have, to a certain extent, proved real legislators. The new character which they impressed upon our prose and verse has never been since lost. We may have gradually freed ourselves from much of the restraint which they imposed in the first instance, and recovered something of our old liberty, that was for a time suspended; but it is a more regulated liberty than formerly. If we have got rid of some stiffness and monotony, we have retained the correctness introduced by Pope and Johnson. Nobody now writes with the same natural negligence which was common before their time. There is a measured flow, as well as a grammatical precision, in the easiest, loosest style now written, which formerly was scarcely to be found in the most laboured. We may have paid something for this; we may have paid more for it than it is worth ; but surely it is, in itself

, not a loss, but a gain. Nor is there any reason to suppose that correctness is necessarily inconsistent with either ease and freedom or life and variety of style. One of the freest and most various, as well as most expressive and picturesque, of styles, is that of Livy; and it is not only correct, but may be said to be even highly rhetorical. Whether it was a good or an evil, however, the change in our manner of writing which Pope and Johnson heralded, or rather first exemplified, was an inevitable one. It was a necessity of the stage at which the language had arrived; of that complete crystallization of the language of which the production of such a work as Johnson's Dictionary was another of the natural results. Dictionary was, as it were, the Theodosian Code, authoritatively proclaiming the state of the law, and declaring, from a survey of all preceding enactments and decisions, how much of what had hitherto been held for right or allowable was to stand good for the future.

As Pope was the natural, as well as the actual, successor of Dryden, so Johnson may be accounted the natural successor of Swift. In the revolutions of literature, the new prose has thus, in most instances, kept at some short distance behind the new verse. So formerly, in our English literature, Bacon had followed close upon Spenser and Shakspeare. It is remarkable that Pope, who had only seen Dryden, just lived to hear the first sound of the rising reputation of Johnson, who, although not the greatest genius that was to adorn the next era, was, more than any.

other figure, to fill that space in the public eye which he himself and Dryden had previously filled. The three generations, making up about a century of our literature, may be, with sufficient general propriety, designated by their names, and called the ages of Dryden, of Pope, and of Johnson. Objections have been made by some recent writers to the title

NO, XI.

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which it has been customary to give to the period in which Pope first came before the world, of the Augustan age of our literature. But its meaning seems to be misunderstood. The last five or six years of the reign of Anne are to be considered as the Augustan age of English literature, because literature was then more distinctly patronized by the court and the government than it has ever been in this country at any other era. The leading writers were all intimately connected with one or other of the two great political parties, either as being themselves public men, as were Steele and Addison, Bolingbroke and Prior, or as the personal friends and most familiar associates of the persons at the head of affairs. There never was before, there never has been since, so close an alliance between literature and politics. Hence the literature of the day came to be looked upon as, in a more especial sense, a portion of the glory of the prince, in the same way as it was under Augustus at Rome, or under Louis XIV. in France. Within the compass of these brilliant five or six years are crowded the Tatlers, Spectators, and Guardians of Steele and Addison and their associates ; Addison's Cato; a long succession of the most vigorous of Swift's political effusions, both in prose and verse; and all Pope's poems down to the translation of the Iliad; while Bolingbroke, Atterbury, Prior, Garth, Arbuthnot, Parnell, and Gay, all arrived at, or fast ascending to, the meridian of their reputation, were also shedding light around them, either by means of the press or in some other way, or, if in no other, by the very lustre of their names. It was undeniably a time of extraordinary literary activity and productiveness; never before had so many works appeared among us within so short a space, which have retained their celebrity, and to a certain extent their popularity, so long.

As for the real worth of the literature of this our so called Augustan age, or the rank which it is entitled to hold, as compared with that of any of our other great literary eras, that is another matter. It does not follow that it should be our highest literature because it took something of its inspiration from the best society. Even its popularity, although that should be allowed to be, or to have been, greater than what any other portion of our literature has enjoyed, will be no demonstration of its claims to such supremacy. It was, indeed, well adapted to the taste of the most numerous class of readers in its own day, and for a long time afterwards. The period during which it maintained its ascendancy was principally characterized by the spread of intelligence among the middle classes, and the extension of the reading public from the capital over the provinces, from the towns to the villages and the country. But the general intelligence with

which it thus found acceptance was not of the highest order. It had been originally created and nourished much more by political than by poetical reading. The age of newspapers, it is true, had hardly yet come; but the same stimulant was applied in another form by an incessant production of political pamphlets, which seem to have kept up rather a more intense excitement in regard to public affairs than exists in our own day-with this difference, indeed, that it extends much more nearly over the whole population now than it did then. The popular periodical essay upon general subjects, which may be said to have headed or led on the new literature of the age of Anne, and heralded the poetry of Pope, was in its original design mainly an attempt to dilute, by a slight infusion of a less inflammatory kind of reading, the strong interest in politics which held almost exclusive possession of the public mind. It endeavoured, therefore, in the first instance, to ally itself to, and to lean for support upon, what it was destined eventually in a great degree to supersede. The Tatler, at its commencement, was partly a newspaper. But, even after actual political intelligence or discussion was dropt in this description of publications, there remained, whether for essayists or poets, only the same public, with such tastes as its previous habits of reading and thinking had given it; and these could not be other than artificial and conventional. That was the inevitable effect of absorption in the party politics of the day. When the battle, indeed, is between great fundamental principles of government or society, whether it be fought with words or with swords, a time of civil contest awakens and calls forth men's highest mental powers and strongest passions; but the mere ordinary struggle between the occupants of office and their would-be successors is an affair of another kind altogether. The general interest which the prospects and vicissitudes of such a struggle excite rather resembles that which is felt by the lookers-on at any other game of strength, or skill, or chance; it is an interest centering more in the game itself in the players and the manner in which they acquit themselves, than in any important principle which is ordinarily felt to hang upon the result. The habitual disposition of mind which it engenders and maintains in the community is to look not so much to principles as to persons. It tends to withdraw the mind from all large or distant views, fixing it upon the present to the exclusion alike

of the future and the past. Moreover, by keeping the general attention so much directed upon the seat of government, it spreads what we may call a metropolitan infection throughout society, spoiling or dulling all relish for everything except what is understood to be in vogue in the politest town circles. Such was the character of

the public taste which Pope and his contemporaries had to court and to endeavour to charm with their verses. Perhaps he might have been a greater poet in another era; in that age it was impossible. No poetry more ideal than what he actually produced was then producible, at least by him. And yet he was certainly the most imaginative and impassioned, as well as the most terse and polished, the most epigrammatic and brilliant, of all the poetical writers of that time.

In other respects, however, the extension of the reading public over the provinces, that was now going on, operated in another direction. It thrust aside some kinds of popular literature, the town or metropolitan spirit and character of which were too essential and too exclusive for country readers in general, as yet, to find much attraction in them. It is very remarkable, in particular, how what is especially a metropolitan literature, writing for the stage, almost entirely ceased for a time on the opening of the new era. The busy dramatists of the immediately preceding period now almost all, as if with one consent, dropt their pens, or disappeared, and no others arose to take their places. Wycherley, indeed, was old and worn out, and his brief dramatic career had been long terminated. Farquhar, after having produced a new comedy every year on an average since the beginning of the century, died in 1707, while his eighth, The Beaux Stratagem,' was in the midst of its run. But Congreve, Vanbrugh, Steele, Rowe, and Southerne were all still in the vigour of life. Yet Congreve produced nothing except a slight Masque, and a still slighter Opera, after 1700, and nothing whatever after 1707. Vanbrugh, also, with the exception of a farce which he translated from the French in 1715, wrote nothing after 1706. Of Steele's four comedies, the first three were written and brought out between 1702 and 1706; the fourth not till after an interval of fifteen years, during which he was occupied with quite another description of literature—with the Tatler, the Spectator, the Guardian, the Englishman, the Reader, the Lover, and other periodical publications. Rowe, who by the year 1708 had produced four tragedies and one comedy since the commencement of the century, after that date turned, in like manner, to other work; and his next dramatic piece, his tragedy. of Jane Shore,' did not appear till 1713, "nor in the five remaining years of his life did his pen, formerly so productive in that line, yield any other except his tragedy of . Lady Jane Grey,' which was brought out in 1715. Yet he was only forty-five when he died. Southerne, also, who had begun to write in 1682, stopped in 1700, although he survived till 1746. Gay had, before the death of Queen Anne, only written one or two trifles of a

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dramatic character, which brought him no reputation. In short, with the solitary exception of Addison's · Cato, the higher literature of what is properly called our Augustan age is almost wholly undramatic. The demands of the stage were left to be supplied by a second-rate order of writers, of whom the most reputable were such as Mrs. Centlivre and Colley Cibber. Nay, even Cibber produced only a Masque and an Interlude between 1709 and 1718; and, although one of Mrs. Centlivre's cleverest comedies, her Wonder, or, a Woman keeps a Secret,' was brought out in 1714, as another, her · Busy Body,' was in 1709, even these pieces have never been held to entitle her to rank as one of our classic dramatists.

We shall take in very nearly the entire literature of the age of Pope, if, to his own productions, and those of his personal friends and associates, on the one hand, we add those of the writers commemorated in the Dunciad,' on the other. And it must be confessed that, generally speaking, Time, in dispensing honour and oblivion here, has adopted his partialities. The names of that day, that are still familiar in our mouths as household words, are those of Pope and Swift, of Addison and Steele, of Bolingbroke and Prior, of Atterbury and Berkeley, of Gay and Arbuthnot, of Parnell and Garth ; and not many others. Almost the only one of Pope's Dunces who has completely recovered from that bad baptism is Defoe. Some three or four writers, at most, of those of that era, are probably all that could be mentioned as having then held, or since maintained, any considerable reputa

, tion, who did not belong to what may be called the literary confederacy of which the great poet and satirist was the head. The most eminent, perhaps, would be Shaftesbury and Mandeville. But the noble author of the Characteristics passed the portion of his short life that was spent in England in a seclusion which separated him personally from his contemporaries almost as much as his peculiar philosophical notions did intellectually, so that he scarcely seemed to be a writer of that age at all; and the Fable of the Bees, in which the cooler judgment of posterity, without therefore adopting its leading doctrines or principles, has recognised so much real acuteness and originality of thought, was then chiefly notorious as a work which had been presented for its immorality by the grand jury:

. The habits of a valetudinarian prevented Pope from making many new acquaintances in the latter part of his life; but even of the writers who succeeded those by whom he was surrounded when he first entered upon the stage, and who had either already become conspicuous before he passed from it, or were giving promise of being the lights of the next era, some of the most remark_ able had enjoyed his friendship, or been cheered by his encou