Halleck's New English Literature

[Illustration: VISIT OF MILTON TO THE BLIND GALILEO AT THE VILLA
D'ARCETRI NEAR FLORENCE IN 1638. From the painting by T. Lessi.]

In 1638, when he was in his thirtieth year, he determined to broaden his views by travel. He went to Italy, which the Englishmen of his day still regarded as the home of art, culture, and song. After about fifteen months abroad, hearing that his countrymen were on the verge of civil war, he returned home to play his part in the mighty tragedy of the times.

Milton's "Left Hand."—In 1642 the Civil War broke out between the Royalists and the Puritans. He took sides in the struggle for liberty, not with his sword, but with his pen. During this time he wrote little but prose. He regretted that the necessity of the time demanded prose, in the writing of which, he says, "I have the use, as I may account it, but of my left hand."

With that "left hand" he wrote much prose. There is one common quality running through all his prose works, although they treat of the most varied subjects. Every one of these works strikes a blow for fuller liberty in some direction,—for more liberty in church, in state, and in home relations, for the freedom of expressing opinions, and for a system of education which should break away from the leading strings of the inferior methods of the past. His greatest prose work is the Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing.

Much of his prose is poetic and adorned with figures of rhetoric. He frequently follows the Latin order, and inverts his sentences, which are often unreasonably long. Sometimes his "left hand" astonishes us by slinking mud at his opponents, and we eagerly await the loosing of the right hand which was to give us Paradise Lost.

His Blindness.—The English government from 1649 to 1660 is known as
the Commonwealth. The two most striking figures of the time were
Oliver Cromwell, who in 1653 was styled the Lord Protector, and John
Milton, who was the Secretary for Foreign Tongues.

[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF MILTON'S SIGNATURE IN THE ELEVENTH YEAR
OF HIS BLINDNESS.From his application to wed Elizabeth Minshull.
Feb. 11, 1663.]

One of the greatest of European scholars, a professor at Leyden, named Salmasius, had written a book attacking the Commonwealth and upholding the late king. The Council requested Milton to write a fitting answer. As his eyes were already failing him, he was warned to rest them; but he said that he would willingly sacrifice his eyesight on the altar of liberty. He accordingly wrote in reply his Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, a Latin work, which was published in 1651. This effort cost him his eyesight. In 1652, at the age of forty-three, he was totally blind. In his Paradise Lost, he thus alludes to his affliction:—

      "Thus with the year
  Seasons return; but not to me returns
  Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
  Or sight of vernal bloom or summer's rose,
  Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
  But clouds instead and ever-during dark
  Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
  Cut off."

Life after the Restoration.—In 1660, when Charles II. was made king, the leaders of the Commonwealth had to flee for their lives. Some went to America for safety while others were caught and executed. The body of Cromwell was taken from its grave in Westminster Abbey, suspended from the gallows and left to dangle there. Milton was concealed by a friend until the worst of the storm had blown over. Then some influential friends interceded for him, and his blindness probably won him sympathy.

[Illustration: COMUS TITLE PAGE.]

During his old age his literary work was largely dependent on the kindness of friends, who read to him, and acted as his amanuenses. His ideas of woman having been formed in the light of the old dispensation, he had not given his three daughters such an education as might have led them to take a sympathetic interest in his work. They accordingly resented his calling on them for help.

During this period of his life, when he was totally blind, he wrote Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. He died in 1674, and was buried beside his father in the chancel of St. Giles, Cripplegate, London.

Minor Poems.—In 1629, while Milton was a student at Cambridge, and only twenty-one years old, he wrote a fine lyrical poem, entitled On the Morning of Christ's Nativity. These 244 lines of verse show that he did not need to be taught the melody of song any more than a young nightingale.

Four remarkable poems were written during his years of studious leisure at Horton,—L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas. L'Allegro describes the charms of a merry social life, and Il Penseroso voices the quiet but deep enjoyment of the scholar in retirement. These two poems have been universal favourites.

Comus is a species of dramatic composition known as a Masque, and it is the greatest of its class. It far surpassess any work of a similar kind by Ben Jonson, that prolific writer of Masques. Some critics, like Taine and Saintsbury, consider Comus the finest of Milton's productions. Its 1023 lines can soon be read; and there are few poems of equal length that will better repay careful reading.

Comus is an immortal apotheosis of virtue. While in Geneva in 1639, Milton was asked for his autograph and an expression of sentiment. He chose the closing lines of Comus:—

[Illustration: MILTON'S MOTTO FROM COMUS, WITH AUTOGRAPH. Written in an album at Geneva.]

Lycidas, one of the world's great elegies, was written on the death of Milton's classmate, Edward King. Mark Pattison, one of Milton's biographers, says: "In Lycidas we have reached the high-water mark of English poesy and of Milton's own production."

He is one of the four greatest English sonnet writers. Shakespeare alone surpasses him in this field. Milton numbers among his pupils Wordsworth and Keats, whose sonnets rank next in merit.

Paradise Lost; Its Inception and Dramatic Plan.—Cambridge University has a list, written by Milton before he was thirty-five, of about one hundred possible subjects for the great poem which he felt it was his life's mission to give to the world. He once thought of selecting Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table; but his final choice was Paradise Lost, which stands first on this special list. There are in addition four separate drafts of the way in which he thought this subject should be treated. This proves that the great work of a man like; Milton was planned while he was young. It is possible that he may even have written a very small part of the poem earlier than the time commonly assigned.

All four drafts show that his early intention was to make the poem a drama, a gigantic Miracle play. The closing of the theaters and the prejudice felt against them during the days of Puritan ascendancy may have influenced Milton to forsake the dramatic for the epic form, but he seems never to have shared the common prejudice against the drama and the stage. His sonnet on Shakespeare shows in what estimation he held that dramatist.

Subject Matter and Form.—About 1658, when Milton was a widower, living alone with his three daughters, he began, in total blindness, to dictate his Paradise Lost, sometimes relying on them but more often on any kind friend who might assist him. The manuscript accordingly shows a variety of handwriting. The work was published in 1667, after some trouble with a narrow-minded censor who had doubts about granting a license.

The subject matter can be best given in Milton's own lines at the beginning of the poem:—

  "Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit
  Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
  Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
  With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
  Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
  Sing, Heavenly Muse…"

The poem treats of Satan's revolt in heaven, of his conflict with the Almighty, and banishment with all the rebellious angels. Their new home in the land of fire and endless pain is described with such a gigantic grasp of the imagination, that the conception has colored all succeeding theology.

The action proceeds with a council of the fallen angels to devise means for alleviating their condition and annoying the Almighty. They decide to strike him through his child, and they plot the fall of man. In short, Paradise Lost is an intensely dramatic story of the loss of Eden. The greatest actors that ever sprang from a poet's brain appear before us on the stage, which is at one time the sulphurous pit of hell, at another the bright plains of heaven, and at another the Elysium of our first parents.

In form the poem is an epic in twelve books, containing a total of 10,565 lines. It is written in blank verse of wonderful melody and variety.

Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes.—After finishing Paradise Lost, Milton wrote two more poems, which he published in 1671. Paradise Regained is in great part a paraphrase of the first eleven verses of the fourth chapters of St. Matthew. The poem is in four books of blank verse and contains 2070 lines. Although it is written with great art and finish, Paradise Regained shows a falling off in Milton's genius. There is less ornament and less to arouse human interest.

Samson Agonistes (Samson the Struggler) is a tragedy containing 1758 lines, based on the sixteenth chapter of Judges. This poem, modeled after the Greek drama, is hampered by a strict observance of the dramatic unities. It is vastly inferior to the Paradise Lost. Samson Agonistes contains scarcely any of the glorious imagery of Milton's earlier poems. It has been called "the most unadorned poem that can be found."

CHARACTERISTICS OF MILTON'S POETRY

Variety in his Early Work.—A line in Lycidas says:—

"He touched the tender stops of various quills,"

and this may be said of Milton. His early poems show great variety. There are the dirge notes in Lycidas; the sights, sounds, and odors of the country, in L'Allegro; the delights of "the studious cloister's pale," in Il Penseroso; the impelling presence of his "great Task-Master," in the sonnets.

Although Milton is noted for his seriousness and sublimity, we must not be blind to the fact that his minor poems show great delicacy of touch. The epilogue of the Spirit at the end of Comus is an instance of exquisite airy fancy passing into noble imagination at the close. In 1638 Sir Henry Wotton wrote to Milton this intelligent criticism of Comus: "I should much commend the tragical part, if the lyrical did not ravish me with a certain Doric delicacy in your Songs and Odes, whereunto I must plainly confess to have seen yet nothing parallel in our language Ipsa mollities."

Limitations.—In giving attention to Milton's variety, we should not forget that when we judge him by Elizabethan standards his limitations are apparent. As varied as are his excellences, his range is far narrower than Shakespeare's. He has little sense of humor and less sympathy with human life than either Shakespeare or Burns. Milton became acquainted with flowers through the medium of a book before he noticed them in the fields. Consequently, in speaking of flowers and birds, he sometimes makes those mistakes to which the bookish man is more prone than the child who first hears the story of Nature from her own lips. Unlike Shakespeare and Burns, Milton had the misfortune to spend his childhood in a large city. Again, while increasing age seemed to impose no limitations on Shakespeare's genius, his touch being as delicate in The Tempest as in his first plays, Milton's style, on the other hand, grew frigid and devoid of imagery toward the end of his life.

Sublimity.—The most striking characteristic of Milton's poetry is sublimity, which consists, first, in the subject matter. In the opening lines of Paradise Lost he speaks of his "adventurous song"—

  "That with no middle flight intends to soar
  Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues
  Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme."

Milton succeeded in his intention. The English language has not another poem that approaches Paradise Lost in sustained sublimity.

In the second place, we must note the sublimity of treatment. Milton's own mind was cast in a sublime mold. This quality of mind is evident even in his figures of rhetoric. The Milky Way appears to him as the royal highway to heaven:—

"A broad and ample road, whose dust is gold,
And pavement stars."[3]

When Death and Satan meet, Milton wishes the horror of the scene to manifest something of the sublime. What other poet could, in fewer words, have conveyed a stronger impression of the effect of the frown of those powers?

"So frowned the mighty combatants, that Hell
Grew darker at their frown."[4]

George Saintsbury's verdict is approved by the majority of the greatest modern critics of Milton: "In loftiness—sublimity of thought, and majesty of expression, both sustained at almost superhuman pitch, he has no superior, and no rival except Dante."

Mastery of Verse.—Milton's verse, especially in Paradise Lost, is such a symphony of combined rhythm, poetic expression, and thought; it is so harmonious, so varied, and yet so apparently simple in its complexity, that it has never been surpassed in kind.

His mastery of rhythm is not so evident in a single line as in a group of lines. The first sentence in Paradise Lost contains sixteen lines, and yet the rhythm, the pauses, and the thought are so combined as to make oral reading easy and the meaning apparent. The conception of the music of the spheres in their complex orbits finds some analogy in the harmony of the combined rhythmical units of his verse.

Denied the use of his eyes as a guide to the form of his later verse, he must have repeated aloud these groups of lines and changed them until their cadence satisfied his remarkably musical ear. Lines like these show the melody of which this verse is capable:—

  "Heaven opened wide
  Her ever-during gates, harmonious sound
  On golden hinges moving."[5]

To begin with, he had, like Shakespeare and Keats an instinctive feeling for the poetic value of words and phrases. Milton's early poems abound in such poetic expressions as "the frolic wind," "the slumbring morn," "linkèd sweetness," "looks commercing with the skies," "dewy-feathered sleep," "the studious cloister's pale," "a dim religious light," the "silver lining" of the cloud, "west winds with musky wing," "the laureate hearse where Lycid lies." His poetic instinct enabled him to take common prosaic words and, by merely changing the position of the adjective, transmute them into imperishable verse. His "darkness visible" and "human face divine" are instances of this power.

[Illustration: MILTON DICTATING PARADISE LOST TO HIS DAUGHTERS. From the painting by Munkacsy.]

Twentieth century criticism is more fully recognizing the debt of subsequent poetic literature to Milton. Saintsbury writes:—

"Milton's influence is omnipresent in almost all later English poetry, and in not a little of later prose English literature. At first, at second, at third, hand, he has permeated almost all his successors."[6]

How the Paradise Lost has affected Thought.—Few people realize how profoundly this poem has influenced men's ideas of the hereafter. The conception of hell for a long time current was influenced by those pictures which Milton painted with darkness for his canvas and the lightning for his brush. Our pictures of Eden and of heaven have also felt his touch. Theology has often looked through Milton's imagination at the fall of the rebel angels and of man. Huxley says that the cosmogony which stubbornly resists the conclusions of science, is due rather to the account in Paradise Lost than to Genesis.

Many of Milton's expressions have become crystallized in modern thought. Among such we may mention:—

  "The mind is its own place, and in itself
  Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven,
  What matter where, if I be still the same?"[7]

"To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven."[8]

"…Who overcomes
By force hath overcome but half his foe."[9]

The effect of Paradise Lost on English thought is more a resultant of the entire poem than of detached quotations. L'Allegro and Il Penseroso have furnished as many current quotations as the whole of Paradise Lost.

The Embodiment of High Ideals.—-No poet has embodied in his verse higher ideals than Milton. When twenty-three, he wrote that he intended to use his talents—

"As ever in my great Taskmaster's eye."[10]

Milton's poetry is not universally popular. He deliberately selected his audience. These lines from Comus show to whom he wished to speak:—

  "Yet some there be that by due steps aspire
  To lay their just hands on that golden key
  That opes the palace of eternity.
  To such my errand is."

He kept his promise of writing something which speaks for liberty and for nobility of soul and which the world would not willingly let die. His ideals react on us and raise us higher than we were. To him we may say with Wordsworth:—

  "Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart;
  Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea,
  Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free." [11]

SUMMARY

The Puritan age was one of conflict in religious and political ideals.
James I. and Charles I. trampled on the laws and persecuted the
Puritans so rigorously that many of them fled to New England. Civil
war, in which the Puritans triumphed, was the result.

The Puritans, realizing that neither lands beyond the sea nor the New Learning could satisfy the aspirations of the soul, turned their attention to the life beyond. Bunyan's Pilgrim felt that the sole duty of life was to fight the forces of evil that would hold him captive in the City of Destruction and to travel in the straight and narrow path to the New Jerusalem. Life became a ceaseless battle of the right against the wrong. Hence, much of the literature in both poetry and prose is polemical. Milton's Paradise Lost is an epic of war between good and evil. The book that had the most influence in molding the thought of the time was the King James (1611) version of the Bible.

The minor prose deals with a variety of subjects. There are argumentative, philosophical, historical, biographical, and theological prose works; but only the fine presentation of nature and life in The Complete Angler interests the general reader of to-day, although the grandeur of Milton's Areopagitica, the humor of Thomas Fuller, the stately rhythmical prose of Sir Thomas Browne, and the imagery and variety of Jeremy Taylor deserve more readers.

Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is the masterpiece of Puritan prose, written in the simple, direct language of the 1611 version of the Bible. The book is a prose epic of the journey of the Puritan Christian from the City of Destruction to the New Jerusalem.

The Cavalier poets wrote much lyrical verse, mostly in lighter vein, but the religious poets strike a deeper note. The work of these minor poets is often a reflection of the Elizabethan lyrics of Donne and Jonson.

John Milton, who has the creative power of the Elizabethans, is the only great poet of the period. His greatest poems are L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Lycidas, Comus, and Paradise Lost. In sublimity of subject matter and cast of mind, in nobility of ideals, in expression of the conflict between good and evil, he is the fittest representative of the Puritan spirit in literature.

REFERENCES FOR FUTURE STUDY

HISTORICAL

Read the chapters on this period in Gardiner,[12] Walker, Cheney, Lingard, or Green. For the social life, see Traill, IV. The monumental history of this time has been written in eighteen volumes by Samuel Rawson Gardiner. His Oliver Cromwell, I vol., is excellent, as is also Frederick Harrison's Oliver Cromwell.

LITERARY

The Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. VII.

Courthope's History of English Poetry, Vol. III.

Masterman's The Age of Milton.

Saintsbury's A History of Elizabethan Literature (comes down to 1660).

Dowden's _Puritan and Anglican Studies in Literature.

Dictionary of National Biography_ (for lives of minor writers).

Froude's John Bunyan.

Brown's John Bunyan, his Life, Times, and Works.

Macaulay's Life of Bunyan in Encylopaedia Britannica or in his Essays.

Macaulay's Essay on Southey's Edition of the Pilgrim's Progress.

Masson's The Life of John Milton, Narrated in Connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary history of his Time (6 vols.).

Masson's Poetical Works of John Milton, 3 vols., contains excellent introductions and notes, and is the standard edition.

Raleigh's Milton.

Pattison's Milton. (E.M.L.)

Woodhull's The Epic of Paradise Lost.

Macaulay's Essay on Milton.

Lowell's Milton (in Among My Books).

Addison's criticisms on Milton, beginning in number 267 of The
Spectator, are suggestive.

FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER V:

[Footnote 1: See Milton's Sonnet: On the Late Massacre in Piedmont.]

[Footnote 2: Robert Herrick's Prayer to Ben Jonson.]

[Footnote 3: Paradise Lost, Book VII., lines 577-578.]

[Footnote 4: Ibid., Book II., lines 719-720.]

[Footnote 5: Paradise Lost, Book VII., lines 207-209.]

[Footnote 6: The Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. VII., p.156.]

[Footnote 7: Paradise Lost, Book I., line 254.]

[Footnote 8: Ibid, line 262.]

[Footnote 9: Ibid, line 649.]

[Footnote 10: Sonnet: On His Having Arrived at the Age of
Twenty-three.]

[Footnote 11: Milton: A Sonnet.]

[Footnote 12: For full titles, see list on p. 50.]

[Footnote 13: For full titles, see p.6.]

CHAPTER VI: FROM THE RESTORATION, 1660, TO THE PUBLICATION OF PAMELA, 1740

History of the Period.—This chapter opens with the Restoration of Charles II. (1660-1685) in 1660 and ends before the appearance, in 1740, of a new literary creation, Richardson's Pamela, the novel of domestic life and character. This period is often called the age of Dryden and Pope, the two chief poets of the time. When Oliver Cromwell died, the restoration of the monarchy was inevitable. The protest against the Puritanic view of life had become strong. Reaction always results when excessive restraint in any direction is removed.

During his exile, Charles had lived much in France and had become accustomed to the dissolute habits of the French court. The court of Charles II. was the most corrupt ever known in England. The Puritan virtues were laughed to scorn by the ribald courtiers who attended Charles II. John Evelyn (1620-1706) and Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) left diaries, which give interesting pictures of the times. The one by Pepys is especially vivid.

In 1663 Samuel Butler (1612-1680) published a famous satire, entitled Hudibras. Its object was to ridicule everything that savored of Puritanism. This satire became extremely popular in court circles, and was the favorite reading of the king.

[Illustration: SAMUEL BUTLER.]

Charles II. excluded all but Episcopalians from holding office, either in towns or in Parliament. Only those who sanctioned the Episcopal prayer book were allowed to preach. In order to keep England's friendship and to be able to look to her for assistance in time of war, Louis XIV. of France paid Charles II. £100,000 a year to act as a French agent. In this capacity, Charles II. began against Holland. From a position of commanding importance under Cromwell, England had become a third-rate power, a tail to a French kite.

James II. (1685-1688), who succeeded his brother, Charles II., undertook to suspend laws and to govern like a despot. He was driven out in the bloodless revolution of 1688 by his son-in-law, William (1689-1702), and his daughter Mary. William of Orange, who thus became king of England, was a prince of Holland. This revolution led to the Bill of Rights (1689), the "third pillar of the British Constitution," the two previous being Magna Charta and the Petition of Right. The foundations were now firmly laid for a strictly constitutional monarchy in England. From this time the king has been less important, sometimes only a mere figure-head.

This revolution, coupled with the increasing rivalry of France in trade and colonial expansion, altered the foreign policy of England. Holland was the head of the European coalition against France; and William III. was influential in having England join it. For the larger part of the eighteenth century there was intermittent war with France.

Under Anne (1702-1714) the Duke of Marlborough won many remarkable victories against France. The most worthy goal of French antagonism, expansion of trade, and displacement of the French in America and India, was not at this time clearly apparent.

Anne's successor was the Hanoverian Elector, George I. (1714-1727), a descendant of the daughter of James I., who had married a German prince. At the time of his accession, George I. was fifty-four years old and could speak no English. He seldom attended the meetings of his cabinet, since he could not understand the deliberations. This circumstance led to further decline of royal power, so that his successor, George II. (1727-1760), said: "Ministers are the king in this country."

The history of the rest of this period centers around the great prime minister, Robert Walpole, whose ministry lasted from 1715-1717 and from 1721-1742. His motto was, "Let sleeping dogs lie"; and he took good care to offend no one by proposing any reforms, either political or religious. "Every man has his price" was the succinct statement of his political philosophy; and he did not hesitate to secure by bribery the adoption of his measures in Parliament. He succeeded in three aims: (1) in making the house of Hanover so secure on the throne that it has not since been displaced, (2) in giving fresh impetus to trade and industry at home by reducing taxation, and (3) in strengthening the navy and encouraging colonial commerce.

Change in Foreign Influence.—Of all foreign influences from the beginning of the Renaissance to the Restoration, the literature of Italy had been the most important. French influence now gained the ascendancy.

There were several reasons for this change. (1) France under the great Louis XIV. was increasing her political importance. (2) She now had among her writers men who were by force of genius fitted to exert wide influence. Among such, we may instance Molière (1622-1673), who stands next to Shakespeare in dramatic power. (3) Charles II. and many Cavaliers had passed the time of their exile in France. They became familiar with French literature, and when they returned to England in 1660, their taste had already been influenced by French models.

Change in the Subject Matter of Literature.—The Elizabethan age impartially held the mirror up to every type of human emotion. The writers of the Restoration and of the first half of the eighteenth century, as a class, avoided any subject that demanded a portrayal of deep and noble feeling. In this age, we catch no glimpse of a Lady Macbeth in the grasp of remorse or of a Lear bending over a dead Cordelia.

The popular subjects were those which appealed to cold intellect; and these were, for the most part, satirical, didactic, and argumentative. The two greatest poets of the period, John Dryden and his successor, Alexander Pope, usually chose such subjects. John Locke (1632-1704), a great prose writer of this age, shows in the very title of his most famous work, Of the Conduct of the Understanding, what he preferred to discuss. That book opens with the statement, "The last resort a man has recourse to in the conduct of himself is his understanding." This declaration, which is not strictly true, embodies a pronounced tendency of the age, which could not understand that the world of feeling is no less real than that of the understanding.

One good result of the ascendancy of the intellect was seen in scientific investigation. The Royal Society was founded in 1662 to study natural phenomena and to penetrate into the hidden mysteries of philosophy and life.

The Advance of Prose.—In each preceding age, the masterpieces were poetry; but before the middle of the eighteenth century we find the prose far surpassing the poetry. Dryden, almost immediately after the Restoration, shows noteworthy advance in modern prose style. He avoids a Latinized inversion, such as the following, with which Milton begins the second sentence of his Areopagitica (1644):—

"And me perhaps each of these dispositions, as the subject was whereon I entered, may have at other times variously affected …"

Here, the object "me" is eighteen words in advance of its predicate. The sentence might well have ended with the natural pause at "affected," but Milton adds fifty-one more words. We may easily understand by comparison why the term "modern" is applied to the prose of Dryden and of his successors Addison and Steele. To emphasize the precedence of these writers in the development of modern prose is no disparagement to Bunyan's style, which is almost as quaint and as excellent as that of the 1611 version of the Bible.

French influence was cumulative in changing the cumbersome style of Milton's prose to the polished, neatly-turned sentences of Addison. Matthew Arnold says: "The glory of English literature is in poetry, and in poetry the strength of the eighteenth century does not lie. Nevertheless the eighteenth century accomplished for us an immense literary progress, and its very shortcomings in poetry were an instrument to that progress, and served it. The example of Germany may show us what a nation loses from having no prose style… French prose is marked in the highest degree by the qualities of regularity, uniformity, precision, balance… The French made their poetry also conform to the law which was molding their prose… This may have been bad for French poetry, but it was good for French prose."

The same influence which gave vigor, point, and definiteness to the prose, necessary for the business of the world, helped to dwarf the poetry. If both could not have advanced together, we may be thankful that the first part of the eighteenth century produced a varied prose of such high excellence.

The Classic School.—The literary lawgivers of this age held that a rigid adherence to certain narrow rules was the prime condition of producing a masterpiece. Indeed, the belief was common that a knowledge of rules was more important than genius.

The men of this school are called classicists because they held that a study of the best works of the ancients would disclose the necessary guiding rules. No style that did not closely follow these rules was considered good. Horace, seen through French spectacles, was the classical author most copied by this school. His Epistles and Satires were considered models.

The motto of the classicists was polished regularity. Pope struck the keynote of the age when he said:—

"True wit is nature to advantage dress'd,
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd."[1]

These two lines show the form of the "riming couplet," which the classical poets adopted. There is generally a pause at the end of each line; and each couplet, when detached from the context, will usually make complete sense.

Edmund Waller (1606-1687), remembered today for his single couplet:—

"The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made,"

had used this form of verse before 1630; but it was reserved for Dryden, and especially for Pope, to bring the couplet to a high degree of perfection. A French critic advised poets to compose the second line of the couplet first. No better rule could have been devised for dwarfing poetic power and for making poetry artificial.

Voltaire, a French classicist, said, "I do not like the monstrous irregularities of Shakespeare." An eighteenth-century classicist actually endeavored to improve Hamlet's soliloquy by putting it in riming couplets. These lines from Macbeth show that Shakespeare will not tolerate such leading strings nor allow the ending of the lines to interfere with his sense:—

  "…Besides, this Duncan
  Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
  So clear in his great office, that his virtues
  Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued against
  The deep damnation of his taking-off."

A later romantic poet called the riming couplet "rocking-horse meter"; and said that the reading of many couplets reminded him of round trips on a rocking-horse.

Advances are usually made by overstressing some one point. The classicists taught the saving grace of style, the need of restraint, balance, clearness, common sense. We should therefore not despise the necessary lesson which English literature learned from such teaching,—a lesson which has never been forgotten.

The Drama.—The theaters were reopened at the time of the Restoration. It is interesting to read in the vivacious Diary of Samuel Pepys how he went in 1661 to see Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, "a play of itself the worst that I ever heard." The next year he characterizes A Midsummer Night's Dream as "the most ridiculous play that I ever saw." He liked the variety in Macbeth, and calls The Tempest "the most innocent play that I ever saw."

The Restoration dramatists, who were dominated by French influence, so often sneered at morality and the virtues of the home, that they have paid the penalty of being little read in after times. The theater has not yet entirely recovered from the deep-seated prejudice which was so intensified by the coarse plays which flourished for fifty years after the Restoration.

Although John Dryden is best known among a large number of Restoration dramatists,[2] he did better work in another field. William Congreve (1670-1729) made the mast distinctive contribution to the new comedy of manners. Descended from an old landowning family in Staffordshire, he was for a while a mate of Jonathan Swift at Trinity College, Dublin. In 1691 Congreve was entered in the Middle Temple, London, to begin the study of law, but he soon turned playwright. His four comedies,—The Old Bachelor, The Double Dealer, Love for Love, The Way of the World,—and one tragedy, The Mourning Bride, were all written in the last decade of the seventeenth century. After 1700 he wrote no more plays, although he lived nearly thirty years longer. On his death, in 1729, he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Congreve attempts to picture the manners of contemporary society, and he does not penetrate far below the surface of life. He is not read for the depth of his thought, but for his humor and for the clear, pointed style of his prose comedies. George Meredith says:—

"Where Congreve excels all his English rivals is in his literary force, and a succinctness of style peculiar to him… He is at once precise and voluble. If you have ever thought upon style, you will acknowledge it to be a signal accomplishment. In this he is a classic, and he is worthy of treading a measure with Molière."

Congreve's best comedies are Love for Love and The Way of the World. The majority of critics agree with Meredith in calling Miss Millimant, who is the heroine of the latter play, "an admirable, almost a lovable heroine." Meredith illustrates one phase of his own idea of the comic spirit, by the language which Miss Millimant uses in accepting her lover: "If I continue to endure you a little longer, I may by degrees dwindle into a wife." Congreve's peculiar genius is well shown in his ability to make her manner of speech reveal her characteristics. His plays are unfortunately disfigured with the coarseness of the age.

The blemishes in the drama did not exist, however, without an emphatic contemporary protest. Jeremy Collier (1650-1729), a non-conforming bishop, in his Short View of the Immorality of the Stage (1698), complains that the unworthy hero of one of Congreve's plays "is crowned for the man of merit, has his wishes thrown into his lap, and makes the happy exit."

Such attacks had their weight and prepared the way far the more moral sentimental comedies of Richard Steele and succeeding playwrights. The sacrifice of plot to moral purpose and the deliberate introduction of scenes designed to force an appeal to sentiment caused the later drama to deteriorate in a different way. We shall see that the natural hearty humor of Goldsmith's comedy, She Stoops to Conquer(1773), afforded a welcome relief from such plays.

JOHN DRYDEN, 1631-1700

[Illustration: JOHN DRYDEN. From the painting by Sir Godfrey
Knellwe, National Portrait Gallery.]

[Illustration: BIRTHPLACE OF DRYDEN. From a print.]

Life.—John Dryden was born in 1631 in the small village of Aldwinkle, in the northern part of Northamptonshire. Few interesting facts concerning his life have come down to us. His father was a baronet; his mother, the daughter of a rector. Young Dryden graduated from Cambridge in 1654.

During his entire life, Dryden was a professional literary man; and with his pen he made the principal part of his living. This necessity often forced him against his own better judgment to cater to the perverted taste of the Restoration. When he found that plays had more market value than any other kind of literature, he agreed to furnish three plays a year for the king's actors, but was unable to produce that number. For fifteen years in the prime of his life, Dryden did little but write plays, the majority of which are seldom read to-day. His only important poem during his dramatic period was Annus Mirabilis (The Wonderful Year, 1666), memorable for the great London fire and for naval victories over the Dutch.

By writing the greatest political satire in the language at the age of fifty, he showed the world where his genius lay. During the last twenty years of his life, he produced but few plays. His greatest satires, didactic poems, and lyrics belong to this period. In his last years he wrote a spirited translation of Vergil, and retold in his own inimitable way various stories from Chaucer and Boccaccio and Ovid. These stories were published in a volume entitled Fables, Ancient and Modern. Dryden died in 1700 and was buried in Westminster Abbey beside Chaucer.

It is difficult to speak positively of Dryden's character. He wrote a poem in honor of the memory of Cromwell, and a little later another poem, Astraea Redux, welcoming Charles II. He argued in stirring verse in favor of the Episcopal religion when that was the faith of the court; but after the accession of James II., who was a Catholic, Dryden wrote another poem to prove the Catholic Church the only true one. He had been appointed poet laureate in 1670, but the Revolution of 1688, which drove James from the throne, caused Dryden to lose the laureateship. He would neither take the oath of fealty to the new government nor change his religion. In spite of adversity and the loss of an income almost sufficient to support him, he remained a Catholic for the rest of his life and reared his sons in that faith.

He seems to have been of a forgiving disposition and ready to acknowledge his own faults. He admitted that his plays were disfigured with coarseness. He was very kind to young writers and willing to help them with their work. In his chair at Will's Coffee House, discoursing to the wits of the Restoration about matters of literary art, he was one of the most prominent figures of the age.

His Prose.—Although to the majority of people Dryden is known only as a poet, his influence on prose has been so far-reaching as to entitle him to be called one of the founders of modern prose style.

The shortening of sentences has been a striking feature in the development of modern English prose. Edmund Spenser averages about fifty words to each of his prose sentences; Richard Hooker, about forty-one. One of the most striking sentences in Milton's Areopagitica contains ninety-five words, although he crowds over three hundred words into some of his long sentences. The sentences in some of Dryden's pages average only twenty-five words in length. Turning to Macaulay, one of the most finished masters of modern prose, we find that his sentences average twenty-two words. Dryden helped also to free English prose from the inversions, involutions, and parenthetical intricacies of earlier times. His influence on both prose and poetry were much the same. In verse he adopted the short, easily understood unit of the classical couplet; and in prose, the short, direct sentence.

Dryden's prose deals chiefly with literary criticism. Most of his prose is to be found in the prefaces to his plays and poems. His most important separate prose composition is his Essay of Dramatic Poesy, a work which should be read by all who wish to know some of the foundation principles of criticism.

Satiric Poetry.—No English writer has surpassed Dryden in satiric verse. His greatest satire is Absalom and Achitophel, in which, under the guise of Old Testament characters, he satirizes the leading spirits of the Protestant opposition to the succession of James, the brother of Charles II., to the English throne. Dryden thus satirizes Achitophel, the Earl of Shaftesbury:—

  "Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
   And thin partitions do their bounds divide;
   Else, why should he, with wealth and honor blest,
   Refuse his age the needful hours of rest?
   Punish a body which he could not please,
   Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease?
   And all to leave what with his toil he won
   To that unfeathered two-legged thing, a son.
       * * * * *
   In friendship false, implacable in hate,
   Resolved to ruin or to rule the state."

Zimri, the Duke of Buckingham, is immortalized thus:—

"Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,
Was everything by starts, and nothing long."

Mac Flecknoe is another satire of almost as great merit, directed against a certain Whig poet by the name of Shadwell. He would have been seldom mentioned in later times, had it not been for two of Dryden's lines:—

"The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense."

All for Love, one of Dryden's greatest plays, shows the delicate keenness of his satire in characterizing the cold-blooded Augustus Caesar, or Octavius, as he is there called. Antony has sent a challenge to Octavius, who replies that he has more ways than one to die. Antony rejoins:—

                   "He has more ways than one;
                    But he would choose them all before that one.
  Ventidius. He first would choose an ague or a fever.
  Antony. No; it must be an ague, not a fever;
                    He has not warmth enough to die by that."

Dryden could make his satire as direct and blasting as a thunderbolt.
He thus describes his publisher:—

  "With leering looks, bull-faced, and freckled fair,
   With two left legs, and Judas-colored hair,
   And frowsy pores that taint the ambient air."

Argumentative or Didactic Verse.—Dryden is a master in arguing in poetry. He was not a whit hampered by the restrictions of verse. They were rather an advantage to him, for in poetry he could make more telling arguments in briefer compass than in prose. The best two examples of his power of arguing in verse are Religio Laici, written in 1682, to uphold the Episcopal religion, and The Hind and the Panther, composed in 1687, to vindicate the Catholic church. Verse of this order is called didactic, because it endeavors to teach or to explain something. The age of the Restoration delighted in such exercises of the intellect vastly more than in flights of fancy or imagination.

Lyrical Verse.—While most of Dryden's best poetry is either satiric or didactic, he wrote three fine lyrical poems: Alexander's Feast, A Song for St. Cecilia's Day, and An Ode to Mrs. Anne Killigrew. All are distinguished by remarkable beauty and energy of expression. Alexander's Feast is the most widely read of Dryden's poems. The opening lines of the Ode to Mrs. Anne Killigrew seem almost Miltonic in their conception, and they show great power in the field of lyrical poetry. Mistress Killigrew was a young lady of rare accomplishments in both poetry and painting, who died at the age of twenty-five. Dryden thus begins her memorial ode:—

"Thou youngest virgin daughter of the skies,
    Made in the last promotion of the blest;
  Whose palms, new plucked from Paradise,
    In spreading branches more sublimely rise,
  Rich with immortal green above the rest:
       * * * * *
  Thou wilt have time enough for hymns divine,
    Since Heaven's eternal year is thine."

Some of his plays have songs and speeches instinct with lyrical force. The following famous lines on the worth of existence are taken from his tragedy of Aurengzebe:—

  "When I consider'd life, 'tis all a cheat,
  Yet, fool'd with hope, men favor the deceit,
  Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay:
  To-morrow's falser than the former day,
  Lies worse; and while it says, we shall be blest
  With some new joys, cuts off what we possest.
  Strange cozenage! none would live past years again;
  Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain.
  And, from the dregs of life, think to receive
  What the first sprightly running could not give.
  I'm tir'd with waiting for this chemic gold,
  Which fools us young and beggars us when old."

General Characteristics.—In point of time, Dryden is the first great poet of the school of literary artists. His verse does not tolerate the unpruned irregularities and exaggerations of many former English poets. His command over language is remarkable. He uses words almost as he chooses, but he does not invest them with the warm glow of feeling. He is, however, something more than a great word artist. Many of his ideas bear the stamp of marked originality.

In the field of satiric and didactic poetry, he is a master. The intellectual, not the emotional, side of man's nature appeals strongly to him. He heeds not the song of the bird, the color of the rose, nor the clouds of evening.

Although more celebrated for his poetry than for his prose, he is the earliest of the great modern prose stylists, and he displays high critical ability.

DANIEL DEFOE, 1659?-1731

[Illustration: DANIEL DEFOE. From a print by Vandergucht.]

Varied Experiences.—Daniel Defoe was born in London, probably the year before the Restoration. His father, a butcher in good circumstances, sent the boy to a school in which English, instead of Latin, was the medium of instruction. He was taught how to express himself in the simple, forceful English for which he became famous. His education was planned to make him a dissenting minister; but he preferred a life of varied activity. He became a trader, a manufacturer of tiles, a journalist, and a writer of fiction. By also serving as a government agent and spy, he incurred the severe criticism of contemporaries. It is doubtful if even Shakespeare had more varied experiences or more vicissitudes in life.

For writing what would to-day be considered a harmless piece of irony, The Shortest Way with Dissenters, in which Defoe, who was himself a dissenter, advocated banishment or hanging, he suffered the mortification of exposure for three days in the pillory and of imprisonment in the pestilent Newgate jail. His business of making tiles was consequently ruined. These experiences, with which his enemies taunted him, colored his entire life and made him realize that the support of his wife and six children necessitated care in his choice and treatment of subjects.

His life was a succession of changing fortunes. He died in poverty in 1731 and was buried in Bunhill Fields, London. His grave was marked by only a small headstone, but the English boys and girls who had read Robinson Crusoe in the Victorian age subscribed the money for a monument with a suitable inscription. It is remarkable that Bunhill Fields, which contains the graves of so many humble dissenters, should be the final resting place of both Bunyan and Defoe, the authors of the first two English prose works most often read to-day.

A Journalist and a Prolific Writer.—Defoe has at last come to be regarded as the first great English journalist. He had predecessors in this field, for as early as 1622 the Coranto, or journal of "current" foreign news, appeared. In 1641, on the eve of the civil war, the Diurnall of domestic news was issued. In 1643, when Parliament appointed a licenser, who gave copyright protection to the "catchword" or newspaper title, journalists became a "recognized body." "Newsbooks" and especially "newsletters" grew in popularity. Only a few years after the Restoration, there appeared The London Gazette, which has been continued to the present time as the medium through which the government publishes its official news.

From 1704 to 1713 Defoe issued The Review, which appeared triweekly for the greater part of the time, and gave the news current in England and in much of Europe. The Review, an unusual achievement for the age, shows Defoe to have been a journalist of great ability. This paper had one department, called The Scandal Club, which furnished suggestions for The Tatler and The Spectator.

It has been computed that Defoe wrote for The Review during the nine years of its publication 5000 pages of essays, in addition to nearly the same amount of other matter. He also issued many pamphlets, which performed somewhat the same service as the modern newspaper with its editorials. It is probable that he was the most prolific of all English authors. Few have discussed as wide a range of matter. He wrote more than two hundred and fifty separate works on subjects as different as social conditions, the promotion of business, human conduct, travels in England, and ghosts.

Fiction.—Defoe was nearly sixty when he began to write fiction. In 1719 he published the first part of Robinson Crusoe, the story of the adventures of a sailor wrecked on a solitary island. The Frenchman Daudet said of this work: "It is as nearly immortal as any book can ever be." The nineteenth century saw more than one hundred editions of it published in London alone. It has been repeatedly issued in almost every language of Europe. The secret of the success of Robinson Crusoe has puzzled hundreds of writers who have tried to imitate it.

The world-wide popularity of Robinson Crusoe is chiefly due (1) to the peculiar genius of the author; (2) to his journalistic training, which enabled him to seize on the essential elements of interest and to keep these in the foreground; (3) to the skill with which he presents matter-of-fact details, sufficient to invest the story with an atmosphere of perfect reality; (4) to his style, which is as simple and direct as the speech of real life, and which is made vivid by specific words describing concrete actions,—such as hewing a tree, sharpening a stake, hanging up grapes to dry, tossing a biscuit to a wild cat, taking a motherless kid in his arms; and (5) to the skill with which he sets a problem requiring for its solution energy, ingenuity, self-reliance, and the development of the moral power necessary to meet and overcome difficulties.

Young and old follow with intense interest every movement of the shipwrecked mariner when he first swims to the stranded ship, constructs a raft, and places on it "bread, rice, three Dutch cheeses, five pieces of dried goat's flesh, a little remainder of European corn, and the carpenter's chest." Readers do not accompany him passively as he lands the raft and returns. They work with him; they are not only made a part of all Crusoe's experience, but they react on it imaginatively; they suggest changes; they hold their breath or try to assist him when he is in danger. Defoe's genius in making the reader a partner in Robinson Crusoe's adventures has not yet received sufficient appreciation. The author could never have secured such a triumph if he had not compelled readers to take an active part in the story.

It was for a long time thought that Defoe was ignorant, that he accidentally happened to write Robinson Crusoe because he had been told of the recent experience of Alexander Selkirk on a solitary island in the Pacific. It is now known that Defoe was well educated, versed in several languages, and the most versatile writer of his time. Robinson Crusoe was no more of an accident than any other creation of genius.

Defoe's other principal works of fiction are: Memoirs of a Cavalier, the story of a soldier's adventures in the seventeenth century; The Life, Adventures, and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton, a graphic account of adventures in a journey across Africa; Moll Flanders, a story of a well-known criminal; and A Journal of the Plague Year, a vivid, imaginative presentation, in the most realistic way, of the horrors of the London plague in 1665. These works are almost completely overshadowed by Robinson Crusoe; but they also show Defoe's narrative power and his ability to make fiction seem an absolute reality. In writing Gulliver's Travels, Swift received valuable hints from Defoe. Stevenson's Treasure Island is the most successful of the almost numberless stories of adventure suggested by Robinson Crusoe.

JONATHAN SWIFT, 1667-1745

[Illustration: JONATHAN SWIFT. From the painting by C. Jervas,
National Portrait Gallery.]

Life.—Swift, one of the greatest prose writers of the eighteenth century, was born of English parents in Dublin in 1667. It is absolutely necessary to know something of his life in order to pass proper judgment on his writings. A cursory examination of his life will show that heredity and environment were responsible for many of his peculiarities. Swift's father died a few months before the birth of his son, and the boy saw but little of his mother.

Swift's school and college life were passed at Kilkenny School and Trinity College, Dublin. For his education he was indebted to an uncle, who made the boy feel the bitterness of his dependence. In after times he said that his uncle treated him like a dog. Swift's early experience seems to have made him misanthropic and hardened to consequences, for he neglected certain studies, and it was only by special concession that he was allowed to take his A.B. degree in 1686.

After leaving college, he spent almost ten years as the private secretary of Sir William Temple, at Moor Park in Surrey, about forty miles southwest of London. Temple had been asked to furnish some employment for the young graduate because Lady Temple was related to Swift's mother. Here Swift was probably treated as a dependent, and he had to eat at the second table. Finally, this life became so intolerable that he took holy orders and went to a little parish in Ireland; but after a stay of eighteen months he returned to Moor Park, where he remained until Temple's death in 1699. Swift then went to another little country parish in Ireland. From there he visited London on a mission in behalf of the Episcopal Church in Ireland. He quarreled with the Whigs, became a Tory, and assisted that party by writing many political pamphlets. The Tory ministry soon felt that it could scarcely do without him. He dined with ministers of state, and was one of the most important men in London; but he advanced the interests of his friends much better than his own, for he got little from the government except the hope of becoming bishop. In 1713 he was made dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. In 1714, Queen Anne died, the Tories went out of power, and Swift returned to Ireland, a disappointed man. He passed the rest of his life there, with the exception of a few visits to England.

[Illustration: MOOR PARK. From a drawing.]

When English politicians endeavored to oppress Ireland with unjust laws, Swift championed the Irish cause. A man who knew him well, says: "I never saw the poor so carefully and conscientiously attended to as those of his cathedral." He gave up a large part of his income every year for the poor. In Dublin he was looked upon as a hero. When a certain person tried to be revenged on Swift for a satire, a deputation of Swift's neighbors proposed to thrash the man. Swift sent them home, but they boycotted the man and lowered his income £1200 a year.

During the last years of his life, Swift was hopelessly insane. He died in 1745, leaving his property for an asylum for lunatics and incurables.

[Illustration: SWIFT AND STELLA. From the painting by Dicksee.]

The mysteries in Swift's life may be partly accounted for by the fact that during many years he suffered from an unknown brain disease. This affection, the galling treatment received in his early years, and the disappointments of his prime, largely account for his misanthropy, for his coldness, and for the almost brutal treatment of the women who loved him.

Swift's attachment to the beautiful Esther Johnson, known in literature as Stella, led him to write to her that famous series of letters known as the Journal to Stella, in which he gives much of his personal history during the three sunniest years of his life, from 1710 to 1713, when he was a lion in London. Thackeray says: "I know of nothing more manly, more tender, more exquisitely touching, than some of these brief notes, written in what Swift calls his 'little language' in his Journal to Stella."

A Tale of a Tub and the Battle of the Books.—Swift's greatest satire, the greatest prose satire in English, is known as A Tale of a Tub. The purpose of the work is to uphold the Episcopalians and satirize opposing religious denominations. For those not interested in theological arguments, there is much entertaining philosophy, as the following quotation will show:—

"If we take an examination of what is generally understood by happiness, as it has respect either to the understanding or the senses, we shall find all its properties and adjuncts will herd under this short definition,—that it is a perpetual possession of being well deceived. And first, with relation to the mind or understanding it is manifest what mighty advantages fiction has over truth; and the reason is just at our elbow, because imagination can build nobler scenes and produce more wonderful revolutions than fortune or nature will be at expense to furnish."

Swift's satiric definition of happiness as the art "of being well deceived" is a characteristic instance of a combination of his humor and pessimistic philosophy.

In the same volume with A Tale of a Tub, there was published a prose satire in almost epic form, An Account of a Battle between the Ancient and Modern Books in St. James Library (1704). Although this satire apparently aims to demonstrate the superior merits of the great classical writers, it is mainly an attack on pretentions to knowledge. Our greatest surprise in this satire comes not only from discovering the expression, "sweetness and light," made famous by Matthew Arnold in the Victorian age, but also from finding that a satirist like Swift assigned such high rank to these qualities. He says that the "Ancients" thus expressed an essential difference between themselves and the "Moderns":—

"The difference is that, instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to fill our lives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are Sweetness and Light."

Gulliver's Travels.—The world is always ready to listen to any one who has a good story to tell. Neither children nor philosophers have yet wearied of reading the adventures of Captain Lemuel Gulliver in Lilliput and Brobdingnag. Gulliver's Travels is Swift's most famous work.

Gulliver makes four remarkable voyages to strange countries. He first visits Lilliput, which is inhabited by a race of men about six inches high. Everything is on a corresponding scale. Gulliver eats a whole herd of cattle for breakfast and drinks several hogsheads of liquor. He captures an entire fleet of warships. A rival race of pygmies endeavors to secure his services so as to obtain the balance of power. The quarrels between these little people seem ridiculous, and so petty as to be almost beneath contempt.

Gulliver next visits Brobdingnag, where the inhabitants are sixty feet tall, and the affairs of ordinary human beings appear petty and insignificant. The cats are as large as three oxen, and the dogs attain the size of four elephants. Gulliver eats on a table thirty feet high, and trembles lest he may fall and break his neck. The baby seizes Gulliver and tries to swallow his head. Afterward the hero fights a desperate battle with two rats. A monkey catches him and carries him to the almost infinite height of the house top. Certainly, the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag merit Leslie Stephen's criticism of being "almost the most delightful children's book ever written."

The third voyage, which takes him to Laputa, satirizes the philosophers. We are taken through the academy at Lagado and are shown a typical philosopher:—

"He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in vials, hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers. He told me he did not doubt that in eight years more he should be able to supply the governor's gardens with sunshine at a reasonable rate."

In this voyage the Struldbrugs are described. They are a race of men who, after the loss of every faculty and of every tie that binds them to earth, are doomed to continue living. Dante never painted a stronger or a ghastlier picture.

On his fourth voyage, he visits the country of the Houyhnhnms and describes the Yahoos, who are the embodiment of all the detestable qualities of human beings. The last two voyages are not pleasant reading, and one might wish that the author of two such inimitable tales as the adventures in Lilliput and Brobdingnag had stopped with these.

Children read Gulliver's Travels for the story, but there is much more than a story in the work. In its pages the historian finds allusions that throw much light on the history of the age. Among the Lilliputians, for example, there is one party, known as the Bigendians, which insists that all eggs shall be broken open at the big end, while another party, called the Littleendians, contends that eggs shall be opened only at the little end. These differences typify the quarrels of the age concerning religion and politics. The Travels also contains much human philosophy. The lover of satire is constantly delighted with the keenness of the thrusts.

General Characteristics.—Swift is one of the greatest of English prose humorists. He is noted also for wit of that satiric kind which enjoys the discomfiture of the victim. A typical instance is shown in the way in which, under the assumed name of Isaac Bickerstaff, he dealt with an astrologer and maker of prophetic almanacs, whose name was Partridge. Bickerstaff claimed to be an infallible astrologer, and predicted that Partridge would die March 29, 1708, at 11 P.M. When that day had passed, Bickerstaff issued a pamphlet giving a circumstantial account of Partridge's death. Partridge, finding that his customers began to decrease, protested that he was alive. Bickerstaff promptly replied that Partridge was dead by his own infallible rules of astrology, and that the man now claiming to be Partridge was a vile impostor.