His minor and fugitive poems are very numerous; and as they were generally inspired by persons and scenes around him, they are truly literary types of the age in which he lived. In his Task, he resembles Thomson and Akenside; in his didactic poems, he reminds us of the essays of Pope; in his hymns he catered successfully to the returning piety of the age; in his translations of Homer and of Ovid, he presented the ancients to moderns in a new and acceptable dress; and in his Letters he sets up an epistolary model, which may be profitably studied by all who desire to express themselves with energy, simplicity, and delicate taste.

OTHER WRITERS OF THE TRANSITION SCHOOL.

James Beattie, 1735-1803: he was the son of a farmer, and was educated at Marischal College, Aberdeen, where he was afterwards professor of natural philosophy. For four years he taught a village school. His first poem, Retirement, was not much esteemed; but in 1771 appeared the first part of The Minstrel, a poem at once descriptive, didactic, and romantic. This was enthusiastically received, and gained for him the favor of the king, a pension of £200 per annum, and a degree from Oxford. The second part was published in 1774. The Minstrel is written in the Spenserian stanza, and abounds in beautiful descriptions of nature, marking a very decided progress from the artificial to the natural school. The character of Edwin, the young minstrel, ardent in search for the beautiful and the true, is admirably portrayed; as is also that of the hermit who instructs the youth. The opening lines are very familiar:

Ah, who can tell how hard it is to climb

The steep where Fame's proud temple shines afar;

and the description of the morning landscape has no superior in the language:

But who the melodies of morn can tell?

The wild brook babbling down the mountain side;

The wing herd; the sheepfold's simple bell;
The pipe of early shepherd dim descried

In the lone valley.

Beattie wrote numerous prose dissertations and essays, one of which was in answer to the infidel views of Hume Essay on the Nature

and Immutability of Truth, in Opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism. Beattie was of an excitable and sensitive nature, and his polemical papers are valued rather for the beauty of their language, than for acuteness of logic.

William Falconer, 1730-1769: first a sailor in the merchant service, he afterwards entered the navy. He is chiefly known by his poem The Shipwreck, and for its astonishing connection with his own fortunes and fate. He was wrecked off Cape Colonna, on the coast of Greece, before he was eighteen; and this misfortune is the subject of his poem. Again, in 1760, he was cast away in the Channel. In 1769, the Aurora frigate, of which he was the purser, foundered in Mozambique Channels, and he, with all others on board, went down with her. The excellence of his nautical directions and the vigor of his descriptions establish the claims of his poem; but it has the additional interest attaching to his curious experience — it is his autobiography and his enduring monument. The picture of the storm is very fine; but in the handling of his verse there is more of the artificial than of the romantic school. William Shenstone, 1714-1763: his principal work is The Schoolmistress, a poem in the stanza of Spenser, which is pleasing from its simple and sympathizing description of the village school, kept by a dame; with the tricks and punishment of the children, and many little traits of rural life and character. It is pitched in so low a key that it commends itself to the world at large. Shenstone is equally known for his mania in landscape gardening, upon which he spent all his means. His place, The Leasowes in Shropshire, has gained the greater notoriety through the descriptions of Dodsley and Goldsmith. The natural simplicity of The Schoolmistress allies it strongly to the romantic school, which was now about to appear.

William Collins, 1720-1756: this unfortunate poet, who died at the early age of thirty-six, deserves particular mention for the delicacy of his fancy and the beauty of his diction. His Ode on the Passions is universally, esteemed for its sudden and effective changes from the bewilderment of Fear, the violence of Anger, and the wildness of Despair to the rapt visions of Hope, the gentle dejection of Pity, and the sprightliness of Mirth and Cheerfulness. His Ode on the Death of Thomson is an exquisite bit of pathos, as is also the Dirge on Cymbeline. Everybody knows and admires the short ode beginning

How sleep the brave who sink to rest
By all their country's wishes blest!

His Oriental Eclogues please by the simplicity of the colloquies, the choice figures of speech, and the fine descriptions of nature. But of all his poems, the most finished and charming is the Ode to Evening. It contains thirteen four-lined stanzas of varied metre, and in blank verse so full of harmony that rhyme would spoil it. It presents a series of soft, dissolving views, and stands alone in English poetry, with claims sufficient to immortalize the poet, had he written nothing else. The latter part of his life was clouded by mental disorders, not unsuggested to the reader by the pathos of many of his poems. Like Gray, he wrote little, but every line is of great merit.

Henry Kirke White, 1785-1806: the son of a butcher, this gifted youth displayed, in his brief life, such devotion to study, and such powers of mind, that his friends could not but predict a brilliant future for him, had he lived. Nothing that he produced is of the highest order of poetic merit, but everything was full of promise. Of a weak constitution, he could not bear the rigorous study which he prescribed to himself, and which hastened his death. With the kind assistance of Mr. Capel Lofft and the poet Southey, he was enabled to leave the trade to which he had been apprenticed and go to Cambridge. His poems have most of them a strongly devotional cast. Among them are Gondoline, Clifton Grove, and the Christiad, in the last of which, like the swan, he chants his own death-song. His memory has been kept green by Southey's edition of his Remains, and by the beautiful allusion of Byron to his genius and his fate in The English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. His sacred piece called The Star of Bethlehem has been a special fa

vorite :

When marshalled on the nightly plain

The glittering host bestud the sky,
One star alone of all the train

Can fix the sinner's wandering eye.

Bishop Percy, 1728-1811: Dr. Thomas Percy, Bishop of Dromore, deserves particular notice in a sketch of English Literature not so much for his own works, although he was a poet, - as for his collection of ballads, made with great research and care, and published in 1765. By bringing before the world these remains of English songs and idyls, which lay scattered through the ages from the birth of the language, he showed England the true wealth of her romantic history, and influenced the writers of the day to abandon the artificial and reproduce the natural, the simple, and the romantic. He gave the impulse which produced the minstrelsy of Scott and the simple stories of Wordsworth.

Many of these ballads are descriptive of the border wars between England and Scotland; among the greatest favorites are Chevy Chase, The Battle of Otterburne, The Death of Douglas, and the story of Sir Patrick Spens. Anne Letitia Barbauld, 1743-1825: the hymns and poems of Mrs. Barbauld are marked by an adherence to the artificial school in form and manner; but something of feminine tenderness redeems them from the charge of being purely mechanical. Her Hymns in Prose for Children have been of value in an educational point of view; and the tales comprised in Evenings at Home are entertaining and instructive. Her Ode to Spring, which is an imitation of Collins's Ode to Evening, in the same measure and comprising the same number of stanzas, is her best poetic effort, and compares with Collins's piece as an excellent copy compares with the picture of a great master.

TH

THE PROGRESS OF THE DRAMA.

HE latter half of the eighteenth century, so marked, as we have seen, for manifold literary activity, is, in one phase of its history, distinctly represented by the drama. It was a very peculiar epoch in English annals. The accession. of George III., in 1760, gave promise, from the character of the king and of his consort, of an exemplary reign. George III. was the first monarch of the house of Hanover who may be justly called an English king in interest and taste. He and his queen were virtuous and honest; and their influence was at once felt by a people in whom virtue and honesty are inherent, and whose consciences and tastes had been violated by the evil examples of the former reigns.

In 1762 George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales, was born; and as soon as he approached manhood, he displayed the worst features of his ancestral house: he was extravagant and debauched; he threw himself into a violent opposition to his father with this view he was at first a Whig, but afterwards became a Tory. He had also peculiar opportunities for exerting authority during the temporary fits of insanity which attacked the king in 1764, in 1788, and in 1804. At last, in 1810, the king was so disabled from attending to his