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

Macpherson (in 1762) published what was claimed by its author to be a series of translations of epic poems from the Gaelic, or ancient Caledonian tongue. These poems were filled with highly stimulating mysteries, and good melodies, too, for that age. Indeed, they affected the whole course of European literature from that time on. The French Chateaubriand, the English Byron and even Wordsworth, and the German Goethe would hardly have had the world ready for them but for the work of Ossian, as Macpherson called the writer whom he claimed to be translating. Primitive, plaintive, pathetic, melancholy, the epics were to those who lived in that age, though to us insincere, pompous, and pretentious. The acceptance of Ossian's work was due to two facts: first, that people then were wearying of the correctness of the classic literary form, and second, that they were hungering for something in ideas remote from their immediate experience, or from any easily imagined combination of their experiences. Macpherson gave that something to them, especially in his chief epic poem, Fingal.

Bishop Percy fell in with the work of Chatterton and of Ossian, and in 1765 published his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. The ballads and romances contained in Percy's Reliques were medieval rather than ancient. They had an immense influence in furthering the already aroused interest in things that were primeval as well as medieval. Their success illustrates the increasing interest in freedom of expression, in revolt from classic formalism. The tastes of the eighteenth century were broadly various, as we have already suggested. That this is true, one may see clearly if he will but read almost any passage from Pope and think of the enthusiasm it created, and then turn to Ossian, with knowledge of the equal enthusiasm aroused by him, and read from his prose-poetry any one of many such passages as

Cuchullin sits at Lego's lake, at the dark rolling of waters. Night is around the hero; and his thousands spread on the heath; a hundred oaks burn in the midst; the feast of shells is smoking wide. Carril strikes the harp, beneath a tree; his gray locks glitter in the beam; the rustling blast of night is near, and light his aged hair. This song is of the blue Togorma, and of its chief, Cuchullin's friend.

The Deserted Village of Oliver poem. It was printed in 1770. the life of common man.

Goldsmith is still a popular
Its author's interest was in

But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied

strikes the keynote of much of the thought of this Irishman, and helped to open the way for a reawakening of interest in England's mainstay, her country folk. Goldsmith was neither very emotional nor very didactic; rather, he attempted calmly to describe only what he had seen. But he served to call attention strongly to the life of the fields.

James Beattie, also, in his Minstrel (1771) shows a notable love for the beauty of nature and for communion with her, thus carrying the literary expression of that time farther towards the romantic interest of later days. The love of the visible forms of nature was constantly widening and deepening as the century aged.

This second period upon which we are now dwelling came to an end with the Task of William Cowper, 1785. Cowper wrote many religious hymns such as those with which the Wesleyan movement had flooded the country earlier in the century. Cowper was gently humorous in John Gilpin's Ride, and mildly pathetic in his lines to his Mother's Picture; in these and in all else he was natural in feeling. He was also greatly interested in the classics of Greece and Rome, and translated some of