 Chapter 4 of A Brief History of English and American Literature This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A Brief History of English and American Literature by Henry A. Beers. Chapter 4 The Age of Milton 1608-1674 The Elizabethan Age proper, closed with the death of the Queen, and the accession of James I in 1603. But the literature of the fifty years following was quite as rich as that of the half-century that had passed since she came to the throne in 1557. The same qualities of thought and style which had marked the writers of her reign prolonged themselves and their successors, through the reigns of the first two Stuart Kings and the Commonwealth. Yet there was a change in spirit. Literature is only one of the many forms in which the national mind expresses itself. In periods of political revolution, literature, leaving the serene era of fine art, partakes the violent agitation of the times. There were seeds of civil and religious discord in Elizabethan England. As between the two parties in the church there was a compromise and a truce rather than a final settlement. The Anglican doctrine was partly Calvinistic and partly Arminian. The form of government was episcopal, but there was a large body of Presbyterians in the church who desired a change. In the ritual and ceremonies many rags of popery had been retained, which the extreme reformers wished to tear away. But Elizabeth was a worldly-minded woman, impatient of theological disputes. Though circumstances had made her the champion of Protestantism in Europe, she kept many Catholic notions, disapproved for example of the marriage of priests, and hated sermons. She was jealous of her prerogative in the state, and in the church she enforced uniformity. The authors of the Martin-Marperlet pamphlets against the bishops were punished by death or imprisonment. While the Queen lived things were kept well together, and England was at one in face of the common foe. Admiral Howard, who commanded the English naval forces against the Armada, was a Catholic. But during the reigns of James I, 1603-1625, and Charles I, 1625-1649, Puritanism grew stronger through repression. England, says the historian Green, became the people of a book, and that book, the Bible. The power of the king was used to impose the power of the bishops upon the English and Scotch churches until religious discontent became also political discontent, and finally overthrew the throne. The writers of this period divided more and more into two hostile camps. On the side of church and king was the bulk of the learning and genius of the time, but on the side of free religion and the parliament were the stern conviction, the fiery zeal, the excited imagination of English Puritanism. The spokesman of this movement was Milton, whose great figure dominates the literary history of his generation as Shakespeare's does of the generation proceeding. The drama went on in the course marked out for it by Shakespeare's example until the theatres were closed by parliament in 1642. Of the Stuart dramatists, the most important were Beaumont and Fletcher, all of whose plays were produced during the reign of James I. These were fifty-three in number, but only thirteen of them were joint productions. Francis Beaumont was twenty years younger than Shakespeare and died a few years before him. He was the son of a judge of the common pleas. His collaborator, John Fletcher, a son of the Bishop of London, was five years older than Beaumont and survived him nine years. He was much the more prolific of the two and wrote alone some forty plays. Although the life of one of these partners was determinist with Shakespeare's, their works exhibit a later phase of dramatic art. The Stuart dramatists followed the lead of Shakespeare rather than of Ben Johnson. Their plays, like the former's, belonged to the romantic drama. They present a poetic and idealized version of life, deal with the highest passions and the wildest buffoonery and introduce a great variety of those daring situations and incidents which we agree to call romantic. But while Shakespeare seldom or never overstepped the modesty of nature, his successors ran into every license. They sought to stimulate the jaded appetite of their audience from monstrosities of character, unnatural lusts, subtleties of crime, virtues and vices both in excess. Beaumont and Fletcher's plays are much easier and more agreeable reading than Ben Johnson's. Though often loose in their plots and without that consistency in the development of their characters, which distinguished Johnson's more conscientious workmanship, they are full of graceful dialogue and beautiful poetry. Dryden said that after the restoration two of their plays were acted by one of Shakespeare's or Johnson's throughout the year, and he added that they understood and imitated the conversation of gentlemen much better, whose wild debaucheries and quickness of wit in repartets no poet can ever paint as they have done. Wild debauchery was certainly not the mark of a gentleman in Shakespeare, nor was it altogether so in Beaumont and Fletcher. Their gentlemen are gallant and passionate lovers, gay cavaliers, generous, courageous, courteous, according to the fashion of their times, and sensitive on the point of honor. They are far superior to the cold-blooded rakes of Dryden and the restoration comedy. Still, the manners and language in Beaumont and Fletcher's plays are extremely licentious, and it is not hard to sympathize with the objections to the theatre expressed by the Puritan writer William Prynne, who after denouncing the long hair of the cavaliers in his tract, the unloveliness of love locks, attacked the stage in 1633 with historyomastics, the player's scourge, an offense for which he was fined, imprisoned, pilloried, and had his ears cropped. Coleridge said that Shakespeare was coarse, but never gross. He had the healthy coarseness of nature herself. But Beaumont and Fletcher's pages are corrupt. Even their chaste women are immodest in language and thought. They use not merely that frankness of speech which was a fashion of the times, but a profusion of obscene imagery which could not proceed from a pure mind. The contrastity with them is rather a bodily accident than a virtue of the heart, says Coleridge. Among the best of their light comedies are the Chances, the Scornful Lady, the Spanish Curit, and Rule a Wife and Have a Wife. But far superior to these are their tragedies and tragic comedies, the Maya's Tragedy, Philaster, A King and No King, all written jointly, and Valentinian and Thierry and Teodre, written by Fletcher alone, but perhaps in part sketched out by Beaumont. The tragic masterpiece of Beaumont and Fletcher is the Maid's Tragedy, a powerful but repulsive play which sheds a singular light not only upon its author's dramatic methods, but also upon the attitude toward royalty favored by the doctrine of the divine right of kings which grew up under the stewards. The heroine, Evidney, has been in secret a mistress of the king who marries her to Amateur, a gentleman of his court, as he explains to her bridegroom on the wedding night, I must have one to father children and to bear the name of husband to me that my sin may be more honorable. This scene is perhaps the most affecting and impressive in the whole range of Beaumont and Fletcher's drama. Yet when Evidney names the king as her paramour, Amateur exclaims, Oh, thou hast named a word that wipes away all thoughts revengeful. In that sacred name, the king, there lies a terror. What frail man dares lift his hand against it, let the gods speak to him when they please, till when let us suffer and wait. And the play ends with the words, Oh, lustful kings, unlooked for sudden deaths from heaven are sent, but cursed is he that is their instrument. Aspacia in this tragedy is a good instance of Beaumont and Fletcher's pathetic characters. She is troth-plighted wife to Amateur, and after he, by the king's command, has forsaken her for Evidney, she disguises herself as a man, provokes her unfaithful lover to a duel, and dies under his sword, blessing the hand that killed her. This is a common type in Beaumont and Fletcher, and was drawn originally from Shakespeare's Ophelia. All their good women have the instinctive fidelity of a dog, and the superhuman patience and devotion, a gentle forlornness under wrongs, which is painted with an almost feminine tenderness. In Philaster, or Love Lies Bleeding, Euphrasia, conceiving a hopeless passion for Philaster, who is in love with Arathusa, puts on the dress of a page and enters his service. He employs her to carry messages to his lady love just as Viola in Twelfth Night is sent by the Duke to Olivia. Philaster is persuaded by slanderers that his page and his lady have been unfaithful to him, and in his jealous fury he wounds Euphrasia with his sword. Afterward, convinced of the boy's fidelity, he asks forgiveness. Where to? Euphrasia replies, Alas, my lord, my life is not a thing worthy of your noble thoughts. Tis not a life, tis but a piece of childhood thrown away. Beaumont and Fletcher's love-lorn maids wear the willow very sweetly, but in all their piteous passages there is nothing equal to the natural pathos, the pathos which arises from the deep springs of character, of that one brief question and answer in King Lear. Lear, so young and so untender? Cordelia, so young, my lord, and true. The disguise of a woman in Man's Apparel is a common incident in the romantic drama, and the fact that on the Elizabethan stage the female parts were taken by boys made the deception easier. Viola's situation in Twelfth Night is precisely similar to Euphrasia's, but there is a difference in the handling of the device, which is characteristic of a distinction between Shakespeare's art and that of his contemporaries. The audience in Twelfth Night is taken into confidence and made aware of Viola's real nature from the start, while Euphrasia's incognito is preserved till the Fifth Act, and then disclosed by an accident. This kind of mystification and surprise was a trick below Shakespeare. In this instance, moreover, it involved a departure from dramatic probability. Euphrasia could at any moment by revealing her identity have averted the greatest sufferings and dangers from Philastor, Arathusa, and herself, and the only motive for her keeping silence is represented to have been a feeling of maidenly shame at her position. Such strained and fantastic motives are too often made the pivot of the action in Beaumont and Fletcher's tragic comedies. Their characters have not the depth and truth of Shakespeare's, nor are they drawn so sharply. One reads their plays with pleasure and remembers here and there a passage of fine poetry or a noble or lovely trait. But their characters as holes leave a fading impression. Who, even after a single reading or representation, ever forgets Falstaff or Shylock or King Lear. The moral inferiority of Beaumont and Fletcher is well seen in such a play as A King and No King. Here, Arbasses falls in love with his sister, and after a furious conflict in his own mind finally succumbs to his guilty passion. He is rescued from the consequences of his weakness by the discovery that Panthea is not, in fact, his sister. But this is to cut the knot and not to untie it. It leaves the De Nume onto chance, and not to those moral forces through which Shakespeare always wrought his conclusions. Arbasses has failed, and the piece of luck which keeps his failure innocent is rejected by every right-feeling spectator. In one of John Ford's tragedies, the situation which in A King and No King is only apparent becomes real, and incest is boldly made the subject of the play. Ford pushed the morbid and unnatural in character and passion into even wilder extremes than Beaumont and Fletcher. His best play, The Broken Heart, is a prolonged and unrelieved torture of the feelings. Fletcher's faithful shepherdess is the best English pastoral drama. Its choral songs are richly and sweetly modulated, and the influence of the whole poem upon Milton is very apparent in his commos. The Night of the Burning Pessil, written by Beaumont and Fletcher jointly, was the first burlesque comedy in the language and his excellent fooling. Beaumont and Fletcher's blank verse is musical, but less masculine than Marlowe's or Shakespeare's by reason of their excessive use of extra syllables and feminine endings. In John Webster, the fondness of the abnormal and sensational themes which beset the Stuart stage showed itself in the exaggeration of the terrible into the horrible. Fear in Shakespeare, as in the great murder scene in Macbeth, is a pure passion, but in Webster it is mingled with something physically repulsive. Thus, his Duchess of Malfi is presented in the dark with a dead man's head and is told that it is the hand of her murdered husband. She is shown a dance of madmen and, behind a traverse, the artificial figures of her children appearing as if dead. Treated in this elaborate fashion, that terror, which Aristotle said it was one of the objects of tragedy to move, loses half its dignity. Webster's images have the smell of the charnel house about them. She would not, after the report, keep fresh as long as flowers on graves. We are only like dead walls or vaulted graves that ruined, yield no echo. Oh, this gloomy world, in what a shadow or deep pit of darkness doth womanish and fearful mankind live. Webster had an intense and somber genius. In diction he was the most Shakespearean of the Elizabethan dramatists, and there are sudden gleams of beauty among his dark horrors, which light up a whole scene with some abrupt touch of feeling. Cover her face, mine eyes dazzle, she died young, says the brother of the Duchess, when he has procured her murder and stands before the corpse. Victoria Corombona is described in the Old Editions as a night-piece, and it should indeed be acted by the shuttering light of torches, and with the cry of the screech owl to punctuate the speeches. The scene of Webster's two best tragedies was laid, like many of Ford's, Cyril Torners and Beaumont and Fletcher's, in Italy, the wicked and splendid Italy of the Renaissance, which had such a fascination for the Elizabethan imagination. It was to them the land of the Borges and the Sensi, of families of proud nobles, luxurious, cultivated, but full of revenges and ferocious cunning, subtle poisoners who killed with a perfumed glove or fan, parasites, atheists, committers of unnameable crimes, and inventors of strange and delicate varieties of sin. But a very few have here been mentioned of the great host of dramatists who kept theaters busy through the reigns of Elizabeth, James I, and Charles I. The last of the race was James Shirley, who died in 1666, and whose 38 plays were written during the reign of Charles I and the Commonwealth. In the miscellaneous prose and poetry of this period, there is lacking the free, exultant, creative impulse of the elder generation, but there is a soberer feeling and a certain scholarly choiceless which commend themselves to readers of bookish tastes. Even that quaintness of thought, which is a mark of the Commonwealth writers, is not without its attraction for a nice literary palette. Prose became now of greater relative importance than ever before. Almost every distinguished writer of the time lent his pen to one or the other party in the great theological and political controversy of the time. There were famous theologians like Hales, Chillingworth, and Baxter, historians and antiquaries like Selden, Knowles, and Cotton, philosophers such as Hobbes, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and more, the Platonist, and writers in rural science which now entered upon its modern experimental phase under the stimulus of Bacon's writings, among whom may be mentioned Wallace, the mathematician, Boyle, the chemist, and Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood. These are outside of our subject, but in the strictly literary prose of the time, the same spirit of roused inquiry is manifest, and the same disposition to a thorough and exhaustive treatment of a subject, which is proper to the scientific attitude of mind. The line between true and false science, however, had not yet been drawn. The age was pedantic, and appealed too much to the authority of antiquity. Hence we have such monuments of perverse and curious erudition as Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621, and Sir Thomas Brown's Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Inquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors, 1646. The former of these was the work of an Oxford scholar, an astrologer who cast his own horoscope, and a victim himself of the astribilious humor from which he sought relief in listening to the ribaldry of bargemen, and in compiling this anatomy in which the causes, symptoms, prognostics, and cures of melancholy are considered in numerous partitions, sections, members, and subsections. The work is a mosaic of quotations. All literature is ransacked for anecdotes and instances, and the book has thus become a mine of out-of-the-way learning in which later writers have dug. Lawrence Stern helped himself freely to Burton's treasures, and Dr. Johnson said that the anatomy was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise. The vulgar and common errors which Sir Thomas Brown set himself to refute were such as these, that dolphins are crooked, that Jews stink, that a man hath one rib less than a woman, that Xerxes army drank up rivers, that cicadas are bred out of cuckoo spittle, that Hannibal split alps with vinegar, together with many similar fallacies touching Pope Joan, the Wandering Jew, the Decumen or Tenth Wave, the Blackness of Negroes, Friar Bacon's brazen head, etc. Another book in which great learning and ingenuity were applied to trifling ends was the same author's Garden of Cyrus, or the Quincuniel Lausange or Network Plantations of the Ancients, in which a mystical meaning is sought in the occurrence through nature and art of the figure of the Quincunce or Lausange. Brown was a physician of Norwich where his library, museum, aviary, and botanic garden were thought worthy of a special visit by the Royal Society. He was an antiquary and a naturalist, and deeply read in the schoolmen and the Christian Fathers. He was a mystic and a writer of a rich and peculiar imagination whose thoughts have impressed themselves upon many kindred minds like Coleridge, De Quincey, and Emerson. Two of his books belonged to literature. Religio Medici, published in 1642, and Hydriotaphia, or Earned Burial, 1658, a discourse upon rites of burial and incrimination suggested by some Roman funeral urns dug up in Norfolk. Brown's style, though too highly Latinized, is a good example of commonwealth prose that stately, cumbrous, brocaded prose which had something of the flow and measure of verse rather than the quicker colloquial movement of modern writing. Brown stood aloof from the disputes of his time, and in his very subjects there is a calm and meditative remoteness from the daily interests of men. His Religio Medici is full of a wise tolerance and a singular elevation of feeling. At the sight of a cross or crucifix, I can dispense with my hat, and embrace with the thought or memory of my savior. They had only the advantage of a bold and noble faith who lived before his coming. They go the fairest way to heaven that would serve God without a hell. All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God. The last chapter of the Earned Burial is an almost rhythmical descant on mortality and oblivion. The style kindles slowly into a somber eloquence. It is the most impressive and extraordinary passage in the prose literature of the time. Brown, like Hamlet, loved to consider too curiously. His subtlety led him to pose his apprehension with those involved in nigmas and riddles of the Trinity with incarnation and resurrection, and to start odd inquiries. What song the sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, or whether, after Lazarus was raised from the dead, his heir might lawfully detain his inheritance. The quaintness of his phrase appears at every turn. Charles V can never hope to live within two Methuselahs of Hector. Generations pass while some trees stand and old families survive not three oaks. Mummy has become merchandise. Misram cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams. One of the pleasantest of Old English humorists is Thomas Fuller, who was a chaplain in the Royal Army during the Civil War and wrote, among other things, a church history of Britain, a book of religious meditations, good thoughts in bad times, and a character book, The Holy and Profane State. His most important work, The Worthies of England, was published in 1662 the year after his death. This was a description of every English county, its natural commodities, manufacturers, wonders, proverbs, etc., with brief biographies of its memorable persons. Fuller had a well-stored memory, sound piety, and excellent common sense. Witt was his leading intellectual trait, and the quaintness which he shared with his contemporaries appears in his writings in a fondness for puns, droll terms of expressions, and bits of eccentric suggestion. His prose, unlike Brown's, Milton's, and Jeremy Taylor's, is brief, simple, and pithy. His dry vein of humor was imitated by the American cotton-mather in his magnalia, and by many of the English and New England divines of the 17th century. Jeremy Taylor was also a chaplain in the King's Army, was several times imprisoned for his opinions, and was afterward made by Charles II, Bishop of Down and Connor. He is a devotional rather than a theological writer, and his holy living and holy dying are religious classics. Taylor, like Sidney, was a warbler of poetic prose. He has been called the prose Spencer, and his English has the opulence, the gentle elaboration, the linked sweetness long drawn out of the poet of the Fairy Queen. In fullness and resonance, Taylor's diction resembles that of the great orators, though it lacks their nervous energy. His pathos is exclusively tender, and his numerous similes have Spencer's pictorial amplitude. Some of them have become common places for admiration. Notably, his description of the Flight of the Skylark, and the sentence in which he compares the total awakening of the human faculties to the sunrise, which first opens a little eye of heaven and sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls up the lark to meta, and by and by guilds the fringes of a cloud, and peeps over the eastern hills. Perhaps the most impressive single passage of Taylor's is the concluding chapter in Holy Dying. From the midst of the sickening paraphernalia of death, which he there accumulates, one of the most perfect things in its wording in all our prose literature. But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first it was as fair as the morning, and full with the dew of heaven as a lamb's fleece. But when a rudder breath had forced to open its virgin modesty and dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness, and to decline in softness, and the symptoms of a sickly age. It bowed the head and broke its stock, and at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and outworn faces. With the progress of knowledge and discussion, many kinds of prose literature, which were not absolutely new, now began to receive wider extension. Of this sort are the Letters from Italy, and other miscellanies included in the Reliquae Watonione, or Remains of Sir Henry Watten, English Ambassador at Venice, in the reign of James I, and subsequently Provost of Eaton College. Also the Table Talk, full of incisive remarks left by John Selden, whom Milton pronounced the first scholar of his age, and who was a distinguished authority in legal antiquities and international law, furnished notes to Drayton's Polyulbion, and wrote upon Eastern religions and upon the Arundel marbles. Literary biography was represented by the charming little lives of good old Isaac Walton, the first edition of whose Complete Angler was printed in 1653. The lives were five in number, of Hooker, Watten, Dunn, Herbert, and Sanderson. Several of these were personal friends of the author, and Sir Henry Watten was a brother of the angle. The Complete Angler, though not the first piece of sporting literature in English, is unquestionably the most popular, and still remains a favorite with the lovers of virtue and dare trust in providence and be quiet and go a-angling. As in Aschem's Talks of Phyllis, the instruction is conveyed in dialogue form, but the technical part of the book is relieved by many delightful digressions. Piscator and his pupil, Venator, pursue their talk under a honeysuckle hedge or a sycamore tree during a passing shower. They repair after the day's fishing to some honest alehouse with lavender in the window and a score of ballads stuck about the wall, where they sing, catches, old-fashioned poetry but choicelessly good, composed by the author or his friends, drink barley wine and eat their trout or chub. They encounter milkmaids who sing to them and give them a draft of the red cow's milk, and they never cease their praises of the Angler's life, of rural contentment among the cow-slip meadows and the quiet streams of Thames or Lee or Shafferdbrook. The decay of a great literary school is usually signalized by the exaggeration of its characteristic traits. The manner of the Elizabethan poets was pushed into mannerism by their successors. That manner, at its best, was hardly a simple one, but in the steward and commonwealth writers it became mere extravagance. Thus Phineas Fletcher, a cousin of the dramatist, composed a long, Spinsarian allegory, the purple island, descriptive of the human body. George Herbert and others made anagrams and verses shaped like an altar, a cross, or a pair of Easter wings. This group of poets was named by Dr. Johnson in his life of Cowley, the metaphysical school. Other critics have preferred to call them the Fantastic or Conceded School, the later Euphuists, or the English Maranists and Gungorists, after the poets Marino and Gungora, who brought this fashion to its extreme in Italy and in Spain. The English conceptistas were mainly clergymen of the established church, Dunn, Herbert, Vaughn, Quarles, and Herrick. But Crasha was a Roman Catholic, and Cowley, the latest of them, a layman. The one who set the fashion was Dr. John Dunn, Dean of St. Paul's, whom Dryden pronounced a great wit, but not a great poet, and whom Ben Johnson esteemed the best poet in the world for some things, but likely to be forgotten for want of being understood. Besides satires and epistles in verse, he composed amatory poems in his youth and divine poems in his age, both kinds, distinguished by such subtle obscurity and far-fetched ingenuities that they read like a series of puzzles. When this poet has occasion to write a valediction to his mistress upon going into France, he compares their temporary separation to that of a pair of compasses. Such wilt thou be to me who must like the other foot obliquely run. Thy firmness makes my circle just and makes me end where I begun. If he would persuade her to marriage, he calls her attention to a flea. Me it sucked first and now sucks thee, and in this flea are two bloods mingled be. He says that the flea is their marriage-temple and bids her forebear to kill it, lest she thereby commit murder, suicide, and sacrilege all in one. Dunn's figures are scholastic and smell of the lamp. He ransacked cosmography, astrology, alchemy, optics, the canon law, and the divinity of the schoolmen for incorn terms and similes. Dunn's inverse what Brown was in prose. He loved to play with distinctions, hyperboles, paradoxes, the very causistry and dialectics of love or devotion. Thou canst not every day give me thy heart. Thou canst give it, then thou never gavest it. Love's riddles are that, though thy heart depart, it stays at home, and thou with losing saves this. Dunn's verse is usually as uncouth as his thought, but there is a real passion slumbering under these ashy heaps of conceit, and occasionally a pure flame darts up, as in the justly admired lines. Her pure and elegant blood spoke in her cheek and so divinely wrought that one might almost say her body thought. This description of Dunn is true with modifications of all the metaphysical poets. They had the same forced and unnatural style. The ordinary laws of the association of ideas were reversed with them. It was not the nearest, but the remotest association that was called up. Their attempts, said Johnson, were always analytic. The finest spirit among them was Holy George Herbert, whose temple was published in 1631. The titles in this volume were such as the following Christmas, Easter, Good Friday, Holy Baptism, The Cross, The Church Porch, Church Music, The Holy Scriptures, Redemption, Faith, Doomsday. Never since, except perhaps in Cable's Christian year, have the ecclesiastic ideals of the Anglican church the beauty of holiness found such sweet expression in poetry. The verses entitled Virtue, Sweet Day, So Cool, So Calm, So Bright, etc. are known to most readers, as well as the line, Who sweeps aroma for thy laws makes that and the action fine. The quaintly named pieces, the elixir, the collar, the pulley, are full of deep thought and spiritual feeling. But Herbert's poetry is constantly disfigured by bad taste. Take this passage from Whitsunday. Listen, sweet dove, unto my song and spread thy golden wings on me, hatching my tender heart so long till it get wing and fly away with thee. Which is almost as ludicrous as the epitaph, written by his contemporary caro, on the daughter of Sir Thomas Wentworth, whose soul grew so fast within it broke the outward shell of sin and so was hatched a cherubin. Another of these church poets was Henry Vaughn, the Silerist, or Welshman, whose fine piece, The Retreat, has often been compared with Wordsworth, owed on the intimations of immortality. Francis Quirrell's Divine Emblems long remained a favorite book with religious readers, both in old and New England. Emblem books, in which engravings of a figurative design were accompanied with explanatory letterpress in verse, were a popular class of literature in the 17th century. One of the most delightful of English lyric poets Robert Herrick, whose Hesperides 1648, has lately received such sympathetic illustration from the pencil of an American artist, Mr. E. A. Abbey. Herrick was a clergyman of the English church and was expelled by the Puritans from his living, the vicarage of Dean Pryor in Devonshire. The most quoted of his religious poems is How to Keep a True Lent, but it may be doubted whether his tastes were prevailingly clerical, his poetry certainly was not. He was a disciple of Ben Johnson and his boon companion at those lyric feasts made at the sun, the dog, the triple ton, where we such clusters had as made us nobly wild, not mad. And yet each verse of line out did the meat, out did the frolic wine. Herrick's noble number seldom rises above the expression of cheerful gratitude and contentment. He had not the subtlety and elevation of Herbert, but he surpassed him in the grace, melody, sensuous beauty and fresh lyrical impulse of his verse. Feats of the metaphysical school appear in Herrick only in the form of an occasional pretty quaintness. He is the poet of English parish festivals and of English flowers, the primrose, the white-thorn, the daffodil. He sang the praises of the country life, loved songs to Julia and hymns of thanksgiving for simple blessings. He has been called the English Catullus, but he strikes rather the Horatian note of Carpe Diem and regret at the shortness of life and youth in many of his best-known poems, The Ye Rosebuds While Ye May and To Corinna To Go Amaying. Abraham Cowley is now less remembered for his poetry than for his pleasant volume of essays published after the Restoration, but he was thought in his own time a better poet than Milton. His collection of love songs, The Mistress, is a mass of cold conceits in the metaphysical manner, but his elegies on Crashel and Harvey have much dignity and natural feeling. He introduced the penderic ode into English and wrote an epic poem about the political subject, The David Ace, now quite unreadable. Cowley was a royalist and followed the exiled court to France. Side by side with the church poets were the Cavaliers, Carew, Waller, Lovelace, Suckling, Lestrange, and others, gallant courtiers and officers in the royal army who mingled love and loyalty in their strains. Colonel Richard Lovelace, who lost everything in the king's service and was several times imprisoned, wrote two famous songs, going to the wars in which occurred the lines, I could not love thee dear so much loved I not honour more. And to Alothea from prison, in which he sings, the sweetness, mercy, majesty and glories of his king, and declares that stone walls do not a prison make nor iron bars a cage. Another of the Cavaliers was Sir John Suckling, who formed a plot to rescue the Earl of Stratford, raised a troop of horse for Charles I, was impeached by the Parliament and fled to France. He was a man of wit and pleasure, who penned a number of gay trifles, but has been saved from oblivion chiefly by his exquisite ballad upon a wedding. Thomas Carew and Edmund Waller were poets of the same stamp, graceful and easy but shallow in feeling. Waller, who followed the court to Paris was the author of two songs which are still favourites, Go Lovely Rose and On a Girdle. And he first introduced the smooth correct manner of writing in couplets which Dryden and Pope carried to perfection. Gallantry rather than love was the inspiration of these courtly singers, in such verses as Carew's encouragements to a lover, and George Withers the manly heart. If she be not so to me, what care I how fair she be? We see the revolt against the high, passionate Sydneyan love of Elizabethan sonateers and the note of Perciflage that was to mark the lyrical verse of the Restoration. But the poetry of the Cavaliers reached its high watermark in one fiery-hearted song by the noble and unfortunate James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, who invaded Scotland in the interest of Charles II and was taken prisoner and put to death at Edinburgh in 1650. My dear and only love, I pray that little world of thee be governed by no other sway than purest monarchy. In language borrowed from the politics of the time, he cautions his mistress against synods or committees in her heart, swears to make her glorious by his pen and famous by his sword, and with that fine recklessness which distinguished the dashing troopers of Prince Rupert he adds in words that have been often quoted. He either fears his fate too much or his deserts are too small that dares not put it to the touch to gain or lose at all. John Milton, the greatest English poet except Shakespeare, was born in London in 1608. His father was a scrivener, an educated man and a musical composer of some merit. At his home, Milton was surrounded with all the influences of a refined and well-ordered Puritan household of the better class. He inherited his father's musical tastes and during the latter part of his life he spent a part of every afternoon in playing the organ. No poet has written more beautifully of music than Milton. One of his sonnets was addressed to Henry Laws, the composer, who wrote the heiress to the songs in Comus. Milton's education was most careful and thorough. He spent seven years at Cambridge, where from his personal beauty and fastidious habits he was called the Lady of Christs. At Horton in Buckinghamshire, where his father had a country seat he passed five years more, perfecting himself in his studies and then traveled for fifteen months, mainly in Italy, visiting Naples and Rome, but residing at Florence. Here he saw Galileo, a prisoner of the Inquisition, Milton is the most scholarly and the most truly classical of English poets. His Latin verse for elegance and correctness ranks with Addison's and his Italian poems were the admiration of the Tuscan scholars. But his learning appears in his poetry only in the form of a fine and chastened result and not in laborious illusion and pedantic citation, as too often in Ben Johnson, for instance. My father, he wrote, destined me while yet a little child to study of human letters. He was also destined for the ministry, but coming to some maturity of years and perceiving what tyranny had invaded the church, I thought it better to prefer a blameless silence before the sacred office of speaking bought and begun with servitude and foreswering. Other hands than a bishop were laid upon his head. He who would not be frustrated of his hope to write well hereafter, he says, ought himself to be a true poem. And he adds that his natural haughtiness saved him from all impurity of living. Milton had a sublime self-respect. The dignity and earnestness of the Puritan gentleman blended in his training with the culture of the Renaissance. Born into an age of spiritual conflict, he dedicated his gift to the service of heaven and he became, like Heine, a valiant soldier in the war for liberation. He was the poet of a cause and his song was keyed to the Dorian mood of flutes and soft recorders such as raised to hytha of noblest temper, heroes old, arming to battle. On comparing Milton with Shakespeare with his universal sympathies and receptive imagination, one perceives a loss in breadth but a gain in an intense personal conviction. He introduced a new note into English poetry, the passion for truth and the feeling of religious sublumity. Milton's was in heroic age and its song must be lyric rather than dramatic. Its singer must be in the fight for the ultimate of it. Of the verses which he wrote at Cambridge the most important was his splendid ode on the morning of Christ's Nativity. At Horton he wrote, among other things, the companion pieces, La Legro and Il Penseroso of a kind quite new in English giving to the landscape an expression in harmony with two contrasted moods. Comus, which belongs to the same period was the perfection of the Elizabethan court mask and was presented at Ludlow Castle in 1634 on the occasion of the installation of the Earl of Bridgewater as Lord President of Wales. Under the guise of a skillful addition to the Homeric allegory of Cersei with her cup of enchantment it was a Puritan song in praise of chastity and temperance. Lycidas, in like manner, was the perfection of the Elizabethan pastoral elegy. It was contributed to a volume of memorial verses on the death of Edward King, a Cambridge friend of Milton's who was drowned in the Irish Channel in 1637. In one stern strain which is put into the mouth of St. Peter the author fortells the ruin of our corrupted clergy then at their height. But that two-handed engine at the door stands ready to smite once and smite no more. This was Milton's last utterance in English first before the outbreak of the Civil War and it sounds the alarm of the impending struggle. In technical quality Lycidas is the most wonderful of all Milton's poems. The cunningly intricate harmony of the verse the pressed and packed language with its fullness of meaning and illusion make it worthy of the minutest study. In these early poems Milton, merely as a poet, is at his best. Something of the Elizabethan style still clings to them but their grave sweetness, their choice wording, their originality and epithet name and phrase were novelties of Milton's own. His English masters were Spencer, Fletcher and Sylvester, the translator of Dupartis's Lecepemene but nothing of Spencer's prolixity or Fletcher's effeminacy or Sylvester's quaintness is found in Milton's pure energetic diction. He inherited their beauties but his taste had been tempered to a finer edge by his studies in Greek and Hebrew poetry. He was the last of the Elizabethans and his style was at once the crown of the old and a departure into the new. In Masque, Elegy and Sonnet the seal to the Elizabethan poetry said the last word and closed one great literary era. In 1639 the breach between Charles I and his parliament brought Milton back from Italy. I thought it based to be traveling at my ease for amusement while my fellow countrymen at home were fighting for liberty. For the next 20 years he threw himself into the contest and poured forth a succession of tracts in English and Latin upon the various public questions at issue. As a political thinker Milton had what Bacon calls the humor of a scholar. In a country of endowed grammar schools and universities, hardly emerged from a medieval discipline and curriculum. He wanted to set up a Greek gymnasium and philosophical schools after the fashion of the porch and the academy. He would have imposed an Athenian democracy upon a people trained in the traditions of monarchy and episcopacy. At the very moment when England had grown tired of the protectorate according to Welcome Back the Stewards he was writing an easy and ready way to establish a free common well. Milton acknowledged that in prose he had the use of his left hand only. There are passages of fervid eloquence where the style swells into a kind of lofty chant with a rhythmical rise and fall to it as in parts of the English Book of Common Prayer. But in general his sentences are long and involved, full of inventions and Latinized constructions. Controversy at that day was conducted on scholastic lines. Each disputant, instead of appealing at once to the arguments of expediency in common sense, began with a formidable display of learning, ransacking Greek and Latin authors and the fathers of the church for opinions in support of his own position. These authorities he deployed at tedious length and followed them up with heavy scurrilities and excusations by way of attack and defense. The dispute between Milton and Selmasius over the execution of Charles I was full between two knights in full armor striking at each other with ponderous maces. The very titles of these pamphlets are enough to frighten off a modern reader. A confutation of the animate versions upon a defense of a humble remonstrance against the treaties entitled of Reformation. The most interesting of Milton's prose tracts is his Aereo Pagitica, a speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing 1644. The arguments in this are of permanent force, but if the reader will compare it or Jeremy Taylor's liberty of prophesying with Locke's Letters on Toleration he will see how much clearer and more convincing is the modern method of discussion introduced by writers like Hobbes and Locke and Dryden. Under the protectorate Milton was appointed Latin secretary to the Council of State. In the diplomatic correspondence which was his official duty and in the composition of his tract of the Cano he over tasked his eyes and in 1654 became totally blind. The only poetry of Milton's belonging to the years 1640 to 1660 are a few sonnets of the pure Italian form, mainly called forth by public occasions. By the Elizabethans the sonnet had been used mainly in love poetry. In Milton's hands, said Wordsworth, the thing became a trumpet. Some of his were addressed to political leaders Cromwell and Sir Henry Vane and of these the best is perhaps the sonnet written on the massacre of the Vaudois Protestants. A collect inverse it has been called which has the fire of a Hebrew prophet invoking the divine wrath upon the oppressors of Israel. Two were on his own blindness and in these there is not one selfish repining but only a regret that the value of his service is impaired. Will God exact day labor light denied? In the restoration of the stewards in 1660 Milton was for a while in peril by reason of the part that he had taken against the king. But on evil days through fallen and evil tongues in darkness and with dangers compassed round and solitude he baited no jot of heart or hope. Henceforth he becomes the most heroic and affecting figure in English literary history. Years before he had planned an epic poem on the subject of King Arthur and again a sacred tragedy on man's fall and redemption. These experiments finally took shape in Paradise Lost which was given to the world in 1667. This is the epic of English Puritanism and of Protestant Christianity. It was Milton's purpose to assert eternal providence and justify the ways of God to men or in other words to embody his theological system in verse. This gives a doctrinal rigidity and even dryness to parts of the Paradise Lost which endure its effects as a poem. His God the Father turns a school divine His Christ as had been wittily said is God's good boy. The discourses of Raphael to Adam are scholastic lectures. Adam himself is too sophisticated for the state of innocence and Eve is somewhat insipid. The real protagonist of the poem is Satan upon whose mighty figure Milton unconsciously bestowed something of his own nature and whose words of defiance might almost have come from some republican leader when the good old cause went down. What though the field be lost, all is not lost the unconquerable will and study of revenge, immortal hate and courage never to submit or yield. But when all has been said that can be said in disparagement or qualification Paradise Lost remains the foremost of English poems and the sublimest of all epics. Even in those parts where theology encroaches most upon poetry the diction, though often heavy is never languid. Milton's blank verse in itself is enough to bear up the most prosaic theme and so is his epic English a style more massive and splendid than Shakespeare's and comparable like Tertullian's Latin to a river of molten gold. Of the countless single beauties that sow his page thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Valembrosa there is no room to speak nor of the astonishing fullness of substance and multitude of thoughts which have caused the Paradise Lost to be called the Book of Universal Knowledge. The heat of Milton's mind said Dr. Johnson, might be said to sublimate his learning and throw off into his work the spirit of science unmingled with its grosser parts. The truth of this remark is clearly seen upon a comparison of Milton's description of the creation, for example with corresponding passages in Sylvester's Divine Weeks and Works translated from the Huguenot poem Dubartas which was in some sense his original but the most heroic thing in Milton's heroic poem is Milton There are no strains in Paradise Lost so absorbing as those in which the poet breaks the strict epic bounds and speaks directly of himself as in the majestic lament over his own blindness and in the invocation to Urania which opens the third and seventh books Everywhere too one reads between the lines We think of the Dissolute Cavaliers as Milton himself undoubtedly was thinking of them when we read of the sons of Belial flown with insolence and wine or when the Puritan turns among the sweet landscapes of Eden to denounce Court Amours, Mixed Dance or Wanton Mask or Midnight Ball or Serenade which the star of lovers sings to his proud fare best quitted with disdain and we think of Milton among the triumphant royalists when we read of the Seraph Abdeel Faithful found among the Faithless Nor number nor example with him wrought to swerve from truth or change his constant mind though single From amidst them forth he passed long way through hostile scorn which he sustained superior nor of violence feared ought and with retorted scorn his back he turned on those proud towers to swift destruction doomed Paradise Regained and Sampson Agonists were published in 1671. The first of these treated in four books Christ's Temptation in the Wilderness a subject that had already been handled in the Spinsarian allegorical manner by Giles Fletcher a brother of the Purple Islander in his Christ's Victory and Triumph 1610 The superiority of Paradise lost to his sequel is not without significance. The Puritans were Old Testament men. Their God was the Hebrew Jehovah whose single divinity the Catholic mythology had overlaid with figures of the Sun, the Virgin Mary and the Saints. They identified themselves in thought with his chosen people with the militant theocracy of the Jews. Their sword was the sword of the Lord and of Gideon. To your tents, O Israel, was the cry of the London mob when the bishops were committed to the tower. And when the fog lifted on the morning of the Battle of Dunbar, Cromwell exclaimed Let God arise and let his enemies be scattered like as the sun rises, so shall they drive them away. Samson agonists, though Hebrew in theme and since spirit, was in form a Greek tragedy. It had chorus and semi-chorus and preserved the so-called dramatic unities, that is, the scene was unchanged and there were no intervals of time between the acts. In accordance with the rules of the Greek theater, but two speakers appeared upon the stage at once and there was no violent action. The death of Samson is related by a messenger. Milton's reason for the choice of this subject is obvious. He himself was Samson, shorn of his strength, blind and alone among enemies, given over to the unjust tribunals under change of times and condemnation of the ungrateful multitude. As Milton grew older, he discarded more and more the graces of poetry and relied purely upon the structure and the thought. In Paradise Lost, although there is little resemblance to Elizabethan work, such as one notices in Comus and the Christmas hymn, yet the style is rich, especially in the earlier books. But in Paradise Regained, it is severe to bareness and in Samson even to ruggedness. Like Michelangelo, with whose genius he had much in common, Milton became impatient of finish or of mere beauty. He blocked out his work in masses, left rough places and surfaces not filled in and inclined to express his meaning by a symbol rather than work it out in detail. It was a part of his austerity, his increasing preference for structural over decorative methods to give up his rhyme for blank verse. His latest poem, Samson Agonist's A Metrical Study of the Highest, Interest. Milton was not quite alone among the poets of his time in espousing the popular cause. Andrew Marvell, who was his assistant in the Latin secretarieship and sat in Parliament for Hull after the Restoration, was a good Republican and wrote a fine, Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's return from Ireland. There was also a rare imaginative quality in his Song of the Exiles in Bermuda, Thoughts in a Garden, and The Girl Describes Her Fawn. George Wither, who was imprisoned for his satires, also took the side of the Parliament, but there is little that is distinctively Puritan in his poetry. End of Chapter 4 Recording by Colinda in Lunenburg, Germany on February 15th, 2009. Part 1, Chapter 5 of a Brief History of English and American Literature. This lipo box recording is in the public domain. Recording by Colinda. A Brief History of English and American Literature by Henry A. Beers. Part 1, Chapter 5 From the Restoration to the Death of Pope, 1660 to 1744. The Stuart Restoration was a period of descent from poetry to prose, from passion and imagination to wit and understanding. The serious, exalted mood of the Civil War and the Commonwealth had spent itself and issued in disillusion. There followed a generation of wits, logical, skeptical and prosaic, without earnestness, as without principle. The characteristic literature of such a time is criticism, satire and burlesque, and such indeed continued to be the course of English literary history for a century after the return of the stewards. The age was not a stupid one, but one of active inquiry. The Royal Society for the Cultivation of the Natural Sciences was founded in 1662. There were able divines in the pulpit and at the university, Barrow, Tillitson, Stilling Fleet, South and others, scholars like Bentley, historians like Clarendon and Bernay, scientists like Boyle and Newton, philosophers like Hobbes and Locke. But of poetry in any high sense of the word, there was little between the time of Milton and the time of Goldsmith and Gray. The English writers of this period were strongly influenced by the contemporary literature of France, by the comedies of Molière and the tragedies of Cornet and Racine, and the satires, epistles and versified essays of Boileau. Many of the restoration writers, Waller, Cowley, Davenant, Witcherly, Villiers and others had been in France during the exile and brought back with them French tastes. John Dryden, 1631 to 1700, who is the great literary figure of his generation, has been called the first of the moderns. From the reign of Charles II, indeed, we may date the beginnings of modern English life. What we call society was forming, the town, the London world. Coffee, which makes the politician wise, has just been introduced and the ordinaries of Ben Johnson's time gave way to coffee houses, like wills and buttons, which became the headquarters of literary and political gossip. The two great English parties, as we know them today, were organized. The words Wig and Tory date from this reign. French etiquette and fashions came in and French phrases of convenience, such as coup de grâce, bel esprit, etc., began to appear in English prose. Literature became intensely urban and partisan. It reflected city life, the disputes of faction, and the personal quarrels of authors. The politics of the great rebellion had been of heroic proportions and found fitting expression in song, but in the revolution of 1688 the issues were constitutional and to be settled by the arguments of lawyers. Measures were in question rather than principles, and there was little inspiration to the poet and exclusion bills and acts of settlement. The poet and society in the reign of Charles II and James II were shockingly disillute, and in literature, as in life, the reaction against Puritanism went to great extremes. The social life of the time is faithfully reflected in the diary of Samuel Pepis. He was a simple-minded man, the son of a London tailor, and became himself secretary to the Admiralty. His diary was kept in Cypher and published only in 1825. Being written for his own eye, it is singularly outspoken, and its naive, gossipy, confidential tone makes it a most diverting book, as it is historically a most valuable one. Perhaps the most popular book of its time was Samuel Butler's Huda Brass 1663-64, a burlesque romance in ridicule of the Puritans. The king carried a copy of it in his pocket, and Pepis testifies that it was quoted and praised on all sides. Ridicule of the Puritans was nothing new, Zeal of the Land Busy in Ben Johnson's Bartholomew Fair is an early instance of the kind. There was nothing laughable about the earnestness of men like Cromwell, Milton, Algernon Sidney, and Sir Henry Vane, but even the French Revolution had its humours, and as the English Puritan Revolution gathered head and the extremer secretaries pressed to the front, Quakers, New Lights, Fifth Monarchy Men, Ranters, etc., its grotesque sides came uppermost. Butler's hero is a presbyterian justice of the peace, who sallies forth with his secretary Ralfo, an independent and anabaptist, like Don Quixote with Sancho Panza to suppress May games and bear-baitings. Macaulay, it will be remembered, said that the Puritans disapproved of bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. The humour of Huda Brass is not of the finest. The knight and squire are discomfited in broadly comic adventures, and as the Puritans, they are discomfited in broadly comic adventures, hardly removed from the rough physical droleries of a pantomime or a circus. The deep heart laughter of Cervantes, the pathos on which his humour rests, is of course not to be looked for in Butler. But he had a wit of a sharp, logical kind, and his style surprises with all manner of verbal antics. He is almost as great a phrase-maker as Pope, though in a coarser kind. His verse is a smart doggerel, and his poem has furnished many stock sayings, as for example, to strange what difference there can be Twix Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Huda Brass had many imitators, not the least successful of whom was the American John Trumbull in his revolutionary satire Muffingle, some couplets of which are generally quoted as butlers, as for example, No man ere felt the halter draw with good opinion of the law. The rebound against Puritanism is seen no less plainly in the drama of the restoration, and the stage now took vengeance for its enforced silence under the protectorate. Two theaters were opened under the patronage respectively of the king and of his brother, the Duke of York. The manager of the latter, Sir William Davenant, who had fought on the king's side, been knighted for his services, escaped to France, and was afterward captured and imprisoned in England for two years, had managed to evade the law against stage plays as early as 1656 by presenting his Siege of Rhodes as an opera instrumental music and dialogue in recitative, after a fashion newly sprung up in Italy. This he brought out again in 1661 with the dialogue recast into rhyming couplets in the French fashion. Moveable painted scenery was now introduced from France, and actresses took the female parts formally played by boys. This last innovation was said to be at the request of the king, one of whose mistresses, the famous Nel Gwin, was the favorite actress at the king's theater. Upon the stage, thus reconstructed, the so-called classical rules of the French theater were followed, at least in theory. The Louis XIV writers were not purely creative like Shakespeare and his contemporaries in England, but critical and self-conscious. The academy had been formed in 1636 for the preservation of the purity of the French language, and discussion abounded on the principles and methods of literary art. Cornet not only wrote tragedies, but essays on tragedy, and one in particular on the three unities. Dryden followed his example in his essay of dramatic poetry, in which he treated of the unities and argued for the use of rhyme and tragedy in preference to blank verse. His own practice varied. Most of his tragedies were written in rhyme, but in the best of them, all for love, 1678, founded on Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra, he returned to blank verse. One of the principles of the classical school was to keep comedy and tragedy distinct. The tragic dramatists of the restoration, Dryden, Howard, Settle, Crown, Lee, and others, composed what they called heroic plays, such as The Indian Emperor, The Conquest of Granada, The Duke of Lerma, The Empress of Morocco, The Destruction of Jerusalem, Nero, and The Rival Queens. The titles of these pieces indicate their character. Their heroes were great historic personages. Subject and treatment were alike remote from nature and real life. The diction was stilted and artificial, and Pompey's declamation took the place of action and genuine passion. The tragedies of Racine seemed chill to an Englishman brought up on Shakespeare, but to see how great an artist Racine was, in his own somewhat narrow way, one has but to compare his Fedre, or Iphigenie, with Dryden's ranting tragedy of tyrannic love. These bombastic heroic plays were made the subject of a capital burlesque, the rehearsal, by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, acted in 1671 at the King's Theatre. The indebtedness of the English stage to the French did not stop with a general adoption of its dramatic methods, but extended to direct imitation and translation. Dryden's comedy and evening's love was adapted from Thomas Cornice, the late Austro-Log, and his Sir Martin Marrall, from Molière's Les Tordis. Shadwell borrowed his miser from Molière, and Ottway made versions of Racine's Berenice and Molière's Four Berries d'Escapin, which released Country Wife and Plain Dealer, although not translations were based in a sense upon Molière's École des Femmes and Le Missantrope. The only one of the tragic dramatists of the restoration who prolonged this stage was Ottway, whose Venice preserved, written in blank verse, still keeps the boards. There are fine passages in Dryden's heroic plays, passages weighty in thought and nobly sonorous in language. There is one great scene between Antony and Vintidius in his All for Love, and one at least of his comedies, the Spanish Friar, is skillfully constructed. But his nature was not pliable enough for the drama, and he acknowledged that in writing it was genius. In sharp contrast with these heroic plays was the comic drama of the restoration. The plays of Wicherly, Kiligrew, Etheridge, Farquhar, Van Brug, Congrieve and others, plays like the Country Wife, the Parsons Wedding, She Would If She Could, the Bose Stratagem, the Relapse and The Way of the World. These were in prose and represented the gay world and the surface of fashionable life. This intrigue was their constantly recurring theme. Some of them were written expressly and ridicule of the Puritans. Such was the committee of Dryden's brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard, the hero of which is a distressed gentleman and the villain, a London sit and president of the committee appointed by Parliament to sit upon the sequestration of the estates of royalists. Such were also the roundheads and the banished cavaliers of Mrs. Afra Ben, who was a female spy in the service of a second at Antwerp and one of the coarsest of the restoration comedians. The profession of piety had become so disagreeable that a shameless cynicism was now considered the mark of a gentleman. The ideal hero of Witcher Lee or Etheridge was the witty young profligate who had seen life and learned to disbelieve in virtue. His highest qualities were a contempt for Kant, physical courage, a sort of spin-thrift generosity and a good-natured readiness to have a friend in a quarrel or in a moor. Virtue was bourgeois, reserved for London tradespeople. A man must be either a rake or a hypocrite. The gentlemen were rakes, the city people were hypocrites. Their wives, however, were all in love with the gentleman and it was the proper thing to seduce them and to borrow their husband's money. For the first and last time, perhaps, in the history of the English drama, the sympathy of the audience was deliberately sought by the Witcher and the rogue and the laugh turned against the dishonored husband and the honest man. Contrast this with Shakespeare's Mary Wives of Windsor. The women were represented as worse than the men, scheming, ignorant and corrupt. The dialogue and the best of these plays was easy, lively and witty. The situations in some of them audacious almost beyond belief. Under a thin varnish of good-breeding the sentiments and manners were really brutal. The loosest scallants of Beaumont and Fletcher's Theatre retain a fineness of feeling and that polytest occur, which marks the gentleman. They are poetic creatures and own a capacity for romantic passion. But the manlies and homers of the Restoration Comedy have a prosaic, cold-blooded profligacy that disgusts. Charles Lamb, in his ingenious essay on the artificial comedy of the last century, apologized for the Restoration Stage on the ground that it represented the morality in which the ordinary laws of morality had no application. But Macaulay answered truly that at no time has the stage been closer in its imitation of real life. The theatre of Wittorley and Etheridge was but the counterpart of that social condition which we read of in Pepe's Diary and in the memoirs of the Chevalier de Camon. This prose comedy of manners was not indeed artificial at all in the sense in which the contemporary tragedy, the heroic play, was artificial. It was, on the contrary, far more natural and intellectually of much higher value. In 1698, Jeremy Collier, a non-juring Jacobite clergyman, published his short view of the immorality and profaneness of the English stage which did much toward reforming the practice of the dramatists. The formal characteristics without the immorality of the Restoration Comedy reappeared briefly in Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer 1772 and Sheridan's Rival, School for Scandal and Critic 1775 to 79. Our last strictly classical comedies. None of this school of English comedians approached their model Molière. He excelled his imitators not only in his French urbanity, the polished Witt and delicate grace of his style, but in the dexterous unfolding of his plot and in the wisdom and truth of his criticism of life and his insight into character. It is a symptom of the false taste of the age that Shakespeare's plays were rewritten for the Restoration Stage. Davenant made new versions of Macbeth and Julius Caesar, substituting rhyme for blank verse. In conjunction with Dryden he altered the Tempest, complicating the intrigue by the introduction of a male counterpart to Miranda, a youth who had never seen a woman. Shadwell improved Timon of Athens and Nahum Tate changed a new fifth act to King Lear which turned the play into a comedy. In the prologue to his doctored version of Troilus and Cressida Dryden made the ghost of Shakespeare speak of himself as untaught, unpracticed in a barbarous age. Thomas Reimer, whom Pope pronounced a good critic, was very severe upon Shakespeare in his remarks on the tragedies of the last age and in his short view of tragedy 1693 he said, The neighing of a horse or in the growling of a mastiff there is more humanity than many times in the tragical flights of Shakespeare. To Deptford by Water writes Pepis in his diary for August 1666 reading Othello, more of Venice which I ever heard to fore esteemed a mighty good play but having so lately read the adventures of five hours it seems a mean thing. In undramatic poetry the new school both in England and in France took its point of departure in a reform against the extravagances of the marinists or conceited poets, specially represented in England by Dunn and Cowley. The new poets both in their theory and practice insisted upon correctness, clearness, polish, moderation and good sense. Boillo's La Poetique 1673 inspired by Horace's Ars Poetica was a treatise inverse upon the rules of correct composition and it gave the law criticism for over a century not only in France but in Germany and England. It gave English poetry a didactic turn and started the fashion of writing critical essays in rhyming couplets. The Earl of Mulgrave published two poems of this kind, an essay on satire and an essay on poetry. The Earl of Roscommon who, said Addison, makes even rules a noble poetry made a metrical version of Horace's Ars Poetica and wrote an original essay on translated verse. Of the same kind were Addison's Epistle to Sacravel entitled An Account of the Greatest English Poets and Pope's Essay on Criticism 1711 which was nothing more than versified maxims of rhetoric put with Pope's usual point and brilliancy. The classicism of the 18th century it has been said was a classicism in red heels and a parawig. It was Latin rather than Greek. It turned to the least imaginative side of Latin literature and found its models not in Virgil, Catullus and Lucretius but in the satires, epistles and didactic pieces of juvenile, Horace, and Perseus. The chosen medium of the new poetry was the heroic couplet. This had of course been used before by English poets as far back as Chaucer. The greater part of the Canterbury Tales was written in heroic couplets. But now a new strength and precision were given to the familiar measure by imprisoning the sense within the limit of the couplet and by treating each line as also a unit in itself. Edmund Waller had written verse of this kind as early as the reign of Charles I. He, said Dryden, first showed us to conclude the sense most commonly in districts which in the verse of those before him runs on for so many lines together that the reader is out of breath to overtake it. Sir John Denham also in his Coopers Hill 1643 had written such a verse as this. Oh, could I flow like thee and make thy stream my great example as it is my theme, though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull, strong without rage, without or flowing full. Here we have the regular flow and the nice balance between the first and second member of each couplet and the first and second part of each line which characterized the verse of Dryden and Pope. Waller was smooth, but Dryden taught us to join the varying verse, the full resounding line, the long resounding march and energy divine. Thus wrote Pope, using for the nonce the triplet and Alexandrin by which Dryden frequently varied the couplet. Pope himself added a greater neatness and polish to Dryden's verse and brought the system to such monotonous perfection that he made poetry a mere mechanic art. The lyrical poetry of this generation was almost entirely worthless. The disillet wits of Charles II's court, Sedley, Rochester, Sackville and the mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease threw off a few amateury trifles, but the age was not spontaneous or sincere enough for genuine song. Cowley introduced the penderic ode, a highly artificial form of the lyric in which the language was tortured into a kind of spurious grandeur and the meter teased into a sound and fury signifying nothing. Cowley's penderics were filled with something which passed through the fire but has now utterly gone out. Nevertheless the fashion spread and he who could do nothing else, said Dr. Johnson could write like Pindar. The best of these odes was Dryden's famous Alexander's Feast written for a celebration of Saint Cecilia's Day by a musical club. To this same fashion also we owe Grey's Two Fine Odes the Progress of Poesy and The Bard written a half century later. He was not so much a great poet as a solid thinker, with a splendid mastery of expression who used his energetic verse as a vehicle for political argument in satire. His first noteworthy poem, Anrus Mirabilis 1667 was a narrative of the public events of the year 1666, namely the Dutch war and the great fire of London. The subject of Absalom in Ahetophel the first part of which appeared in 1681 was the alleged plot of the the Earl of Shaftesbury to defeat the succession of the Duke of York afterward James II by securing the throne to Monmouth, a natural son of Charles II. The parallel afforded by the story of Absalom's revolt against David was wrought out by Dryden with admirable ingenuity and keeping. He was at his best in satirical character sketches such as the brilliant portraits in his poem of Shaftesbury as the false counselor Ahetophel and of the Duke of Buckingham as Zimri. The latter was Dryden's reply to the rehearsal. Absalom in Ahetophel was followed by the medal, a continuation of the same subject, and Mac Flecknow a personal onslaught on the true blue Protestant poet Thomas Shadwell, a political and literary foe of Dryden. Flecknow, an obscure Irish poet tester, being about to retire from the throne of Dunstam resolved to settle the succession upon his son Shadwell, whose claims to the inheritance are vigorously asserted. The rest to some faint meaning make pretense, but Shadwell never deviates into sense. The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull with this prophetic blessing, be thou dull. Dryden is our first great satirist. The formal satire had been written in the reign of Elizabeth by Dun and by Joseph Hall, Bishop of Exeter, and subsequently by Marston the dramatist, by Wither, Marvel and others. But all of these failed through an over-violence of language and a purpose too pronouncedly moral. They had no lightness of touch, no irony and mischief. They bore down too hard, imitated juvenile, and lashed English society in terms befitting the corruption of Imperial Rome. They denounced, instructed, preached, did everything but satirize. The satirist must raise a laugh. Dunn and Hall abused men in classes, priests were worldly, lawyers greedy, curdiers obsequious, etc. But the easy scorn of Dryden and the delightful malice of Pope gave a pungent personal interest to their sarcasm, infinitely more effective than these common places of satire. Dryden was as happy in controversy as in satire and as unexcelled in the power to reason and verse. His religio laizzi, 1682, was a poem in defense of the English church. But when James II came to the throne Dryden turned Catholic and wrote The Hind and Panther, 1687 to vindicate his new belief. Dryden had the misfortune to be dependent upon royal patronage and upon a corrupt stage. He sold his pen to the court, and in his comedies he was heavily and deliberately lewd, a sin which he afterward acknowledged and regretted. Milton's soul was like a star and dwelt apart, but Dryden wrote for the trampling multitude. He had a coarseness of moral fiber, but was not malignant in his satire, being of a large, careless and forgetting nature. He had that masculine, enduring cast of mind which gathers heat and clearness from motion and grows better with age. His fables, modernizations from Chaucer and translations from Boccaccio, written the year before he died, are among his best works. Dryden is also our first critic of any importance. His critical essays were mostly written as prefaces or dedications to his poems and plays. But his essay on dramatic poetry, which Dr. Johnson called our first regular and valuable treatise on the art of writing, was in the shape of a platonic dialogue. When not mislead by the French classicism of his day, Dryden was an admirable critic, full of penetration and sound sense. He was the earliest writer, too, of modern literary prose. If the imitation of French models was an injury to poetry, it was a benefit to prose. The best modern prose is French, and it was the essayists of the Gallicized Restoration Age, Cowley, Sir William Temple and above all Dryden, who gave modern English prose that simplicity, directness and colloquial air, which marks it off from the more artificial diction of Milton, Taylor and Brown. A few books whose shaping influences lay in the past belong by their date to this period. John Bunyan, a poor tinker, whose reading was almost wholly in the Bible and Fox's Book of Martyrs, imprisoned for twelve years in Bedford jail for preaching at Conventicles, wrote and in 1678 published his Pilgrim's Progress, the greatest of religious allegories. Bunyan's spiritual experiences were so real to him that they took visible, concrete shape in his imagination as men, women, cities, landscapes. It is the simplest, the most transparent of allegories. Unlike the Fairy Queen, the story of Pilgrim's Progress has no reason for existing apart from its inner meaning, and yet its reality is so vivid that children read of Vanity Fair and the sloth of Despond and Doubting Castle and the Valley of the Shadow of Death with the same belief with which they read of Crusoe's Cave or Aladdin's Palace. It is a long step from the Bedford tinker to the cultivated poet of Paradise Lost. They represent the polls 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 it once into circulation and not even 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. Dryden visited him in his retirement and asked Leif to turn it into rhyme and put it on the stages in opera. I said, Milton, good humoredly, you may tag my verses. And accordingly they appeared, duly tagged, in Dryden's operatic mask, the State of Innocence. In this startling conjunction we have the two ages in a nutshell. The Commonwealth was an epic, the Restoration and Opera. The literary period covered by the life of Pope, 1688 to 1744, is marked off in no distinct line from the generation before it. Taste continued to be governed by the precepts of Boileau and the French classical 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 to 1714 was still more a literature of the town and fashionable society than that of the Restoration had been. It was also closely involved with party struggles of Whig and Tory and the ableist pens on either side were taken into alliance by the political leaders. Swift was in high favour with the Tory ministers, Oxford and Bowlingbroke and his pamphlets, the Public Spirit of the Whigs and the Conduct of the Allies were rewarded with the Deenery of St. Patrick's Dublin. Addison became Secretary of State under a Whig Government. Pryor was in the Diplomatic Service. Daniel Defoe, 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 Whigside held various public offices such as Commissioner of Stamps and Commissioner for Forfeited Estates and Sadden 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 proflicacy 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 bookseller 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 paid hack writers, penny aligners, who lived from hand to mouth and did small literary jobs to order. Many of these inhabited Grubb Street and their lampoons against Pope and others of their more successful rivals called out Popes, Dunciad or Epic of the Dunces by way of retaliation. The politics of the time were sorted and consisted mainly of an ignoble scramble for office. The wigs were fighting to maintain the act of succession in favor of the House of Hanover and the Tories were secretly intriguing with the exiled stewards. Many of the leaders, such as the great Wig 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 Stern were worldly in their lives and immoral in their writings and were practically unbelievers. The growing religiousism 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 Bowlingbroke, 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 is little to show it in his writings and the underlying thought of his famous essay on man was furnished him by Bowlingbroke. The old-hearted Chesterfield to his son were accepted as a manual of conduct and the Roche Foucauld's cynical maxims were quoted as authority on life and human nature. Said Swift, As Roche Foucauld 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. He was overly 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 Virgil and so Pope translated Homer. The throne of the dunces which Dryden had conferred upon Shadwell, Pope in his duncead passed on to two of his own literary foes, Theobald and Collie Sibber. 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 and amber are now quite unknown. But although we have to read it with notes to get the point of its conclusions, 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. The sketch of Addison who had offended Pope by praising a rival translation of Homer as Atticus is as brilliant as anything 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 Peter's cutting a lock of hair from the head of Mrs. Arabella firmer. Boileau in his Lutheran had treated with the same apectignity a dispute over the placing of the reading desk in a church. Pope was the Homer of the Drawing Room, the Boudoir, the Tea Earn, the Ombre Party, the Sedan Share, the Parrot Cage, and the Lap Dogs. This poem, in its sparkle and airy grace, is the top most blossom of a highly artificial society the quintessence of whatever poetry was possible in those teacup times of hood and hoop and when the patch was worn with whose decorative features at least the recent queen and lady this generation familiar. It may be said of it as Thackeray said of Gay's Pastorals, it is to poetry what charming little Dresden China figures are to sculpture, graceful, minnican, fantastic with a certain beauty always accompanying them. The Rape of the Lock perhaps stops short of beauty but it attains elegance and prettiness and a supreme degree. In imitation of the gods and goddesses in the Iliad who is for or against the human characters Pope introduces the sylphs of the Rossacrucian philosophy. We may measure the distance between imagination and fancy if we will compare these little filigree creatures with Shakespeare'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 margin of the sea to dance their ringlets of the whispering wind. Very different were the offices of Pope's phase. 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 often dreams invention we bestow to change a flounce or add a furbeloe. 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 passion he was altogether impotent. His Windsor forests 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 a 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 antithesis, paraphrasis 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 grain than Dryden's. His great art was the art of putting things. He is more quoted than any other English poet but Shakespeare. He struck the average intelligence, the common sense of English readers and furnished it with neat, portable formulas so that it could no longer need to vent its observation in mangled terms but could pour itself out compactly, artistically in little ready made molds. But his 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 1st, 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 passing humours 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 the closets and libraries, schools and colleges to dwell in clubs and assemblies 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 lectures and sometimes he preaches and in his Saturday 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 Merza, an Oriental Allegory of Human Life. The adoption of this slight 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 DeCoverly 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 stern or lam. 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 the Tempest who, pleased the Almighty's orders to perform, riots in the whirlwind and directs the storm. His stately classical tragedy, Cato, which was acted at Drury Lane Theatre in 1712 with immense applause, was pronounced by Dr. Johnson unquestionably the noblest production of Addison's genius. It is, notwithstanding, cold and tedious as a whole, though it has some fine declamatory passages, in particular, the soliloquy of Cato in the Fifth Act. It must be so, play-doh, thou reasonest well, etc. 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 denary of St. Patrick's and retired to Ireland to die like a poison rat in a hole. His life was made tragical by the forecast of the madness which finally overtook him. The stage darkened, 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 Seva 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 Atalb, 1704, a satire on religious differences. But his great work was Gulliver's Travel, 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 Winems as they read Robinson Crusoe as stories of wonderful adventure. Swift had all of Defoe's realism, his power of giving verisimilitude to his narrative by the invention of a vast number of small, exact, consistent details. But underneath its fairy tales, Gulliver's Travel 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 looking first through one end of the telescope and then through the other, that human greatness, goodness, beauty disappear if the scale be altered a little. If men were six inches high instead of six feet such as the logic of his tale their wars, governments, science, religion all their institutions 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 their faces, hairs, excretances 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 passed 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 temporarily, proving that he was dead and remonstrating 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. Swift delighted to dwell upon the lowest bodily functions of human nature. He saw bloodshot, said Thackeray.