From Chaucer to Tennyson Part 9

It is a long step from the Bedford tinker to the cultivated poet of _Paradise Lost_. They represent the poles of the Puritan party. Yet it may admit of a doubt whether the Puritan epic is, in essentials, as vital and original a work as the Puritan allegory. They both came out quietly and made little noise at first. But the _Pilgrim's Progress_ got at once into circulation, and hardly a single copy of the first edition remains. Milton, too--who received ten pounds for the copyright of _Paradise Lost_--seemingly found that "fit audience though few" for which he prayed, as his poem reached its second impression in five years (1672). Dryden visited him in his retirement and asked leave to turn it into rime and put it on the stage as an opera. "Ay," said Milton, good humoredly, "you may tag my verses." And accordingly they appeared, duly tagged, in Dryden's operatic masque, the _State of Innocence_. In this startling conjunction we have the two ages in a nutsh.e.l.l: the Commonwealth was an epic, the Restoration an opera.

The literary period covered by the life of Pope, 1688-1744, is marked off by no distinct line from the generation before it. Taste continued to be governed by the precepts of Boileau and the French cla.s.sical school. Poetry remained chiefly didactic and satirical, and satire in Pope's hands was more personal even than in Dryden's, and addressed itself less to public issues. The literature of the "Augustan age" of Queen Anne (1702-1714) was still more a literature of the town and of fashionable society than that of the Restoration had been. It was also closely involved with party struggles of Whig and Tory, and the ablest pens on either side were taken into alliance by the political leaders.

Swift was in high favor with the Tory ministers, Oxford and Bolingbroke, and his pamphlets, the _Public Spirit of the Whigs_ and the _Conduct of the Allies_, were rewarded with the deanery of St. Patrick's, Dublin.

Addison became secretary of state under a Whig government. Prior was in the diplomatic service. Daniel De Foe, the author of _Robinson Crusoe_, 1719, was a prolific political writer, conducted his _Review_ in the interest of the Whigs, and was imprisoned and pilloried for his ironical pamphlet, _The Shortest Way with the Dissenters_. Steele, who was a violent writer on the Whig side, held various public offices, such as Commissioner of Stamps, and Commissioner for Forfeited Estates, and sat in Parliament. After the Revolution of 1688 the manners and morals of English society were somewhat on the mend. The court of William and Mary, and of their successor, Queen Anne, set no such example of open profligacy as that of Charles II. But there was much hard drinking, gambling, dueling, and intrigue in London, and vice was fashionable till Addison partly preached and partly laughed it down in the _Spectator_.

The women were mostly frivolous and uneducated, and not unfrequently fast. They are spoken of with systematic disrespect by nearly every writer of the time, except Steele. "Every woman," wrote Pope, "is at heart a rake." The reading public had now become large enough to make letters a profession. Dr. Johnson said that Pope was the first writer in whose case the book-seller took the place of the patron. His translation of Homer, published by subscription, brought him between eight and nine thousand pounds and made him independent. But the activity of the press produced a swarm of poorly-paid hack-writers, penny-a-liners, who lived from hand to mouth and did small literary jobs to order. Many of these inhabited Grub Street, and their lampoons against Pope and others of their more successful rivals called out Pope's _Dunciad_, or epic of the dunces, by way of retaliation. The politics of the time were sordid, and consisted mainly of an ign.o.ble scramble for office. The Whigs were fighting to maintain the Act of Succession in favor of the House of Hanover, and the Tories were secretly intriguing with the exiled Stuarts. Many of the leaders, such as the great Whig champion, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, were without political principle or even personal honesty. The Church, too, was in a condition of spiritual deadness. Bishoprics and livings were sold, and given to political favorites. Clergymen, like Swift and Lawrence Sterne, were worldly in their lives and immoral in their writings, and were practically unbelievers. The growing religious skepticism appeared in the Deist controversy. Numbers of men in high position were Deists; the Earl of Shaftesbury, for example, and Pope's brilliant friend, Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, the head of the Tory ministry, whose political writings had much influence upon his young French acquaintance, Voltaire. Pope was a Roman Catholic, though there was little to show it in his writings, and the underlying thought of his famous _Essay on Man_ was furnished him by Bolingbroke. The letters of the cold-hearted Chesterfield to his son were accepted as a manual of conduct, and La Rochefoucauld's cynical maxims were quoted as authority on life and human nature. Said Swift:

As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew From nature, I believe them true.

They argue no corrupted mind In him; the fault is in mankind.

The succession which Dryden had willed to Congreve was taken up by Alexander Pope. He was a man quite unlike Dryden--sickly, deformed, morbidly precocious, and spiteful; nevertheless he joined on to and continued Dryden. He was more careful in his literary workmanship than his great forerunner, and in his _Moral Essays_ and _Satires_ he brought the Horatian epistle in verse, the formal satire and that species of didactic poem of which Boileau had given the first example, to an exquisite perfection of finish and verbal art. Dryden had translated Vergil, and so Pope translated Homer. The throne of the dunces, which Dryden had conferred upon Shadwell, Pope, in his _Dunciad_, pa.s.sed on to two of his own literary foes, Theobald and Colley Cibber. There is a great waste of strength in this elaborate squib, and most of the petty writers, whose names it has preserved, as has been said, like flies in amber, are now quite unknown. But, although we have to read it with notes, to get the point of its allusions, it is easy to see what execution it must have done at the time, and it is impossible to withhold admiration from the wit, the wickedness, the triumphant mischief of the thing. In the _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_, the satirical sketch of Addison--who had offended Pope by praising a rival translation of Homer--is as brilliant as any thing of the kind in Dryden. Pope's very malignity made his sting sharper than Dryden's. He secreted venom, and worked out his revenges deliberately, bringing all the resources of his art to bear upon the question of how to give the most pain most cleverly.

Pope's masterpiece is, perhaps, the _Rape of the Lock_, a mock heroic poem, a "dwarf _Iliad_" recounting, in five cantos, a society quarrel, which arose from Lord Petre's cutting a lock of hair from the head of Mrs. Arabella Fermor. Boileau, in his _Lutrin_, had treated with the same epic dignity a dispute over the placing of the reading-desk in a parish church. Pope was the Homer of the drawing-room, the boudoir, the tea-urn, the ombre-party, the sedan-chair, the parrot cage, and the lap-dogs. This poem, in its sparkle and airy grace, is the topmost blossom of a highly artificial society, the quintessence of whatever poetry was possible in those

Tea-cup times of hood and hoop, And when the patch was worn,

with whose decorative features, at least, the recent Queen Anne revival has made this generation familiar. It may be said of it, as Thackery said of Gay's pastorals: "It is to poetry what charming little Dresden china figures are to sculpture, graceful, minikin, fantastic, with a certain beauty always accompanying them." The _Rape of the Lock_, perhaps, stops short of beauty, but it attains elegance and prettiness in a supreme degree. In imitation of the G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses in the _Iliad_, who intermeddle for or against the human characters, Pope introduced the Sylphs of the Rosicrucian philosophy. We may measure the distance between imagination and fancy, if we will compare these little filagree creatures with Shakspere's elves, whose occupation it was

To tread the ooze of the salt deep, Or run upon the sharp wind of the north,...

Or on the beached margent of the sea To dance their ringlets to the whispering wind.

Very different are the offices of Pope's fays:

Our humble province is to tend the fair; Not a less pleasing, though less glorious, care; To save the powder from too rude a gale, Nor let the imprisoned essences exhale....

Nay oft in dreams invention we bestow To change a flounce or add a furbelow.

Pope was not a great poet; it has been doubted whether he was a poet at all. He does not touch the heart, or stimulate the imagination, as the true poet always does. In the poetry of nature, and the poetry of pa.s.sion, he was altogether impotent. His _Windsor Forest_ and his _Pastorals_ are artificial and false, not written with "the eye upon the object." His epistle of _Eloisa to Abelard_ is declamatory and academic, and leaves the reader cold. The only one of his poems which is at all possessed with feeling is his pathetic _Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady_. But he was a great literary artist. Within the cramped and starched regularity of the heroic couplet, which the fashion of the time and his own habit of mind imposed upon him, he secured the largest variety of modulation and emphasis of which that verse was capable. He used ant.i.thesis, periphrasis, and climax with great skill.

His example dominated English poetry for nearly a century, and even now, when a poet like Dr. Holmes, for example, would write satire or humorous verse of a dignified kind, he turns instinctively to the measure and manner of Pope. He was not a consecutive thinker, like Dryden, and cared less about the truth of his thought than about the pointedness of its expression. His language was closer-grained than Dryden's. His great art was the art of putting things. He is more quoted than any other English poet but Shakspere. He struck the average intelligence, the common sense of English readers, and furnished it with neat, portable formulas, so that it no longer needed to "vent its observation in mangled terms," but could pour itself out compactly, artistically in little ready-made molds. But this high-wrought brilliancy, this unceasing point, soon fatigue. His poems read like a series of epigrams; and every line has a hit or an effect.

From the reign of Queen Anne date the beginnings of the periodical essay. Newspapers had been published since the time of the civil war; at first irregularly, and then regularly. But no literature of permanent value appeared in periodical form until Richard Steele started the _Tatler_, in 1709. In this he was soon joined by his friend, Joseph Addison; and in its successor, the _Spectator_, the first number of which was issued March 1, 1711, Addison's contributions outnumbered Steele's. The _Tatler_ was published on three, the _Spectator_ on six, days of the week. The _Tatler_ gave political news, but each number of the _Spectator_ consisted of a single essay. The object of these periodicals was to reflect the pa.s.sing humors of the time, and to satirize the follies and minor immoralities of the town. "I shall endeavor," wrote Addison, in the tenth paper of the _Spectator_, "to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality....It was said of Socrates that he brought Philosophy down from Heaven to inhabit among men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I have brought Philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and a.s.semblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses."

Addison's satire was never personal. He was a moderate man, and did what he could to restrain Steele's intemperate party zeal. His character was dignified and pure, and his strongest emotion seems to have been his religious feeling. One of his contemporaries called him "a parson in a tie wig," and he wrote several excellent hymns. His mission was that of censor of the public taste. Sometimes he lectured and sometimes he preached, and in his Sat.u.r.day papers he brought his wide reading and nice scholarship into service for the instruction of his readers. Such was the series of essays in which he gave an elaborate review of _Paradise Lost_. Such also was his famous paper, the _Vision of Mirza_, an oriental allegory of human life. The adoption of this slightly pedagogic tone was justified by the prevalent ignorance and frivolity of the age. But the lighter portions of the _Spectator_ are those which have worn the best. Their style is at once correct and easy, and it is as a humorist, a sly observer of manners, and, above all, a delightful talker, that Addison is best known to posterity. In the personal sketches of the members of the Spectator Club, of Will Honeycomb, Captain Sentry, Sir Andrew Freeport, and, above all, Sir Roger de Coverley, the quaint and honest country gentleman, may be found the nucleus of the modern prose fiction of character. Addison's humor is always a trifle grave. There is no whimsy, no frolic in it, as in Sterne or Lamb. "He thinks justly," said Dr. Johnson, "but he thinks faintly."

The _Spectator_ had a host of followers, from the somewhat heavy _Rambler_ and _Idler_ of Johnson, down to the _Salmagundi_ papers of our own Irving, who was, perhaps, Addison's latest and best literary descendant. In his own age Addison made some figure as a poet and dramatist. His _Campaign_, celebrating the victory of Blenheim, had one much admired couplet, in which Marlborough was likened to the angel of tempest, who,

Pleased the Almighty's orders to perform, Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm.

His stately, cla.s.sical tragedy, _Cato_, which was acted at Drury Lane Theater in 1712, with immense applause, was p.r.o.nounced by Dr. Johnson "unquestionably the n.o.blest production of Addison's genius." Is is, notwithstanding, cold and tedious, as a whole, though it has some fine declamatory pa.s.sages--in particular the soliloquy of Cato in the fifth act--

It must be so: Plato, thou reasonest well, etc.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Dryden, Addison, Pope, Swift]

The greatest of the Queen Anne wits, and one of the most savage and powerful satirists that ever lived, was Jonathan Swift. As secretary in the family of Sir William Temple, and domestic chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley, he had known in youth the bitterness of poverty and dependence. Afterward he wrote himself into influence with the Tory ministry, and was promised a bishopric, but was put off with the deanery of St. Patrick's, and retired to Ireland to "die like a poisoned rat in a hole." His life was made tragical by the forecast of the madness which finally overtook him, "The stage dark-ended," said Scott, "ere the curtain fell." Insanity deepened into idiocy and a hideous silence, and for three years before his death he spoke hardly ever a word. He had directed that his tombstone should bear the inscription, _Ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit_. "So great a man he seems to me," wrote Thackeray, "that thinking of him is like thinking of an empire falling." Swift's first noteworthy publication was his _Tale of a Tub_, 1704, a satire on religious differences. But his great work was _Gulliver's Travels_, 1726, the book in which his hate and scorn of mankind, and the long rage of mortified pride and thwarted ambition found their fullest expression. Children read the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag, to the flying island of Laputa and the country of the Houyhnhnms, as they read _Robinson Crusoe_, as stories of wonderful adventure. Swift had all of De Foe's realism, his power of giving veri-similitude to his narrative by the invention of a vast number of small, exact, consistent details. But underneath its fairy tales _Gulliver's Travels_ is a satire, far more radical than any of Dryden's or Pope's, because directed, not against particular parties or persons, but against human nature. In his account of Lilliput and Brobdingnag, Swift tries to show that human greatness, goodness, beauty disappear if the scale be altered a little. If men were six inches high instead of six feet, their wars, governments, science, religion--all their inst.i.tutions, in fine, and all the courage, wisdom, and virtue by which these have been built up, would appear laughable. On the other hand, if they were sixty feet high instead of six, they would become disgusting.

The complexion of the finest ladies would show blotches, hairs, excrescences, and an overpowering effluvium would breathe from the pores of the skin. Finally, in his loathsome caricature of mankind, as Yahoos, he contrasts them, to their shame, with the beasts, and sets instinct above reason.

The method of Swift's satire was grave irony. Among his minor writings in this kind are his _Argument against Abolishing Christianity_, his _Modest Proposal_ for utilizing the surplus population of Ireland by eating the babies of the poor, and his _Predictions of Isaac Bickerstaff_. In the last he predicted the death of one Partridge, an almanac maker, at a certain day and hour. When the time set was past, he published a minute account of Partridge's last moments; and when the subject of this excellent fooling printed an indignant denial of his own death, Swift answered very temperately, proving that he was dead and remonstrating with him on the violence of his language. "To call a man a fool and villain, an impudent fellow, only for differing from him in a point merely speculative, is, in my humble opinion, a very improper style for a person of his education." Swift wrote verses as well as prose, but their motive was the reverse of poetical. His gross and cynical humor vulgarized whatever it touched. He leaves us no illusions, and not only strips his subject, but flays it and shows the raw muscles beneath the skin. He delighted to dwell upon the lowest bodily functions of human nature. "He saw blood-shot," said Thackeray.

1. History of Eighteenth Century Literature (1660-1780).

Edmund Gosse. London: Macmillan & Co., 1889.

2. Macaulay's Essay, The Comic Dramatists of the Restoration.

3. The Poetical Works of John Dry den. Macmillan & Co., 1873. (Globe Edition.)

4. Thackeray's English Humorists of the last Century.

5. Sir Roger de Coverley. New York: Harpers, 1878.

6. Swift's Tale of a Tub, Gulliver's Travels, Directions to Servants, Polite Conversation, The Great Question Debated, Verses on the Death of Dean Swift.

7. The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope. London: Macmillan & Co., 1869. (Globe Edition.)

CHAPTER VI.

FROM THE DEATH OF POPE TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

1744-1789.

Pope's example continued potent for fifty years after his death.

Especially was this so in satiric and didactic poetry. Not only Dr.

Johnson's adaptations from Juvenal, _London_, 1738, and the _Vanity of Human Wishes_, 1749, but Gifford's _Baviad_, 1791, and _Maeviad_, 1795, and Byron's _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_, 1809, were in the verse and the manner of Pope. In Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_, 1781, Dryden and Pope are treated as the two greatest English poets. But long before this a revolution in literary taste had begun, a movement which is variously described as the Return to Nature or the Rise of the New Romantic School.

For nearly a hundred years poetry had dealt with manners and the life of towns--the gay, prosaic life of Congreve or of Pope. The sole concession to the life of nature was the old pastoral, which, in the hands of c.o.c.kneys like Pope and Ambrose Philips, who merely repeated stock descriptions at second or third hand, became even more artificial than a _Beggars Opera_ or a _Rape of the Lock_. These at least were true to their environment, and were natural just because they were artificial.

But the _Seasons_ of James Thomson, published in installments from 1726-1730, had opened a new field. Their theme was the English landscape, as varied by the changes of the year, and they were written by a true lover and observer of nature. Mark Akenside's _Pleasures of Imagination_, 1744, published the year of Pope's death, was written, like the _Seasons_, in blank verse; and although its language had the formal, didactic cast of the Queen Anne poets, it pointed unmistakably in the new direction. Thomson had painted the soft beauties of a highly cultivated land--lawns, gardens, forest-preserves, orchards, and sheep-walks. But now a fresh note was struck in the literature, not of England alone, but of Germany and France--romanticism, the chief element in which was a love of the wild. Poets turned from the tameness of modern existence to savage nature and the heroic simplicity of life among primitive tribes. In France, Rousseau introduced the idea of the natural man, following his instincts in disregard of social conventions.

In Germany Bodmer published, in 1753, the first edition of the old German epic, the _Nibelungen Lied_. Works of a similar tendency in England were the odes of William Collins and Thomas Gray, published between 1747 and 1757; especially Collins's _Ode on the Superst.i.tions of the Highlands_, and Gray's _Bard_, a Pindaric in which the last survivor of the Welsh bards invokes vengeance on Edward I., the destroyer of his guild. Gray and Mason, his friend and editor, made translations from the ancient Welsh and Norse poetry. Thomas Percy's _Reliques of Ancient English Poetry_, 1765, aroused the taste for old ballads. Richard Kurd's _Letters on Chivalry and Romance_, Thomas Warton's _History of English Poetry_. 1774-1778, Tyrwhitt's critical edition of Chaucer, and Horace Walpole's Gothic romance, the _Castle of Otranto_, 1765, stimulated this awakened interest in the picturesque aspects of feudal life, and contributed to the fondness for supernatural and mediaeval subjects.

James Beattie's _Minstrel_, 1771, described the educating influence of Scottish mountain scenery upon the genius of a young poet. But the most remarkable instances of this pa.s.sion for wild nature and the romantic past were the _Poems of Ossian_ and Thomas Chatterton's literary forgeries.

In 1762 James Macpherson published the first installment of what professed to be a translation of the poems of Ossian, a Gaelic bard, whom tradition placed in the 3d century. Macpherson said that he made his version--including two complete epics, _Fingal_ and _Temora_--from Gaelic MSS., which he had collected in the Scottish Highlands. A fierce controversy at once sprang up over the genuineness of these remains.

Macpherson was challenged to produce his originals, and when, many years after, he published the Gaelic text, it was a.s.serted that this was nothing but a translation of his own English into modern Gaelic. Of the MSS. which he professed to have found not a sc.r.a.p remained: the Gaelic text was printed from transcriptions in Macpherson's handwriting or in that of his secretaries.

But whether these poems were the work of Ossian or of Macpherson, they made a deep impression at the time. Napoleon admired them greatly, and Goethe inserted pa.s.sages from the "Songs of Selma" in his _Sorrows of Werther_. Macpherson composed--or translated--them in an abrupt, rhapsodical prose, resembling the English version of Job or of the prophecies of Isaiah. They filled the minds of their readers with images of vague sublimity and desolation; the mountain torrent, the mist on the hills, the ghosts of heroes half seen by the setting moon, the thistle in the ruined courts of chieftains, the gra.s.s whistling on the windy heath, the gray rock by the blue stream of Lutha, and the cliffs of sea-surrounded Gormal.

"A tale of the times of old!"

"Why, thou wanderer unseen! Thou bender of the thistle of Lora; why, thou breeze of the valley, hast thou left mine ear? I hear no distant roar of streams! No sound of the harp from the rock! Come, thou huntress of Lutha, Malvina, call back his soul to the bard. I look forward to Lochlin of lakes, to the dark billowy bay of U-thorno, where Fingal decends from Ocean, from the roar of winds. Few are the heroes of Morven in a land unknown."

Thomas Chatterton, who died by his own hand in 1770, at the age of seventeen, is one of the most wonderful examples of precocity in the history of literature. His father had been s.e.xton of the ancient Church of St. Mary Redcliff, in Bristol, and the boy's sensitive imagination took the stamp of his surroundings. He taught himself to read from a black-letter Bible. He drew charcoal sketches of churches, castles, knightly tombs, and heraldic blazonry. When only eleven years old, he began the fabrication of doc.u.ments in prose and verse, which he ascribed to a fict.i.tious Thomas Rowley, a secular priest at Bristol in the 15th century. Chatterton pretended to have found these among the contents of an old chest in the muniment room of St. Mary Redcliff's. The Rowley poems included two tragedies, _Aella_ and _G.o.ddwyn_, two cantos of a long poem on the _Battle of Hastings_, and a number of ballads and minor pieces. Chatterton had no precise knowledge of early English, or even of Chaucer. His method of working was as follows. He made himself a ma.n.u.script glossary of the words marked as archaic in Bailey's and Kersey's English dictionaries, composed his poems first in modern language, and then turned them into ancient spelling, and subst.i.tuted here and there the old words in his glossary for their modern equivalents. Naturally he made many mistakes, and though Horace Walpole, to whom he sent some of his pieces, was unable to detect the forgery, his friends, Gray and Mason, to whom he submitted them, at once p.r.o.nounced them spurious. Nevertheless there was a controversy over Rowley hardly less obstinate than that over Ossian, a controversy made possible only by the then almost universal ignorance of the forms, scansion, and vocabulary of early English poetry. Chatterton's poems are of little value in themselves, but they are the record of an industry and imitative quickness marvelous in a mere child, and they show how, with the instinct of genius, he threw himself into the main literary current of his time. Discarding the couplet of Pope, the poets now went back for models to the Elizabethan writers. Thomas Warton published in 1753 his _Observations on the Faerie Queene_. Beattie's _Minstrel_, Thomson's _Castle of Indolence_, and William Shenstone's _Schoolmistress_ were all written in the Spenserian stanza. Shenstone gave a partly humorous effect to his poem by imitating Spenser's archaisms, and Thomson reproduced in many pa.s.sages the copious harmony and luxuriant imagery of the _Faerie Queene_. John Dyer's _Fleece_ was a poem in blank verse on English wool-growing, after the fashion of Vergil's _Georgics_. The subject was unfortunate, for, as Dr. Johnson said, it is impossible to make poetry out of serges and druggets. Dyer's _Grongar Hill_, which mingles reflection with natural description in the manner of Gray's _Elegy written in a Country Churchyard_, was composed in the octosyllabic verse of Milton's _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_.

Milton's minor poems, which had hitherto been neglected, exercised a great influence on Collins and Gray. Collins's _Ode to Simplicity_ was written in the stanza of Milton's _Nativity_, and his exquisite unrimed _Ode to Evening_ was a study in versification, after Milton's translation of Horace's _Ode to Pyrrha_, in the original meters.

Shakspere began to be studied more reverently: numerous critical editions of his plays were issued, and Garrick restored his pure text to the stage. Collins was an enthusiastic student of Shakspere, and one of his sweetest poems, the _Dirge in Cymbeline_, was inspired by the tragedy of _Cymbeline_. The verse of Gray, Collins, and the Warton brothers abounds in verbal reminiscences of Shakspere; but their genius was not allied to his, being exclusively lyrical and not at all dramatic. The Muse of this romantic school was Fancy rather than Pa.s.sion. A thoughtful melancholy, a gentle, scholarly pensiveness, the spirit of Milton's _Il Penseroso_, pervades their poetry. Gray was a fastidious scholar, who produced very little, but that little of the finest quality. His famous _Elegy_, expressing a meditative mood in language of the choicest perfection, is the representative poem of the second half of the 18th century, as the _Rape of the Lock_ is of the first. The romanticists were quietists, and their scenery is characteristic. They loved solitude and evening, the twilight vale, the mossy hermitage, ruins, glens, and caves. Their style was elegant and academic, retaining a little of the stilted poetic diction of their cla.s.sical forerunners. Personification and periphrasis were their favorite mannerisms: Collins's Odes were largely addressed to abstractions, such as Fear, Pity, Liberty, Mercy and Simplicity. A poet in their dialect was always a "bard;" a countryman was "the untutored swain," and a woman was a "nymph" or "the fair," just as in Dryden and Pope. Thomson is perpetually mindful of Vergil, and afraid to speak simply. He uses too many Latin epithets, like _amusive_ and _precipitant_, and calls a fish-line

The floating line s.n.a.t.c.hed from the h.o.a.ry steed.

They left much for Cowper and Wordsworth to do in the way of infusing the new blood of a strong, racy English into our exhausted poetic diction. Their poetry is impersonal, bookish, literary. It lacks emotional force, except now and then in Gray's immortal _Elegy_, in his _Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College_, in Collins's lines, _On the Death of Thomson_, and his little ode beginning, "How sleep the brave."

The new school did not lack critical expounders of its principles and practice. Joseph Warton published, in 1756, the first volume of his _Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope_, an elaborate review of Pope's writings _seriatim_, doing him certainly full justice, but ranking him below Shakspere, Spenser, and Milton. "Wit and satire,"

wrote Warton, "are transitory and perishable, but nature and pa.s.sion are eternal....He stuck to describing modern manners; but those manners, because they are familiar, artificial, and polished, are, in their very nature, unfit for any lofty effort of the Muse. Whatever poetical enthusiasm he actually possessed he withheld and stifled. Surely it is no narrow and n.i.g.g.ardly encomium to say, he is the great Poet of Reason, the first of Ethical authors in verse." Warton ill.u.s.trated his critical positions by quoting freely not only from Spenser and Milton, but from recent poets, like Thomson, Gray, Collins, and Dyer. He testified that the _Seasons_ had "been very instrumental in diffusing a general taste for the beauties of nature and landscape." It was symptomatic of the change in literary taste that the natural or English school of landscape gardening now began to displace the French and Dutch fashion of clipped hedges, and regular parterres, and that Gothic architecture came into repute. Horace Walpole was a virtuoso in Gothic art, and in his castle at Strawberry Hill he made a collection of ancient armor, illuminated ma.n.u.scripts, and bric-a-brac of all kinds. Gray had been Walpole's traveling companion in France and Italy, and the two had quarreled and separated, but were afterward reconciled. From Walpole's private printing-press at Strawberry Hill Gray's two "sister odes," the _Bard_, and the _Progress of Poesy_, were first issued in 1757. Both Gray and Walpole were good correspondents, and their printed letters are among the most delightful literature of the kind.