Brontë, George Eliot, Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell, May Sinclair, it is a renowned list. Frances Burney's best-known novel is Evelina. Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, printed in 1800, is packed with unpremeditated humor. Miss Edgeworth is the creator of the international novel, made so famous to-day by Henry James. Irish character is perfectly delineated in her work. Sir Walter Scott thought her wonderful. She will be mentioned again, for she made straight the way for the almost omniscient and errorless Jane Austen. V. PHILOSOPHERS AND HISTORIANS The philosophers in Great Britain during this century were the Earl of Shaftesbury, Bishop Berkeley, Bishop Butler, and David Hume. The historians were William Robertson and Edward Gibbon. Hume was a historian as well as a philosopher. Edmund Burke and Adam Smith might well be called political philosophers. Philosophy. Shaftesbury's name is always associated with the philosophy of optimism. He had much effect upon Alexander Pope. Shaftesbury reasoned about beauty in the arts, and tried to harmonize the beautiful, the good, and the true. He was less psychological than Burke in reasoning about the beautiful, but his theories still survive in the thinking of those who are interested in the arts. Bishop Berkeley questioned the real existence of matter in quite a Platonic fashion, and has been the inspirer of numberless thinner thinkers in the same fashion. Butler, in his Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature, attempted to harmonize authority and reason. His book is still used as a textbook in a college here and there. Henry Drummond in the nineteenth century was stimulated by him to write a very popu lar book entitled Natural Law in the Spiritual World. David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature limited all our knowledge to the phenomena revealed to us by experience. His book was later published under the title of Concerning the Human Understanding. Burke's political philosophy was revealed in the speeches and letters we have discussed in connection with the essayists of this century. Adam Smith's greatest work was the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. It has been affirmed that if this book had been written ten years earlier, the American Revolution would not have occurred. In it Smith maintained that labor is the source of wealth, and that the laborer should be given complete freedom to pursue his own interests in his own way. All laws, he claimed, to restrict the freedom of the laborer are stumblingblocks in the path of the increasing wealth of a nation. Adam Smith was the founder of the science of political economy, and also the first strongly and intelligently to set forth the theory of free trade. History. David Hume's History of Great Britain was written in polished and noble style, and was so interesting that it was read as eagerly as if it were a novel. He was not an accurate historian, but his work is of great value because his philosophical reflections are uttered in such a way as to be easily understood by the general reader. William Robertson wrote a History of the Reign of Charles V. Robertson was most graceful in style, and greatly influenced Carlyle, not in style, but in historical research. But the inimitably great historian was Edward Gibbon. Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is not far short of being the most famous historical work ever written. Certainly it is the most eminent of the eighteenth century. Professor Freeman, himself a prominent historian, has said of Gibbon, "He remains the one historian of the eighteenth century whom modern research has neither set aside nor threatened to set aside." He was scholarly, unprejudiced, — and interesting. Whatever else is read, Gibbon must be read too." And he will always be read, both for his facts and his interpretations of facts, and for his richly colored and splendidly forceful style. James Boswell, as the historian of one man, ought here to be mentioned. He wrote a Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. It is the general custom to speak lightly of Boswell, but, strangely enough, the detractor is quite likely to say, and say truly, that his book is one of the best among a dozen or less of the greatest books in the world. It is a very wonderful biography of a most remarkable man. Perhaps Defoe might be mentioned as a comic historian; The Political History of the Devil is his book in this field. Current history met a satirist in this book, at least. The eighteenth century in America. — In eighteenth-century America, makers of history were doing some important writing in the English language. In that century we find Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography; the state papers of George Washington; the Declaration of Independence, written chiefly by Thomas Jefferson; the papers of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in the Federalist; and Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, written in reply to Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution. Also there were the writings of Jonathan Edwards, particularly his Freedom of the Will. This book has given Edwards the reputation of having been a great metaphysician. Europeans are divided as to our greatest thinker, opinion running between Hamilton and Edwards. Very much more attention than this should be given by the student to these American writers, but it is the chief purpose of this book to present the work of writers in Great Britain. QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION 1. What were the leading features of eighteenth-century life and thought? 2. Its principal authors may be grouped under what heads? 3. Into how many periods may the poetry of the eighteenth century be divided, and who do you think was the chief poet in each period? 4. What place does Pope hold among English poets? 5. Learn one poem by Thomas Gray or one by William Collins, and recite it. 6. What is " romance"? What does "romantic" mean? 7. Learn one poem by Robert Burns or one by William Blake, and recite it. 8. Find out all you can about the Lyrical Ballads published jointly by Coleridge and Wordsworth. 9. Who were the foremost English dramatists of the eighteenth century, and what plays of that time are often staged to-day? 10. What essay which you have read of those written during the eighteenth century do you like best, and why? II. Describe the work of Swift; of Dr. Johnson; of Edmund Burke. 12. What is the business of the novel? When did it first begin to appear as a great type of literature? 13. Characterize Goldsmith, Swift, Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. 14. What do you know of the work of Gibbon, of Hume, and of Adam Smith? 15. Tell all you can concerning the literature which was being produced in America during the eighteenth century. POPE, GRAY, READING LIST FOR THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY POETRY The Rape of the Lock, and Essay on Man. In Selections from Pope, edited by Edward Bliss Reed. Elegy in a Country Churchyard. In Gray's Poems, edited by John Bradshaw. WILLIAM COLLINS, Ode to Evening. In The Poems of Collins, edited by Christopher Stone. WILLIAM COWPER, The Diverting History of John Gilpin. In Cowper's Shorter Poems, edited by W. T. Webb. BURNS, WILLIAM BLAKE, COLERIDGE, WORDSWORTH, GOLDSMITH, ADDISON, BURKE, BUNYAN, DEFOE, SWIFT, The Cotter's Saturday Night. In Selections from The Tiger. In Lyrical Poems of Blake, edited by John The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In Christabel and Lines composed above Tintern Abbey. In Selected Poems, edited by Clara L. Thomson. (See next period.) DRAMA She Stoops to Conquer. Edited by J. M. Dent. ESSAY Sir Roger de Coverley Papers. Edited by Zelma Gray. Conciliation with the American Colonies. Edited by NOVEL The Pilgrim's Progress. Winston's "Illustrated Handy Robinson Crusoe. "Everyman's Library." GOLDSMITH, RICHARDSON, ADAM SMITH, The Vicar of Wakefield. Winston's "Illustrated Handy Classics." Pamela. "Everyman's Library." The Adventures of Joseph Andrews. Edited by George ECONOMICS AND HISTORY Wealth of Nations. "Everyman's Library." Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. "Everyman's |