to have been the power of reasoning, and of expressing the result in appropriate language. This may seem slender praise; yet these were the talents that led Bacon into the recesses of philosophy, and conducted Newton to the cabinet of nature. The prose works of Dryden bear repeated evidence to his philosophical powers. * * The early habits of his education and poetical studies gave his researches somewhat too much of a metaphysical character: and it was a consequence of his mental acuteness, that his dramatic personages often philosophized or reasoned when they ought only to have felt. The more lofty, the fiercer, the more ambitious feelings, seem also to have been his favourite studies. * * Though his poetry, from the nature of his subjects, is in general rather ethic and didactic than narrative; yet no sooner does he adopt the latter style of composition, than his figures and his landscapes are presented to the mind with the same vivacity as the flow of his reasoning, or the acute metaphysical discrimination of his characters. * * The satirical powers of Dryden were of the highest order. head, and dismisses it straight upon his object of aim. But, while he seized, and dwelt upon, and aggravated, all the evil features of his subject, he carefully retained just as much of its laudable traits, as preserved him from the charge of want of candour, and fixed down the resemblance upon the party. And thus, instead of unmeaning caricatures, he presents portraits which cannot be mistaken, however unfavourable ideas they may convey of the originals. The character of Shaftesbury, both as Achitophel, and as drawn in 'The Medal,' bears peculiar witness to this assertion. * * The 'Fables' of Dryden are the best examples of his talents as a narrative poet; those powers of composition, description, and narration, which must have been called into exercise by the Epic Muse, had his fate allowed him to enlist among her votaries. The account of the procession of the fairy chivalry in the 'Flower and the Leaf;' the splendid description

He draws his arrow to the

He was too warm on picking-work to dwell,
But fagoted his notions as they fell:
And if they rhymed and rattled all was well.
Spiteful he is not, though he wrote a satire;
For still there goes some thinking to ill-nature.
He needs no more than birds or beasts to think:
All his occasions are to eat and drink.
If he call rogue and rascal from a garret,
He means you no more mischief than a parrot:
The words for friend and foe alike were made;
To fetter them in verse is all his trade.

of the champions who came to assist at the tournament in the Knight's Tale;' the account of the battle itself, its alternations and issue if they cannot be called improvements on Chaucer, are nevertheless so spirited a transfusion of his ideas into modern verse, as almost to claim the merit of originality. Many passages might be shown, in which this praise may be carried still higher, and the merit of invention added to that of imitation. Such is, in the 'Knight's Tale,' the description of the commencement of the tourney, which is almost entirely original; and such are most of the ornaments in the translations from Boccaccio, whose prose fictions demanded more additions from the poet than the exuberant imagery of Chaucer. To select instances would be endless: but every reader of poetry has by heart the description of Iphigenia asleep nor are the lines in Theodore and Honoria,' which describe the approach of the apparition, and its effects upon animated and inanimated nature, even before it becomes visible, less eminent for beauties of the terrific order."

*Sir Walter Scott: Life of Dryden.

CHAPTER IX.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

A. D. 1702-A. D. 1800.

SECTION FIRST: THE LITERARY CHARACTER AND CHANGES OF THE PERIOD.

1. 1haracter of the Period as a Whole-Its Relations to Our Own Time.-2. Literary Character of its First Generation-The Age of Queen Anne and George I.-3. Literary Character of its Second and Third Generations-From the Accession of George II.-4. The Prose Style of the First Generation-Addison-Swift.-5. The Prose Style of the Second and Third Generations-Johnson.

1. No period in our literary history has been, at various times, estimated so variously as the Eighteenth Century. If it was overvalued by those who lived in it, it is assuredly undervalued in our day; a natural result of circumstances, but not the less a result to be regretted. In regard to ages more remote, the beautifying charm of antiquity tempts us to err, oftenest, by entertaining for their great men and great deeds, although the principles may be very unlike ours, a respect exceeding that which is their due. But the century immediately preceding our own is not far enough distant to be reverenced as ancient; while its distance is sufficient to have caused, in the modes of thinking and varieties of taste, changes so material as to incapacitate us for sympathizing readily with its characteristics.

It is true, no doubt, that in England, as elsewhere in Europe, the temper of the eighteenth century was cold, dissatisfied, and hypercritical. Alike in the theory of literature and in that of society, in the theory of knowledge and in that of religion, old principles were peremptorily called in question; and the literary man and statesman, the philosopher and the theologian, alike found the task allotted them to be mainly that of attack or defence. It is true, likewise, that the opinions which kept the firmest hold on the minds of the nation, and the sentiments which those opinions prompted, were quite alien to the speculative or the heroic; and that they received adequate literary expression, in a philosophy which acknowledged no higher motive than utility, and in a kind of poetry which found its favourite field in didactic discussion, and sank in narrative into the comic and do

mestic. It is further true, (and it is a fact which had a very wide influence,) that, in all departments of literary composition, but most of all in poetry, the form had come to be more regarded than the matter; that melody of rhythm, and elegance of phrase, and symmetry of parts, were held to be higher excel lences than rich fancy or fervid emotion.

Whatever may be the amount of likeness or unlikeness which, as a whole, this description bears to the character of our own time, it is plain, that there are points of dissimilarity, sufficient to make us look with indifference on many literary phenomena which were deeply interesting to those who first beheld them. It is certain, also, that an age like the eighteenth century could not give birth to a literature possessing the loftiest and most striking qualities, either of poetry or of eloquence. But it was an age whose monuments we cannot overlook, without losing much instruction as well as much pleasure. It increased prodigiously the knowledge previously possessed by mankind, especially in those fields which lie furthest from that of literature: it swept away a vast number of wrong opinions by which all preceding knowledge had been alloyed, and this in literature as well as in other walks of thought it produced many literary works excellent both in matter and in expression, and especially excellent in those qualities which are chiefly wanting in the literature of our time; and it exercised on the English language, partly for good and partly for evil, an influence which is shown in every sentence we now speak or write.

2. The diversities which took place in the English Literature of the Eighteenth Century, diversities in opinion, in sentiment, and in taste, diversities in matter and in style, may in a general way be understood sufficiently, if we regard the whole period as portioned off into Three successive Stages, the average length of which will thus be about a generation in the life of man.

The First Generation of the time was that which is currently named from Queen Anne, but which should be taken as including also the reign of her successor. Our notion of its literary character is chiefly derived from the poetry of Pope, and the prose of Addison and his friends. It was long regarded among us as worthy to be compared with the Augustan age in the literature of Rome; and it was so compared by critics who intended thus to intimate its superiority, not only to all that had gone before, but to all that was likely to follow. There was really not a little likeness between the ancient age and the modern; and the likeness prevails especially in the tendency to didactic coldness which pervaded the writings of both, and in the anxious attention paid

But the

to correctness of style and formal symmetry of method. works of Virgil and his contemporaries were not the noblest efforts of the Roman mind: still less could England, which had already given birth to Chaucer and Shakspeare, to Spenser and Milton, to the Old Divines and other masters of eloquence, be believed to have reached the culminating point of her poetry in Pope's satires and didactic verses, or that of her prose in the light elegancies of the Essayists. In philosophical thinking itself, which is seldom taken into account in those popular estimates, Berkeley and Clarke, though we shall probably place them higher than Hobbes and Locke, will by few be estimated as standing above Bacon.

In its own region, a region which is not low, though a good way below the highest, the lighter and more popular section in the literature of Queen Anne's time is distinguished and valuable. The readers it addressed were sought only in the upper ranks of society; and the success which attended its teaching was equally honourable to the instructors and beneficial to the pupils. Its lessons were full of good sense and correct taste; they insinuated as much information as an audience chiefly composed of fashionable or literary idlers could be expected to accept; and, never affecting imaginative or impassioned flights that were alike beyond the sphere of the teachers and that of the taught, they were generally pervaded by right and amiable feelings, and by welldirected though not widely-reaching sympathies. As literary artists, those writers attained an excellence as eminent as any that can be reached by art, when it is neither inspired by enthusiastic genius, nor employed on majestic themes; but an excellence which, through the want of such inspiration and such topics, was of a negative rather than a positive cast. Subjecting themselves cordially to the laws of that French school of criticism, of which Dryden and his contemporaries had been in part disciples, they exhibited, perhaps more thoroughly than the literary men of Louis the Fourteenth's court, the results to which those laws tend: and their polish, and grace, and sensitive refinement of taste, were accompanied in not a few of them, and in some quite overpowered, by a national and masculine vigour, of which the French courtliterature was altogether destitute. In its moral tone, again, the early part of the eighteenth century, actually much better than the age before it, communicated a better tone to its literature. It is much purer, at least, if not always so lofty as we might wish to see it.

3. The Second Generation of the century may be reckoned, loosely, as contained in the reign of George the Second. It was a time inferior to that of Queen Anne for care and skill in the