emotion and expression and therefore almost, according to Ruskin, great poetry. Cowley's Odes had considerable influence upon the work of Dryden, as is shown in the latter's splendid Alexander's Feast. The satires by Andrew Marvell, and especially those by Samuel Butler, during the period of the Revolution, were fiercely powerful; but they can hardly be called literature, except by a very elastic use of the term. The time spent upon the reading of the Hudibras of this Samuel Butler might better be spent upon the reading of The Way of All Flesh, a highly accurate picture in novel form of English life by the Samuel Butler of the mid-nineteenth century, and a book which a few consider one of the best in the whole realm of novel production. The two Samuel Butlers should be distinguished, and the second of them never forgotten. Around "glorious John" Dryden in Will's Coffee-house in London there often gathered many minor poets who were clever anticipators of the modern journalistic verse writer. Among them were the Earls of Rochester and of Dorset. Rochester's epigram and quasi-epitaph on Charles II is famous for its mockery, Here lies our sovereign lord the king, Whose word no man relies on: Who never said a foolish thing Nor ever did a wise one. But the Earl of Dorset's introductory lines to some verses written during the Dutch War in 1665 find a surer chord of response in the breast of many a modern student, To all ye ladies now on land We men at sea indite; But first would have you understand How hard it is to write. QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION 1. Tell what you have learned about the Puritan movement. 2. Who were the leading "successors" of Shakespeare? Tell what you have learned about the works of one of them. 3. What was the purpose of the "character-writings" of the seventeenth century? 4. In Palgrave's "Golden Treasury" find a lyric of the seventeenth century and quote it from memory. 5. Classify the works of John Milton. 6. What effect had Milton's blindness upon his writings? 7. Memorize and quote the passage in Paradise Lost which you think the finest. 8. What is a "Masque"? Masque of Comus? What is the chief purpose of Milton's 9. Quote Dryden's lines on "how to write." 10. Briefly describe the phases through which the literary work of Dryden passed. II. A German critic, Lessing, said that Dryden's Alexander's Feast, an Ode in honor of St. Cecilia's Day, "is full of musical pictures, but gives no employment to the painter's brush." Read the ode and see if you agree with Lessing. 12. Classify the chief writers of the last years of the seventeenth century. READING LIST FOR THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY BEN JONSON, JOHN EARLE, ROBERT HERRICK, GEORGE HERBERT, MILTON, The Alchemist. Edited by Brinsley Nicholson. Hesperides. "Everyman's Library." A Song for St. Cecilia's Day, Alexander's Feast. In bridge Edition. Minor Poems. Edited by Mary A. Jordan. HELPFUL BOOKS ON THE PERIOD Seventeenth Century Studies, Edmund W. Gosse. (Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co.) The Jacobean Poets, Edmund W. Gosse. (John Murray.) History of English Poetry, Vol. III, W. J. Courthope. (The Macmillan Company.) Ben Jonson to Dryden, in the series entitled Ward's "English Poets." (The Macmillan Company.) History of English Literature, H. A. Taine. (Chatto & Windus.) The Age of Dryden, Richard Garnett. (George Bell & Sons.) John Milton, M. Pattison in “English Men of Letters" Series. (The Macmillan Company.) John Bunyan, J. A. Froude, in "English Men of Letters" Series. (The Old English Dramatists, James Russell Lowell. (Houghton, Mifflin, & Co.) (Dodd, Mead, & Co.) CHAPTER V THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 1700-1798 I. ITS GENERAL CHARACTER ENGLISH literature of the eighteenth century began with the publication, in 1701, of Defoe's True-born Englishman. This century is one often maligned. But it is maligned only by the uninformed and unthinking; for it was, despite all its trivialities, a century of high and hard thinking. The renaissance and the reformation periods had advanced Europe to a cultural point far beyond anything attained previously, except in some forms of the art production of the thirteenth century and in some aspects of the philosophical thinking of the third century preceding the Christian era. The seventeenth century had seen considerable settling down and back from the results achieved by the two movements, the Renaissance and the Reformation, which had ended the middle ages and introduced modern times. But the eighteenth century rose to be one of deep and absorbed reflection. All the elements of civilization and culture were passed under review by the thinkers of Great Britain and even more deeply by those of Germany and France. The intellect of man was pondered over as it had not been since the days of Aristotle in ancient Greece. And not only man's intellect, but the universe in which man lives, was thought through with a penetrative power of vision, especially by such minds as that of Kant in Germany, such as had never before been applied to the nature and purposes of the universe. The foundations of government, and all the aspects of its constitution and administration, were examined most seriously. The keenest attempts were also made to estimate the processes of literary production and the values of that which had been done. in literature and other forms of art in the past. It was an intellectual century, primarily. And all the activities of mind we have just been outlining were certain to bear fruit in life. They did bear fruit in life, both in that disciplined expression of life which we call literary work and in the less disciplined form of life which we term social relationships. Yet this century, while it produced great literature, produced little which can be ranked with the greatest, for it was nearly all brought forth too much under the "rule of thumb" of the intellect. And, moreover, the social life of the century, while in general it was one of progress, yet was much hampered by the strong struggles of old institutions to perpetuate their already doomed existence. The century was, in Europe, largely one of reflection upon the past. But that reflection was sure to extend itself to what was contemporary, and when it did so, it precipitated a crisis. in the French Revolution. The eighteenth century may be said, then, to be a transitional century, one fully taking up into itself the elements of the past and then transmuting them into the vitality of the future, a century actively preparatory for that which was to follow. The greatest product of that century was the civilization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was, on the whole, a conservative age; but the result of its conservatism was such an intelligent conservation of that which was of value in the past that it brought about at its end great revolutions, such as the French Revolution, against the harmful and valueless elements of life which had survived |