1761, looking about

for a theme of satire that promised notoriety, had the happy thought

of attacking the actors and actresses of the day in "The Rosciad".

"The profession" is sensitive; the actors were not silent about their

wrongs; there was plenty of hubbub, and the satire was remunerative.

Any man who stoops to taunt actors, and even actresses, by personal

attacks in rhyme, can make himself notorious. Perhaps the best-known

rhymes of Churchill are

On my life

That Davies hath a very pretty wife.

There were replies and hostile reviews, and Churchill, in "The

Apology," assailed Garrick as "the vain tyrant" with

His puny green-room wits and venal bards.

Garrick is said not to have dared to contemn things contemptible, and

to have propitiated Churchill. As ally of Jack Wilkes, he "took the

Wilkes and Liberty" to assail Scotland in "The Prophecy of Famine".

Waft me, some Muse, to Tweed's inspiring stream

. . . . . . . . . .

Where, slowly winding the dull waters creep

And seem themselves to own the power of sleep.

In fact, "the glittering and resolute streams of Tweed," as the old

Cromwellian angler, Richard Franck, styles them, are only dull and

sleepy in the "dubs" where England provides their flat southern bank.

In 1763 Churchill assailed Hogarth in an epistle, and Hogarth replied

in kind with a truly English caricature. He wrote several other satires

and a Hudibrastic skit, in Four Books, on Dr. Johnson's incursion

into psychical research, in the matter of the famous Cock Lane Ghost.

Churchill died at Boulogne, in November, 1764, and is buried at Dover.

In private life he displayed some kindly and honourable qualities,

and Byron, before leaving England for ever, in 1816, consecrated a

poem to his grave. To the discredit of Scotland, Dr. Beattie lampooned

Churchill--after he was dead!

George Crabbe.

Born more than twenty years after Cowper, but making his first

noticeable entry into literature at the same time as he, Crabbe belongs

in curious ways to different schools and different ages. In verse he

follows the tradition of Pope and Goldsmith; writing, in his best-known

works, in the rhymed ten syllables, and much influenced by Goldsmith's

"Deserted Village," and by reaction against the smiling conventional

"pastorals", But perhaps Crabbe's genius, stern and almost grim, was

unfortunate in finding no other vendible vehicle of his thought than

verse, for his natural bent was to the modern "realistic" novel on the

squalor, sufferings and sins of the neglected rural poor. He had a

genius like that of several modern novelists, for painting all that in

nature or human nature is dark, lowering, and sullen; he is unsparingly

devoted to actual study from the life; and yet he has a peculiar humour

of his own. His later works were "Tales," short stories in the measure

of Pope, but destitute of brilliance, and extremely prolix, so that,

though these narratives in verse were apparently more popular than

the contemporary novels of Miss Austen, the rapid rise and universal

popularity of the prose novel began to deprive Crabbe of readers even

in his own later years. Crabbe, who had been praised by Dr. Johnson,

lived to enjoy the generous applause of Scott, Byron, Miss Austen,

and, what was more rare, the approval of Wordsworth. But as, in the

beginning of his career, he censured the Newspaper as the supplanter of

poetry, so, before his death in 1832, he found that the world preferred

novels in prose to short tales of modern life in verse. He profited

by the brief period of the bloom of poetry, but his biographer, Canon

Ainger, observes that "Crabbe is practically unknown to the readers

of the present day". The gaiety and grace which in Cowper alternate

with gloom, and make many of his poems so generally familiar, were not

elements in the genius of Crabbe.

He was born at Aldeburgh, on the coast of Suffolk, on Christmas Eve,

1754, the son of a man who had been a schoolmaster, but later obtained

a small post in the Customs. In Crabbe's day Aldeburgh was not, as

now, a watering-place, but through the inroads of the sea, was become

a squalid smuggling village with a desolate background of poor and

ill-cultivated land: as described in "The Village". Crabbe was from

childhood a great devourer of books, and at the second of his two

country schools acquired Latin enough for his later purposes. He was

apprenticed to a surgeon, fell early in love, at 18 won a prize for a

magazine poem, "Hope," made songs to his mistress's eyebrow, printed

(1775) a moral poem ("Inebriety"), at Ipswich practised medicine in

a humble way, and in April, 1780, went to London with his surgical

instruments and three pounds in his pocket. He wrote poems which were

declined by publishers; though there was an opening for a poet--

When Verse her wintry prospect weeps,

When Pope is gone, and mighty Milton sleeps,

When Gray in lofty lines has ceased to soar,

And gentle Goldsmith charms the Town no more.

(Lines of 1780.) But the opening was occupied by Cowper, and Crabbe

was as destitute as Chatterton, when a letter written by him to

Burke excited the sympathy of that generous heart in 1781. Burke

offered encouragement and hospitality, Thurlow gave money; Crabbe was

introduced to Fox, Reynolds and Dr. Johnson, took orders, was made

curate of his native village, liked it not, and became chaplain of

the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir. Later he held a variety of livings,

and, for a poet so satirical about clerical neglect of the poor, was,

inconsistently, a pluralist and an absentee, till his Bishop made him

mend his ways.

His first poem of any note, "The Library" (1781-2) has no great merit:

we see that the novel, to Crabbe's mind, was represented by the old

heroic romance,

bloody deeds

Black suits of armour, masks, and foaming steeds.

In "The Village" (1783) Crabbe showed his true self in realistic

descriptions of wretchedness. He first tells the Pastoral Muse that her

day is over:--

I paint the cot,

As Truth will paint it, and as bards will not.

There follows a perfect masterpiece of landscape in his manner, "the

thin harvest with its withered ears" beyond the "burning sands"; the

blighted rye, the thistles, poppies, blue bugloss, slimy mallow, the

tares, the charlock. The peasants are "a wild amphibious race" of

smugglers and fishers; the farm-labourers

hoard up aches and agues for their age,

and

mend the broken hedge with icy thorn.

In the poorhouse, amidst unspeakable filth, the dying are neglected

by the doctor and the sporting curate, and the dead are buried

without rites. There is not a gleam of hope or sunshine, except in

the accidental mention of "the flying ball, the bat, the wicket". The

poet ends with applause of the heroic death in action of Lord Robert

Manners, and with consolatory remarks to the Duke of Rutland.

The poem was successful and was admired by Scott, then a lad of 18: a

few lines had been contributed by Dr. Johnson.

Deserting the topics in which he was strongest, Crabbe (1785) published

"The Newspaper"; the papers are

A daily swarm that banish every Muse,

For these unread the noblest volumes lie,

For these unsoiled in sheets the Muses die....

For daily bread the dirty trade they ply,

Coin their fresh tales and live upon the lie.

"The puffing poet" is also censured.

Crabbe continued to write, but not till 1807 did he publish "The Parish

Register," which returns to the theme of "The Village". He was now

doing duty at his parish, Muston, and, not unnaturally, found that, in

various forms, the people had become Nonconformists. He now took a much

more cheerful view of "the cot," and found its book-shelf well occupied

by the Bible, Bunyan, and old English fairy tales; while the garden was

rich in salads, carnations, hyacinths, and tulips. But Crabbe turns

with more zest

To this infected row we term our street,