The Project Gutenberg eBook of History of English Literature from Beowulf to Swinburne, by Andrew Lang.

The life of Burns is so familiarly known that the briefest survey must suffice. Born on 25 January, 1759, in a clay bigging in the parish of Alloway, in Ayrshire, he was the son of a small labouring farmer of the class whence so many of the martyrs and stout fighting men of the Covenant sprang. His father, a "grave liver" and devout, like them, managed to obtain for Burns, and out of every book which came in his way Burns picked-up for himself, a fair literary education. He owed much, especially many opportunities of reading, to a young tutor, Mr. Murdoch. He never was such a bookish man as Hogg, neglected as Hogg's education was in youth, but he acquired a knowledge of French, and studied Molière. The hardships of a poor farmer, in a cold soil, under a heartless "factor," the severest struggles for existence were known to Burns, but he also had his fill of dancing and "daffing," and the consequent "Kirk discipline". On this aspect of his life and adventures what is best to say has been said by Keats, in a letter written from Burns's country.

Entanglements of love affairs, and despair of success in life, caused Burns to contemplate emigration to the West Indies, but first he published at Kilmarnock (July, 1786), a collection of his songs and verses which instantly made him famous. Invited to Edinburgh, he passed a winter there in learned, noble, and festive society, carrying the celebrated Duchess of Gordon "off her feet," as she said, but winning far more admirers and boon companions than serviceable friends.

The Earl of Glencairn, whom Burns immortalized in sincere and glowing verse, died young; the age of Harley and Bolingbroke, of pensions and places for poets, was long dead. Burns met Scott, then a boy of 15; Scott later said that he was unworthy to tie Burns's shoes, but had the men been of equal age, better work would have been found for Burns than the perilous and bitterly uncongenial task of the exciseman (1789).

Not successful as a farmer at Ellisland (his capital was no more than the scanty profits of his poems), Burns settled in the pretty little town of Dumfries. Here his wit and genius made him the guest of the town and country, of lairds and tourists, and tradesmen. A constitution naturally robust, though injured by early privation, broke down; he had not the energy to continue in the vein of "Tam o' Shanter"; but poured out his songs, original, or re-creations of old popular ditties, till his death on 21 July, 1796.

Burns was singular as a poet, in one point: he needed, as it were, to have a key-note struck for him, and he prolonged and glorified the note which had inspired him. Far from concealing the fact, he acknowledged, with perfect candour and generosity, his debt to Robert Fergusson. This poet, born in Edinburgh (1750), and educated at the University of St. Andrews, died, after an interval of madness, in 1774. He, like Burns, had been too welcome a guest of more seasoned convivialists for the sake of his wit. His verses in English are commonplace, but his lyrics, in Burns's favourite measure, on the rude pleasures of Edinburgh tavern life, his "Leith Races," "The Farmer's Ingle," "Ode to the Gowdspink," and other pieces, gave Burns the needed key-note for "The Cottar's Saturday Night," "The Holy Fair" (the sacramental meeting in the open air, a relic of Covenanting days), and, perhaps, for the poems on "The Mouse," and "The Mountain Daisy". Burns has so entirely eclipsed Fergusson that he is scarcely remembered, even in Scotland.

"Poor Mailie's Elegy" had a much older predecessor; and, generally, Burns's songs start from an old tune, to which, through the ages, new verses had been set in new generations. There was a Jacobite "Auld Lang Syne," there was a Jacobite "For a' that," there was a very improper "Green grows the Rashes, o'" and so on, endlessly. But Burns, in many cases, transfigured his original. That he shone more in Scots than in English is admitted—but the best verses in his "Jolly Beggars" are in English, and there is only one word spelled in the Scots fashion in

Had we never lov'd sae kindly,
Had we never lov'd sae blindly,
Never met or never parted—
We had ne'er been broken hearted.

Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,
Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee.

The vigour and variety, the humour, the pity, the scorn, and the sentiment of Burns were all entirely new when he wrote, and his variety enabled him to please the most widely different tastes. Critics who were horrified by "The Jolly Beggars," and "The Holy Fair," and the reckless song to Anna found consolation in "The Cottar's Saturday Night," and the lament for "Highland Mary"

in English. Poems in the manner of these two last are sometimes spoken of as "sentimental," but the sentiment was as real a mood, while it lasted, as the scorn, or the revelry.

Of Burns it may be said that, beloved as he has been, not always for his best qualities, by the uncritical, he has been no less admired by the greatest poets of the age that followed his own, Keats, Scott, and Wordsworth. No poet ever was more truly national; none had more of the genius of the popular past, and the aspirations of the popular future; none was more essentially and spontaneously lyrical; none was more at home with Mature, with human society (with the life of the animal world, too, as in "The Twa Dogs"), and, in the humorous tale, none has excelled "Tam o'Shanter". No poet wears better in the changes of circumstance and taste. His letters, though of capital biographical interest, are sometimes of a comic complexion; "the style of the Bird of Paradise" prevails, now and then, in his English prose. But his English verse, as Scott found to be the way with his countrymen when they had, in passionate moments, "gotten to their English," is sometimes the natural vehicle of high reflection or of sincere grief.

Satire is the least worthy kind of poetry; for it is almost never sincere. The writer is always in a fatiguing state of virtuous indignation about matters for which he really cares very little, except when his virulence is brewed out of personal spite. Satire, in fact, is only tolerable when combined with the smiling humour of Horace, the occasional majesty of Juvenal, the grace, wit, and finish of Pope, or the airy contempt and sonorous lines of Dryden. Charles Churchill had little of the qualities of these poets, yet was, no doubt, the most popular writer of satire in the rhymed heroic couplet between Pope and Byron. He was born in 1731, the son of the Rector at Rainham; was at Westminster School a contemporary of Cowper and Warren Hastings; did not study at either University, though he was admitted to Trinity, Cambridge; married at 18, and married unwisely; took orders, and returned to lay costume and pursuits, and in 1761, looking about for a theme of satire that promised notoriety, had the happy thought of attacking the actors and actresses of the day in "The Rosciad". "The profession" is sensitive; the actors were not silent about their wrongs; there was plenty of hubbub, and the satire was remunerative. Any man who stoops to taunt actors, and even actresses, by personal attacks in rhyme, can make himself notorious. Perhaps the best-known rhymes of Churchill are

There were replies and hostile reviews, and Churchill, in "The Apology," assailed Garrick as "the vain tyrant" with

Garrick is said not to have dared to contemn things contemptible, and to have propitiated Churchill. As ally of Jack Wilkes, he "took the Wilkes and Liberty" to assail Scotland in "The Prophecy of Famine".

Waft me, some Muse, to Tweed's inspiring stream
. . . . . . . . . .
Where, slowly winding the dull waters creep
And seem themselves to own the power of sleep.

In fact, "the glittering and resolute streams of Tweed," as the old Cromwellian angler, Richard Franck, styles them, are only dull and sleepy in the "dubs" where England provides their flat southern bank.

In 1763 Churchill assailed Hogarth in an epistle, and Hogarth replied in kind with a truly English caricature. He wrote several other satires and a Hudibrastic skit, in Four Books, on Dr. Johnson's incursion into psychical research, in the matter of the famous Cock Lane Ghost. Churchill died at Boulogne, in November, 1764, and is buried at Dover. In private life he displayed some kindly and honourable qualities, and Byron, before leaving England for ever, in 1816, consecrated a poem to his grave. To the discredit of Scotland, Dr. Beattie lampooned Churchill—after he was dead!

Born more than twenty years after Cowper, but making his first noticeable entry into literature at the same time as he, Crabbe belongs in curious ways to different schools and different ages. In verse he follows the tradition of Pope and Goldsmith; writing, in his best-known works, in the rhymed ten syllables, and much influenced by Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," and by reaction against the smiling conventional "pastorals", But perhaps Crabbe's genius, stern and almost grim, was unfortunate in finding no other vendible vehicle of his thought than verse, for his natural bent was to the modern "realistic" novel on the squalor, sufferings and sins of the neglected rural poor. He had a genius like that of several modern novelists, for painting all that in nature or human nature is dark, lowering, and sullen; he is unsparingly devoted to actual study from the life; and yet he has a peculiar humour of his own. His later works were "Tales," short stories in the measure of Pope, but destitute of brilliance, and extremely prolix, so that, though these narratives in verse were apparently more popular than the contemporary novels of Miss Austen, the rapid rise and universal popularity of the prose novel began to deprive Crabbe of readers even in his own later years. Crabbe, who had been praised by Dr. Johnson, lived to enjoy the generous applause of Scott, Byron, Miss Austen, and, what was more rare, the approval of Wordsworth. But as, in the beginning of his career, he censured the Newspaper as the supplanter of poetry, so, before his death in 1832, he found that the world preferred novels in prose to short tales of modern life in verse. He profited by the brief period of the bloom of poetry, but his biographer, Canon Ainger, observes that "Crabbe is practically unknown to the readers of the present day". The gaiety and grace which in Cowper alternate with gloom, and make many of his poems so generally familiar, were not elements in the genius of Crabbe.

He was born at Aldeburgh, on the coast of Suffolk, on Christmas Eve, 1754, the son of a man who had been a schoolmaster, but later obtained a small post in the Customs. In Crabbe's day Aldeburgh was not, as now, a watering-place, but through the inroads of the sea, was become a squalid smuggling village with a desolate background of poor and ill-cultivated land: as described in "The Village". Crabbe was from childhood a great devourer of books, and at the second of his two country schools acquired Latin enough for his later purposes. He was apprenticed to a surgeon, fell early in love, at 18 won a prize for a magazine poem, "Hope," made songs to his mistress's eyebrow, printed (1775) a moral poem ("Inebriety"), at Ipswich practised medicine in a humble way, and in April, 1780, went to London with his surgical instruments and three pounds in his pocket. He wrote poems which were declined by publishers; though there was an opening for a poet—

When Verse her wintry prospect weeps,
When Pope is gone, and mighty Milton sleeps,
When Gray in lofty lines has ceased to soar,
And gentle Goldsmith charms the Town no more.

(Lines of 1780.) But the opening was occupied by Cowper, and Crabbe was as destitute as Chatterton, when a letter written by him to Burke excited the sympathy of that generous heart in 1781. Burke offered encouragement and hospitality, Thurlow gave money; Crabbe was introduced to Fox, Reynolds and Dr. Johnson, took orders, was made curate of his native village, liked it not, and became chaplain of the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir. Later he held a variety of livings, and, for a poet so satirical about clerical neglect of the poor, was, inconsistently, a pluralist and an absentee, till his Bishop made him mend his ways.

His first poem of any note, "The Library" (1781-2) has no great merit: we see that the novel, to Crabbe's mind, was represented by the old heroic romance,

In "The Village" (1783) Crabbe showed his true self in realistic descriptions of wretchedness. He first tells the Pastoral Muse that her day is over:—

There follows a perfect masterpiece of landscape in his manner, "the thin harvest with its withered ears" beyond the "burning sands"; the blighted rye, the thistles, poppies, blue bugloss, slimy mallow, the tares, the charlock. The peasants are "a wild amphibious race" of smugglers and fishers; the farm-labourers

In the poorhouse, amidst unspeakable filth, the dying are neglected by the doctor and the sporting curate, and the dead are buried without rites. There is not a gleam of hope or sunshine, except in the accidental mention of "the flying ball, the bat, the wicket". The poet ends with applause of the heroic death in action of Lord Robert Manners, and with consolatory remarks to the Duke of Rutland.

The poem was successful and was admired by Scott, then a lad of 18: a few lines had been contributed by Dr. Johnson.

Deserting the topics in which he was strongest, Crabbe (1785) published "The Newspaper"; the papers are

A daily swarm that banish every Muse,
For these unread the noblest volumes lie,
For these unsoiled in sheets the Muses die....

For daily bread the dirty trade they ply,
Coin their fresh tales and live upon the lie.

Crabbe continued to write, but not till 1807 did he publish "The Parish Register," which returns to the theme of "The Village". He was now doing duty at his parish, Muston, and, not unnaturally, found that, in various forms, the people had become Nonconformists. He now took a much more cheerful view of "the cot," and found its book-shelf well occupied by the Bible, Bunyan, and old English fairy tales; while the garden was rich in salads, carnations, hyacinths, and tulips. But Crabbe turns with more zest

he enumerates the smells, and describes the horrible results of overcrowded dwellings; and catalogues the disguises, the weapons, and the implements of the poacher. There follows the sad story of "The Miller's Daughter"; and another girl who thus addresses her clerical rebuker,

Alas! your Reverence, wanton thoughts, I grant,
Were once my motive, now the thoughts of want.

In "The Parish Register" Crabbe reduces the story of a life to the brevity of an anecdote, and in the dearth of novels his book was very popular. A better book of a similar scope and aim, in prose, Galt's "Annals of the Parish," was being written, but, taking time by the forelock, Crabbe, in 1810, produced "The Borough," descriptions of a large country town, including tales in verse of more considerable length. But, in 1804-1805, he had written a poem which is strange in his work, "Sir Eustace Grey," a tale told by a madman, a record of the dreams of madness, closely resembling De Quincey's account of the visions begotten by opium, and, in essence, not unlike Coleridge's "Pains of Sleep". The metre is that of the French ballade, and of the oldest Scottish ditty on the death of Alexander III. Thus

They hung me on a bough so small,
The rook could build her nest no higher,
They fixed me on the trembling ball
That crowns the steeple's quivering spire;

They set me where the seas retire,
But drown with their returning tide;
And made me flee the mountain's fire
When rolling from its burning side.

This adventure into romance has imaginative merits, and a speed of movement elsewhere unexampled in the work of Crabbe. The hymn with which poor Sir Eustace consoles himself might have been written by Cowper when first converted and "from cells of madness unconfined":—

Pilgrim, burdened with thy sin,
Come the way to Zion's gate;
There, till Mercy let thee in,
Knock and weep, and watch and wait.
Knock! He knows the sinner's cry:
Weep! He loves the mourner's tears:
Watch! for saving grace is nigh:
Wait! till heavenly light appears.

Crabbe thought it necessary to apologize for the "enthusiasm" of the hymn, and to point out that Sir Eustace, had he been sane, would not have been converted by "a methodistic call". "The World of Dreams," in the same stanza, might take its place in "Sir Eustace Grey," so similar are the processions of terrible fantastic visions. These things are very strange among the vigorous but heavy-footed marches of Crabbe's habitual style.

To return to "The Borough," Crabbe paints its very aspect with his Dutch precision; and, incidentally, strikes at his rivals, the enthusiasts of various sects, who were much more popular preachers than himself.

he exclaims; making an exception for Mendoza and other famed Semitic bruisers. The poem is of some value to the social historian, and the tales of the country coquette, and the horrible and haunted Peter Grimes, have a gloomy vigour, and somewhat resemble, in poetry, the moral pictures of Hogarth.

Crabbe's later works were collections of tales in verse, and with all their merits their versification condemns them to general neglect. His "Lady Barbara, or the Ghost" is not so successful in rendering the well-known story of "The Beresford Ghost" as is Scott's early ballad "The Eve of St John". To read with attention novels of everyday life narrated in the metre of Pope, without the skill of Pope, requires a vigorous effort.

In his Tales (as when a sturdy orthodox farmer expels the demon of scepticism from his son by a sound trouncing) Crabbe is often somewhat remote from our sympathetic modern tolerance of honest doubt. His method of narration is obsolete. In "The Patron," the patronized youth of humble birth, who has loved the Squire's daughter, is neglected,

"Emma," the lady cried, "my words attend,
Your syren-smiles have killed your humble friend;
The hopes you raised can now delude no more,
Nor charms, that once inspired, can now restore."

Crabbe died in the same year as Sir Walter Scott, who, like Byron, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, appreciated that in him which was rare, excellent, and original.

[1] The Bannatyne Club, for the printing and preservation of old manuscripts, a kind of Scottish Roxburghe Club, was founded by Sir Walter Scott in memory of the old lover of poetry.

CHAPTER XXX.

GEORGIAN PROSE.

The Great Novelists.

The novel, since the days of the mediaeval romances, and the Elizabethan prose stories from Sidney's "Arcadia" to the tales of Greene and Nash, was never quite unrepresented in England, for example, there were translations and imitations of the huge French "Heroic" romances; Bunyan's stories are religious and moral novels, and under the Restoration Mrs. Aphra Behn (1640-1689) wrote short novels of love which do not quite deserve the bad reputation conferred on them by an anecdote told by Sir Walter Scott. Eliza Haywood (1693-1756) was prolific in prose tales, and is the author of a little romance of Prince Charles's adventures in 1749-1750, disguised as "A Letter of H— G—," Henry Goring, the Prince's equerry. But in literary circles, the novel was held in as high disdain as it was later, before Scott produced "Waverley" (1814).

The novel of modern life, manners, and sentiment first came to its own as the universal joy of reading mankind in Richardson's "Pamela"; advertised as it was, in modern fashion from the pulpits of all denominations.

Samuel Richardson, the son of a Yorkshire joiner, was born in 1689, and after being educated at the Charterhouse was apprenticed to a London printer. As a boy he made small sums by writing love-letters for maid-servants and others who were unable to write for themselves; and when, as a middle-aged man, he turned to writing novels, he cast them in the form of letters. "Pamela," which he began to publish in 1740, is the story of a girl who is a waiting-maid to a lady and is persecuted by her mistress's son; in the end he marries her and becomes a model husband. It may annoy us from the very strange and unnatural way in which all the characters behave. Pamela strikes us less as a being of equal innocence and virtue, mistress of her own passion for "the dear obliger," Mr. B. (only the initial is given), than as a young woman who knows her game and plays her cards most adroitly. Her snobbishness was, no doubt, in the manner of her class in her day, but we approve of Pamela no more than Fielding did, when he overwhelmed it with the sturdy laughter of his parody, "Joseph Andrews," brother of Pamela, and as virtuous as that paragon, yet no milksop. But "Pamela" was admired beyond "this side idolatry".

"Clarissa" (1748) is another novel of Virtue in danger and distress, but Clarissa is a lady of good family and fortune, and of a pure and heroic spirit. Decoyed from her home and friends by the wiles of the professional seducer, Lovelace, a rake so brilliant and witty and reckless as to win the hearts, if not of Clarissa, of all Richardson's lady readers, Clarissa is exposed to the last extreme of misery, steadily refuses to marry the scoundrel who has wronged her, and dies slowly among the sobs of the congregation.

"Sir Charles Grandison," whose name has become a proverb in the English language, appeared in 1753, and is one of the longest books that ever was printed. It is very badly constructed too, and contains lengthy episodes which have nothing to do with the story, and only puzzle and confuse the reader. Properly speaking it is not so much a novel as a series of incidents, all tending to the glorification of the hero, who is made up of long words, fine sentiments and whalebone. The women of the tale are less exasperating than the men, though they can hardly be considered attractive. The reason of this may be found in the fact that Richardson neither sought nor was sought by men, while he was in the habit of reading his manuscripts to a group of enthusiastic young ladies (among whom was the future Mrs. Chapone) in his garden at Fulham. Unluckily his audience, who might have been of service to him in pointing out that well-bred people had other manners than those of the characters of Richardson, were too deeply engulfed in admiration to be capable of criticism; or possibly they may not have been aware, as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was, that Richardson did not know the society which he described. The letters themselves, besides showing a frankness and lack of reticence which it may confidently be said few real letters could ever parallel, are of a length which even on a desert island no one could write. The genuine letters in his correspondence, between him and the unknown but worshipping Lady Bradshaigh, and their romantic and elaborate arrangements to discover each other in Hyde Park, are far more amusing reading. Richardson has been accused, and justly, of a portentous lack of humour, but if his reader has any of his own, he will not read the novels in vain.

These censures are the candid criticism of the modern reader who finds that he cannot think himself back into the circle of Richardson, who finds its Virtue and its Sentiment hardly intelligible, though he is entirely at home with the society of all degrees that Fielding describes, or that lives in Boswell's "Life of Johnson," and in the "Letters" of Horace Walpole and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, expressing themselves like people of this world. But though Richardson lived in a kind of moral and sentimental hothouse, where one can scarcely breathe; though he had a more than feminine liking for accumulated minutenesses of details and a more than mediaeval prolixity; yet his full-length pictures of his personages, stippled like a miniature in a ring, delighted not only English but continental, especially French readers. It was an age when people took little exercise, were little in the open air, and passed endless hours in conversation on the ethics and philosophy of love and sentiment. The Memoirs of Madame d'Épinay are partly a romance in the manner of Richardson, and to read them is to understand the society which found in him its ideal novelist. "The man would hang himself who tried to read 'Clarissa' for its story," said Dr. Johnson, a friend of the author, partly because the author was the friend of Virtue. We, if we please, may detest and disbelieve in Lovelace, who was, none the less, the conqueror of the hearts of the ladies of the time, that implored Richardson to convert a hero so brilliant, witty and amiable. But for Richardson it had been enough to convert Mr. B., and he was artist enough to refuse to gratify tastes which, in the manner of Charles II., demanded that all tragedies should end happily. Scott, with the resurrection of Athelstane; Dickens, with the conversion of Estella, were more good-naturedly and erroneously amenable to the requests of friends.

There was a blush between Charles Lamb and the girl who sat down beside him to read "Pamela," and, in fact, Richardson's way of educating girls in virtue may seem apt to have effects which he did not contemplate. Other times, other manners.

To say anything at once new and true about Henry Fielding passes the power of man. His defects and his qualities; the good in him and in his work, and the not so good, are so conspicuous that his contemporaries, and later generations down to our own, have passed on them the same remarks. There are the admirers of Fielding, who justly see in him one of the three very greatest of English novelists of contemporary life and manners as exhibited in the portions of society which he knew and illustrated. But he did not take all contemporary society for his province. Born at Sharpham Park, in Somerset, in 1707, he had far greater advantages of birth than other men of the pen. The House of Fielding is ancient and noble, though, unlike Gibbon in his monumental compliment to Fielding, Mr. Horace Round cannot accept its connexion with the House of Hapsburg.

The Fieldings had two Earldoms, of Desmond (in Ireland) and of Denbigh; Fielding's father was of a cadet branch of the family: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was a kind of cousin of the novelist. He was educated at Eton and in the law-loving University of Leyden; but when he "came upon the town," in 1728, he did not associate himself with the circle of Pope and Bolingbroke and the wits and the great ladies; he does not draw his characters from that splendid society, though Lady Bellaston, in "Tom Jones," is a member thereof.

Fielding had to live by his brains, by writing comedies, and by journalism. He showed his genius for parody of the heroic tiresome tragedy that was "such an unconscionable time adying," in "Tom Thumb the Great"; and his dangerous turn for political satire in "The Historical Register" (1737). But the Licensing Act, making the Lord Chamberlain, or his subaltern, Licencer of Plays, excluded Fielding from that course; he was called to the Bar (1740), where he did not practise much. He was married in 1735 to the original, it is said, of the exquisite Sophia of "Tom Jones"; he wrote in the Press; in 1745 he took the Hanoverian side, in "The True Patriot," and "The Jacobite's Journal," in mockery so named; and during all this period he saw a great deal of the world, especially the world of the stage and of light literature.

But of all this he makes little display in his novels. He falls back on the humours of the country: on the country parson, Adams; the Tory Squire, Squire Western; a neighbour, in character of Sir Tunbelly Clumsey, and so good an Englishman that he rejoices when he hears that "twenty thousand honest Frenchmen are landed in Kent" to back the Rightful King, and the landed interest, against Hanoverians, financiers, and Whigs in general. His excellent Allworthy is no townsman; Mr. Thomas Jones, a Foundling, is country born and country bred; most of the adventures of Joseph Andrews take place in the country; in "Amelia" we are in town, and in taverns and prisons often, but by no means "in society".

"Jonathan Wild" is a tale of town villains and rogues; and Fielding's minor characters, from postilions to philosophers, like Philosopher Square, landlords, landladies, serving-men, lawyers, parsons, unfortunate ladies, people on the road, are of ordinary humanity, with a considerable sprinkling of hypocrites. He had heard the chimes at midnight and much later; he had hunted; he had lived the tavern life, the life of debts and expedients, but he "had kept the bird in his bosom," the sterling excellence of his heart; pity for the poor and oppressed; honour, good humour, tolerance, and manly indignation.

To Fielding, Richardson's "Pamela," the text of many a sermon, the snow-pure prudent Pamela, with Virtue rewarded by the hand of the enterprising Mr. B., was even as a red rag to a bull. He did not weep over Pamela's tears, these "pearly fugitives". He no more believed in Mr. B.'s return to virtue than in that of Vanbrugh's Loveless. Respectability was so far from being his favourite virtue, that, like many very inferior writers, he inclined to identify it, unjustly, with hypocrisy.

Consequently he began "Joseph Andrews" as a parody or burlesque of "Pamela". That paragon had a brother, appropriately named Joseph; and the virtue of Joseph is assailed like that of his sister, but in vain. Joseph is invincibly respectable, yet no hypocrite, but a very manly young fellow with an honest love in his own rank. The story soon ceased to be a parody; that grotesque, learned, excellent and extremely muscular Christian, Parson Adams, came into the tale with the egregious Mrs. Slipslop; and the thing became a "picaresque" novel, a tale of the road and of chance meetings: with the lesson that kind hearts are more than coronets, and a postilion, later guilty of robbing a hen roost, is a better Christian than a whole coach-load of Pharisees. Indeed St. Augustine, once at least, robbed an orchard, yet became a shining light, having been misled (as regards the apples and pears) by his sense of humour.

"Joseph Andrews," though its language is occasionally coarse, as regards its meaning is not obscure, and it is certainly one of the most amusing works in our language: though it is not written for small boys and little girls. We meet Pamela and Mr. B. (cruelly styled Mr. Booby), again at the close, and they behave ill in church, when Joseph is married.

Richardson was very much hurt, of course, and spoke very ill of Fielding; if he forgave Fielding, he "forgave him as a Christian," like Rowena in Ivanhoe, "'which means,' said Wamba, 'that she does not forgive him at all'".

There is an endless discussion about Fielding's morality. Natural goodness of heart is everything with him. Of his Tom Jones the epitaph might be that devised by Joe Gargery in "Great Expectations" for his reprobate of a father,

Whatsume'er the failings on his part,
Remember reader he were that good in his hart.

Thomas was "that good at his heart" and lectures young Nightingale very nobly on the infamy of corrupting virtue. But where there is no virtue to corrupt in others, Thomas pays no attention to his own. Perhaps he could have resisted temptation, in Nightingale's circumstances, but he is wisely kept out of it by the author. He does what is thought the very basest thing that a man can do; Colonel Newcome never forgave him; if we are to pardon Tom it must be, as Dumas urges in the case of Porthos, because, "other times, other manners".

This affair is the dangerous step in "Tom Jones" (1749), that epic of the eighteenth century. Fielding thought of it as an epic in prose; he is fond of burlesquing Homer and of quoting Aristotle. The plot has been praised by Coleridge and justly, as on a level with that of the "Œdipus Tyrannus" of Sophocles. The construction of plots has not been the strong point of most great novelists, but Fielding set this good example, not immaculate of course, but admirable.

The real merit of the book lies in its pell-mell of characters, all delineated with exquisite humour, wit, and observation, from the mysterious mother of the hero, and the adorable Sophia, to the adroit hypocrite, Blifil; the uproarious stupid fox-hunter, the Jacobite who drinks healths, Squire Western; the philanthropic yet really good Allworthy; the delightful pedantic Partridge, with his tags of Latin quotations; the rural ruffian, Black George; the harmless vanity of Miss Western (the aunt), the sternly Protestant and Anglican, but not immaculately virtuous Philosopher Square, and all the attendant crowd.

The moral introductory reflections may, of course, be skipped, yet not by wise readers, for they are full of Fielding's humour, and display his confidence in the immortality of his book.

Fielding was Thackeray's master and model; in his too frequent reflections he follows Fielding too closely. If all men were equally fortunate, they would all read "Tom Jones" in the six small volumes of the First Edition: but in any edition the book is delightful. Charlotte Brontë thought it corrupting to such young fellows as her brother, the unhappy Branwell, but Branwells will go their own way, with or without the aid of the too fortunate Foundling.

Fielding was a sturdy Hanoverian, but he was mortal and an author. He must have been pleased had he known that the hero of 1745 (the year in which the tale is cast), that Prince Charles then lurking in a Parisian convent, purchased "Tom Jones," both in French and English.

Earlier than "Tom Jones" is "Jonathan Wild the Great," the romance of a thief-taker and sharer of spoils with thieves, who was gibbeted in 1725. It is customary to speak of this book, a satire of the "greatness" of men like Julius Cæsar, as a masterpiece of irony, and as a success in the field where Thackeray, on the same estimate, failed with "Barry Lyndon". If irony is to be openly and noisily unveiled in every page, then "Jonathan Wild" may be a masterpiece of irony. The reader may be left, if he can read "Jonathan Wild," to compare it with "Barry Lyndon" for himself, and to draw his own conclusions as to the relative merits of these books. The deliciously absurd adventures of Mrs. Heartfree, like those of the heroines of late Greek romances, are, at all events, intentionally or unintentionally funny. Sir Walter Scott disliked this masterpiece, and after reading it, and the commendations which eminent modern critics bestow upon it, the writer cannot honestly dissent from the disrelish of Sir Walter. He is said not to have understood Fielding's meaning which Fielding constantly proclaims and avows, namely that greatness of intellect and ambition without goodness of heart is a mischievous monstrosity. Mr. Carlyle, in some moods of hero-worship, might have differed, but we can give a general assent without wading through "Jonathan Wild".

Fielding's own heart was as good as Steele's. He adored his beautiful wife as Steele adored Prue. But, while "the greatest blessing is a faithful and beloved wife," says our author in "Amelia," "it rather tends to aggravate the misfortune of distressed circumstances from the consideration of the share which she is to bear in them". But the circumstances were distressed because Fielding, like Amelia's Captain Booth, was "a good fellow," and, like Johnson's friend, Savage, was at no time of his life the first to leave any company,—over the punch bowl. And Amelia was listening for every footstep, and dreading every accident of the streets, and money was a minus quantity, and a scrag of mutton was a rare festival, because Captain Booth had every generosity except that of a little self-denial.

By 1749 Mr. Fielding, as his friendly biographer says, "was a martyr to gout". "He had not stolen it," and we have heard of another sufferer, "a martyr to delirium tremens". By this time his wife was dead; later he married her maid, an excellent woman, Mary Daniel, probably of an old and ruined Jacobite family of Daniel. At the end of 1748 Fielding had been made a stipendiary magistrate for Westminster. Unlike his Jonathan Thrasher, Esq., J.P., who was infamously corrupt, and as ignorant of the law as the country justice before whom Frank Osbaldistone appears in "Rob Roy," Fielding brought to his work his honesty, courage, and sympathy with the poor.

The first chapters of his "Amelia" (1751) contain pictures of the contemporary corruption of justice, and the laxity of the prisons. Thence came the misfortunes of Captain Booth, a true lover, but also a young man in the prime of life. From this error of the Captain's, who met a Circe in prison, and from the greatness of his wife's character, the beautiful Amelia, the plot of the novel adroitly develops itself. She was "too good to be true". On the other hand the high spirit and temper of Miss Matthews make her a kind of shady Brynhild; and only coincidences in which Captain Booth recognized the hand of Providence prevent the most tragical catastrophe. "Men worship women on their knees; when they get up they go away," says Fielding's great successor. They never get up and go away when they worship Amelia.

The book, in addition to her and Miss Matthews, presents the delightfully amusing characters of Colonel Bath, "old honour and dignity," who fights Booth in Hyde Park from motives of the purest friendship; Colonel James, with a philosophy of love rather like Lord Foppington's; Sergeant Atkinson, a kind of later Great Heart; Mrs. Ellison, a lady "not of the nicest delicacy"; Murphy, a Jonathan Wild as attorney; and a score of other characters worthy of their creator. With "Joseph Andrews" and "Tom Jones," "Amelia" is an immortal glory of English fiction.

Fielding's experiences led him into plans for suppressing lawlessness, and for important social reforms. In 1753 he took the side of Elizabeth Canning in that unsolved mystery of a girl who, if not a good girl, "has been too hard for me," says Fielding. His own behaviour, in the case of Miss Virtue's examination, is rather startling to the modern student; and whether he ended as a partisan of the Gipsy or of Elizabeth Canning is uncertain (1753-1754). Elizabeth made a good marriage, in America, whither she was banished, and lived and died respected.

In his pamphlet on Elizabeth's affair, which excited and divided London for more than a year, Fielding speaks of his illness and overtaxed strength. He spent what was left of it in his public duties; was advised to voyage to Portugal, and his "Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon," written with a dying hand, is the record of his sufferings and reflections. He sailed in the "Queen of Portugal" (Captain Veal), had intervals of enjoyment, and sketched, with his usual humour, the events and incidents of the expedition. He died at Lisbon on 8 October, 1754.

The name of Smollett is coupled as familiarly with that of Fielding as the name of Thackeray with that of Dickens. Smollett and Fielding were contemporaries: both came of ancient families: each had a profession;—Smollett was a physician while Fielding was a barrister,—but each lived mainly by journalism, literature and fiction. If opinions as to their relative merits were divided in their day, posterity has awarded the crown to Fielding. The reason is obvious: Fielding is full of good humour; in him there is no rancour; he admires good women almost to adoration, and paints them as only the very greatest poets have done. Again, his tales are well constructed, especially "Tom Jones". On the other hand Smollett allows his story to wander in the roads and haunt the inns, and encounter grotesque adventures; he has bitter grudges against all and sundry, especially against his patrons and his kinsfolk. His heroines are regarded by his heroes rather as luxuries than as ladies; his heroes, to be plain, are not merely libertines, but often behave like selfish ruffians; and his relish for odious images and thoughts is hardly surpassed by that of Swift. These faults in temper and taste have made Smollett unpopular, despite his wide knowledge of life; his irresistible power of compelling laughter, his swaggering vein. But, if he drew Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle from himself, he gave them bad qualities far in excess of his own, and did not endow them with many of his own better attributes. Smollett would never have used the loyal Strap as Roderick Random often does; and was incapable of what may be styled the dastardly plot in which Peregrine was fain to have imitated Richardson's Lovelace.

Smollett was born in 1721, a younger son of a younger son of the ancient house of Smollett of Bonhill, on the Leven near Loch Lomond. An ancestor of his, he says, blew up a galleon of the Spanish Armada in Tobermory Bay. He did indeed, by an act of suborned treachery. Like Burns, Tobias celebrated in verse his native stream; like Burns in boyhood he devoured the truculent romance of "Wallace" by Blind Harry. He was poor, and believed himself to be badly treated by his kinsfolk; after studying at Glasgow University he was apprenticed to a surgeon. In 1739 he went to London to push his fortunes, carrying with him a foolish tragedy on the murder of James I, which was the apple of his eye. No manager would accept it, wherefore Smollett raged against Garrick and Lord Lyttelton: he puts the story of his woes into "Roderick Random," where Mr. Melopoyn, unhappy poet, is the sufferer. He got what Chatterton and Goldsmith failed to obtain, the post of surgeon's mate in a ship of war; lived through the distresses of the siege of Carthagena (1741), and obtained that knowledge of naval squalor and brutality, and of the good qualities of sea-men, which he used in "Roderick Random" and in the characters of Bowling and Trunnion. Leaving the navy, he married in Jamaica, came to town, practised as a physician, and certainly lived in most fashionable quarters. He speaks of Bob Sawyer's method of advertisement by being hastily called out of church as an old trick; perhaps Dickens, a reader of Smollett from his childhood, borrowed here from "Count Fathom". His patriotism was stirred by the fatal disaster of Culloden, and he boldly published his "Tears of Scotland" (1746).

In 1748 he published "Roderick Random," the history of a meritorious orphan who lives on his servant, cheats his tailor, is a gambler, and enriches himself in the slave trade; but all is to be forgiven to Roderick's ebullient vigour and occasional sentimentalism. There are countless changes of scene and varieties of character, from the ocean to the Marshalsea Prison, to adventures in French service, from Strap and Bowling to the literary Miss Snapper and the unfortunate Miss Williams. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu supposed her cousin, Fielding, to be the author, which showed little discrimination, though her ladyship's letters are among the wittiest and most brilliantly amusing of her century. Smollett had a bitter feud with Fielding; we do not know, or care, for what cause. The briskness of the book, and the novelty of the nautical horrors, made Smollett's reputation.

Going to Paris in 1750, Smollett found some of the characters who appear in the crowd of "Peregrine Pickle" (1751), of which the first edition aroused censures on passages later pruned by the author. It is a work of amazingly careless vigour and humour: the irrepressible Peregrine is even a less desirable hero than Roderick; and an infamous Jacobite spy was not ill-advised in choosing Pickle for his pseudonym. Emilia is more than too good for the rascal to whom she descends in marriage, after escaping plots of his which might have disgusted Pamela's Mr. B. But Cadwallader Crabtree, Hatchway and Pipes, and Commander Hawser Trunnion are immortal characters; it is cruel to call Trunnion caricatured; he is a comic masterpiece.

The "Ferdinand, Count Fathom" (1753), the adventurous son of a suttler and murderess, is not a much worse man than Peregrine, but, in place of Trunnion and Pipes, we are entertained with a queer attempt at romance in the loves of Rinaldo and Monimia, who meets her lover as he weeps over her empty tomb. "Sir Lancelot Greaves," a modern Don Quixote, armour and all, was preferred by Scott to "Jonathan Wild," and, despite the patent absurdity of the armed knight, is really a much more agreeable story. In 1763 Smollett visited Italy, and his grumbling hypochondriacal narrative of his tour was ridiculed by that more sentimental traveller, Sterne. His "Adventures of an Atom" (1769) is a scurrilous political satire. On the other hand his "Humphry Clinker" (1771), a narrative, in letters, of a journey by English travellers in Scotland, is both more good-humoured and more amusing than any of his other stories—Matthew Bramble is a favourable study of his later self; Lieutenant Lismahago is a kind of Dugald Dalgetty, born more than a century later than the laird of Drumthwacket, and the spelling and innocent good-hearted absurdity of Winifred Jenkins endear her to every reader, as a contrast to Tabitha Bramble, a bad kind of old maid. Here we meet Ferdinand, Count Fathom, as a sincerely converted character!

Smollett is not only remarkable for variety, humour, vigour, as a social observer: he strongly influenced both Fanny Burney and Dickens. His History of England has been justly described by Sir Pitt Crawley as less interesting but less dangerous than that by Hume. Smollett, revisiting Italy, died at Monte Nero, near Leghorn, in the early autumn of 1771.

CHAPTER XXXI.

GEORGIAN PROSE.

II.

We could scarcely understand how Dr. Johnson gained his immense influence and acknowledged chiefship in literature if we had only his works of various kinds before us. But he had a friend and biographer, James Boswell, Esq. (younger of Auchinleck in Ayrshire), and "Bozzy," by showing Johnson as he was and talked, explains his supremacy. In an age when classical learning counted for something, Johnson was, especially in Roman literature, vastly learned. In a time when people who could tear themselves from cards, took little exercise, but sat and talked, over wine or over tea, or as they slowly sauntered, Johnson was probably the best and certainly the best reported of the talkers. While politicians like Burke, and painters like Sir Joshua Reynolds, and musicians like Burney (Fanny Burney's father), were men of letters, critics, talkers, a scholar and author who could talk like Johnson was certain of his reward, was sure to be at the front. Though he confessed himself not specially partial to clean linen; though he did not eat in a neat and cleanly fashion; though he had the strange tricks which we know so well; though if his pistol missed fire in argument he knocked you down with the butt; though he had curious prejudices, was at heart a Jacobite, and could be extremely rude, yet the excellence of his heart, his large sagacity, his immense knowledge and readiness, his humour, all of him that is immortally delightful to read about in Boswell's Life, won his forgiveness and his welcome from the most refined of men and women. He thought himself a lady's man, he said, and a man of the world, and he was thoroughly a man's man, with heart, and tongue, and hands, if that were necessary.

As a playwriter, he had not great success, and his friend Goldsmith's comedies keep the stage, unlike Johnson's tragedy. Johnson's tale "Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia," has wisdom and humour enough, "wit enough to keep it sweet," but it never did nor ever can share the popularity of Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield".

Johnson's essays, in "The Rambler" and "The Idler," may still be but are seldom read: they are far less alive than the essays of Addison and Steele, and are weighed down by the ponderous harmonies of the Latinised style.

Of his books, "The Lives of the Poets," written in his old age, are, to some, we may hope to many, readers, entrancing. Here we find the Johnson of conversation. He is not, indeed, a scientific biographer, a searcher among old letters and old records. But his memory was rich in anecdotes of the half century before his own; his style contains many a humorous comment, and his criticism is often acute, and always honest, and unaffectedly tinged, especially when he writes of the republican and puritan Milton, or of the dainty, yet, in poetry, revolutionary Gray, with all the literary and political prejudices that gave salt to his conversation. There may have been more enlightened critics, but none was ever more entertaining.

If his literary biographies are not of the most exact, they are occasionally minute enough. "Pope's weakness was so great, that he constantly wore stays, as I have been assured by a waterman (of Twickenham) who, in lifting him into his boat, had often felt them." Again, "Pope once slumbered at his own table while the Prince of Wales was talking of poetry". In his "Life of Swift" Johnson is by no means friendly, and publishes an anecdote which was indignantly denied. His life of his friend, Richard Savage, a most detestable person, is an example of Johnson's loyalty and tolerance. Supposing that Savage was the son of the Countess of Macclesfield, and was persecuted by her with incredible cruelty, yet his conduct in most ways was detestable, though Johnson, who candidly narrates the facts, good-humouredly condones them. The conversation of Savage must, apparently, have won the heart of "the great Lexicographer". Even the Dictionary of the Doctor contains several of his good sayings, and perhaps the learning and persevering industry which Johnson displayed as a "drudge" increased his reputation, and won for him friends and admirers, as much as his more literary works.

The outlines of his life are too well known to need more than a brief summary. His family was matter of interest to the Highlanders when he visited them, was he a MacIan of Glencoe or a Johnston of the Border? He was born at Lichfield (18 September, 1709), his father was a bookseller. His Oxford career, at Pembroke College, was embittered by poverty, but he retained a great affection for his college and University, which delighted to honour him. He kept a school without much profit, and, coming to London with Garrick in 1737, lived the life of Grub Street, doing translations, writing for Cave's "Gentleman's Magazine," compiling parliamentary debates in which he "took care not to let the Whig dogs have the best of it". Of his doings in 1745 Boswell could learn nothing, and there was a fancy that he was inclined to take part in what he called "a gallant enterprise," that of Prince Charles.

His "London," an imitation of Juvenal, was well thought of by Pope, and Scott took more pleasure in no modern poem than in Johnson's manly, resolute, and mournful "Vanity of Human Wishes," also based on Juvenal's satire (1749). The "Rambler" and "Idler," were his next works (with the Dictionary), and in 1759 he rapidly wrote "Rasselas," to pay the expenses of his mother's funeral. In 1762 he accepted, from a King who "gloried in the name of Briton," a pension of £300 yearly. He lived much, after this date, at the house of Mrs. Thrale and her husband, "my Master" as she called him, the rich brewer. Here he was happy in the society of many wits, of the beautiful Sophy Streatfield, "with nose and notions à la Grecque," and of Fanny Burney, blessed in the success of "Evelina". Mrs. Thrale and Miss Burney have left many reminiscences of him which complete the account by his young Scottish adorer and butt, Boswell.

Johnson founded the Club, and such was his influence that the Club did not blackball Bozzy. With him Johnson made his difficult journey to the Western Islands of Scotland; so happily described both by Boswell and himself; stayed at Dunvegan Castle, was entertained by Flora Macdonald, met a learned minister in Skye who was a sceptic about Homer, inquired into the Second Sight; stayed at Inveraray Castle with the Duke of Argyll; and at St. Andrews was told that at Oxford they had nothing like the St. Andrews University Library. On hearing this Dr. Johnson, for once, made no reply.

His "Lives of the Poets" was written in 1779-1781, when he was 70 years of age and more. His cruel last illness was nobly borne; he died on 13 December, 1784, one of the best, greatest, wisest, and most humorous of Englishmen.

His "Lives," and the Life of him are among the works which time cannot stale; read ten times over they please the more, and more excellencies are discovered. No man of times past is known so well, and none was so well worth knowing. His critical tastes and rules are not ours, and perhaps even in his own day were falling out of fashion; but they are none the less historically valuable.

Dr. Johnson carried all his set with him into renown, and though Oliver Goldsmith was a writer of versatile and charming genius, but for his friendship with Johnson he would have been much less successful in life, and less well loved and remembered after his death.

Like several great writers born in Ireland, Goldsmith was of an English family, but they had been so long settled in Ireland that they had become "more Irish than the Irish". Goldsmith's father had the care of Protestant souls at Pallasmore, County Longford, where (10 November, 1728) the poet was born. The father obtained a cure worth more than the "forty pounds a year" at Lissoy in West Meath, and Lissoy contributes some features to the Auburn of the "Deserted Village," an ideal village, in an ideal state of desertion. His father, according to Goldsmith's poetry and prose, was a most excellent man; more capable of teaching his family how to spend large fortunes in benevolence than how to earn a maintenance,

He was the generous host of "all the vagrant train," of "the long-remembered beggar," an Irish Edie Ochiltree, of "the ruined spendthrift," who "claimed kindred," and came to "scorn," and of "the broken soldier".

This pity was Goldsmith's own characteristic. When an exceedingly poor scholar at Trinity College, Dublin, his feats of charity matched those of St. Francis or St. Martin of Tours. He is said to have given away his blanket, and slept in the ticking of his bed.

A love of fine clothes was no less part of his nature than love of his neighbours, while he liked "the cards," and the bowl and tavern talk. He took his bachelor's degree in February, 1749: idled away a year or two at home, learned to play the flute, failed to take holy orders, and, as a medical student, went to Edinburgh University (1752-1754) lived on the benevolence of an uncle, Contarine, and, on his way to Leyden, was taken in the company of five or six Scottish gentlemen in French service, who had been recruiting for King Louis in the Highlands. Alan Breck may have been in this adventure. Throughout 1755-1756, Goldsmith roamed about the Continent, supporting himself by his flute, and entertained by the hospitality of the Universities.

"Sir," said Johnson, "he disputed his way through Europe," as the Admirable Crichton had done, a hundred and seventy years earlier. At Padua, it is thought, if anywhere, he obtained his Doctor's degree: his adventures later gave him materials for essays, for the wandering scholar in "The Vicar of Wakefield," and for his poem, "The Traveller". "He was making himself all the time."

Returning to England in 1756, he lived as an usher in a small school; as a corrector for the press; as a kind of indentured reviewer and general hack to Griffiths the publisher; failed to pass as a naval surgeon; wrote with Smollett's literary gang, conducted a weekly booklet or magazine, "The Bee," for a few numbers (1759); and published "An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe". He was much more successful (1760) with letters in "The Public Ledger," in the assumed character of a Chinese visitor to London.

In the former work Goldsmith complains that young genius effervesces at college and is unrewarded, while dull plodders fatten. "The link" between "the great" and the literary "now seems entirely broken". "An author" is a thing only to be laughed at. "His person, not his jest, becomes the mirth of the company." Indeed Goldsmith's person was quaint, his attire, when in funds, was that of the bird of paradise; while his wit flowed from his pen, not from his tongue; his repartee was not ready; eager he was but apparently absent-minded in company. As for the publisher, "it is his interest to allow as little as possible for writing, and of the author to write as much as possible". Writers for the stage suffer from the competition of the dead. Like two or three men of genius of our day, Goldsmith asks "who will deliver us from Shakespeare?" from "these pieces of forced humour, far-fetched conceit, and unnatural hyperbole which have been ascribed to Shakespeare." Here is scepticism! Managers make new authors wait some years before giving their plays a chance: a malady most incident to managers; and Garrick believed that he was attacked.

The not unnatural acrimony of a neglected man appears in some of the Chinese Letters (published in book form as "The Citizen of the World"), notably in the visit to Westminster Abbey. Goldsmith had a spite against the patronage, given to the art of painting, and made his Chinaman share it. The same critic looks on Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" as a lewd compound of pertness, vanity, and obscene buffoonery.

The Chinaman also attacked the brutality of the criminal law (that of his own country being so mild), and generally inveighed against the state of society. The Letters are an unflattering picture of the times. By 1761 Johnson had made the acquaintance of Goldsmith, and henceforth Goldsmith had not to complain of neglect from wits and authors. In 1764 he published his moral and contemplative poem "The Traveller"; with his "Deserted Village" it is perhaps the last good thing of the old school of poems in rhymed heroic couplets. The dedicatory preface to the author's brother, the Rev. Henry Goldsmith, tells us that, as society becomes refined, painting and music "offer the feeble mind a less laborious entertainment" than poetry, which they supplant, while "what criticisms have we not heard of late in favour of blank verse, and Pindaric Odes, anapests (sic) and iambics, alliterative care and happy negligence! Every absurdity has now a champion to defend it!"

Goldsmith, in social matters rather a Socialist, is, in poetry, opposing the slowly dawning freedom, and upholding the school of Pope. But there is, in both of his longer poems, a kind of softness in the versification, and of sincerity in the sentiments and descriptions of Nature, which we miss in Pope, while each piece, as the man said of "Hamlet," "is made up of quotations," of lines which live in many memories like household words. The pictures of the parish clergyman, of the schoolmaster, of the harmless old rustic ale-house, in the "Deserted Village," may be called imperishable; and Goldsmith cries "back to the land" and denounces "landlordism," and forced migration to North America,

Goldsmith, in fact, never revisited "the decent church," "the hawthorn bush," the harmless pot-house, and other scenes of his infancy: in his poem he blends an ideal Irish with an ideal English village, and ascribes the result to a tyrannical, landlord with admirable pathetic success.

Of his other poems "The Haunch of Venison," imitated from Horace, and the witty and kind raillery of "Retaliation," in which his pen supplies the wit that often failed his tongue in the wit-combats of "the Club," are both in "anapests" and are the most important. The "Lament for Madame Blaise" is a lively adaptation from the French, and the "Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog" is a most vivacious piece. As a ballad "Edwin and Angelina," though popular, is too unballad-like.

The works on which Goldsmith's fame depends are not his essays, histories, or view of "Animated Nature," genially unscientific, but his "Vicar of Wakefield" (written earlier, but sold by Johnson for while Goldsmith was in a sponging house in 1764), and his two plays "The Good Natured Man," and "She Stoops to Conquer" (1768, 1773).

"The Vicar of Wakefield" drew the highest possible praise from Goethe, and the most furious of attacks from the critical pen of Mark Twain. Nobody says that it shines in construction, but its humour and sweetness, the goodness, the simplicity, the true wisdom, and the learned foibles of the Vicar, with the humours of his wife, daughters, and wandering scholar son, an usher, a dweller in Grub Street, make "The Vicar of Wakefield" a book to be read once a year. "Finding that the best things had not been said on the wrong side, I resolved to write a book that should be wholly new... the learned world said nothing to my paradoxes, nothing at all, sir." In the son's narrative Goldsmith has his usual flout at art and amateurs of art, and Pietro Perugino.

The plays are too well known for comment, with Croaker and Lofty, the Bailiffs, Tony Lumpkin, Mrs. Hardcastle, the revellers at the Three Pigeons, and young Marlow, they are at least as familiar on the amateur as on the professional boards. They brought to Goldsmith fame, some money and more credit, but he was still a drudge, still working for booksellers, and deep in debt, when his death on 4 April, 1774, made Reynolds for once lay down his brush, saddened the Club, and filled the stairs of his chambers in Brick Court with poor weeping women to whom he had been kind,—their only friend. "Nullum fere scribendi genus non tetigit, nullum quod tetigit non ornavit," wrote Johnson in his epitaph, adding a new phrase to Latin proverbial philosophy.[1]

"It seems probable," says Burke's biographer, Lord Morley, "that Burke will be more frequently and more seriously referred to within the next twenty years" (from 1899) "than he has been within the whole of the last eighty." Yet we do not find many references to Burke, who, living, speaking, and writing through some thirty years of discontents and revolutions (the American and the French) and bringing to problems like our own a masculine judgment, and a lucid and energetic style, might seem worthy of general study.

In a sketch of the history of literature space for the works of Burke, saturated with politics as they are, and only to be understood in the light of ample historical knowledge, cannot be provided. The speeches of most successful orators are brilliant, and persuasive for the hour, with crowds who wish to be persuaded. The speeches of Burke are sometimes, when his pity and indignation are stirred (as by the fate of Marie Antoinette, or the alleged infamies of Warren Hastings), rich in floral components, in impassioned rhetoric. But, as a rule, his best orations required to be read if they were to be appreciated; they are too full of thought and knowledge and too logically built to be generally effective at the moment.

Whatever our political opinions may be, we cannot but find Burke's "Speech on Moving His Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies" (22 March, 1775) a very great and noble literary work. For its purpose it was futile; fierce peoples are not to be guided by all the eloquence and all the wisdom of the wise. "We are called upon, as it were by a superior warning Voice, again to attend to America; to attend to the whole of it together; and to review the subject with an unusual degree of care and calmness. Surely it is an awful subject; or there is none so on this side of the grave."

It was an awful subject; but it was also a party question. Knowledge, care, and calmness were, therefore, put out of action. On an infamous proposal to "reduce the high aristocratic spirit of Virginia and the southern colonies" by proclaiming the freedom of the black slaves and raising a servile war, Burke said: "Slaves as these unfortunate black people are, and dull as all men are from slavery, must they not a little suspect the offer of freedom from that very nation which has sold them to their present masters? from that nation, one of whose causes of quarrel with those masters is their refusal to deal any more in that inhuman traffic?"—the Slave Trade. The idea of sending, in the same ship, samples of fresh "black ivory" and a proclamation of freedom for all blacks, not unreasonably seemed absurd, to Burke.

This speech, so moving to the reader, is said to have driven members out of the House; the gestures of the orator being clumsy, his tones harsh, and his delivery hasty. Johnson said that his wit was "blunt"; Goldsmith, on the other hand, that he "cut blocks with a razor". He "to party gave up what was meant for mankind," but, save through party, mankind is not to be helped by the politicians.

To glance at the main facts of Burke's life, he appears to have been, as far as his name shows, of Norman but long Hibernicised stock on his father's side; of native Irish blood on that of his mother, a Miss Nagle, a Catholic. He was born in Dublin, apparently on 12 January, 1729. His father was a solicitor. After two years at a small school kept by a learned Quaker, Burke went to Trinity College, Dublin, where he showed eager intellectual appetites, without paying much heed to the academic round of studies. In 1750 he went to London, to the Middle Temple, and studied law, but did not practise. In 1755 his father cut off his allowance, in 1756 he married. He cannot have made money by his "Vindication of Natural Society" (1756), written in the rhetorical manner of Bolingbroke. The book is an ironical reply to Bolingbroke's argument for "natural" against "revealed" religion. Transfer the view to society: our religion may have its anomalies, yet our society has far more and worse. Do you propose, therefore, to return to "natural society"? "Natural" society was then supposed by the wise and learned to be a happy go-as-you-please innocent communism. In fact, if savage society be "natural" society it is emmeshed in the strangest and most artificial, cruel, and filthy set of laws and customs: the marriage laws, when carried (as they sometimes are) to their logical conclusion, make marriage impossible! All this was not understood, but Burke, while arguing against a sudden and violent break-up of society, did perceive and state brilliantly, the glaring injustices of our society, as Goldsmith did in "The Deserted Village".