details of literary composition; but it was much more remark able, in almost all departments of literature, for vigour of thinking, for variety and ingenuity in the treatment of themes, and for the exhibition, in not a few quarters, of genuine poetic fancy and susceptibility. The clearer accents in which poetry began to speak, awakened, doubtless, no more than faint echoes in the minds of the listeners; but the efforts of the seekers after truth, not being too ambitious for the temper of the time, were, on the whole, justly appreciated.

Samuel Johnson, entering on his toils soon after the beginning of this period, had produced his principal works before its close; although his influence, whether on thinking or on style, was not matured till later. In singular contrast to his writings, stand those of the novelists: Richardson alone having anything in common with him; while Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, are equally distant from the dignified pomp of his manner, and from the as- cetic elevation of his morality. It deserves to be remembered, too, that a more solemn spirit was beginning to be prevalent in thinking; and that, in the same generation with the looseness of the novels and the scepticism of Hume, the manly reasoning of Butler was employed in defence of sacred truth, and the stern dissent of Wesley and Whitefield was entered against religious deadness. Poetry began to stir with a new life. Johnson himself belonged essentially, in his versified compositions, to the school of Pope; but a nobler ambition animated Young and Akenside, and a finer poetic sense was perceptible in Thomson, Gray, and Collins.

About the accession of George the Third, we may conveniently consider ourselves as entering on a new development of literary elements, and as approaching, with accelerated rapidity, the state of things which arose about the close of the century.

This Third Generation of the eighteenth century was by no means so fertile in literary genius as either of the other two. But some of the men who were its sons were very richly gifted; and the tone both of thinking and of feeling was such as we can readily sympathize with. The earliest of its remarkable writers were the historians, headed by Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon; writers whose works, some of them defective as records of truth, have hardly ever been exceeded as literary compositions of their class. In philosophical thinking, the efforts were both active and varied. They embraced ethics in Paley and Adam Smith; the theory of public wealth in the great work of the latter of those two; psychology and metaphysics in Reid and the other founders of the Scottish school. Criticism, conducted by Johnson during

his old age in the narrow spirit which he had learnt in youth, was now called on to give account of its principles; and poetry began to traverse paths which she had long deserted, with some which she had never trodden before. In the roll of the poets who adorned those forty years, we read successively the names of Goldsmith, Cowper, and Burns.

4. There is one feature of our literature on which the influence of the eighteenth century has been great and permanent, namely, the character of our Prose Style. In the course of that time, there were formed two dissimilar manners of writing, each of which has contributed towards the formation of all that is distinctive in our more modern forms of expression. The earlier of those manners we may understand by studying the language of Addison, or still better by comparing his with that of Swift. The later of the two is instanced most distinctly in the language of Johnson; if indeed we should not rather consider him as carrying its peculiarities to excess.

In style, as in so much else, the writers of Queen Anne's time pursued the track of their predecessors, but cultivated successfully the ground on which the latter had done only the rough work of pioneers. Dryden and his followers had cleared away, almost entirely, the quaintness and pedantry of the times preceding the Restoration, and had written with neatness or attained elegance whenever they wrote with care. But there was in all of them an inclination to looseness of structure and meanness of phrase, which, in the more hasty writers, degenerated, as it has aptly been said, into what we now call slang.

Addison and his friends aimed assiduously at rising above this, yet without rising higher than the ordinary language of refined social life. Their great merit of style consisted in their correct knowledge and accurate reproduction of those genuine idiomatic peculiarities of our speech, which had been received into the conversation of intelligent and instructed men. They wrote such English as an accomplished person of their day would naturally have spoken. This is true of all of them, though most emphatically so of Addison. It is true of Swift himself, whose worst coarseness of manner hardly ever betrays him into offensive coarseness of expression. Yet there are great diversities among them; and these two leaders of the band furnish apt instances of the extremes. Addison being admirable for ease and grace, but sometimes feeble through fastidiousness; Swift being often clumsy, but always vigorous and pointed, and presenting a greater stock of good and familiar words and idioms than any other writer in our language.

It is instructive to remark, that the principles on which this style was constructed, exposed it to an imminent risk of contract ing serious faults in the hands of writers not more than usually adroit. Seemingly easy, it was really very difficult. If the author dealt with familiar topics, or aimed at nothing more than a colloquial tone, he was liable to fall back into the old defects of vulgarism or irregular looseness; faults to which the nature of the style directly disposed it, and from which the chief himself had not always been free. If, again, the kind of topic, or any other motive, tempted towards elevation of style, the adaptation of the familiar language to this new exigency was apt to cause a complete evaporation of that easy and unforced union of extreme clearness with sufficient strength, which, almost everywhere, stamped so firmly the style of the skilful model.

5. It was not to be expected that the colloquial elegance of Addison should be inherited by any successor, nor perhaps that the popularity of such a style should long survive the discredit thrown on it by a series of bad imitations. The case was, that, by the middle of the century, the new style, of which Johnson became the characteristic example, was both the most common and the most admired.

His writings, indeed, gave to his style, during his old age and after his death, a fame which made it ridiculous through the undesigned caricatures perpetrated by his copyists. But the features imitated by such writers are, in many points, merely the accidental characteristics produced by Johnson's own manner of thinking; and we must not be tempted by them, either to misapprehend what was the real character of the style, or to believe that he or any one person whatever was the sole parent of it.

It deviated from the style of the age before it, both in idiom and in vocabulary.

In Idiom, its tendency was, to abandon the familiar and native characteristics of the Saxon part of our language, and to fall into those expressions and modes of arrangement, which may be said to be common to all the modern European tongues and particularly inherent in none. In Addison's Spectator there are sen tences and phrases innumerable, which we could not possibly translate, with literal faithfulness, into any other language of Europe: in Johnson's Rambler there is hardly perhaps a clause or a sentence but could be transferred, by close rendering, to the French or Italian, the modern tongues whose idiomatic structure is farthest distant from that of the English. The change in idiom thus described can hardly be attributed at all to any special influence exercised by Johnson. It is also to be remembered that

it has had, on the speech of more recent times, an effect much wider and more permanent than the other class of changes.

In the changes on the Vocabulary, Johnson's writings operated much more actively; although here, also, all that he did was to accelerate the working of a tendency already existing, and closely allied to that which caused the idiomatic transformations. By others as well as by him, though by none so much, large use was made of words derived from the Latin. A very considerable proportion of such words had been formed by the writers who belonged to the first half of the seventeenth century, but were become obsolete in the course of the hundred years that had since elapsed. All that Johnson and his contemporaries did as to these, was to revive the use of them, and thus, in a certain degree, to throw our diction back on its older character. A good many others were new in the tongue; but those of this group were by no means so numerous as they have sometimes been believed to be. The new importations and the restorations of the old were alike prompted by various motives. A few of these terms may really have been required, for the expression of new facts. But, in a large majority of cases, there were already words denoting the same ideas; and what was gained was not so much an increase of precision, but only, in addition to the effect of novelty, greater impressiveness and pomp. These attributes of style were held valuable, when language was beginning to be wanting in grace and nature, and needed other qualities to make up for the loss.

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POETRY. 1. The Drama--Non-Dramatic Poetry-Its Artificial Character-Minor Posk. -2. Alexander Pope-Characteristics of his Genius and Poetry.-3. Pope's Worka His Early Poems-Poems of Middle Age-His Later Poems.-PROSE. 4. Theologians-Philosophers-Clarke's Natural Theology-Bishop Berkeley's IdealismShaftesbury-Bolingbroke.-5. Miscellaneous Prose-Occasional Writings-Defoo and Robinson Crusoe-Swift's Works and Literary Character--Other Prose Satires6. The Periodical Essayists-Addison and Steele-The Spectator-Its Character-Its Design.

POETICAL LITERATURE.

1. In our study of the Poetry of Queen Anne's time, the Drama scarcely deserves more than a parenthesis. The one pleasant point about it is the improvement in morals, which was shown by the Comedies, although accompanied by great want of delicacy both in manners and in language. That the ethical tone was high, however, cannot be asserted of a time, in which the most famous works of the kind were Gay's equivocal "Beggar's Opera," and the "Careless Husband" of Cibber. Nor are these, or any other comic dramas of that day, comparable in ability to those of the best writers of the age immediately before them. In Tragedy, the first noticeable fact was the appearance of Rowe's "Fair Penitent," which has already been noticed as an impudent but clever plagiarism from Massinger. In Addison's celebrated "Cato," the strict rules of the French stage became triumphant, and co-operated with the natural coldness of the author, in producing a series of stately and impressive speeches hardly in any sense deserving to be called dramatic. Young's 'Revenge" had much more of tragic passion; though it wanted almost entirely that force of characterization, which seemed to have been buried with the old dramatists, and which had not even in them been the strongest point.

When we turn from the Drama, we find some Minor Poets, who should not be altogether overlooked. Such were Gay, whose