19. Sidney’s Poetry.—In addition to the Arcadia and the Apologie for Poetrie, Sidney wrote a number of beautiful poems. The best of these are a series of sonnets called Astrophel and Stella, of which his latest critic says: “As a series of sonnets, the Astrophel and Stella poems are second only to Shakespeare’s; as a series of love-poems, they are perhaps unsurpassed.” Spenser wrote an elegy upon Sidney himself, under the title of Astrophel. Sidney’s prose is among the best of the sixteenth century. “He reads more modern than any other author of that century.” He does not use “ink-horn terms,” or cram his sentences with Latin or French or Italian words; but both his words and his idioms are of pure English. He is fond of using personifications. Such phrases as, “About the time that the candles began to inherit the sun’s office;” “Seeing the day begin to disclose her comfortable beauties,” are not uncommon. The rhythm of his sentences is always melodious, and each of them has a very pleasant close.

CHAPTER V.

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

1. The First Half.—Under the wise and able rule of Queen Elizabeth, this country had enjoyed a long term of peace. The Spanish Armada had been defeated in 1588; the Spanish power had gradually waned before the growing might of England; and it could be said with perfect truth, in the words of Shakespeare:—

The country was at peace; and every peaceful art and pursuit prospered. As one sign of the great prosperity and outstretching enterprise of commerce, we should note the foundation of the East India Company on the last day of the year 1600. The reign of James I. (1603-1625) was also peaceful; and the country made steady progress in industries, in commerce, and in the arts and sciences. The two greatest prose-writers of the first half of the seventeenth century were Raleigh and Bacon; the two greatest poets were Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.

2. Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618).—Walter Raleigh, soldier, statesman, coloniser, historian, and poet, was born in Devonshire, in the year 1552. He was sent to Oriel College, Oxford; but he left at the early age of seventeen to fight on the side of the Protestants in France. From that time his life is one long series of schemes, plots, adventures, and misfortunes—culminating in his execution at Westminster in the year 1618. He spent “the evening of a tempestuous life” in the Tower, where he lay for thirteen years; and during this imprisonment he wrote his greatest work, the History of the World, which was never finished. His life and adventures belong to the sixteenth; his works to the seventeenth century. Raleigh was probably the most dazzling figure of his time; and is “in a singular degree the representative of the vigorous versatility of the Elizabethan period.” Spenser, whose neighbour he was for some time in Ireland, thought highly of his poetry, calls him “the summer’s nightingale,” and says of him—

Raleigh is the author of the celebrated verses, “Go, soul, the body’s guest;” “Give me my scallop-shell of quiet;” and of the lines which were written and left in his Bible on the night before he was beheaded:—

Raleigh’s prose has been described as “some of the most flowing and modern-looking prose of the period;” and there can be no doubt that, if he had given himself entirely to literature, he would have been one of the greatest poets and prose-writers of his time. His style is calm, noble, and melodious. The following is the last sentence of the History of the World:—

“O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised; thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words Hic jacet.”

3. Francis Bacon (1561-1626), one of the greatest of English thinkers, and one of our best prose-writers, was born at York House, in the Strand, London, in the year 1561. He was a grave and precocious child; and Queen Elizabeth, who knew him and liked him, used to pat him and call him her “young Lord Keeper”—his father being Lord Keeper of the Seals in her reign. At the early age of twelve he was sent to Trinity College, Cambridge, and remained there for three years. In 1582 he was called to the bar; in 1593 he was M.P. for Middlesex. But his greatest rise in fortune did not take place till the reign of James I.; when, in the year 1618, he had risen to be Lord High Chancellor of England. The title which he took on this occasion—for the Lord High Chancellor is chairman of the House of Lords—was Baron Verulam; and a few years after he was created Viscount St Albans. His eloquence was famous in England; and Ben Jonson said of him: “The fear of every man that heard him was lest he should make an end.” In the year 1621 he was accused of taking bribes, and of giving unjust decisions as a judge. He had not really been unconscientious, but he had been careless; was obliged to plead guilty; and he was sentenced to pay a fine of £40,000, and to be imprisoned in the Tower during the king’s pleasure. The fine was remitted; Bacon was set free in two days; a pension was allowed him; but he never afterwards held office of any kind. He died on Easter-day of the year 1626, of a chill which he caught while experimenting on the preservative properties of snow.

4. His chief prose-works in English—for he wrote many in Latin—are the Essays, and the Advancement of Learning. His Essays make one of the wisest books ever written; and a great number of English thinkers owe to them the best of what they have had to say. They are written in a clear, forcible, pithy, and picturesque style, with short sentences, and a good many illustrations, drawn from history, politics, and science. It is true that the style is sometimes stiff, and even rigid; but the stiffness is the stiffness of a richly embroidered cloth, into which threads of gold and silver have been worked. Bacon kept what he called a Promus or Commonplace-Book; and in this he entered striking thoughts, sentences, and phrases that he met with in the course of his reading, or that occurred to him during the day. He calls these sentences “salt-pits, that you may extract salt out of, and sprinkle as you will.” The following are a few examples:—

“That that is Forced is not Forcible.”

“No Man loveth his Fetters though they be of Gold.”

“Clear and Round Dealing is the Honour of Man’s Nature.”

“The Arch-flatterer, with whom all the petty Flatterers have intelligence, is a Man’s Self.”

“If Things be not tossed upon the Arguments of Counsell, they will be tossed upon the Waves of Fortune.”

The following are a few striking sentences from his Essays:—

“Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set.”

“A man’s nature runs either to herbs or weeds; therefore, let him seasonably water the one, and destroy the other.”

“A crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, when there is no love.”

No man could say wiser things in pithier words; and we may well say of his thoughts, in the words of Tennyson, that they are—

5. William Shakespeare (1564-1616) has been already treated of in the chapter on the sixteenth century. But it may be noted here that his first two periods—as they are called—fall within the sixteenth, and his last two periods within the seventeenth century. His first period lies between 1591 and 1596; and to it are ascribed his early poems, his play of Richard II., and some other historical plays. His second period, which stretches from 1596 to 1601 holds the Sonnets, the Merchant of Venice, the Merry Wives of Windsor, and a few historical dramas. But his third and fourth periods were richer in production, and in greater productions. The third period, which belongs to the years 1601 to 1608, produced the play of Julius Cæsar, the great tragedies of Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, and some others. To the fourth period, which lies between 1608 and 1613, belong the calmer and wiser dramas,—Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Henry VIII. Three years after—in 1616—he died.

6. The Second Half.—The second half of the great and unique seventeenth century was of a character very different indeed from that of the first half. The Englishmen born into it had to face a new world! New thoughts in religion, new forces in politics, new powers in social matters had been slowly, steadily, and irresistibly rising into supremacy ever since the Scottish King James came to take his seat upon the throne of England in 1603. These new forces had, in fact, become so strong that they led a king to the scaffold, and handed over the government of England to a section of Republicans. Charles I. was executed in 1649; and, though his son came back to the throne in 1660, the face, the manners, the thoughts of England and of Englishmen had undergone a complete internal and external change. The Puritan party was everywhere the ruling party; and its views and convictions, in religion, in politics, and in literature, held unquestioned sway in almost every part of England. In the Puritan party, the strongest section was formed by the Independents—the “root and branch men”—as they were called; and the greatest man among the Independents was Oliver Cromwell, in whose government John Milton was Foreign Secretary. Milton was certainly by far the greatest and most powerful writer, both in prose and in verse, on the side of the Puritan party. The ablest verse-writer on the Royalist or Court side was Samuel Butler, the unrivalled satirist—the Hogarth of language,—the author of Hudibras. The greatest prose-writer on the Royalist and Church side was Jeremy Taylor, Bishop of Down, in Ireland, and the author of Holy Living, Holy Dying, and many other works written with a wonderful eloquence. The greatest philosophical writer was Thomas Hobbes, the author of the Leviathan. The most powerful writer for the people was John Bunyan, the immortal author of The Pilgrim’s Progress. When, however, we come to the reigns of Charles II. and James II., and the new influences which their rule and presence imparted, we find the greatest poet to be John Dryden, and the most important prose-writer, John Locke.

7. The Poetry of the Second Half.—The poetry of the second half of the seventeenth century was not an outgrowth or lineal descendant of the poetry of the first half. No trace of the strong Elizabethan poetical emotion remained; no writer of this half-century can claim kinship with the great authors of the Elizabethan period. The three most remarkable poets in the latter half of this century are John Milton, Samuel Butler, and John Dryden. But Milton’s culture was derived chiefly from the great Greek and Latin writers; and his poems show few or no signs of belonging to any age or generation in particular of English literature. Butler’s poem, the Hudibras, is the only one of its kind; and if its author owes anything to other writers, it is to France and not to England that we must look for its sources. Dryden, again, shows no sign of being related to Shakespeare or the dramatic writers of the early part of the century; he is separated from them by a great gulf; he owes most, when he owes anything, to the French school of poetry.

8. John Milton (1608-1674), the second greatest name in English poetry, and the greatest of all our epic poets, was born in Bread Street, Cheapside, London, in the year 1608—five years after the accession of James I. to the throne, and eight years before the death of Shakespeare. He was educated at St Paul’s School, and then at Christ’s College, Cambridge. He was so handsome—with a delicate complexion, clear blue eyes, and light-brown hair flowing down his shoulders—that he was known as the “Lady of Christ’s.” He was destined for the Church; but, being early seized with a strong desire to compose a great poetical work which should bring honour to his country and to the English tongue, he gave up all idea of becoming a clergyman. Filled with his secret purpose, he retired to Horton, in Buckinghamshire, where his father had bought a small country seat. Between the years 1632 and 1638 he studied all the best Greek and Latin authors, mathematics, and science; and he also wrote L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, Comus, Lycidas, and some shorter poems. These were preludes, or exercises, towards the great poetical work which it was the mission of his life to produce. In 1638-39 he took a journey to the Continent. Most of his time was spent in Italy; and, when in Florence, he paid a visit to Galileo in prison. It had been his intention to go on to Greece; but the troubled state of politics at home brought him back sooner than he wished. The next ten years of his life were engaged in teaching and in writing his prose works. His ideas on teaching are to be found in his Tractate on Education. The most eloquent of his prose-works is his Areopagitica, a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing (1644)—a plea for the freedom of the press, for relieving all writings from the criticism of censors. In 1649—the year of the execution of Charles I.—Milton was appointed Latin or Foreign Secretary to the Government of Oliver Cromwell; and for the next ten years his time was taken up with official work, and with writing prose-volumes in defence of the action of the Republic. In 1660 the Restoration took place; and Milton was at length free, in his fifty-third year, to carry out his long-cherished scheme of writing a great Epic poem. He chose the subject of the fall and the restoration of man. Paradise Lost was completed in 1665; but, owing to the Plague and the Fire of London, it was not published till the year 1667. Milton’s young Quaker friend, Ellwood, said to him one day: “Thou hast said much of Paradise Lost, what hast thou to say of Paradise Found?” Paradise Regained was the result—a work which was written in 1666, and appeared, along with Samson Agonistes, in the year 1671. Milton died in the year 1674—about the middle of the reign of Charles II. He had been three times married.

9. L’Allegro (or “The Cheerful Man”) is a companion poem to Il Penseroso (or “The Meditative Man”). The poems present two contrasted views of the life of the student. They are written in an irregular kind of octosyllabic verse. The Comus—mostly in blank verse—is a lyrical drama; and Milton’s work was accompanied by a musical composition by the then famous musician Henry Lawes. Lycidas—a poem in irregular rhymed verse—is a threnody on the death of Milton’s young friend, Edward King, who was drowned in sailing from Chester to Dublin. This poem has been called “the touchstone of taste;” the man who cannot admire it has no feeling for true poetry. The Paradise Lost is the story of how Satan was allowed to plot against the happiness of man; and how Adam and Eve fell through his designs. The style is the noblest in the English language; the music of the rhythm is lofty, involved, sustained, and sublime. “In reading ‘Paradise Lost,’” says Mr Lowell, “one has a feeling of spaciousness such as no other poet gives.” Paradise Regained is, in fact, the story of the Temptation, and of Christ’s triumph over the wiles of Satan. Wordsworth says: “‘Paradise Regained’ is most perfect in execution of any written by Milton;” and Coleridge remarks that “it is in its kind the most perfect poem extant, though its kind may be inferior in interest.” Samson Agonistes (“Samson in Struggle”) is a drama, in highly irregular unrhymed verse, in which the poet sets forth his own unhappy fate—

“Eyeless, in Gaza, at the mill with slaves.”

It is, indeed, an autobiographical poem—it is the story of the last years of the poet’s life.

10. Samuel Butler (1612-1680), the wittiest of English poets, was born at Strensham, in Worcestershire, in the year 1612, four years after the birth of Milton, and four years before the death of Shakespeare. He was educated at the grammar-school of Worcester, and afterwards at Cambridge—but only for a short time. At the Restoration he was made secretary to the Earl of Carbery, who was then President of the Principality of Wales, and steward of Ludlow Castle. The first part of his long poem called Hudibras appeared in 1662; the second part in 1663; the third in 1678. Two years after, Butler died in the greatest poverty in London. He was buried in St Paul’s, Covent Garden; but a monument was erected to him in Westminster Abbey. Upon this fact Wesley wrote the following epigram:—

11. The Hudibras is a burlesque poem,—a long lampoon, a laboured caricature,—in mockery of the weaker side of the great Puritan party. It is an imaginary account of the adventures of a Puritan knight and his squire in the Civil Wars. It is choke-full of all kinds of learning, of the most pungent remarks—a very hoard of sentences and saws, “of vigorous locutions and picturesque phrases, of strong, sound sense, and robust English.” It has been more quoted from than almost any book in our language. Charles II. was never tired of reading it and quoting from it—

says Butler himself.

The following are some of his best known lines:—

12. John Dryden (1631-1700), the greatest of our poets in the second rank, was born at Aldwincle, in Northamptonshire, in the year 1631. He was descended from Puritan ancestors on both sides of his house. He was educated at Westminster School, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. London became his settled abode in the year 1657. At the Restoration, in 1660, he became an ardent Royalist; and, in the year 1663, he married the daughter of a Royalist nobleman, the Earl of Berkshire. It was not a happy marriage; the lady, on the one hand, had a violent temper, and, on the other, did not care a straw for the literary pursuits of her husband. In 1666 he wrote his first long poem, the Annus Mirabilis (“The Wonderful Year”), in which he paints the war with Holland, and the Fire of London; and from this date his life is “one long literary labour.” In 1670, he received the double appointment of Historiographer-Royal and Poet-Laureate. Up to the year 1681, his work lay chiefly in writing plays for the theatre; and these plays were written in rhymed verse, in imitation of the French plays; for, from the date of the Restoration, French influence was paramount both in literature and in fashion. But in this year he published the first part of Absalom and Achitophel—one of the most powerful satires in the language. In the year 1683 he was appointed Collector of Customs in the port of London—a post which Chaucer had held before him. (It is worthy of note that Dryden “translated” the Tales of Chaucer into modern English.) At the accession of James II., in 1685, Dryden became a Roman Catholic; most certainly neither for gain nor out of gratitude, but from conviction. In 1687, appeared his poem of The Hind and the Panther, in which he defends his new creed. He had, a few years before, brought out another poem called Religio Laici (“A Layman’s Faith”), which was a defence of the Church of England and of her position in religion. In The Hind and the Panther, the Hind represents the Roman Catholic Church, “a milk-white hind, unspotted and unchanged,” the Panther the Church of England; and the two beasts reply to each other in all the arguments used by controversialists on these two sides. When the Revolution of 1688 took place, and James II. had to flee the kingdom, Dryden lost both his offices and the pension he had from the Crown. Nothing daunted, he set to work once more. Again he wrote for the stage; but the last years of his life were spent chiefly in translation. He translated passages from Homer, Ovid, and from some Italian writers; but his most important work was the translation of the whole of Virgil’s Æneid. To the last he retained his fire and vigour, action and rush of verse; and some of his greatest lyric poems belong to his later years. His ode called Alexander’s Feast was written at the age of sixty-six; and it was written at one sitting. At the age of sixty-nine he was meditating a translation of the whole of Homer—both the Iliad and the Odyssey. He died at his house in London, on May-day of 1700, and was buried with great pomp and splendour in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

13. His best satire is the Absalom and Achitophel; his best specimen of reasoning in verse is The Hind and the Panther. His best ode is his Ode to the Memory of Mrs Anne Killigrew. Dryden’s style is distinguished by its power, sweep, vigour, and “long majestic march.” No one has handled the heroic couplet—and it was this form of verse that he chiefly used—with more vigour than Dryden; Pope was more correct, more sparkling, more finished, but he had not Dryden’s magnificent march or sweeping impulsiveness. “The fire and spirit of the ‘Annus Mirabilis,’” says his latest critic, “are nothing short of amazing, when the difficulties which beset the author are remembered. The glorious dash of the performance is his own.” His prose, though full of faults, is also very vigorous. It has “something of the lightning zigzag vigour and splendour of his verse.” He always writes clear, homely, and pure English,—full of force and point.

Many of his most pithy lines are often quoted:—

“Men are but children of a larger growth.”

“The greatest argument for love is love.”

The great American critic and poet, Mr Lowell, compares him to “an ostrich, to be classed with flying things, and capable, what with leap and flap together, of leaving the earth for a longer or a shorter space, but loving the open plain, where wing and foot help each other to something that is both flight and run at once.”

14. Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), the greatest master of ornate and musical English prose in his own day, was born at Cambridge in the year 1613—just three years before Shakespeare died. His father was a barber. After attending the free grammar-school of Cambridge, he proceeded to the University. He took holy orders and removed to London. When he was lecturing one day at St Paul’s, Archbishop Laud was so taken by his “youthful beauty, pleasant air,” fresh eloquence, and exuberant style, that he had him created a Fellow of All Souls’ College, Oxford. When the Civil War broke out, he was taken prisoner by the Parliamentary forces; and, indeed, suffered imprisonment more than once. After the Restoration, he was presented with a bishopric in Ireland, where he died in 1667.

15. Perhaps his best works are his Holy Living and Holy Dying. His style is rich, even to luxury, full of the most imaginative illustrations, and often overloaded with ornament. He has been called “the Shakespeare of English prose,” “the Spenser of divinity,” and by other appellations. The latter title is a very happy description; for he has the same wealth of style, phrase, and description that Spenser has, and the same boundless delight in setting forth his thoughts in a thousand different ways. The following is a specimen of his writing. He is speaking of a shipwreck:—

“These are the thoughts of mortals, this is the end and sum of all their designs. A dark night and an ill guide, a boisterous sea and a broken cable, a hard rock and a rough wind, dash in pieces the fortune of a whole family; and they that shall weep loudest for the accident are not yet entered into the storm, and yet have suffered shipwreck.”

His writings contain many pithy statements. The following are a few of them:—

“No man is poor that does not think himself so.”

“He that spends his time in sport and calls it recreation, is like him whose garment is all made of fringe, and his meat nothing but sauce..”

“A good man is as much in awe of himself as of a whole assembly.”

16. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), a great philosopher, was born at Malmesbury in the year 1588. He is hence called “the philosopher of Malmesbury.” He lived during the reigns of four English sovereigns—Elizabeth, James I., Charles I., and Charles II.; and he was twenty-eight years of age when Shakespeare died. He is in many respects the type of the hard-working, long-lived, persistent Englishman. He was for many years tutor in the Devonshire family—to the first Earl of Devonshire, and to the third Earl of Devonshire—and lived for several years at the family seat of Chatsworth. In his youth he was acquainted with Bacon and Ben Jonson; in his middle age he knew Galileo in Italy; and as he lived to the age of ninety-two, he might have conversed with John Locke or with Daniel Defoe. His greatest work is the Leviathan; or, The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth. His style is clear, manly, and vigorous. He tried to write poetry too. At the advanced age of eighty-five, he wrote a translation of the whole of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey into rhymed English verse, using the same quatrain and the same measure that Dryden employed in his ‘Annus Mirabilis.’ Two lines are still remembered of this translation: speaking of a child and his mother, he says—

17. John Bunyan (1628-1688), one of the most popular of our prose-writers, was born at Elstow, in Bedfordshire, in the year 1628—just three years before the birth of Dryden. He served, when a young man, with the Parliamentary forces, and was present at the siege of Leicester. At the Restoration, he was apprehended for preaching, in disobedience to the Conventicle Act, “was had home to prison, and there lay complete twelve years.” Here he supported himself and his family by making tagged laces and other small-wares; and here, too, he wrote the immortal Pilgrim’s Progress. After his release, he became pastor of the Baptist congregation at Bedford. He had a great power of bringing persons who had quarrelled together again; and he was so popular among those who knew him, that he was generally spoken of as “Bishop Bunyan.” On a journey, undertaken to reconcile an estranged father and a rebellious son, he caught a severe cold, and died of fever in London, in the year 1688. Every one has read, or will read, the Pilgrim’s Progress; and it may be said, without exaggeration, that to him who has not read the book, a large part of English life and history is dumb and unintelligible. Bunyan has been called the “Spenser of the people,” and “the greatest master of allegory that ever lived.” His power of imagination is something wonderful; and his simple, homely, and vigorous style makes everything so real, that we seem to be reading a narrative of everyday events and conversations. His vocabulary is not, as Macaulay said, “the vocabulary of the common people;” rather should we say that his English is the English of the Bible and of the best religious writers. His style is, almost everywhere, simple, homely, earnest, and vernacular—without being vulgar. Bunyan’s books have, along with Shakespeare and Tyndale’s works, been among the chief supports of an idiomatic, nervous, and simple English.

18. John Locke (1632-1704), a great English philosopher, was born at Wrington, near Bristol, in the year 1632. He was educated at Oxford; but he took little interest in the Greek and Latin classics, his chief studies lying in medicine and the physical sciences. He became attached to the famous Lord Shaftesbury, under whom he filled several public offices—among others, that of Commissioner of Trade. When Shaftesbury was obliged to flee to Holland, Locke followed him, and spent several years in exile in that country. All his life a very delicate man, he yet, by dint of great care and thoughtfulness, contrived to live to the age of seventy-two. His two most famous works are Some Thoughts concerning Education, and the celebrated Essay on the Human Understanding. The latter, which is his great work, occupied his time and thoughts for eighteen years. In both these books, Locke exhibits the very genius of common-sense. The purpose of education is, in his opinion, not to make learned men, but to maintain “a sound mind in a sound body;” and he begins the education of the future man even from his cradle. In his philosophical writings, he is always simple; but, as he is loose and vacillating in his use of terms, this simplicity is often purchased at the expense of exactness and self-consistency.

CHAPTER VI.

THE FIRST HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

1. The Age of Prose.—The eighteenth century was an age of prose in two senses. In the first place, it was a prosaic age; and, in the second place, better prose than poetry was produced by its writers. One remarkable fact may also be noted about the chief prose-writers of this century—and that is, that they were, most of them, not merely able writers, not merely distinguished literary men, but also men of affairs—men well versed in the world and in matters of the highest practical moment, while some were also statesmen holding high office. Thus, in the first half of the century, we find Addison, Swift, and Defoe either holding office or influencing and guiding those who held office; while, in the latter half, we have men like Burke, Hume, and Gibbon, of whom the same, or nearly the same, can be said. The poets, on the contrary, of this eighteenth century, are all of them—with the very slightest exceptions—men who devoted most of their lives to poetry, and had little or nothing to do with practical matters. It may also be noted here that the character of the eighteenth century becomes more and more prosaic as it goes on—less and less under the influence of the spirit of poetry, until, about the close, a great reaction makes itself felt in the persons of Cowper, Chatterton, and Burns, of Crabbe and Wordsworth.

2. The First Half.—The great prose-writers of the first half of the eighteenth century are Addison and Steele, Swift and Defoe. All of these men had some more or less close connection with the rise of journalism in England; and one of them, Defoe, was indeed the founder of the modern newspaper. By far the most powerful intellect of these four was Swift. The greatest poets of the first half of the eighteenth century were Pope, Thomson, Collins, and Gray. Pope towers above all of them by a head and shoulders, because he was much more fertile than any, and because he worked so hard and so untiringly at the labour of the file—at the task of polishing and improving his verses. But the vein of poetry in the three others—and more especially in Collins—was much more pure and genuine than it was in Pope at any time of his life—at any period of his writing. Let us look at each of these writers a little more closely.

3. Daniel Defoe (1661-1731), one of the most fertile writers that England ever saw, and one who has been the delight of many generations of readers, was born in the city of London in the year 1661. He was educated to be a Dissenting minister; but he turned from that profession to the pursuit of trade. He attempted several trades,—was a hosier, a hatter, a printer; and he is said also to have been a brick and tile maker. In 1692 he failed in business; but, in no long time after, he paid every one of his creditors to the uttermost farthing. Through all his labours and misfortunes he was always a hard and careful reader,—an omnivorous reader, too, for he was in the habit of reading almost every book that came in his way. He made his first reputation by writing political pamphlets. One of his pamphlets brought him into high favour with King William; another had the effect of placing him in the pillory and lodging him in prison. But while in Newgate, he did not idle away his time or “languish”; he set to work, wrote hard, and started a newspaper, The Review,—the earliest genuine newspaper England had seen up to his time. This paper he brought out two or three times a-week; and every word of it he wrote himself. He continued to carry it on single-handed for eight years. In 1706, he was made a member of the Commission for bringing about the union between England and Scotland; and his great knowledge of commerce and commercial affairs were of singular value to this Commission. In 1715 he had a dangerous illness, brought on by political excitement; and, on his recovery, he gave up most of his political writing, and took to the composition of stories and romances. Although now a man of fifty-four, he wrote with the vigour and ease of a young man of thirty. His greatest imaginative work was written in 1719—when he was nearly sixty—The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner,... written by Himself. Within six years he had produced twelve works of a similar kind. He is said to have written in all two hundred and fifty books in the course of his lifetime. He died in 1731.

4. His best known—and it is also his greatest—work is Robinson Crusoe; and this book, which every one has read, may be compared with ‘Gulliver’s Travels,’ for the purpose of observing how imaginative effects are produced by different means and in different ways. Another vigorous work of imagination by Defoe is the Journal of the Plague, which appeared in 1722. There are three chief things to be noted regarding Defoe and his writings. These are: first, that Defoe possessed an unparalleled knowledge—a knowledge wider than even Shakespeare’s—of the circumstances and details of human life among all sorts, ranks, and conditions of men; secondly, that he gains his wonderful realistic effects by the freest and most copious use of this detailed knowledge in his works of imagination; and thirdly, that he possessed a vocabulary of the most wonderful wealth. His style is strong, homely, and vigorous, but the sentences are long, loose, clumsy, and sometimes ungrammatical. Like Sir Walter Scott, he was too eager to produce large and broad effects to take time to balance his clauses or to polish his sentences. Like Sir Walter Scott, again, he possesses in the highest degree the art of particularising.

5. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), the greatest prose-writer, in his own kind, of the eighteenth century, and the opposite in most respects—especially in style—of Addison, was born in Dublin in the year 1667. Though born in Ireland, he was of purely English descent—his father belonging to a Yorkshire family, and his mother being a Leicestershire lady. His father died before he was born; and he was educated by the kindness of an uncle. After being at a private school at Kilkenny, he was sent to Trinity College, Dublin, where he was plucked for his degree at his first examination, and, on a second trial, only obtained his B.A. “by special favour.” He next came to England, and for eleven years acted as private secretary to Sir William Temple, a retired statesman and ambassador, who lived at Moor Park, near Richmond-on-Thames. In 1692 he paid a visit to Oxford, and there obtained the degree of M.A. In 1700 he went to Ireland with Lord Berkeley as his chaplain, and while in that country was presented with several livings. He at first attached himself to the Whig party, but stung by this party’s neglect of his labours and merits, he joined the Tories, who raised him to the Deanery of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. But, though nominally resident in Dublin, he spent a large part of his time in London. Here he knew and met everybody who was worth knowing, and for some time he was the most imposing figure, and wielded the greatest influence in all the best social, political, and literary circles of the capital. In 1714, on the death of Queen Anne, Swift’s hopes of further advancement died out; and he returned to his Deanery, settled in Dublin, and “commenced Irishman for life.” A man of strong passions, he usually spent his birthday in reading that chapter of the Book of Job which contains the verse, “Let the day perish in which I was born.” He died insane in 1745, and left his fortune to found a lunatic asylum in Dublin. One day, when taking a walk with a friend, he saw a blasted elm, and, pointing to it, he said: “I shall be like that tree, and die first at the top.” For the last three years of his life he never spoke one word.

6. Swift has written verse; but it is his prose-works that give him his high and unrivalled place in English literature. His most powerful work, published in 1704, is the Tale of a Tub—a satire on the disputes between the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Presbyterian Churches. His best known prose-work is the Gulliver’s Travels, which appeared in 1726. This work is also a satire; but it is a satire on men and women,—on humanity. “The power of Swift’s prose,” it has been said by an able critic, “was the terror of his own, and remains the wonder of after times.” His style is strong, simple, straightforward; he uses the plainest words and the homeliest English, and every blow tells. Swift’s style—as every genuine style does—reflects the author’s character. He was an ardent lover and a good hater. Sir Walter Scott describes him as “tall, strong, and well made, dark in complexion, but with bright blue eyes (Pope said they were “as azure as the heavens”), black and bushy eyebrows, aquiline nose, and features which expressed the stern, haughty, and dauntless turn of his mind.” He grew savage under the slightest contradiction; and dukes and great lords were obliged to pay court to him. His prose was as trenchant and powerful as were his manners: it has been compared to “cold steel.” His own definition of a good style is “proper words in proper places.”

7. Joseph Addison (1672-1719), the most elegant prose-writer—as Pope was the most polished verse-writer—of the eighteenth century, was born at Milston, in Wiltshire, in the year 1672. He was educated at Charterhouse School, in London, where one of his friends and companions was the celebrated Dick Steele—afterwards Sir Richard Steele. He then went to Oxford, where he made a name for himself by his beautiful compositions in Latin verse. In 1695 he addressed a poem to King William; and this poem brought him into notice with the Government of the day. Not long after, he received a pension of £300 a-year, to enable him to travel; and he spent some time in France and Italy. The chief result of this tour was a poem entitled A Letter from Italy to Lord Halifax. In 1704, when Lord Godolphin was in search of a poet who should celebrate in an adequate style the striking victory of Blenheim, Addison was introduced to him by Lord Halifax. His poem called The Campaign was the result; and one simile in it took and held the attention of all English readers, and of “the town.” A violent storm had passed over England; and Addison compared the calm genius of Marlborough, who was as cool and serene amid shot and shell as in a drawing-room or at the dinner-table, to the Angel of the Storm. The lines are these:—

For this poem Addison was rewarded with the post of Commissioner of Appeals. He rose, successively, to be Under Secretary of State; Secretary for Ireland; and, finally, Secretary of State for England—an office which would correspond to that of our present Home Secretary. He married the Countess of Warwick, to whose son he had been tutor; but it was not a happy marriage. Pope says of him in regard to it, that—

“He married discord in a noble wife.”

He died at Holland House, Kensington, London, in the year 1719, at the age of forty-seven.

8. But it is not at all as a poet, but as a prose-writer, that Addison is famous in the history of literature. While he was in Ireland, his friend Steele started The Tatler, in 1709; and Addison sent numerous contributions to this little paper. In 1711, Steele began a still more famous paper, which he called The Spectator; and Addison’s writings in this morning journal made its reputation. His contributions are distinguishable by being signed with some one of the letters of the name Clio—the Muse of History. A third paper, The Guardian, appeared a few years after; and Addison’s contributions to it are designated by a hand (-->) at the foot of each. In addition to his numerous prose-writings, Addison brought out the tragedy of Cato in 1713. It was very successful; but it is now neither read nor acted. Some of his hymns, however, are beautiful, and are well known. Such are the hymn beginning, “The spacious firmament on high;” and his version of the 23d Psalm, “The Lord my pasture shall prepare.”

9. Addison’s prose style is inimitable, easy, graceful, full of humour—full of good humour, delicate, with a sweet and kindly rhythm, and always musical to the ear. He is the most graceful of social satirists; and his genial creation of the character of Sir Roger de Coverley will live for ever. While his work in verse is never more than second-rate, his writings in prose are always first-rate. Dr Johnson said of his prose: “Whoever wishes to attain an English style—familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious,—must give his days and nights to the study of Addison.” Lord Lytton also remarks: “His style has that nameless urbanity in which we recognise the perfection of manner; courteous, but not courtier-like; so dignified, yet so kindly; so easy, yet high-bred. It is the most perfect form of English.” His style, however, must be acknowledged to want force—to be easy rather than vigorous; and it has not the splendid march of Jeremy Taylor, or the noble power of Savage Landor.

10. Richard Steele (1671-1729), commonly called “Dick Steele,” the friend and colleague of Addison, was born in Dublin, but of English parents, in the year 1671. The two friends were educated at Charterhouse and at Oxford together; and they remained friends, with some slight breaks and breezes, to the close of life. Steele was a writer of plays, essays, and pamphlets—for one of which he was expelled from the House of Commons; but his chief fame was earned in connection with the Society Journals, which he founded. He started many—such as Town-Talk, The Tea-Table, Chit-Chat; but only the Tatler and the Spectator rose to success and to fame. The strongest quality in his writing is his pathos: the source of tears is always at his command; and, although himself of a gay and even rollicking temperament, he seems to have preferred this vein. The literary skill of Addison—his happy art in the choosing of words—did not fall to the lot of Steele; but he is more hearty and more human in his description of character. He died in 1729, ten years after the departure of his friend Addison.

11. Alexander Pope (1688-1744), the greatest poet of the eighteenth century, was born in Lombard Street, London, in the year of the Revolution, 1688. His father was a wholesale linendraper, who, having amassed a fortune, retired to Binfield, on the borders of Windsor Forest. In the heart of this beautiful country young Pope’s youth was spent. On the death of his father, Pope left Windsor and took up his residence at Twickenham, on the banks of the Thames, where he remained till his death in 1744. His parents being Roman Catholics, it was impossible for young Pope to go either to a public school or to one of the universities; and hence he was educated privately. At the early age of eight, he met with a translation of Homer in verse; and this volume became his companion night and day. At the age of ten, he turned some of the events described in Homer into a play. The poems of Spenser, the poets’ poet, were his next favourites; but the writer who made the deepest and most lasting impression upon his mind was Dryden. Little Pope began to write verse very early. He says of himself—