The large place which these two little magazines hold in our literature

seems most disproportionate to their short span of days. In the short space

of four years in which Addison and Steele worked together the light essay

was established as one of the most important forms of modern literature,

and the literary magazine won its place as the expression of the social

life of a nation.

SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709-1784)

The reader of Boswell's _Johnson_, after listening to endless grumblings

and watching the clumsy actions of the hero, often finds himself wondering

why he should end his reading with a profound respect for this "old bear"

who is the object of Boswell's groveling attention. Here is a man who was

certainly not the greatest writer of his age, perhaps not even a great

writer at all, but who was nevertheless the dictator of English letters,

and who still looms across the centuries of a magnificent literature as its

most striking and original figure. Here, moreover, is a huge, fat, awkward

man, of vulgar manners and appearance, who monopolizes conversation, argues

violently, abuses everybody, clubs down opposition,--"Madam" (speaking to

his cultivated hostess at table), "talk no more nonsense"; "Sir" (turning

to a distinguished guest), "I perceive you are a vile Whig." While talking

he makes curious animal sounds, "sometimes giving a half whistle, sometimes

clucking like a hen"; and when he has concluded a violent dispute and laid

his opponents low by dogmatism or ridicule, he leans back to "blow out his

breath like a whale" and gulp down numberless cups of hot tea. Yet this

curious dictator of an elegant age was a veritable lion, much sought after

by society; and around him in his own poor house gathered the foremost

artists, scholars, actors, and literary men of London,--all honoring the

man, loving him, and listening to his dogmatism as the Greeks listened to

the voice of their oracle.

What is the secret of this astounding spectacle? If the reader turns

naturally to Johnson's works for an explanation, he will be disappointed.

Reading his verses, we find nothing to delight or inspire us, but rather

gloom and pessimism, with a few moral observations in rimed couplets:

But, scarce observed, the knowing and the bold

Fall in the general massacre of gold;

Wide-wasting pest! that rages unconfined,

And crowds with crimes the records of mankind;

For gold his sword the hireling ruffian draws,

For gold the hireling judge distorts the laws;

Wealth heaped on wealth nor truth nor safety buys;

The dangers gather as the treasures rise.[193]

That is excellent common sense, but it is not poetry; and it is not

necessary to hunt through Johnson's bulky volumes for the information,

since any moralist can give us offhand the same doctrine. As for his

_Rambler_ essays, once so successful, though we marvel at the big words,

the carefully balanced sentences, the classical allusions, one might as

well try to get interested in an old-fashioned, three-hour sermon. We read

a few pages listlessly, yawn, and go to bed.

Since the man's work fails to account for his leadership and influence, we

examine his personality; and here everything is interesting. Because of a

few oft-quoted passages from Boswell's biography, Johnson appears to us as

an eccentric bear, who amuses us by his growlings and clumsy antics. But

there is another Johnson, a brave, patient, kindly, religious soul, who, as

Goldsmith said, had "nothing of the bear but his skin"; a man who battled

like a hero against poverty and pain and melancholy and the awful fear of

death, and who overcame them manfully. "_That trouble passed away; so will

this,_" sang the sorrowing Deor in the first old Anglo-Saxon lyric; and

that expresses the great and suffering spirit of Johnson, who in the face

of enormous obstacles never lost faith in God or in himself. Though he was

a reactionary in politics, upholding the arbitrary power of kings and

opposing the growing liberty of the people, yet his political theories,

like his manners, were no deeper than his skin; for in all London there was

none more kind to the wretched, and none more ready to extend an open hand

to every struggling man and woman who crossed his path. When he passed poor

homeless Arabs sleeping in the streets he would slip a coin into their

hands, in order that they might have a happy awakening; for he himself knew

well what it meant to be hungry. Such was Johnson,--a "mass of genuine

manhood," as Carlyle called him, and as such, men loved and honored

him.[194]

Life of Johnson. Johnson was born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, in 1709. He

was the son of a small bookseller, a poor man, but intelligent and fond of

literature, as booksellers invariably were in the good days when every town

had its bookshop. From his childhood Johnson had to struggle against

physical deformity and disease and the consequent disinclination to hard

work. He prepared for the university, partly in the schools, but largely by

omnivorous reading in his father's shop, and when he entered Oxford he had

read more classical authors than had most of the graduates. Before

finishing his course he had to leave the university on account of his

poverty, and at once he began his long struggle as a hack writer to earn

his living.

At twenty-five years he married a woman old enough to be his mother,--a

genuine love match, he called it,--and with her dowry of £800 they started

a private school together, which was a dismal failure. Then, without money

or influential friends, he left his home and wife in Lichfield and tramped

to London, accompanied only by David Garrick, afterwards the famous actor,

who had been one of his pupils. Here, led by old associations, Johnson made

himself known to the booksellers, and now and then earned a penny by

writing prefaces, reviews, and translations.

It was a dog's life, indeed, that he led there with his literary brethren.

Many of the writers of the day, who are ridiculed in Pope's heartless

_Dunciad_, having no wealthy patrons to support them, lived largely in the

streets and taverns, sleeping on an ash heap or under a wharf, like rats;

glad of a crust, and happy over a single meal which enabled them to work

for a while without the reminder of hunger. A few favored ones lived in

wretched lodgings in Grub Street, which has since become a synonym for the

fortunes of struggling writers.[195] Often, Johnson tells us, he walked the

streets all night long, in dreary weather, when it was too cold to sleep,

without food or shelter. But he wrote steadily for the booksellers and for

the _Gentleman's Magazine_, and presently he became known in London and

received enough work to earn a bare living.

The works which occasioned this small success were his poem, "London," and

his _Life of the Poet Savage_, a wretched life, at best, which were perhaps

better left without a biographer. But his success was genuine, though

small, and presently the booksellers of London are coming to him to ask him

to write a dictionary of the English language. It was an enormous work,

taking nearly eight years of his time, and long before he had finished it

he had eaten up the money which he received for his labor. In the leisure

intervals of this work he wrote "The Vanity of Human Wishes" and other

poems, and finished his classic tragedy of _Irene_.

Led by the great success of the _Spectator_, Johnson started two magazines,

_The Rambler_ (1750--1752) and _The Idler_ (1758--1760). Later the

_Rambler_ essays were published in book form and ran rapidly through ten

editions; but the financial returns were small, and Johnson spent a large

part of his earnings in charity. When his mother died, in 1759, Johnson,

although one of the best known men in London, had no money, and hurriedly

finished _Rasselas_, his only romance, in order, it is said, to pay for his

mother's burial.

It was not till 1762, when Johnson was fifty-three years old, that his

literary labors were rewarded in the usual way by royalty, and he received

from George III a yearly pension of three hundred pounds. Then began a

little sunshine in his life. With Joshua Reynolds, the artist, he founded

the famous Literary Club, of which Burke, Pitt, Fox, Gibbon, Goldsmith, and

indeed all the great literary men and politicians of the time, were

members. This is the period of Johnson's famous conversations, which were

caught in minutest detail by Boswell and given to the world. His idea of

conversation, as shown in a hundred places in Boswell, is to overcome your

adversary at any cost; to knock him down by arguments, or, when these fail,

by personal ridicule; to dogmatize on every possible question, pronounce a

few oracles, and then desist with the air of victory. Concerning the

philosopher Hume's view of death he says: "Sir, if he really thinks so, his

perceptions are disturbed, he is mad. If he does not think so, he lies."

Exit opposition. There is nothing more to be said. Curiously enough, it is

often the palpable blunders of these monologues that now attract us, as if

we were enjoying a good joke at the dictator's expense. Once a lady asked

him, "Dr. Johnson, why did you define _pastern_ as the knee of a horse?"

"Ignorance, madame, pure ignorance," thundered the great authority.

When seventy years of age, Johnson was visited by several booksellers of

the city, who were about to bring out a new edition of the English poets,

and who wanted Johnson, as the leading literary man of London, to write the

prefaces to the several volumes. The result was his _Lives of the Poets_,

as it is now known, and this is his last literary work. He died in his poor

Fleet Street house, in 1784, and was buried among England's honored poets

in Westminster Abbey.

JOHNSON'S WORKS. "A book," says Dr. Johnson, "should help us either to

enjoy life or to endure it." Judged by this standard, one is puzzled what

to recommend among Johnson's numerous books. The two things which belong

among the things "worthy to be remembered" are his _Dictionary_ and his

_Lives of the Poets_, though both these are valuable, not as literature,

but rather as a study of literature. The _Dictionary_, as the first

ambitious attempt at an English lexicon, is extremely valuable,

notwithstanding the fact that his derivations are often faulty, and that he

frequently exercises his humor or prejudice in his curious definitions. In

defining "oats," for example, as a grain given in England to horses and in

Scotland to the people, he indulges his prejudice against the Scotch, whom

he never understood, just as, in his definition of "pension," he takes

occasion to rap the writers who had flattered their patrons since the days

of Elizabeth; though he afterwards accepted a comfortable pension for

himself. With characteristic honesty he refused to alter his definition in

subsequent editions of the _Dictionary_.

The _Lives of the Poets_ are the simplest and most readable of his literary

works. For ten years before beginning these biographies he had given

himself up to conversation, and the ponderous style of his _Rambler_ essays

here gives way to a lighter and more natural expression. As criticisms they

are often misleading, giving praise to artificial poets, like Cowley and

Pope, and doing scant justice or abundant injustice to nobler poets like

Gray and Milton; and they are not to be compared with those found in Thomas

Warton's _History of English Poetry_, which was published in the same

generation. As biographies, however, they are excellent reading, and we owe

to them some of our best known pictures of the early English poets.

Of Johnson's poems the reader will have enough if he glance over "The

Vanity of Human Wishes." His only story, _Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia_,

is a matter of rhetoric rather than of romance, but is interesting still to

the reader who wants to hear Johnson's personal views of society,

philosophy, and religion. Any one of his _Essays_, like that on "Reading,"

or "The Pernicious Effects of Revery," will be enough to acquaint the

reader with the Johnsonese style, which was once much admired and copied by

orators, but which happily has been replaced by a more natural way of

speaking. Most of his works, it must be confessed, are rather tiresome. It

is not to his books, but rather to the picture of the man himself, as given

by Boswell, that Johnson owes his great place in our literature.

BOSWELL'S "LIFE OF JOHNSON"

In James Boswell (1740-1795) we have another extraordinary figure,--a

shallow little Scotch barrister, who trots about like a dog at the heels of

his big master, frantic at a caress and groveling at a cuff, and abundantly

contented if only he can be near him and record his oracles. All his life

long Boswell's one ambition seems to have been to shine in the reflected

glory of great men, and his chief task to record their sayings and doings.

When he came to London, at twenty-two years of age, Johnson, then at the

beginning of his great fame, was to this insatiable little glory-seeker

like a Silver Doctor to a hungry trout. He sought an introduction as a man

seeks gold, haunted every place where Johnson declaimed, until in Davies's

bookstore the supreme opportunity came. This is his record of the great

event:

I was much agitated [says Boswell] and recollecting his prejudice against

the Scotch, of which I had heard much, I said to Davies, "Don't tell him

where I come from." "From Scotland," cried Davies roguishly. "Mr. Johnson,"

said I, "I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it."... "That,

sir" [cried Johnson], "I find is what a very great many of your countrymen

cannot help." This stroke stunned me a good deal; and when we had sat down

I felt myself not a little embarrassed, and apprehensive of what might come

next.

Then for several years, with a persistency that no rebuffs could abate, and

with a thick skin that no amount of ridicule could render sensitive, he

follows Johnson; forces his way into the Literary Club, where he is not

welcome, in order to be near his idol; carries him off on a visit to the

Hebrides; talks with him on every possible occasion; and, when he is not

invited to a feast, waits outside the house or tavern in order to walk home

with his master in the thick fog of the early morning. And the moment the

oracle is out of sight and in bed, Boswell patters home to record in detail

all that he has seen and heard. It is to his minute record that we owe our

only perfect picture of a great man; all his vanity as well as his

greatness, his prejudices, superstitions, and even the details of his

personal appearance:

There is the gigantic body, the huge face seamed with the scars of disease,

the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the gray wig with the scorched

foretop, the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see

the eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy form

rolling; we hear it puffing; and then comes the "Why, sir!" and the "What

then, sir?" and the "No, sir!" and the "You don't see your way through the

question, sir!"[196]

To Boswell's record we are indebted also for our knowledge of those famous

conversations, those wordy, knockdown battles, which made Johnson famous in

his time and which still move us to wonder. Here is a specimen

conversation, taken almost at random from a hundred such in Boswell's

incomparable biography. After listening to Johnson's prejudice against

Scotland, and his dogmatic utterances on Voltaire, Robertson, and twenty

others, an unfortunate theorist brings up a recent essay on the possible

future life of brutes, quoting some possible authority from the sacred

scriptures:

Johnson, who did not like to hear anything concerning a future state which

was not authorized by the regular canons of orthodoxy, discouraged this

talk; and being offended at its continuation, he watched an opportunity to

give the gentleman a blow of reprehension. So when the poor speculatist,

with a serious, metaphysical, pensive face, addressed him, "But really,

sir, when we see a very sensible dog, we don't know what to think of him";

Johnson, rolling with joy at the thought which beamed in his eye, turned

quickly round and replied, "True, sir; and when we see a very _foolish

fellow_, we don't know what to think of _him_." He then rose up, strided to

the fire, and stood for some time laughing and exulting.

Then the oracle proceeds to talk of scorpions and natural history, denying

facts, and demanding proofs which nobody could possibly furnish:

He seemed pleased to talk of natural philosophy. "That woodcocks," said he,

"fly over the northern countries is proved, because they have been observed

at sea. Swallows certainly sleep all the winter. A number of them

conglobulate together by flying round and round, and then all in a heap

throw themselves under water and lie in the bed of a river." He told us one

of his first essays was a Latin poem upon the glowworm: I am sorry I did

not ask where it was to be found.

Then follows an astonishing array of subjects and opinions. He catalogues

libraries, settles affairs in China, pronounces judgment on men who marry

women superior to themselves, flouts popular liberty, hammers Swift

unmercifully, and adds a few miscellaneous oracles, most of which are about

as reliable as his knowledge of the hibernation of swallows.

When I called upon Dr. Johnson next morning I found him highly satisfied

with his colloquial prowess the preceding evening. "Well," said he, "we had

good talk." "Yes, sir" [says I], "you tossed and gored several persons."

Far from resenting this curious mental dictatorship, his auditors never

seem to weary. They hang upon his words, praise him, flatter him, repeat

his judgments all over London the next day, and return in the evening

hungry for more. Whenever the conversation begins to flag, Boswell is like

a woman with a parrot, or like a man with a dancing bear. He must excite

the creature, make him talk or dance for the edification of the company. He

sidles obsequiously towards his hero and, with utter irrelevancy, propounds

a question of theology, a social theory, a fashion of dress or marriage, a

philosophical conundrum: "Do you think, sir, that natural affections are

born with us?" or, "Sir, if you were shut up in a castle and a newborn babe

with you, what would you do?" Then follow more Johnsonian laws, judgments,

oracles; the insatiable audience clusters around him and applauds; while

Boswell listens, with shining face, and presently goes home to write the

wonder down. It is an astonishing spectacle; one does not know whether to

laugh or grieve over it. But we know the man, and the audience, almost as

well as if we had been there; and that, unconsciously, is the superb art of

this matchless biographer.

When Johnson died the opportunity came for which Boswell had been watching

and waiting some twenty years. He would shine in the world now, not by

reflection, but by his own luminosity. He gathered together his endless

notes and records, and began to write his biography; but he did not hurry.

Several biographies of Johnson appeared, in the four years after his death,

without disturbing Boswell's perfect complacency. After seven years' labor

he gave the world his _Life of Johnson_. It is an immortal work; praise is

superfluous; it must be read to be appreciated. Like the Greek sculptors,

the little slave produced a more enduring work than the great master. The

man who reads it will know Johnson as he knows no other man who dwells

across the border; and he will lack sensitiveness, indeed, if he lay down

the work without a greater love and appreciation of all good literature.

LATER AUGUSTAN WRITERS. With Johnson, who succeeded Dryden and Pope in the

chief place of English letters, the classic movement had largely spent its

force; and the latter half of the eighteenth century gives us an imposing

array of writers who differ so widely that it is almost impossible to

classify them. In general, three schools of writers are noticeable: first,

the classicists, who, under Johnson's lead, insisted upon elegance and

regularity of style; second, the romantic poets, like Collins, Gray,

Thomson, and Burns, who revolted from Pope's artificial couplets and wrote

of nature and the human heart[197]; third, the early novelists, like Defoe

and Fielding, who introduced a new type of literature. The romantic poets

and the novelists are reserved for special chapters; and of the other

writers--Berkeley and Hume in philosophy; Robertson, Hume, and Gibbon in

history; Chesterfield and Lady Montagu in letter writing; Adam Smith in

economics; Pitt, Burke, Fox, and a score of lesser writers in politics--we

select only two, Burke and Gibbon, whose works are most typical of the

Augustan, i.e. the elegant, classic style of prose writing.

EDMUND BURKE (1729--1797)

To read all of Burke's collected works, and so to understand him

thoroughly, is something of a task. Few are equal to it. On the other hand,

to read selections here and there, as most of us do, is to get a wrong idea

of the man and to join either in fulsome praise of his brilliant oratory,

or in honest confession that his periods are ponderous and his ideas often

buried under Johnsonian verbiage. Such are the contrasts to be found on

successive pages of Burke's twelve volumes, which cover the enormous range

of the political and economic thought of the age, and which mingle fact and

fancy, philosophy, statistics, and brilliant flights of the imagination, to

a degree never before seen in English literature. For Burke belongs in

spirit to the new romantic school, while in style he is a model for the

formal classicists. We can only glance at the life of this marvelous

Irishman, and then consider his place in our literature.

LIFE. Burke was born in Dublin, the son of an Irish barrister, in 1729.

After his university course in Trinity College he came to London to study

law, but soon gave up the idea to follow literature, which in turn led him

to politics. He had the soul, the imagination of a poet, and the law was

only a clog to his progress. His two first works, _A Vindication of Natural

Society_ and _The Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful_,

brought him political as well as literary recognition, and several small

offices were in turn given to him. When thirty-six years old he was elected

to Parliament as member from Wendover; and for the next thirty years he was

the foremost figure in the House of Commons and the most eloquent orator

which that body has ever known. Pure and incorruptible in his politics as

in his personal life, no more learned or devoted servant of the

Commonwealth ever pleaded for justice and human liberty. He was at the

summit of his influence at the time when the colonies were struggling for

independence; and the fact that he championed their cause in one of his

greatest speeches, "On Conciliation with America," gives him an added

interest in the eyes of American readers. His championship of America is

all the more remarkable from the fact that, in other matters, Burke was far

from liberal. He set himself squarely against the teachings of the romantic

writers, who were enthusiastic over the French Revolution; he denounced the

principles of the Revolutionists, broke with the liberal Whig party to join

the Tories, and was largely instrumental in bringing on the terrible war

with France, which resulted in the downfall of Napoleon.

It is good to remember that, in all the strife and bitterness of party

politics, Burke held steadily to the noblest personal ideals of truth and

honesty; and that in all his work, whether opposing the slave trade, or

pleading for justice for America, or protecting the poor natives of India

from the greed of corporations, or setting himself against the popular

sympathy for France in her desperate struggle, he aimed solely at the

welfare of humanity. When he retired on a pension in 1794, he had won, and

he deserved, the gratitude and affection of the whole nation.

WORKS. There are three distinctly marked periods in Burke's career, and

these correspond closely to the years in which he was busied with the

affairs of America, India, and France successively. The first period was

one of prophecy. He had studied the history and temper of the American

colonies, and he warned England of the disaster which must follow her

persistence in ignoring the American demands, and especially the American

spirit. His great speeches, "On American Taxation" and "On Conciliation

with America," were delivered in 1774 and 1775, preceding the Declaration

of Independence. In this period Burke's labor seemed all in vain; he lost

his cause, and England her greatest colony.

The second period is one of denunciation rather than of prophecy. England

had won India; but when Burke studied the methods of her victory and

understood the soulless way in which millions of poor natives were made to

serve the interests of an English monopoly, his soul rose in revolt, and

again he was the champion of an oppressed people. His two greatest speeches

of this period are "The Nabob of Arcot's Debts" and his tremendous

"Impeachment of Warren Hastings." Again he apparently lost his cause,

though he was still fighting on the side of right. Hastings was acquitted,

and the spoliation of India went on; but the seeds of reform were sown, and

grew and bore fruit long after Burke's labors were ended.

The third period is, curiously enough, one of reaction. Whether because the

horrors of the French Revolution had frightened him with the danger of

popular liberty, or because his own advance in office and power had made

him side unconsciously with the upper classes, is unknown. That he was as

sincere and noble now as in all his previous life is not questioned. He

broke with the liberal Whigs and joined forces with the reactionary Tories.

He opposed the romantic writers, who were on fire with enthusiasm over the

French Revolution, and thundered against the dangers which the

revolutionary spirit must breed, forgetting that it was a revolution which

had made modern England possible. Here, where we must judge him to have

been mistaken in his cause, he succeeded for the first time. It was due

largely to Burke's influence that the growing sympathy for the French

people was checked in England, and war was declared, which ended in the

frightful victories of Trafalgar and Waterloo.

Burke's best known work of this period is his _Reflections on the French

Revolution_, which he polished and revised again Essay on and again before

it was finally printed. This ambitious literary essay, though it met with

remarkable success, is a disappointment to the reader. Though of Celtic

blood, Burke did not understand the French, or the principles for which the

common people were fighting in their own way[198]; and his denunciations

and apostrophes to France suggest a preacher without humor, hammering away

at sinners who are not present in his congregation. The essay has few

illuminating ideas, but a great deal of Johnsonian rhetoric, which make its

periods tiresome, notwithstanding our admiration for the brilliancy of its

author. More significant is one of Burke's first essays, _A Philosophical

Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful_, which

is sometimes read in order to show the contrast in style with Addison's

_Spectator_ essays on the "Pleasures of the Imagination."

Burke's best known speeches, "On Conciliation with America," "American

Taxation," and the "Impeachment of Warren Hastings," are still much studied

in our schools as models of English prose; and this fact tends to give them

an exaggerated literary importance. Viewed purely as literature, they have

faults enough; and the first of these, so characteristic of the Classic

Age, is that they abound in fine rhetoric but lack simplicity.[199] In a

strict sense, these eloquent speeches are not literature, to delight the

reader and to suggest ideas, but studies in rhetoric and in mental

concentration. All this, however, is on the surface. A careful study of any

of these three famous speeches reveals certain admirable qualities which

account for the important place they are given in the study of English.

First, as showing the stateliness and the rhetorical power of our language,

these speeches are almost unrivaled. Second, though Burke speaks in prose,

he is essentially a poet, whose imagery, like that of Milton's prose works,

is more remarkable than that of many of our writers of verse. He speaks in

figures, images, symbols; and the musical cadence of his sentences reflects

the influence of his wide reading of poetry. Not only in figurative

expression, but much more in spirit, he belongs with the poets of the

revival. At times his language is pseudo-classic, reflecting the influence

of Johnson and his school; but his thought is always romantic; he is

governed by ideal rather than by practical interests, and a profound

sympathy for humanity is perhaps his most marked characteristic.

Third, the supreme object of these orations, so different from the majority

of political speeches, is not to win approval or to gain votes, but to

establish the truth. Like our own Lincoln, Burke had a superb faith in the

compelling power of the truth, a faith in men also, who, if the history of

our race means anything, will not willingly follow a lie. The methods of

these two great leaders are strikingly similar in this respect, that each

repeats his idea in many ways, presenting the truth from different view

points, so that it will appeal to men of widely different experiences.

Otherwise the two men are in marked contrast. The uneducated Lincoln speaks

in simple, homely words, draws his illustrations from the farm, and often

adds a humorous story, so apt and "telling" that his hearers can never

forget the point of his argument. The scholarly Burke speaks in ornate,

majestic periods, and searches all history and all literature for his

illustrations. His wealth of imagery and allusions, together with his rare

combination of poetic and logical reasoning, make these orations

remarkable, entirely apart from their subject and purpose.

Fourth (and perhaps most significant of the man and his work), Burke takes

his stand squarely upon the principle of justice. He has studied history,

and he finds that to establish justice, between man and man and between

nation and nation, has been the supreme object of every reformer since the

world began. No small or merely temporary success attracts him; only the

truth will suffice for an argument; and nothing less than justice will ever

settle a question permanently. Such is his platform, simple as the Golden

Rule, unshakable as the moral law. Hence, though he apparently fails of his

immediate desire in each of these three orations, the principle for which

he contends cannot fail. As a modern writer says of Lincoln, "The full,

rich flood of his life through the nation's pulse is yet beating"; and his

words are still potent in shaping the course of English politics in the way

of justice.

EDWARD GIBBON (1737-1794)

To understand Burke or Johnson, one must read a multitude of books and be

wary in his judgment; but with Gibbon the task is comparatively easy, for

one has only to consider two books, his _Memoirs_ and the first volume of

his _History_, to understand the author. In his _Memoirs_ we have an

interesting reflection of Gibbon's own personality,--a man who looks with

satisfaction on the material side of things, who seeks always the easiest

path for himself, and avoids life's difficulties and responsibilities. "I

sighed as a lover; but I obeyed as a son," he says, when, to save his

inheritance, he gave up the woman he loved and came home to enjoy the

paternal loaves and fishes. That is suggestive of the man's whole life. His

_History_, on the other hand, is a remarkable work. It was the first in our

language to be written on scientific principles, and with a solid basis of

fact; and the style is the very climax of that classicism which had ruled

England for an entire century. Its combination of historical fact and

literary style makes _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ the one

thing of Gibbon's life that is "worthy to be remembered."

GIBBON'S HISTORY. For many years Gibbon had meditated, like Milton, upon an

immortal work, and had tried several historical subjects, only to give them

up idly. In his _Journal_ he tells us how his vague resolutions were

brought to a focus:

It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst

the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers

in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of

the city first started to my mind.

Twelve years later, in 1776, Gibbon published the first volume of _The

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire;_ and the enormous success of the work

encouraged him to go on with the other five volumes, which were published

at intervals during the next twelve years. The History begins with the

reign of Trajan, in A.D. 98, and "builds a straight Roman road" through the

confused histories of thirteen centuries, ending with the fall of the

Byzantine Empire in 1453. The scope of the History is enormous. It includes

not only the decline of the Roman Empire, but such movements as the descent

of the northern barbarians, the spread of Christianity, the reorganization

of the European nations, the establishment of the great Eastern Empire, the

rise of Mohammedanism, and the splendor of the Crusades. On the one hand it

lacks philosophical insight, being satisfied with facts without

comprehending the causes; and, as Gibbon seems lacking in ability to

understand spiritual and religious movements, it is utterly inadequate in

its treatment of the tremendous influence of Christianity. On the other

hand, Gibbon's scholarship leaves little to criticise; he read enormously,

sifted his facts out of multitudes of books and records, and then marshaled

them in the imposing array with which we have grown familiar. Moreover, he

is singularly just and discriminating in the use of all documents and

authorities at his command. Hence he has given us the first history in

English that has borne successfully the test of modern research and

scholarship.

The style of the work is as imposing as his great subject. Indeed, with

almost any other subject the sonorous roll of his majestic sentences would

be out of place. While it deserves all the adjectives that have been

applied to it by enthusiastic admirers,--finished, elegant, splendid,

rounded, massive, sonorous, copious, elaborate, ornate, exhaustive,--it

must be confessed, though one whispers the confession, that the style

sometimes obscures our interest in the narrative. As he sifted his facts

from a multitude of sources, so he often hides them again in endless

periods, and one must often sift them out again in order to be quite sure

of even the simple facts. Another drawback is that Gibbon is hopelessly

worldly in his point of view; he loves pageants and crowds rather than

individuals, and he is lacking in enthusiasm and in spiritual insight. The

result is so frankly material at times that one wonders if he is not

reading of forces or machines, rather than of human beings. A little

reading of his History here and there is an excellent thing, leaving one

impressed with the elegant classical style and the scholarship; but a

continued reading is very apt to leave us longing for simplicity, for

naturalness, and, above all, for the glow of enthusiasm which makes the

dead heroes live once more in the written pages.

This judgment, however, must not obscure the fact that the book had a

remarkably large sale; and that this, of itself, is an evidence that

multitudes of readers found it not only erudite, but readable and

interesting.

II. THE REVIVAL OF ROMANTIC POETRY

The old order changeth, yielding place to new;

And God fulfills Himself in many ways,

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

Tennyson's "The Passing of Arthur."

THE MEANING OF ROMANTICISM. While Dryden, Pope, and Johnson were

successively the dictators of English letters, and while, under their

leadership, the heroic couplet became the fashion of poetry, and literature

in general became satiric or critical in spirit, and formal in expression,

a new romantic movement quietly made its appearance. Thomson's _The

Seasons_ (1730) was the first noteworthy poem of the romantic revival; and

the poems and the poets increased steadily in number and importance till,

in the age of Wordsworth and Scott, the spirit of Romanticism dominated our

literature more completely than Classicism had ever done. This romantic

movement--which Victor Hugo calls "liberalism in literature"--is simply the

expression of life as seen by imagination, rather than by prosaic "common

sense," which was the central doctrine of English philosophy in the

eighteenth century. It has six prominent characteristics which distinguish

it from the so-called classic literature which we have just studied:

1. The romantic movement was marked, and is always marked, by a strong

reaction and protest against the bondage of rule and custom, which, in

science and theology, as well as in literature, generally tend to fetter

the free human spirit.

2. Romanticism returned to nature and to plain humanity for its material,

and so is in marked contrast to Classicism, which had confined itself

largely to the clubs and drawing-rooms, and to the social and political

life of London. Thomson's _Seasons_, whatever its defects, was a revelation

of the natural wealth and beauty which, for nearly a century, had been

hardly noticed by the great writers of England.

3. It brought again the dream of a golden age[200] in which the stern

realities of life were forgotten and the ideals of youth were established

as the only permanent realities. "For the dreamer lives forever, but the

toiler dies in a day," expresses, perhaps, only the wild fancy of a modern

poet; but, when we think of it seriously, the dreams and ideals of a people

are cherished possessions long after their stone monuments have crumbled

away and their battles are forgotten. The romantic movement emphasized

these eternal ideals of youth, and appealed to the human heart as the

classic elegance of Dryden and Pope could never do.

4. Romanticism was marked by intense human sympathy, and by a consequent

understanding of the human heart. Not to intellect or to science does the

heart unlock its treasures, but rather to the touch of a sympathetic

nature; and things that are hidden from the wise and prudent are revealed

unto children. Pope had no appreciable humanity; Swift's work is a

frightful satire; Addison delighted polite society, but had no message for

plain people; while even Johnson, with all his kindness, had no feeling for

men in the mass, but supported Sir Robert Walpole in his policy of letting

evils alone until forced by a revolution to take notice of humanity's

appeal. With the romantic revival all this was changed. While Howard was

working heroically for prison reform, and Wilberforce for the liberation of

the slaves, Gray wrote his "short and simple annals of the poor," and

Goldsmith his _Deserted Village_, and Cowper sang,

My ear is pained,

My soul is sick with every day's report

Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled.

There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart,

It does not feel for man.[201]

This sympathy for the poor, and this cry against oppression, grew stronger

and stronger till it culminated in "Bobby" Burns, who, more than any other

writer in any language, is the poet of the unlettered human heart.

5. The romantic movement was the expression of individual genius rather

than of established rules. In consequence, the literature of the revival is

as varied as the characters and moods of the different writers. When we

read Pope, for instance, we have a general impression of sameness, as if

all his polished poems were made in the same machine; but in the work of

the best romanticists there is endless variety. To read them is like

passing through a new village, meeting a score of different human types,

and finding in each one something to love or to remember. Nature and the

heart of man are as new as if we had never studied them. Hence, in reading

the romanticists, who went to these sources for their material, we are

seldom wearied but often surprised; and the surprise is like that of the

sunrise, or the sea, which always offers some new beauty and stirs us

deeply, as if we had never seen it before.

6. The romantic movement, while it followed its own genius, was not

altogether unguided. Strictly speaking, there is no new movement either in

history or in literature; each grows out of some good thing which has

preceded it, and looks back with reverence to past masters. Spenser,

Shakespeare, and Milton were the inspiration of the romantic revival; and

we can hardly read a poem of the early romanticists without finding a

suggestion of the influence of one of these great leaders.[202]

There are various other characteristics of Romanticism, but these six--the

protest against the bondage of rules, the return to nature and the human

heart, the interest in old sagas and mediæval romances as suggestive of a

heroic age, the sympathy for the toilers of the world, the emphasis upon

individual genius, and the return to Milton and the Elizabethans, instead

of to Pope and Dryden, for literary models--are the most noticeable and

the most interesting. Remembering them, we shall better appreciate the work

of the following writers who, in varying degree, illustrate the revival of

romantic poetry in the eighteenth century.

THOMAS GRAY (1716-1771)

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day;

The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea;

The plowman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,

And all the air a solemn stillness holds,

Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,

And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.

So begins "the best known poem in the English language," a poem full of the

gentle melancholy which marks all early romantic poetry. It should be read

entire, as a perfect model of its kind. Not even Milton's "Il Penseroso,"

which it strongly suggests, excels it in beauty and suggestiveness.

LIFE OF GRAY. The author of the famous "Elegy" is the most scholarly and

well-balanced of all the early romantic poets. In his youth he was a

weakling, the only one of twelve children who survived infancy; and his

unhappy childhood, the tyranny of his father, and the separation from his

loved mother, gave to his whole life the stamp of melancholy which is

noticeable in all his poems. At the famous Eton school and again at

Cambridge, he seems to have followed his own scholarly tastes rather than

the curriculum, and was shocked, like Gibbon, at the general idleness and

aimlessness of university life. One happy result of his school life was his

friendship for Horace Walpole, who took him abroad for a three years' tour

of the Continent.

No better index of the essential difference between the classical and the

new romantic school can be imagined than that which is revealed in the

letters of Gray and Addison, as they record their impressions of foreign

travel. Thus, when Addison crossed the Alps, some twenty-five years before,

in good weather, he wrote: "A very troublesome journey.... You cannot

imagine how I am pleased with the sight of a plain." Gray crossed the Alps

in the beginning of winter, "wrapped in muffs, hoods and masks of beaver,

fur boots, and bearskins," but wrote ecstatically, "Not a precipice, not a

torrent, not a cliff but is pregnant with religion and poetry."

On his return to England, Gray lived for a short time at Stoke Poges, where

he wrote his "Ode on Eton," and probably sketched his "Elegy," which,

however, was not finished till 1750, eight years later. During the latter

years of his shy and scholarly life he was Professor of Modern History and

Languages at Cambridge, without any troublesome work of lecturing to

students. Here he gave himself up to study and to poetry, varying his work

by "prowlings" among the manuscripts of the new British Museum, and by his

"Lilliputian" travels in England and Scotland. He died in his rooms at

Pembroke College in 1771, and was buried in the little churchyard of Stoke

Poges.

WORKS OF GRAY. Gray's _Letters_, published in 1775, are excellent reading,

and his _Journal_ is still a model of natural description; but it is to a

single small volume of poems that he owes his fame and his place in

literature. These poems divide themselves naturally into three periods, in

which we may trace the progress of Gray's emancipation from the classic

rules which had so long governed English literature. In the first period he

wrote several minor poems, of which the best are his "Hymn to Adversity"

and the odes "To Spring" and "On a Distant Prospect of Eton College." These

early poems reveal two suggestive things: first, the appearance of that

melancholy which characterizes all the poetry of the period; and second,

the study of nature, not for its own beauty or truth, but rather as a

suitable background for the play of human emotions.

The second period shows the same tendencies more strongly developed. The

"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1750), the most perfect poem of

the age, belongs to this period. To read Milton's "Il Penseroso" and Gray's

"Elegy" is to see the beginning and the perfection of that "literature of

melancholy" which largely occupied English poets for more than a century.

Two other well-known poems of this second period are the Pindaric odes,

"The Progress of Poesy" and "The Bard." The first is strongly suggestive of

Dryden's "Alexander's Feast," but shows Milton's influence in a greater

melody and variety of expression. "The Bard" is, in every way, more

romantic and original. An old minstrel, the last of the Welsh singers,

halts King Edward and his army in a wild mountain pass, and with fine

poetic frenzy prophesies the terror and desolation which must ever follow

the tyrant. From its first line, "Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!" to the

end, when the old bard plunges from his lofty crag and disappears in the

river's flood, the poem thrills with the fire of an ancient and noble race

of men. It breaks absolutely with the classical school and proclaims a

literary declaration of independence.

In the third period Gray turns momentarily from his Welsh material and

reveals a new field of romantic interest in two Norse poems, "The Fatal

Sisters" and "The Descent of Odin" (1761). Gray translated his material

from the Latin, and though these two poems lack much of the elemental

strength and grandeur of the Norse sagas, they are remarkable for calling

attention to the unused wealth of literary material that was hidden in

Northern mythologv. To Gray and to Percy (who published his _Northern

Antiquities_ in 1770) is due in large measure the profound interest in the

old Norse sagas which has continued to our own day.

Taken together, Gray's works form a most interesting commentary on the

varied life of the eighteenth century. He was a scholar, familiar with all

the intellectual interests of his age, and his work has much of the

precision and polish of the classical school; but he shares also the

reawakened interest in nature, in common man, and in mediæval culture, and

his work is generally romantic both in style and in spirit. The same

conflict between the classic and romantic schools, and the triumph of

Romanticism, is shown clearly in the most versatile of Gray's

contemporaries, Oliver Goldsmith.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH (1728-1774)

Because _The Deserted Village_ is one of the most familiar poems in our

language, Goldsmith is generally given a high place among the poets of the

romantic dawn. But the _Village_, when we read it carefully, turns out to

be a rimed essay in the style of Pope's famous _Essay on Man_; it owes its

popularity to the sympathetic memories which it awakens, rather than to its

poetic excellence. It is as a prose writer that Goldsmith excels. He is an

essayist, with Addison's fine polish but with more sympathy for human life;

he is a dramatist, one of the very few who have ever written a comedy that

can keep its popularity unchanged while a century rolls over its head; but

greater, perhaps, than the poet and essayist and dramatist is Goldsmith the

novelist, who set himself to the important work of purifying the early

novel of its brutal and indecent tendencies, and who has given us, in _The

Vicar of Wakefield_, one of the most enduring characters in English

fiction. In his manner, especially in his poetry, Goldsmith was too much

influenced by his friend Johnson and the classicists; but in his matter, in

his sympathy for nature and human life, he belongs unmistakably to the new

romantic school. Altogether he is the most versatile, the most charming,

the most inconsistent, and the most lovable genius of all the literary men

who made famous the age of Johnson.

LIFE. Goldsmith's career is that of an irresponsible, unbalanced genius,

which would make one despair if the man himself did not remain so lovable

in all his inconsistencies. He was born in the village of Pallas, Ireland,

the son of a poor Irish curate whose noble character is portrayed in Dr.

Primrose, of _The Vicar of Wakefield_, and in the country parson of _The

Deserted Village_. After an unsatisfactory course in various schools, where

he was regarded as hopelessly stupid, Goldsmith entered Trinity College,

Dublin, as a sizar, i.e. a student who pays with labor for his tuition. By

his escapades he was brought into disfavor with the authorities, but that

troubled him little. He was also wretchedly poor, which troubled him less;

for when he earned a few shillings by writing ballads for street singers,

his money went oftener to idle beggars than to the paying of his honest

debts. After three years of university life he ran away, in dime-novel

fashion, and nearly starved to death before he was found and brought back

in disgrace. Then he worked a little, and obtained his degree in 1749.

Strange that such an idle and irresponsible youth should have been urged by

his family to take holy orders; but such was the fact. For two years more

Goldsmith labored with theology, only to be rejected when he presented

himself as a candidate for the ministry. He tried teaching, and failed.

Then his fancy turned to America, and, provided with money and a good

horse, he started off for Cork, where he was to embark for the New World.

He loafed along the pleasant Irish ways, missed his ship, and presently

turned up cheerfully amongst his relatives, minus all his money, and riding

a sorry nag called Fiddleback, for which he had traded his own on the

way.[203] He borrowed fifty pounds more, and started for London to study

law, but speedily lost his money at cards, and again appeared, amiable and

irresponsible as ever, among his despairing relatives. The next year they

sent him to Edinburgh to study medicine. Here for a couple of years he

became popular as a singer of songs and a teller of tales, to whom medicine

was only a troublesome affliction. Suddenly the _Wanderlust_ seized him and

he started abroad, ostensibly to complete his medical education, but in

reality to wander like a cheerful beggar over Europe, singing and playing

his flute for food and lodging. He may have studied a little at Leyden and

at Padua, but that was only incidental. After a year or more of vagabondage

he returned to London with an alleged medical degree, said to have been

obtained at Louvain or Padua.

The next few years are a pitiful struggle to make a living as tutor,

apothecary's assistant, comedian, usher in a country school, and finally as

a physician in Southwark. Gradually he drifted into literature, and lived

from hand to mouth by doing hack work for the London booksellers. Some of

his essays and his _Citizen of the World_ (1760-1761) brought him to the

attention of Johnson, who looked him up, was attracted first by his poverty

and then by his genius, and presently declared him to be "one of the first

men we now have as an author." Johnson's friendship proved invaluable, and

presently Goldsmith found himself a member of the exclusive Literary Club.

He promptly justified Johnson's confidence by publishing _The Traveller_

(1764), which was hailed as one of the finest poems of the century. Money

now came to him liberally, with orders from the booksellers; he took new

quarters in Fleet Street and furnished them gorgeously; but he had an

inordinate vanity for bright-colored clothes, and faster than he earned

money he spent it on velvet cloaks and in indiscriminate charity. For a

time he resumed his practice as a physician, but his fine clothes did not

bring patients, as he expected; and presently he turned to writing again,

to pay his debts to the booksellers. He produced several superficial and

grossly inaccurate schoolbooks,--like his _Animated Nature_ and his

histories of England, Greece, and Rome,--which brought him bread and more

fine clothes, and his _Vicar of Wakefield, The Deserted Village_, and _She

Stoops to Conquer_, which brought him undying fame.

After meeting with Johnson, Goldsmith became the object of Boswell's magpie

curiosity; and to Boswell's _Life of Johnson_ we are indebted for many of

the details of Goldsmith's life,--his homeliness, his awkward ways, his

drolleries and absurdities, which made him alternately the butt and the wit

of the famous Literary Club. Boswell disliked Goldsmith, and so draws an

unflattering Portrait, but even this does not disguise the contagious good

humor which made men love him. When in his forty-seventh year, he fell sick

of a fever, and with childish confidence turned to a quack medicine to cure

himself. He died in 1774, and Johnson placed a tablet, with a sonorous

Latin epitaph, in Westminster Abbey, though Goldsmith was buried elsewhere.

"Let not his frailties be remembered; he was a very great man," said

Johnson; and the literary world--which, like that old dictator, is kind

enough at heart, though often rough in its methods--is glad to accept and

record the verdict.

WORKS OF GOLDSMITH. Of Goldsmith's early essays and his later school

histories little need be said. They have settled into their own place, far

out of sight of the ordinary reader. Perhaps the most interesting of these

is a series of letters for the _Public Ledger_ (afterwards published as

_The Citizen of the World_), written from the view point of an alleged

Chinese traveler, and giving the latter's comments on English

civilization.[204] The following five works are those upon which

Goldsmith's fame chiefly rests:

_The Traveller_ (1764) made Goldsmith's reputation among his

contemporaries, but is now seldom read, except by students who would

understand how Goldsmith was, at one time, dominated by Johnson and his

pseudo-classic ideals. It is a long poem, in rimed couplets, giving a

survey and criticism of the social life of various countries in Europe, and

reflects many of Goldsmith's own wanderings and impressions.

_The Deserted Village_ (1770), though written in the same mechanical style,

is so permeated with honest human sympathy, and voices so perfectly the

revolt of the individual man against institutions, that a multitude of

common people heard it gladly, without consulting the critics as to whether

they should call it good poetry. Notwithstanding its faults, to which

Matthew Arnold has called sufficient attention, it has become one of our

best known poems, though we cannot help wishing that the monotony of its

couplets had been broken by some of the Irish folk songs and ballads that

charmed street audiences in Dublin, and that brought Goldsmith a welcome

from the French peasants wherever he stopped to sing. In the village parson

and the schoolmaster, Goldsmith has increased Chaucer's list by two lovable

characters that will endure as long as the English language. The criticism

that the picture of prosperous "Sweet Auburn" never applied to any village

in Ireland is just, no doubt, but it is outside the question. Goldsmith was

a hopeless dreamer, bound to see everything, as he saw his debts and his

gay clothes, in a purely idealistic way.

_The Good-Natured Man_ and _She Stoops to Conquer_ are Goldsmith's two

comedies. The former, a comedy of character, though it has some laughable

scenes and one laughable character, Croaker, met with failure on the stage,

and has never been revived with any success. The latter, a comedy of

intrigue, is one of the few plays that has never lost its popularity. Its

lively, bustling scenes, and its pleasantly absurd characters, Marlowe, the

Hardcastles, and Tony Lumpkin, still hold the attention of modern theater

goers; and nearly every amateur dramatic club sooner or later places _She

Stoops to Conquer_ on its list of attractions.

_The Vicar of Wakefield_ is Goldsmith's only novel, and the first in any

language that gives to home life an enduring romantic interest. However

much we admire the beginnings of the English novel, to which we shall

presently refer, we are nevertheless shocked by its frequent brutalities

and indecencies. Goldsmith like Steele, had the Irish reverence for pure

womanhood, and this reverence made him shun as a pest the vulgarity and

coarseness in which contemporary novelists, like Smollett and Sterne,

seemed to delight. So he did for the novel what Addison and Steele had done

for the satire and the essay; he refined and elevated it, making it worthy

of the old Anglo-Saxon ideals which are our best literary heritage.

Briefly, _The Vicar of Wakefield_ is the story of a simple English

clergyman, Dr. Primrose, and his family, who pass from happiness through

great tribulation. Misfortunes, which are said never to come singly, appear

in this case in flocks; but through poverty, sorrow, imprisonment, and the

unspeakable loss of his daughters, the Vicar's faith in God and man emerges

triumphant. To the very end he is like one of the old martyrs, who sings

_Alleluia_ while the lions roar about him and his children in the arena.

Goldsmith's optimism, it must be confessed, is here stretched to the

breaking point. The reader is sometimes offered fine Johnsonian phrases

where he would naturally expect homely and vigorous language; and he is

continually haunted by the suspicion that, even in this best of all

possible worlds, the Vicar's clouds of affliction were somewhat too easily

converted into showers of blessing; yet he is forced to read on, and at the

end he confesses gladly that Goldsmith has succeeded in making a most

interesting story out of material that, in other hands, would have

developed either a burlesque or a brutal tragedy. Laying aside all romantic

passion, intrigue, and adventure, upon which other novelists depended,

Goldsmith, in this simple story of common life, has accomplished three

noteworthy results: he has made human fatherhood almost a divine thing; he

has glorified the moral sentiments which cluster about the family life as

the center of civilization; and he has given us, in Dr. Primrose, a

striking and enduring figure, which seems more like a personal acquaintance

than a character in a book.

WILLIAM COWPER (1731--1800)

In Cowper we have another interesting poet, who, like Gray and Goldsmith,

shows the struggle between romantic and classic ideals. In his first volume

of poems, Cowper is more hampered by literary fashions than was Goldsmith

in his _Traveller_ and his _Deserted Village_. In his second period,

however, Cowper uses blank verse freely; and his delight in nature and in

homely characters, like the teamster and the mail carrier of _The Task_,

shows that his classicism is being rapidly thawed out by romantic feeling.

In his later work, especially his immortal "John Gilpin," Cowper flings

fashions aside, gives Pegasus the reins, takes to the open road, and so

proves himself a worthy predecessor of Burns, who is the most spontaneous

and the most interesting of all the early romanticists.

LIFE. Cowper's life is a pathetic story of a shy and timid genius, who

found the world of men too rough, and who withdrew to nature like a wounded

animal. He was born at Great Berkhamstead, Hertfordshire, in 1731, the son

of an English clergyman. He was a delicate, sensitive child, whose early

life was saddened by the death of his mother and by his neglect at home. At

six years he was sent away to a boys' school, where he was terrified by

young barbarians who made his life miserable. There was one atrocious bully

into whose face Cowper could never look; he recognized his enemy by his

shoe buckles, and shivered at his approach. The fierce invectives of his

"Tirocinium, or a Review of Schools" (1784), shows how these school

experiences had affected his mind and health. For twelve years he studied

law, but at the approach of a public examination for an office he was so

terrified that he attempted suicide. The experience unsettled his reason,

and the next twelve months were spent in an asylum at St. Alban's. The

death of his father, in 1756, had brought the poet a small patrimony, which

placed him above the necessity of struggling, like Goldsmith, for his daily

bread. Upon his recovery he boarded for years at the house of the Unwins,

cultured people who recognized the genius hidden in this shy and melancholy

yet quaintly humorous man. Mrs. Unwin, in particular, cared for him as a

son; and whatever happiness he experienced in his poor life was the result

of the devotion of this good woman, who is the "Mary" of all his poems.

A second attack of insanity was brought on by Cowper's morbid interest in

religion, influenced, perhaps, by the untempered zeal of one John Newton, a

curate, with whom Cowper worked in the small parish of Olney, and with whom

he compiled the famous Olney Hymns. The rest of his life, between intervals

of melancholia or insanity, was spent in gardening, in the care of his

numerous pets, and in writing his poems, his translation of Homer, and his

charming letters. His two best known poems were suggested by a lively and

cultivated widow, Lady Austen, who told him the story of John Gilpin and

called for a ballad on the subject. She also urged him to write a long poem

in blank verse; and when he demanded a subject, she whimsically suggested

the sofa, which was a new article of furniture at that time. Cowper

immediately wrote "The Sofa," and, influenced by the poetic possibilities

that lie in unexpected places, he added to this poem from time to time, and

called his completed work _The Task_. This was published in 1785, and the

author was instantly recognized as one of the chief poets of his age. The

last years of his life were a long battle with insanity, until death

mercifully ended the struggle in 1800. His last poem, "The Castaway," is a

cry of despair, in which, under guise of a man washed overboard in a storm,

he describes himself perishing in the sight of friends who are powerless to

help.

COWPER'S WORKS. Cowper's first volume of poems, containing "The Progress of

Error," "Truth," "Table Talk," etc., is interesting chiefly as showing how

the poet was bound by the classical rules of his age. These poems are

dreary, on the whole, but a certain gentleness, and especially a vein of

pure humor, occasionally rewards the reader. For Cowper was a humorist, and

only the constant shadow of insanity kept him from becoming famous in that

line alone.

_The Task_, written in blank verse, and published in 1785, is Cowper's

longest poem. Used as we are to the natural poetry of Wordsworth and

Tennyson, it is hard for us to appreciate the striking originality of this

work. Much of it is conventional and "wooden," to be sure, like much of

Wordsworth's poetry; but when, after reading the rimed essays and the

artificial couplets of Johnson's age, we turn suddenly to Cowper's

description of homely scenes, of woods and brooks, of plowmen and teamsters

and the letter carrier on his rounds, we realize that we are at the dawn of

a better day in poetry:

He comes, the herald of a noisy world,

With spatter'd boots, strapp'd waist, and frozen locks:

News from all nations lumbering at his back.

True to his charge, the close-packed load behind,

Yet careless what he brings, his one concern

Is to conduct it to the destined inn,

And, having dropped the expected bag, pass on.

He whistles as he goes, light-hearted wretch,

Cold and yet cheerful: messenger of grief

Perhaps to thousands, and of joy to some;

To him indifferent whether grief or joy.

Houses in ashes, and the fall of stocks,

Births, deaths, and marriages, epistles wet

With tears that trickled down the writer's cheeks

Fast as the periods from his fluent quill,

Or charged with amorous sighs of absent swains,

Or nymphs responsive, equally affect

His horse and him, unconscious of them all.

Cowper's most laborious work, the translation of Homer in blank verse, was

published in 1791. Its stately, Milton-like movement, and its better

rendering of the Greek, make this translation far superior to Pope's

artificial couplets. It is also better, in many respects, than Chapman's

more famous and more fanciful rendering; but for some reason it was not

successful, and has never received the recognition which it deserves.

Entirely different in spirit are the poet's numerous hymns, which were

published in the Olney Collection in 1779 and which are still used in our

churches. It is only necessary to mention a few first lines--"God moves in

a mysterious way," "Oh, for a closer walk with God," "Sometimes a light

surprises"--to show how his gentle and devout spirit has left its impress

upon thousands who now hardly know his name. With Cowper's charming

_Letters_, published in 1803, we reach the end of his important works, and

the student who enjoys reading letters will find that these rank among the

best of their kind. It is not, however, for his ambitious works that Cowper

is remembered, but rather for his minor poems, which have found their own

way into so many homes. Among these, the one that brings quickest response

from hearts that understand is his little poem, "On the Receipt of My

Mother's Picture." beginning with the striking line, "Oh, that those lips

had language." Another, called "Alexander Selkirk," beginning, "I am

monarch of all I survey," suggests how Selkirk's experiences as a castaway

(which gave Defoe his inspiration for _Robinson Crusoe_) affected the

poet's timid nature and imagination. Last and most famous of all is his

immortal "John Gilpin." Cowper was in a terrible fit of melancholy when

Lady Austen told him the story, which proved to be better than medicine,

for all night long chuckles and suppressed laughter were heard in the

poet's bedroom. Next morning at breakfast he recited the ballad that had

afforded its author so much delight in the making. The student should read

it, even if he reads nothing else by Cowper; and he will be lacking in

humor or appreciation if he is not ready to echo heartily the last stanza:

Now let us sing, Long live the King,

And Gilpin, long live he!

And when he next doth ride abroad

May I be there to see.

ROBERT BURNS (1759-1796)

After a century and more of Classicism, we noted with interest the work of

three men, Gray, Goldsmith, and Cowper, whose poetry, like the chorus of

awakening birds, suggests the dawn of another day. Two other poets of the

same age suggest the sunrise. The first is the plowman Burns, who speaks

straight from the heart to the primitive emotions of the race; the second

is the mystic Blake, who only half understands his own thoughts, and whose

words stir a sensitive nature as music does, or the moon in midheaven,

rousing in the soul those vague desires and aspirations which ordinarily

sleep, and which can never be expressed because they have no names. Blake

lived his shy, mystic, spiritual life in the crowded city, and his message

is to the few who can understand. Burns lived his sad, toilsome, erring

life in the open air, with the sun and the rain, and his songs touch all

the world. The latter's poetry, so far as it has a philosophy, rests upon

two principles which the classic school never understood,--that common

people are at heart romantic and lovers of the ideal, and that simple human

emotions furnish the elements of true poetry. Largely because he follows

these two principles, Burns is probably the greatest song writer of the

world. His poetic creed may be summed up in one of his own stanzas:

Give me ae spark o' Nature's fire,

That's a' the learning I desire;

Then, though I trudge thro' dub an' mire

At pleugh or cart,

My Muse, though hamely in attire,

May touch the heart.

LIFE.[205] Burns's life is "a life of fragments," as Carlyle called it; and

the different fragments are as unlike as the noble "Cotter's Saturday

Night" and the rant and riot of "The Jolly Beggars." The details of this

sad and disjointed life were better, perhaps, forgotten. We call attention

only to the facts which help us to understand the man and his poetry.

Burns was born in a clay cottage at Alloway, Scotland, in the bleak winter

of 1759. His father was an excellent type of the Scotch peasant of those

days,--a poor, honest, God-fearing man, who toiled from dawn till dark to

wrest a living for his family from the stubborn soil. His tall figure was

bent with unceasing labor; his hair was thin and gray, and in his eyes was

the careworn, hunted look of a peasant driven by poverty and unpaid rents

from one poor farm to another. The family often fasted of necessity, and

lived in solitude to avoid the temptation of spending their hard-earned

money. The children went barefoot and bareheaded in all weathers, and

shared the parents' toil and their anxiety over the rents. At thirteen

Bobby, the eldest, was doing a peasant's full day's labor; at sixteen he

was chief laborer on his father's farm; and he describes the life as "the

cheerless gloom of a hermit, and the unceasing moil of a galley slave." In

1784 the father, after a lifetime of toil, was saved from a debtor's prison

by consumption and death. To rescue something from the wreck of the home,

and to win a poor chance of bread for the family, the two older boys set up

a claim for arrears of wages that had never been paid. With the small sum

allowed them, they buried their father, took another farm, Mossgiel, in

Mauchline, and began again the long struggle with poverty.

Such, in outline, is Burns's own story of his early life, taken mostly from

his letters. There is another and more pleasing side to the picture, of

which we have glimpses in his poems and in his Common-place Book. Here we

see the boy at school; for like most Scotch peasants, the father gave his

boys the best education he possibly could. We see him following the plow,

not like a slave, but like a free man, crooning over an old Scotch song and

making a better one to match the melody. We see him stop the plow to listen

to what the wind is saying, or turn aside lest he disturb the birds at

their singing and nest making. At supper we see the family about the table,

happy notwithstanding their scant fare, each child with a spoon in one hand

and a book in the other. We hear Betty Davidson reciting, from her great

store, some heroic ballad that fired the young hearts to enthusiasm and

made them forget the day's toil. And in "The Cotter's Saturday Night" we

have a glimpse of Scotch peasant life that makes us almost reverence these

heroic men and women, who kept their faith and their self-respect in the

face of poverty, and whose hearts, under their rough exteriors, were tender

and true as steel.

A most unfortunate change in Burns's life began when he left the farm, at

seventeen, and went to Kirkoswald to study surveying. The town was the

haunt of smugglers, rough-living, hard-drinking men; and Burns speedily

found his way into those scenes of "riot and roaring dissipation" which

were his bane ever afterwards. For a little while he studied diligently,

but one day, while taking the altitude of the sun, he saw a pretty girl in

the neighboring garden, and love put trigonometry to flight. Soon he gave

up his work and wandered back to the farm and poverty again.

When twenty-seven years of age Burns first attracted literary attention,

and in the same moment sprang to the first place in Scottish letters. In

despair over his poverty and personal habits, he resolved to emigrate to

Jamaica, and gathered together a few of his early poems, hoping to sell

them for enough to pay the expenses of his journey. The result was the

famous Kilmarnock edition of Burns, published in 1786, for which he was

offered twenty pounds. It is said that he even bought his ticket, and on

the night before the ship sailed wrote his "Farewell to Scotland,"

beginning, "The gloomy night is gathering fast," which he intended to be

his last song on Scottish soil.

In the morning he changed his mind, led partly by some dim foreshadowing of

the result of his literary adventure; for the little book took all Scotland

by storm. Not only scholars and literary men, but "even plowboys and maid

servants," says a contemporary, eagerly spent their hard-earned shillings

for the new book. Instead of going to Jamaica, the young poet hurried to

Edinburgh to arrange for another edition of his work. His journey was a

constant ovation, and in the capital he was welcomed and feasted by the

best of Scottish society. This inexpected triumph lasted only one winter.

Burns's fondness for taverns and riotous living shocked his cultured

entertainers, and when he returned to Edinburgh next winter, after a

pleasure jaunt through the Highlands, he received scant attention. He left

the city in anger and disappointment, and went back to the soil where he

was more at home.

The last few years of Burns's life are a sad tragedy, and we pass over them

hurriedly. He bought the farm Ellisland, Dumfriesshire, and married the

faithful Jean Armour, in 1788, That he could write of her,

I see her in the dewy flowers,

I see her sweet and fair;

I hear her in the tunefu' birds,

I hear her charm the air:

There's not a bonie flower that springs

By fountain, shaw, or green;

There's not a bonie bird that sings,

But minds me o' my Jean,

is enough for us to remember. The next year he was appointed exciseman,

i.e. collector of liquor revenues, and the small salary, with the return

from his poems, would have been sufficient to keep his family in modest

comfort, had he but kept away from taverns. For a few years his life of

alternate toil and dissipation was occasionally illumined by his splendid

lyric genius, and he produced many songs--"Bonnie Doon," "My Love's like a

Red, Red Rose," "Auld Lang Syne," "Highland Mary," and the soul-stirring

"Scots wha hae," composed while galloping over the moor in a storm--which

have made the name of Burns known wherever the English language is spoken,

and honored wherever Scotchmen gather together. He died miserably in 1796,

when only thirty-seven years old. His last letter was an appeal to a friend

for money to stave off the bailiff, and one of his last poems a tribute to

Jessie Lewars, a kind lassie who helped to care for him in his illness.

This last exquisite lyric, "O wert thou in the cauld blast," set to

Mendelssohn's music, is one of our best known songs, though its history is

seldom suspected by those who sing it.

THE POETRY OF BURNS. The publication of the Kilmarnock Burns, with the

title _Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect_ (1786), marks an epoch in the

history of English Literature, like the publication of Spenser's

_Shepherd's Calendar_. After a century of cold and formal poetry, relieved

only by the romanticism of Gray and Cowper, these fresh inspired songs went

straight to the heart, like the music of returning birds in springtime. It

was a little volume, but a great book; and we think of Marlowe's line,

"Infinite riches in a little room," in connection with it. Such poems as

"The Cotter's Saturday Night," "To a Mouse," "To Mountain Daisy," "Man was

Made To Mourn," "The Twa Dogs," "Address to the Deil," and "Halloween,"

suggest that the whole spirit of the romantic revival is embodied in this

obscure plowman. Love, humor, pathos, the response to nature,--all the

poetic qualities that touch the human heart are here; and the heart was

touched as it had not been since the days of Elizabeth. If the reader will

note again the six characteristics of the romantic movement, and then read

six poems of Burns, he will see at once how perfectly this one man

expresses the new idea. Or take a single suggestion,--

Ae fond kiss, and then we sever!

Ae farewell, and then forever!

Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,

Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee.

Who shall say that Fortune grieves him

While the star of hope she leaves him?

Me, nae cheerfu' twinkle lights me;

Dark despair around benights me.

I'll ne'er blame my partial fancy,

Naething could resist my Nancy;

But to see her was to love her;

Love but her, and love forever.

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 "essence of a thousand love tales" is in that one little song. Because

he embodies the new spirit of romanticism, critics give him a high place in

the history of our literature; and because his songs go straight to the

heart, he is the poet of common men.

Of Burns's many songs for music little need be said. They have found their

way into the hearts of a whole people, and there they speak for themselves.

They range from the exquisite "O wert thou in the cauld blast," to the

tremendous appeal to Scottish patriotism in "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace

bled," which, Carlyle said, should be sung with the throat of the

whirlwind. Many of these songs were composed in his best days, when

following the plow or resting after his work, while the music of some old

Scotch song was ringing in his head. It is largely because he thought of

music while he composed that so many of his poems have the singing quality,

suggesting a melody as we read them.

Among his poems of nature, "To a Mouse" and "To a Mountain Daisy" are

unquestionably the best, suggesting the poetical possibilities that daily

pass unnoticed under our feet. These two poems are as near as Burns ever

comes to appreciating nature for its own sake. The majority of his poems,

like "Winter" and "Ye banks and braes o' bonie Doon," regard nature in the

same way that Gray regarded it, as a background for the play of human

emotions.

Of his poems of emotion there is an immense number. It is a curious fact

that the world is always laughing and crying at the same moment; and we can

hardly read a page of Burns without finding this natural juxtaposition of

smiles and tears. It is noteworthy also that all strong emotions, when

expressed naturally, lend themselves to poetry; and Burns, more than any

other writer, has an astonishing faculty of describing his own emotions

with vividness and simplicity, so that they appeal instantly to our own.

One cannot read, "I love my Jean," for instance, without being in love with

some idealized woman; or "To Mary in Heaven," without sharing the personal

grief of one who has loved and lost.

Besides the songs of nature and of human emotion, Burns has given us a

large number of poems for which no general title can be given. Noteworthy

among these are "A man's a man for a' that," which voices the new romantic

estimate of humanity; "The Vision," from which we get a strong impression

of Burns's early ideals; the "Epistle to a Young Friend," from which,

rather than from his satires, we learn Burns's personal views of religion

and honor; the "Address to the Unco Guid," which is the poet's plea for

mercy in judgment; and "A Bard's Epitaph," which, as a summary of his own

life, might well be written at the end of his poems. "Halloween," a picture

of rustic merrymaking, and "The Twa Dogs" a contrast between the rich and

poor, are generally classed among the poet's best works; but one unfamiliar

with the Scotch dialect will find them rather difficult.

Of Burns's longer poems the two best worth reading are "The Cotter's

Saturday Night" and "Tam o' Shanter,"--the one giving the most perfect

picture we possess of a noble poverty; the other being the most lively and

the least objectionable of his humorous works. It would be difficult to

find elsewhere such a combination of the grewsome and the ridiculous as is

packed up in "Tam o' Shanter." With the exception of these two, the longer

poems add little to the author's fame or to our own enjoyment. It is better

for the beginner to read Burns's exquisite songs and gladly to recognize

his place in the hearts of a people, and forget the rest, since they only

sadden us and obscure the poet's better nature.

WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827)

Piping down the valleys wild,

Piping songs of pleasant glee,

On a cloud I saw a child,

And he laughing said to me:

"Pipe a song about a lamb;"

So I piped with merry cheer.

"Piper, pipe that song again;"

So I piped:, he wept to hear.

"Piper, sit thee down and write

In a book, that all may read;"

So he vanished from my sight,

And I plucked a hollow reed,

And I made a rural pen,

And I stained the water clear,

And I wrote my happy songs

Every child may joy to hear.[206]

Of all the romantic poets of the eighteenth century, Blake is the most

independent and the most original. In his earliest work, written when he

was scarcely more than a child, he seems to go back to the Elizabethan song

writers for his models; but for the greater part of his life he was the

poet of inspiration alone, following no man's lead, and obeying no voice

but that which he heard in his own mystic soul. Though the most

extraordinary literary genius of his age, he had practically no influence

upon it. Indeed, we hardly yet understand this poet of pure fancy, this

mystic this transcendental madman, who remained to the end of his busy life

an incomprehensible child.

LIFE. Blake, the son of a London tradesman, was a strange, imaginative

child, whose soul was more at home with brooks and flowers and fairies than

with the crowd of the city streets. Beyond learning to read and write, he

received education; but he began, at ten years, to copy prints and to write

verses. He also began a long course of art study, which resulted in his

publishing his own books, adorned with marginal engravings colored by

hand,--an unusual setting, worthy of the strong artistic sense that shows

itself in many of his early verses. As a child he had visions of God and

the angels looking in at his window; and as a man he thought he received

visits from the souls of the great dead, Moses, Virgil, Homer, Dante,

Milton,--"majestic shadows, gray but luminous," he calls them. He seems

never to have asked himself the question how far these visions were pure

illusions, but believed and trusted them implicitly. To him all nature was

a vast spiritual symbolism, wherein he saw elves, fairies, devils,

angels,--all looking at him in friendship or enmity through the eyes of

flowers and stars:

With the blue sky spread over with wings,

And the mild sun that mounts and sings;

With trees and fields full of fairy elves,

And little devils who fight for themselves;

With angels planted in hawthorne bowers,

And God himself in the passing hours.

And this curious, pantheistic conception of nature was not a matter of

creed, but the very essence of Blake's life. Strangely enough, he made no

attempt to found a new religious cult, but followed his own way, singing

cheerfully, working patiently, in the face of discouragement and failure.

That writers of far less genius were exalted to favor, while he remained

poor and obscure, does not seem to have troubled him in the least. For over

forty years he labored diligently at book engraving, guided in his art by

Michael Angelo. but inventing his own curious designs, at which we still

wonder. The illustrations for Young's "Night Thoughts," for Blair's

"Grave," and the "Inventions to the Book of Job," show the peculiarity of

Blake's mind quite as clearly as his poems. While he worked at his trade he

flung off--for he never seemed to compose--disjointed visions and

incomprehensible rhapsodies, with an occasional little gem that still sets

our hearts to singing:

Ah, sunflower, weary of time,

Who countest the steps of the sun;

Seeking after that sweet golden clime

Where the traveller's journey is done;

Where the youth pined away with desire,

And the pale virgin shrouded in snow,

Rise from their graves, and aspire

Where my sunflower wishes to go!

That is a curious flower to find growing in the London street; but it

suggests Blake's own life, which was outwardly busy and quiet, but inwardly

full of adventure and excitement. His last huge prophetic works, like

_Jerusalem_ and _Milton_ (1804), were dictated to him, he declares, by

supernatural means, and even against his own will. They are only half

intelligible, but here and there one sees flashes of the same poetic beauty

that marks his little poems. Critics generally dismiss Blake with the word

"madman"; but that is only an evasion. At best, he is the writer of

exquisite lyrics; at worst, he is mad only "north-northwest," like Hamlet;

and the puzzle is to find the method in his madness. The most amazing thing

about him is the perfectly sane and cheerful way in which he moved through

poverty and obscurity, flinging out exquisite poems or senseless

rhapsodies, as a child might play with gems or straws or sunbeams

indifferently. He was a gentle, kindly, most unworldly little man, with

extraordinary eyes, which seem even in the lifeless portraits to reflect

some unusual hypnotic power. He died obscurely, smiling at a vision of

Paradise, in 1827. That was nearly a century ago, yet he still remains one

of the most incomprehensible figures in our literature.

WORKS OF BLAKE. The _Poetical Sketches_, published in 1783, is a collection

of Blake's earliest poetry, much of it written in boyhood. It contains much

crude and incoherent work, but also a few lyrics of striking originality.

Two later and better known volumes are _Songs of Innocence_ and _Songs of

Experience_, reflecting two widely different views of the human soul. As in

all his works, there is an abundance of apparently worthless stuff in these

songs; but, in the language of miners, it is all "pay dirt"; it shows

gleams of golden grains that await our sifting, and now and then we find a

nugget unexpectedly:

My lord was like a flower upon the brows

Of lusty May; ah life as frail as flower!

My lord was like a star in highest heaven

Drawn down to earth by spells and wickedness;

My lord was like the opening eye of day;

But he is darkened; like the summer moon

Clouded; fall'n like the stately tree, cut down;

The breath of heaven dwelt among his leaves.

On account of the chaotic character of most of Blake's work, it is well to

begin our reading with a short book of selections, containing the best

songs of these three little volumes. Swinburne calls Blake the only poet of

"supreme and simple poetic genius" of the eighteenth century, the one man

of that age fit, on all accounts, to rank with the old great masters.[207]

The praise is doubtless extravagant, and the criticism somewhat

intemperate; but when we have read "The Evening Star," "Memory," "Night,"

"Love," "To the Muses," "Spring," "Summer," "The Tiger," "The Lamb," "The

Clod and the Pebble," we may possibly share Swinburne's enthusiasm.

Certainly, in these three volumes we have some of the most perfect and the

most original songs in our language.

Of Blake's longer poems, his titanic prophecies and apocalyptic splendors,

it is impossible to write justly in such a brief work as this. Outwardly

they suggest a huge chaff pile, and the scattered grains of wheat hardly

warrant the labor of winnowing. The curious reader will get an idea of

Blake's amazing mysticism by dipping into any of the works of his middle

life,--_Urizen, Gates of Paradise, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, America,

The French Revolution_, or _The Vision of the Daughters of Albion_. His

latest works, like _Jerusalem_ and _Milton_, are too obscure to have any

literary value. To read any of these works casually is to call the author a

madman; to study them, remembering Blake's songs and his genius, is to

quote softly his own answer to the child who asked about the land of

dreams:

"O what land is the land of dreams,

What are its mountains and what are its streams?

--O father, I saw my mother there,

Among the lilies by waters fair."

"Dear child, I also by pleasant streams

Have wandered all night in the land of dreams;

But though calm and warm the waters wide,

I could not get to the other side."

MINOR POETS OF THE REVIVAL

We have chosen the five preceding poets, Gray, Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns,

and Blake, as the most typical and the most interesting of the writers who

proclaimed the dawn of Romanticism in the eighteenth century. With them we

associate a group of minor writers, whose works were immensely popular in

their own day. The ordinary reader will pass them by, but to the student

they are all significant as expressions of very different phases of the

romantic revival.

JAMES THOMSON (1700-1748). Thomson belongs among the pioneers of

Romanticism. Like Gray and Goldsmith, he wavered between Pseudo-classic and

the new romantic ideals, and for this reason, if for no other, his early

work is interesting, like the uncertainty of a child who hesitates whether

to creep safely on all fours or risk a fall by walking. He is "worthy to be

remembered" for three poems,--"Rule Britannia," which is still one of the

national songs of England _The Castle of Indolence_, and _The Seasons_. The

dreamy and romantic _Castle_ (1748), occupied by enchanter Indolence and

his willing captives in the land of Drowsyhed, is purely Spenserian in its

imagery, and is written in the Spenserian stanza. _The Seasons_ (1726-

1730), written in blank verse, describes the sights and sounds of the

changing year and the poet's own feelings in the presence of nature. These

two poems, though rather dull to a modern reader, were significant of the

early romantic revival in three ways: they abandoned the prevailing heroic

couplet; they went back to the Elizabethans, instead of to Pope, for their

models; and they called attention to the long-neglected life of nature as a

subject for poetry.

WILLIAM COLLINS (1721-1759). Collins, the friend and disciple of Thomson,

was of a delicate, nervous temperament, like Cowper; and over him also

brooded the awful shadow of insanity. His first work, _Oriental Eclogues_

(1742), is romantic in feeling, but is written in the prevailing mechanical

couplets. All his later work is romantic in both thought and expression.

His "Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands" (1750) is an

interesting event in the romantic revival, for it introduced a new world,

of witches, pygmies, fairies, and mediæval kings, for the imagination to

play in. Collins's best known poems are the odes "To Simplicity," "To

Fear," "To the Passions," the little unnamed lyric beginning "How sleep the

brave," and the exquisite "Ode to Evening." In reading the latter, one is

scarcely aware that the lines are so delicately balanced that they have no

need of rime to accentuate their melody.

GEORGE CRABBE (1754-1832). Crabbe is an interesting combination of realism

and romanticism, his work of depicting common life being, at times, vaguely

suggestive of Fielding's novels. _The Village_ (1783), a poem without a

rival as a picture of the workingmen of his age, is sometimes like Fielding

in its coarse vigor, and again like Dryden in its precise versification.

The poem was not successful at first, and Crabbe abandoned his literary

dreams. For over twenty years he settled down as a clergyman in a country

parish, observing keenly the common life about him. Then he published more

poems, exactly like _The Village_, which immediately brought him fame and

money. They brought him also the friendship of Walter Scott, who, like

others, regarded Crabbe as one of the first poets of the age. These later

poems, _The Parish Register_ (1807), _The Borough_ (1810), _Tales in Verse_

(1812), and _Tales of the Hall_ (1819), are in the same strain. They are

written in couplets; they are reflections of nature and of country life;

they contain much that is sordid and dull, but are nevertheless real

pictures of real men and women, just as Crabbe saw them, and as such they

are still interesting. Goldsmith and Burns had idealized the poor, and we

admire them for their sympathy and insight. It remained for Crabbe to show

that in wretched fishing villages, in the lives of hardworking men and

women, children, laborers, smugglers, paupers,--all sorts and conditions

of common men,--there is abundant romantic without exaggerating or

idealizing their vices and virtues.

JAMES MACPHERSON (1736-1796). In Macpherson we have an unusual figure, who

catered to the new romantic interest in the old epic heroes, and won

immense though momentary fame, by a series of literary forgeries.

Macpherson was a Scotch schoolmaster, an educated man, but evidently not

over-tender of conscience, whose imagination had been stirred by certain

old poems which he may have heard in Gaelic among the Highlanders. In 1760

he published his _Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands_,

and alleged that his work was but a translation of Gaelic manuscripts.

Whether the work of itself would have attracted attention is doubtful; but

the fact that an abundance of literary material might be awaiting discovery

led to an interest such as now attends the opening of an Egyptian tomb, and

a subscription was promptly raised in Edinburgh to send Macpherson through

the Highlands to collect more "manuscripts." The result was the epic

_Fingal_ (1762), "that lank and lamentable counterfeit of poetry," as

Swinburne calls it, which the author professed to have translated from the

Gaelic of the poet Ossian. Its success was astonishing, and Macpherson

followed it up with _Temora_ (1763), another epic in the same strain. In

both these works Macpherson succeeds in giving an air of primal grandeur to

his heroes; the characters are big and shadowy; the imagery is at times

magnificent; the language is a kind of chanting, bombastic prose:

Now Fingal arose in his might and thrice he reared his voice. Cromla

answered around, and the sons of the desert stood still. They bent their

red faces to earth, ashamed at the presence of Fingal. He came like a cloud

of rain in the days of the sun, when slow it rolls on the hill, and fields

expect the shower. Swaran beheld the terrible king of Morven, and stopped

in the midst of his course. Dark he leaned on his spear rolling his red

eyes around. Silent and tall he seemed as an oak on the banks of Lubar,

which had its branches blasted of old by the lightning of heaven. His

thousands pour around the hero, and the darkness of battle gathers on the

hill.[208]

The publication of this gloomy, imaginative work produced a literary storm.

A few critics, led by Dr. Johnson, demanded to see the original

manuscripts, and when Macpherson refused to produce them,[209] the Ossianic

poems were branded as a forgery; nevertheless they had enormous success.

Macpherson was honored as a literary explorer; he was given an official

position, carrying a salary for life; and at his death, in 1796, he was

buried in Westminster Abbey. Blake, Burns, and indeed most of the poets of

the age were influenced by this sham poetry. Even the scholarly Gray was

deceived and delighted with "Ossian"; and men as far apart as Goethe and

Napoleon praised it immoderately.

THOMAS CHATTERTON (1752-1770). This "marvelous boy," to whom Keats

dedicated his "Endymion," and who is celebrated in Shelley's "Adonais," is

one of the saddest and most interesting figures of the romantic revival.

During his childhood he haunted the old church of St. Mary Redcliffe, in

Bristol, where he was fascinated by the mediæval air of the place, and

especially by one old chest, known as Canynge's coffer, containing musty

documents which had been preserved for three hundred years. With strange,

uncanny intentness the child pored over these relics of the past, copying

them instead of his writing book, until he could imitate not only the

spelling and language but even the handwriting of the original. Soon after

the "Ossian" forgeries appeared, Chatterton began to produce documents,

apparently very old, containing mediæval poems, legends, and family

histories, centering around two characters,--Thomas Rowley, priest and

poet, and William Canynge, merchant of Bristol in the days of Henry VI. It

seems incredible that the whole design of these mediæval romances should

have been worked out by a child of eleven, and that he could reproduce the

style and the writing of Caxton's day so well that the printers were

deceived; but such is the fact. More and more _Rowley Papers_, as they were

called, were produced by Chatterton,--apparently from the archives of the

old church; in reality from his own imagination,--delighting a large circle

of readers, and deceiving all but Gray and a few scholars who recognized

the occasional misuse of fifteenth-century English words. All this work was

carefully finished, and bore the unmistakable stamp of literary genius.

Reading now his "Ælla," or the "Ballad of Charite," or the long poem in

ballad style called "Bristowe Tragedie," it is hard to realize that it is a

boy's work. At seventeen years of age Chatterton went for a literary career

to London, where he soon afterwards took poison and killed himself in a fit

of childish despondency, brought on by poverty and hunger.

THOMAS PERCY (1729-1811). To Percy, bishop of the Irish church, in Dromore,

we are indebted for the first attempt at a systematic collection of the

folk songs and ballads which are counted among the treasures of a nation's

literature.[210] In 1765 he published, in three volumes, his famous

_Reliques of Ancient English Poetry_. The most valuable part of this work

is the remarkable collection of old English and Scottish Ballads, such as

"Chevy Chase," the "Nut Brown Mayde," "Children of the Wood," "Battle of

Otterburn," and many more, which but for his labor might easily have

perished. We have now much better and more reliable editions of these same

ballads; for Percy garbled his materials, adding and subtracting freely,

and even inventing a few ballads of his own. Two motives probably

influenced him in this. First, the different versions of the same ballad

varied greatly; and Percy, in changing them to suit himself, took the same

liberty as had many other writers in dealing with the same material.

Second; Percy was under the influence of Johnson and his school, and

thought it necessary to add a few elegant ballads "to atone for the

rudeness of the more obsolete poems." That sounds queer now, used as we are

to exactness in dealing with historical and literary material; but it

expresses the general spirit of the age in which he lived.

Notwithstanding these drawbacks, Percy's _Reliques_ marks an epoch in the

history of Romanticism, and it is difficult to measure its influence on the

whole romantic movement. Scott says of it, "The first time I could scrape a

few shillings together, I bought myself a copy of these beloved volumes;

nor do I believe I ever read a book half so frequently, or with half the

enthusiasm." Scott's own poetry is strongly modeled upon these early

ballads, and his _Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_ is due chiefly to the

influence of Percy's work.

Besides the _Reliques_, Percy has given us another good work in his

_Northern Antiquities_ (1770) translated from the French of Mallet's

_History of Denmark_. This also was of immense influence, since it

introduced to English readers a new and fascinating mythology, more rugged

and primitive than that of the Greeks; and we are still, in music as in

letters, under the spell of Thor and Odin, of Frea and the Valkyr maidens,

and of that stupendous drama of passion and tragedy which ended in the

"Twilight of the Gods." The literary world owes a debt of gratitude to

Percy, who wrote nothing of importance himself, but who, by collecting and

translating the works of other men, did much to hasten the triumph of

Romanticism in the nineteenth century.

III. THE FIRST ENGLISH NOVELISTS

The chief literary phenomena of the complex eighteenth century are the

reign of so-called Classicism, the revival of romantic poetry, and the

discovery of the modern novel. Of these three, the last is probably the

most important. Aside from the fact that the novel is the most modern, and

at present the most widely read and influential type of literature, we have

a certain pride in regarding it as England's original contribution to the

world of letters. Other great types of literature, like the epic, the

romance, and the drama, were first produced by other nations; but the idea

of the modern novel seems to have been worked out largely on English

soil;[211] and in the number and the fine quality of her novelists, England

has hardly been rivaled by any other nation. Before we study the writers

who developed this new type of literature, it is well to consider briefly

its meaning and history.

MEANING OF THE NOVEL. Probably the most significant remark made by the

ordinary reader concerning a work of fiction takes the form of a question:

Is it a good story? For the reader of to-day is much like the child and the

primitive man in this respect, that he must be attracted and held by the

story element of a narrative before he learns to appreciate its style or

moral significance. The story element is therefore essential to the novel;

but where the story originates is impossible to say. As well might we seek

for the origin of the race; for wherever primitive men are found, there we

see them gathering eagerly about the story-teller. In the halls of our

Saxon ancestors the scop and the tale-bringer were ever the most welcome

guests; and in the bark wigwams of the American Indians the man who told

the legends of Hiawatha had an audience quite as attentive as that which

gathered at the Greek festivals to hear the story of Ulysses's wanderings.

To man's instinct or innate love for a story we are indebted for all our

literature; and the novel must in some degree satisfy this instinct, or

fail of appreciation.

The second question which we ask concerning a work of fiction is, How far

does the element of imagination enter into it? For upon the element of

imagination depends, largely, our classification of works of fiction into

novels, romances, and mere adventure stories. The divisions here are as

indefinite as the border land between childhood and youth, between instinct

and reason; but there are certain principles to guide us. We note, in the

development of any normal child, that there comes a time when for his

stories he desires knights, giants, elves, fairies, witches, magic, and

marvelous adventures which have no basis in experience. He tells

extraordinary tales about himself, which may be only the vague remembrances

of a dream or the creations of a dawning imagination,--both of which are as

real to him as any other part of life. When we say that such a child

"romances," we give exactly the right name to it; for this sudden interest

in extraordinary beings and events marks the development of the human

imagination,--running riot at first, because it is not guided by reason,

which is a later development,--and to satisfy this new interest the

romance[212] was invented. The romance is, originally, a work of fiction in

which the imagination is given full play without being limited by facts or

probabilities. It deals with extraordinary events, with heroes whose powers

are exaggerated, and often adds the element of superhuman or supernatural

characters. It is impossible to draw the line where romance ends; but this

element of excessive imagination and of impossible heroes and incidents is

its distinguishing mark in every literature.

Where the novel begins it is likewise impossible to say; but again we have

a suggestion in the experience of every reader. There comes a time,

naturally and inevitably, in the life of every youth when the romance no

longer enthralls him. He lives in a world of facts; gets acquainted with

men and women, some good, some bad, but all human; and he demands that

literature shall express life as he knows it by experience. This is the

stage of the awakened intellect, and in our stories the intellect as well

as the imagination must now be satisfied. At the beginning of this stage we

delight in _Robinson Crusoe;_ we read eagerly a multitude of adventure

narratives and a few so-called historical novels; but in each case we must

be lured by a story, must find heroes and "moving accidents by flood and

field" to appeal to our imagination; and though the hero and the adventure

may be exaggerated, they must both be natural and within the bounds of

probability. Gradually the element of adventure or surprising incident

grows less and less important, as we learn that true life is not

adventurous, but a plain, heroic matter of work and duty, and the daily

choice between good and evil. Life is the most real thing in the world

now,--not the life of kings, or heroes, or superhuman creatures, but the

individual life with its struggles and temptations and triumphs or

failures, like our own; and any work that faithfully represents life

becomes interesting. So we drop the adventure story and turn to the novel.

For the novel is a work of fiction in which the imagination and the

intellect combine to express life in the form of a story and the

imagination is always directed and controlled by the intellect. It is

interested chiefly, not in romance or adventure, but in men and women as

they are; it aims to show the motives and influences which govern human

life, and the effects of personal choice upon character and destiny. Such

is the true novel,[213] and as such it opens a wider and more interesting

field than any other type of literature.

PRECURSORS OF THE NOVEL. Before the novel could reach its modern stage, of

a more or less sincere attempt to express human life and character, it had

to pass through several centuries of almost imperceptible development.

Among the early precursors of the novel we must place a collection of tales

known as the Greek Romances, dating from the second to the sixth centuries.

These are imaginative and delightful stories of ideal love and marvelous

adventure,[214] which profoundly affected romance writing for the next

thousand years. A second group of predecessors is found in the Italian and

Spanish pastoral romances, which were inspired by the _Eclogues_ of Virgil.

These were extremely popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and

their influence is seen later in Sidney's _Arcadia_, which is the best of

this type in English.

The third and most influential group of predecessors of the novel is made

up of the romances of chivalry, such as are found in Malory's _Morte

d'Arthur_. It is noticeable, in reading these beautiful old romances in

different languages, that each nation changes them somewhat, so as to make

them more expressive of national traits and ideals. In a word, the old

romance tends inevitably towards realism, especially in England, where the

excessive imagination is curbed and the heroes become more human. In

Malory, in the unknown author of _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_, and

especially in Chaucer, we see the effect of the practical English mind in

giving these old romances a more natural setting, and in making the heroes

suggest, though faintly, the men and women of their own day. The

_Canterbury Tales_, with their story interest and their characters

delightfully true to nature, have in them the suggestion, at least, of a

connected story whose chief aim is to reflect life as it is.

In the Elizabethan Age the idea of the novel grows more definite. In

Sidney's _Arcadia_ (1580), a romance of chivalry, the pastoral setting at

least is generally true to nature; our credulity is not taxed, as in the

old romances, by the continual appearance of magic or miracles; and the

characters, though idealized till they become tiresome, occasionally give

the impression of being real men and women. In Bacon's _The New Atlantis_

(1627) we have the story of the discovery by mariners of an unknown

country, inhabited by a superior race of men, more civilized than

ourselves,--an idea which had been used by More in his _Utopia_ in 1516.

These two books are neither romances nor novels, in the strict sense, but

studies of social institutions. They use the connected story as a means of

teaching moral lessons, and of bringing about needed reforms; and this

valuable suggestion has been adopted by many of our modern writers in the

so-called problem novels and novels of purpose.

Nearer to the true novel is Lodge's romantic story of _Rosalynde_, which

was used by Shakespeare in _As You Like It_. This was modeled upon the

Italian novella, or short story, which became very popular in England

during the Elizabethan Age. In the same age we have introduced into England

the Spanish picaresque novel (from _picaro_, a knave or rascal), which at

first was a kind of burlesque on the mediæval romance, and which took for

its hero some low scoundrel or outcast, instead of a knight, and followed

him through a long career of scandals and villainies. One of the earliest

types of this picaresque novel in English is Nash's _The Unfortunate

Traveller, or the Life of Jack Wilton_ (1594), which is also a forerunner

of the historical novel, since its action takes place during that gorgeous

interview between Henry VIII and the king of France on the Field of the

Cloth of Gold. In all these short stories and picaresque novels the

emphasis was laid not so much on life and character as on the adventures of

the hero; and the interest consisted largely in wondering what would happen

next, and how the plot would end. The same method is employed in all trashy

novels and it is especially the bane of many modern story-writers. This

excessive interest in adventures or incidents for their own sake, and not

for their effect on character, is what distinguishes the modern adventure

story from the true novel.

In the Puritan Age we approach still nearer to the modern novel, especially

in the work of Bunyan; and as the Puritan always laid emphasis on

character, stories appeared having a definite moral purpose. Bunyan's _The

Pilgrim's Progress_ (1678) differs from the _Faery Queen_, and from all

other mediæval allegories, in this important respect,--that the characters,

far from being bloodless abstractions, are but thinly disguised men and

women. Indeed, many a modern man, reading the story of the Christian;--has

found in it the reflection of his own life and experience. In _The Life and

Death of Mr. Badman_ (1682) we have another and even more realistic study

of a man as he was in Bunyan's day. These two striking figures, Christian

and Mr. Badman, belong among the great characters of English fiction.

Bunyan's good work,--his keen insight, his delineation of character, and

his emphasis upon the moral effects of individual action,--was carried on

by Addison and Steele some thirty years later. The character of Sir Roger

de Coverley is a real reflection of English country life in the eighteenth

century; and with Steele's domestic sketches in _The Tatler, The

Spectator_, and _The Guardian_ (1709-1713), we definitely cross the border

land that lies outside of romance, and enter the region of character study

where the novel has its beginning.

THE DISCOVERY OF THE MODERN NOVEL. Notwithstanding this long history of

fiction, to which we have called attention, it is safe to say that, until

the publication of Richardson's _Pamela_ in 1740, no true novel had

appeared in any literature. By a true novel we mean simply a work of

fiction which relates the story of a plain human life, under stress of

emotion, which depends for its interest not on incident or adventure, but

on its truth to nature. A number of English novelists--Goldsmith,

Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne--all seem to have seized upon the

idea of reflecting life as it is, in the form of a story, and to have

developed it simultaneously. The result was an extraordinary awakening of

interest, especially among people who had never before been greatly

concerned with literature. We are to remember that, in previous periods,

the number of readers was comparatively small; and that, with the exception

of a few writers like Langland and Bunyan, authors wrote largely for the

upper classes. In the eighteenth century the spread of education and the

appearance of newspapers and magazines led to an immense increase in the

number of readers; and at the same time the middle-class people assumed a

foremost place in English life and history. These new readers and this new,

powerful middle class had no classic tradition to hamper them. They cared

little for the opinions of Dr. Johnson and the famous Literary Club; and,

so far as they read fiction at all, they apparently took little interest in

the exaggerated romances, of impossible heroes and the picaresque stories

of intrigue and villainy which had interested the upper classes. Some new

type of literature was demanded, this new type must express the new ideal

of the eighteenth century, namely, the value and the importance of the

individual life. So the novel was born, expressing, though in a different

way, exactly the same ideals of personality and of the dignity of common

life which were later proclaimed in the American and in the French

Revolution, and were welcomed with rejoicing by the poets of the romantic

revival. To tell men, not about knights or kings or types of heroes, but

about themselves in the guise of plain men and women, about their own

thoughts and motives and struggles, and the results of actions upon their

own characters,--this was the purpose of our first novelists. The eagerness

with which their chapters were read in England, and the rapidity with which

their work was copied abroad, show how powerfully the new discovery

appealed to readers everywhere.

Before we consider the work of these writers who first developed the modern

novel, we must glance at the work of a pioneer, Daniel Defoe, whom we place

among the early novelists for the simple reason that we do not know how

else to classify him.

DANIEL DEFOE (1661(?)-1731)

To Defoe is often given the credit for the discovery of the modern novel;

but whether or not he deserves that honor is an open question. Even a

casual reading of _Robinson Crusoe_ (1719), which generally heads the list

of modern fiction, shows that this exciting tale is largely an adventure

story, rather than the study of human character which Defoe probably

intended it to be. Young people still read it as they might a dime novel,

skipping its moralizing passages and hurrying on to more adventures; but

they seldom appreciate the excellent mature reasons which banish the dime

novel to a secret place in the haymow, while _Crusoe_ hangs proudly on the

Christmas tree or holds an honored place on the family bookshelf. Defoe's

_Apparition of Mrs. Veal, Memoirs of a Cavalier_, and _Journal of the

Plague Year_ are such mixtures of fact, fiction, and credulity that they

defy classification; while other so-called "novels," like _Captain

Singleton, Moll Flanders_, and _Roxana_, are but, little better than

picaresque stories, with a deal of unnatural moralizing and repentance

added for puritanical effect. In _Crusoe_, Defoe brought the realistic

adventure story to a very high stage of its development; but his works

hardly deserve, to be classed as true novels, which must subordinate

incident to the faithful portrayal of human life and character.

LIFE. Defoe was the son of a London butcher named Foe, and kept his family

name until he was forty years of age, when he added the aristocratic prefix

with which we have grown familiar. The events of his busy seventy years of

life, in which he passed through all extremes, from poverty to wealth, from

prosperous brickmaker to starveling journalist, from Newgate prison to

immense popularity and royal favor, are obscure enough in details; but four

facts stand out clearly, which help the reader to understand the character

of his work. First, Defoe was a jack-at-all-trades, as well as a writer;

his interest was largely with the working classes, and notwithstanding many

questionable practices, he seems to have had some continued purpose of

educating and uplifting the common people. This partially accounts for the

enormous popularity of his works, and for the fact that they were

criticised by literary men as being "fit only for the kitchen." Second, he

was a radical Nonconformist in religion, and was intended by his father for

the independent ministry. The Puritan zeal for reform possessed him, and he

tried to do by his pen what Wesley was doing by his preaching, without,

however, having any great measure of the latter's sincerity or singleness

of purpose. This zeal for reform marks all his numerous works, and accounts

for the moralizing to be found everywhere. Third, Defoe was a journalist

and pamphleteer, with a reporter's eye for the picturesque and a newspaper

man's instinct for making a "good story." He wrote an immense number of

pamphlets, poems, and magazine articles; conducted several papers,--one of

the most popular, the _Review_, being issued from prison,--and the fact

that they often blew hot and cold upon the same question was hardly

noticed. Indeed, so extraordinarily interesting and plausible were Defoe's

articles that he generally managed to keep employed by the party in power,

whether Whig or Tory. This long journalistic career, lasting half a

century, accounts for his direct, simple, narrative style, which holds us

even now by its intense reality. To Defoe's genius we are also indebted for

two discoveries, the "interview" and the leading editorial, both of which

are still in daily use in our best newspapers.

The fourth fact to remember is that Defoe knew prison life; and thereby

hangs a tale. In 1702 Defoe published a remarkable pamphlet called "The

Shortest Way with the Dissenters," supporting the claims of the free

churches against the "High Fliers," i.e. Tories and Anglicans. In a vein of

grim humor which recalls Swift's "Modest Proposal," Defoe advocated hanging

all dissenting ministers, and sending all members of the free churches into

exile; and so ferociously realistic was the satire that both Dissenters and

Tories took the author literally. Defoe was tried, found guilty of

seditious libel, and sentenced to be fined, to stand three days in the

pillory, and to be imprisoned. Hardly had the sentence been pronounced when

Defoe wrote his "Hymn to the Pillory,"--

Hail hieroglyphic state machine,

Contrived to punish fancy in,--

a set of doggerel verses ridiculing his prosecutors, which Defoe, with a

keen eye for advertising, scattered all over London. Crowds flocked to

cheer him in the pillory; and seeing that Defoe was making popularity out

of persecution, his enemies bundled him off to Newgate prison. He turned

this experience also to account by publishing a popular newspaper, and by

getting acquainted with rogues, pirates, smugglers, and miscellaneous

outcasts, each one with a "good story" to be used later. After his release

from prison, in 1704, he turned his knowledge of criminals to further

account, and entered the government employ as a kind of spy or secret-

service agent. His prison experience, and the further knowledge of

criminals gained in over twenty years as a spy, accounts for his numerous

stories of thieves and pirates, _Jonathan Wild_ and _Captain Avery_, and

also for his later novels, which deal almost exclusively with villains and

outcasts.

When Defoe was nearly sixty years of age he turned to fiction and wrote the

great work by which he is remembered. _Robinson Crusoe_ was an instant

success, and the author became famous all over Europe. Other stories

followed rapidly, and Defoe earned money enough to retire to Newington and

live in comfort; but not idly, for his activity in producing fiction is

rivaled only by that of Walter Scott. Thus, in 1720 appeared _Captain

Singleton, Duncan Campbell_, and _Memoirs of a Cavalier_; in 1722, _Colonel

Jack, Moll Flanders_, and the amazingly realistic _Journal of the Plague

Year_. So the list grows with astonishing rapidity, ending with the

_History of the Devil_ in 1726.

In the latter year Defoe's secret connection with the government became

known, and a great howl of indignation rose against him in the public

print, destroying in an hour the popularity which he had gained by a

lifetime of intrigue and labor. He fled from his home to London, where he

died obscurely, in 1731, while hiding from real or imaginary enemies.

WORKS OF DEFOE. At the head of the list stands _Robinson Crusoe_ (1719-

1720), one of the few books in any literature which has held its popularity

undiminished for nearly two centuries. The story is based upon the

experiences of Alexander Selkirk, or Selcraig, who had been marooned in the

island of Juan Fernandez, off the coast of Chile, and who had lived there

in solitude for five years. On his return to England in 1709, Selkirk's

experiences became known, and Steele published an account of them in _The

Englishman_, without, however, attracting any wide attention. That Defoe

used Selkirk's story is practically certain; but with his usual duplicity

he claimed to have written _Crusoe_ in 1708, a year before Selkirk's

return. However that may be, the story itself is real enough to have come

straight from a sailor's logbook. Defoe, as shown in his _Journal of the

Plague Year_ and his _Memoirs of a Cavalier_, had the art of describing

things he had never seen with the accuracy of an eyewitness.