lashings of those whom its author venomously hated. The title is not an attractive one to our generation, and therefore the poem is often overlooked by readers; a comment upon the value of an attractive title.

Pope still holds a commanding place among English poets. It is that of the finest artist in the handling of details, though not in sustained expression of either thought or emotion. Men often maintain that physical ill has much to do with genius. It certainly had much to do with the nature of the genius of Pope. The peculiarly bitter character of his satire was doubtless largely due to the ills to which his flesh was heir.

Minor poetry to 1738. The remaining poetry of the first thirty-eight years of the century may be treated briefly. Defoe's True-born Englishman was a defense of William III, and an excellent introduction to the reign of Queen Anne. The poem was also a good introduction to the work of Defoe as a pamphleteer, which will be noticed in another connection.

Allan Ramsay, a Scotchman, was one of those who, as he said, " spoke their mother-tongue without disguise." He should be remembered not so much for the frequently noticed Gentle Shepherd as for the two groups of poems entitled The Tea-Table and The Evergreen, which stimulated a number of song writers to make ready the popular ear for the riper songs of Burns.

James Thomson, another Scotchman, in his Seasons, 1730, blazed distinctly the path which the nature worshipers of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century were to tread.

Ye forests bend, ye harvests wave, to Him;

Breathe your still song into the reaper's heart,
As home he goes beneath the joyous moon,

could have been written only by one who felt within himself the stirrings of deepest love of nature.

L

Joseph Addison, the journalist, was also a poet. His Campaign, 1704, celebrating the Battle of Blenheim, came most logically from him, as a journalist, for it was a sort of " Gazette " in rhyme. The dramatic work of Addison, and the dramatic work of the entire century, too, may be best treated apart from these three main periods of poetry upon which we are dwelling. But the second period should not be entered upon without notice of a poem by Bernard Mandeville, published in England in 1706, under the title The Grumbling Hive, or The Knaves turned Honest. This poem should not be overlooked by those who desire to follow the many lines which led to the great movement called the French Revolution, for it is a very distinct mark of the reaction very early setting in against the evils of an artificial life, and an emphasis upon the need of maintaining life in the innocence of a state of nature, an emphasis deserving of mention as occurring long before Rousseau. The summary of it by Henry Morley cannot be improved upon :

Bees in a hive are like men in society; they have trades and professions as men have; and in a certain hive every bee became so painfully conscious of the knavery of all his neighbors, that all resolved to become honest. When they did so, there was no more need for lawyers, because there was no injustice to guard against; no need for doctors, because there was an end of ways of life and ways of eating that produced disease; no need of merchants, because there was no demand for foreign luxuries. Trades based upon waste and folly disappeared, and thus with honesty came poverty. The standing army was put down, because the honest hive was capable of no aggressive war. It was attacked, as defenseless, by the bees of other hives. Every bee then served as a volunteer. The enemies were driven back, but honesty had found its way at last to such simplicity of life that the hive itself was judged to be unnecessary. The whole swarm, therefore, flew back to its original home in a hollow tree.

2. Second Period of Eighteenth-century Poetry, 1738-1785 1738-1785. The second period of eighteenth-century poetry, from 1738 to 1785,was like the first, with this difference, - that

it advanced beyond the prevalent tendency of the first period in a nearer approach to nature and, therefore, in less deference to the use of the key " held by the old masters.'

In 1738 Samuel Johnson, destitute of this world's goods, shambling-gaited, near-sighted, a curiosity to look upon, but in all things of the mind and of the moral life fearlessly sincere, and at last in old age to be recognized as filled with the purest love and tenderness, a man in all essentials of lofty grandeur, published a poem entitled London, and in 1749 one entitled The Vanity of Human Wishes. London was an imitation of one of the satires of the Latin poet, Juvenal. It became popular at once, though it contained the only spark of insincerity which his whole life revealed, for it was written in the heroic couplets of Pope and it affected to scorn the city of London, which he was really beginning to love most passionately. The Vanity of Human Wishes is also an experiment in heroic couplets, and also in imitation of Juvenal; but it is graver, even to melancholy, than London. Its melancholy is most thoughtful, preluding the undue gravity which was to prevail throughout the entire period, and which amounted almost to hypochondria in Robert Blair's morbid The Grave. Then, when we read in Edward Young of

The worm to riot in that rose so red,

we find a hand reaching out to Edgar Allan Poe, with his Conqueror Worm. The famous work of Edward Young was the Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality. Young and Blair were more sincere they were entirely sincere than Thomas Gray, however.

Thomas Gray. Perhaps Thomas Gray was less sincere in expression than he was in his own uncommunicated thoughts; for, as Matthew Arnold said of him, "He never spoke out." There are few poems more often memorized than Gray's

Elegy in a Country Churchyard. Fortunately it is less tinged with the melancholy mental sickness of the time than were the poems of many of his contemporaries. It is less melancholy than his own ode On a Distant Prospect of Eton College, for in the Elegy the artistry of the man was at work more than was the pressure of the melancholy of his soul, which is so strong in the other poem. The Elegy is unsurpassed for its exquisite expression of so much that is distinctly English in reflective thought. Its author represented in this poem what was so appealing to his contemporary, Goldsmith, the awakening spirit of English democracy. It may be said of the Elegy that no other one poem is so fully characteristic of the entire eighteenth century. Thomas Gray should be read for his contributions to the literature of letter-writing, so well begun in English literature by Lady Rachel Russell in the later years of the preceding century, as well as for his polished verse.

Minor poetry to 1785. William Collins in 1748 wrote an ode or elegy upon the death of James Thomson, beginning, “ In yonder grave a Druid lies." No stronger tribute could have been paid to the essentially British nature of the sort of poetry which Thomson and his school were writing. Collins, a year earlier, in 1747, had published a volume of twelve Odes. Among these The Passions has been a favorite with declaimers. His Ode to Evening brings the poetry of the day close to the aërial music of Keats. No lines are more characteristic of ' him than these:

How sleep the brave who sink to rest,
By all their country's wishes blest!
When Spring, with dewy fingers cold,
Returns to deck their hallowed mould,
She there shall dress a sweeter sod
Than fancy's feet have ever trod.

By fairy hands their knell is rung;
By forms unseen their dirge is sung;
There honour comes, a pilgrim gray,
To bless the turf that wraps their clay;
And freedom shall awhile repair,

To dwell, a weeping hermit, there!

This is delicately melodious, gently stirring, and only faintly melancholy.

James Thomson did some of his work during this second period of the poetry of the century, though most of it during the first period. The second period saw the appearance of The Castle of Indolence. This poem Thomson wrote in the Spenserian or nine-lined stanza. Indolence he represents as a false enchanter who harbors lotus-eating captives in his embowered castle, but is finally conquered by a Knight of Arts and Industry. In its allegorical nature the poem might be one of the late nineteenth century. In its unemotional manner, too, it is rather out of its date, which is 1748. Many consider this poem much. superior to the same author's Seasons.

Between the years 1760 and 1770, at which latter date he was only eighteen years of age, Thomas Chatterton wrote the most remarkable poems that have ever appeared in print from so young a poet. Ballads, semi-lyrical tragedies, heroic poems, interludes, all were written in mock-antique spelling, which the author found in Kersey's Dictionary, and not in the literature of the fifteenth century, as his contemporaries thought. These poems were full of rich but unrestrained melodies, such as we call romantic. Most of Chatterton's poems are known under the general title of the Rowley Poems, so-called because they purported to have been written by a mythical priest, named T. Rowley.

About the same time that Chatterton was writing, James