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anything that gives him an opportunity of exerting his beloved talent, and very often censures a passage, not because there is any fault in it, but because he can be merry upon it. Such kinds of pleasantry are very unfair and disingenuous in works of criticism, in which the greatest masters, both ancient and modern, have always appeared with a serious and instructive air.

As I intend in my next paper to show the defects in Milton's Paradise Lost, I thought fit to premise these few particulars, to the end that the reader may know I enter upon it, as on a very ungrateful work, and that I shall just point at the imperfections, without endeavoring to inflame them with ridicule. I must also observe with Longinus that the productions of a great genius, with many lapses and inadvertencies, are infinitely preferable to the works of an inferior kind of author which are scrupulously exact and conformable to all the rules of correct writing.

I shall conclude my paper with a story out of Boccalini which sufficiently shows us the opinion that judicious author entertained of the sort of critics I have been here mentioning A famous critic, says he, having gathered together all the faults of an eminent poet, made a present of them to Apollo, who received them very graciously, and resolved to make the author a suitable return for the trouble he had been at in collecting them. In order to this he set before him a sack of wheat, as it had been just threshed out of the sheaf. He then bid him pick out the chaff from among the corn, and lay it aside by itself. The critic applied himself to the task with great industry and pleasure, and, after having made the due separation, was presented by Apollo with the chaff for his pains.

FURTHER READING.-The Sir Roger de Coverley papers, published in pamphlet form by Clark & Maynard.

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PERIOD VII.

FROM SWIFT'S DEATH TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION,

1745-1789.

LESSON 41.

Brief Historical Sketch.-Invasion by second Pretender, son of the first, 1745. Battle of Culloden, Apr. 16, 1746. England begins, 1755, the French and Indian War, closed by Treaty of Paris in 1763. Clive's Battle of Plassey in India, 1757. Eng. aids Frederic the Great in the Seven Years' War against Austria, France, and Russia, begun 1756. Era of the Elder Pitt, the Great Commoner, afterward Lord Chatham, the third quarter of this century. Under Clive the East India Co. conquers a large part of India, 1755-67. Geo. III. succeeds Geo. II., 1760. His influence over his ministry almost supreme. Wilkes' Controversy, 1762-82. Stamp Act, 1764. Repeal of it, 1765. Watt invents Steam Engine, 1765, patents it, 1781. Arkwright's Spinning Machine, 1768. Regulation Acts, 1774. First great English Journals date from about 1770. Right of the press to criticise Parliament, ministers, and even the sovereign now established. Death of Chatham, 1778. American Revolution begins, 1775. Lord George Gordon Riots, 1780. American Independence acknowledged by Treaty of Paris, 1783. The Younger Pitt made Prime Minister, 1784. Mail Coaches introduced, 1784. East Indian possessions vastly increased by Warren Hastings, 1774-85. Articles of impeachment presented against him by Burke, 1786. Trial began 1788, lasting till 1795, and resulting in his acquittal. Howard's Reform of prisons and prison discipline, 1774–90. French Revolution, 1789.

LESSON 42.

PROSE LITERATURE.-"The rapid increase of manufactures, science, and prosperity which began with the middle of the eighteenth century is paralleled by the growth of Literature. The general causes of this growth were:—

1. A good prose style had been perfected, and the method of writing being made easy, production increased. Men were born, as it were, into a good school of the art of composition, and the boy of eighteen had no difficulty in making sentences which the Elizabethan writer could not have put together after fifty years of study.

2. The long peace after the accession of the House of Hanover had left England at rest, and given it wealth. The reclaiming of waste tracts, and the increased wealth and trade made better communication necessary; and the country was soon covered with a network of highways. The leisure gave time to men to think and write: the quicker interchange between the capital and the country spread over England the literature of the capital, and stirred men everywhere to write. The coaching services and the post carried the new book and the literary criticism to the villages, and awoke the men of genius there, who might otherwise have been silent.

3. The Press sent far and wide the news of the day, and grew in importance till it contained the opinions and writing of men like Canning. Such seed produced literary work in the country. Newspapers now began to play their part in literature. They rose under the Commonwealth, but became important when the censorship which reduced them to a mere broadsheet of news was removed after the Revolution of 1688. The political sleep of the age of the first two Georges hindered their progress; but, in the reign of George III., after a struggle with which the name of John Wilkes and the author of the letters of Junius are connected, the Press claimed and

obtained the right to criticise the conduct and measures of Ministers and Parliament and the King; and, after the struggle in 1771, the right to publish and comment on the debates. in the two Houses.

The great English Journals, the Morning Chronicle, the Post, the Herald, and the Times, gave an enormous impulse within the next twenty years to the production of books, and created a new class of literary men-the Journalists. Later on, in 1802, the publication of the Edinburgh Review, and afterwards of the Quarterly Review and Blackwood's Magazine, started another kind of prose writing, and by their criticisms on new books improved and stimulated literature.

4. Communication with the Continent had increased during the peaceable times of Walpole, and the wars that followed made it still easier. With its increase, two new and great outbursts of literature told upon England. France sent the works of Montesquieu, of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, D'Alembert, and the rest of the liberal thinkers who were called the Encyclopædists, to influence and quicken English literature on all the great subjects that belong to the social and political life of man. Afterwards, the fresh German movement, led by Lessing and others, and carried on by Goethe and Schiller, added its impulse to the poetical school that arose in England along with the French Revolution. These were the general causes of the rapid growth of literature from the time of George III."

"It seems as if a simple and natural prose were a thing which we might expect to come easy to communities of men, and to come early to them; but we know from experience that it is not so. Poetry and the poetic form of expression naturally precede prose. We see this in ancient Greece. We see prose forming itself there gradually and with labor; we see it passing through more than one stage before it attains to thorough propriety and lucidity, long after forms of consummate adequacy have already been reached and used in poetry. It is a people's growth in practical life, and its native turn for developing this life and

for making progress in it which awaken the desire for a good prose-a prose, plain, direct, intelligible, serviceable.

The practical genius of our people could not but urge irresistibly to the production of a real prose style, because, for the purposes of modern life, the old English prose, the prose of Milton and Taylor, is cumbersome, unavailable, impossible. A dead language, the Latin, for a long time furnished the nations of Europe with an instrument of the kind superior to any which they had yet discovered in their own tongue. But such nations as England and France, called to a great historic life, and with powerful interests and gifts, were sure to feel the need of having a sound prose of their own, and to bring such a prose forth. They brought it forth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; France first, afterwards England."-Matthew Arnold.

THE NOVEL.-"The novel is perhaps the most remarkable of the forms literature now took. It began in the reign of George II. No other books have ever produced so plentiful an offspring as the novels of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. The novel arranges and combines round the passion of love and its course between two or more persons a number of events and of characters, which, in their action on one another, develop the plot of the story and bring about a sad or a happy close. The story may be laid at any time, in any class of society, in any place. The whole world and the whole of human life lie before it as its subject. Its vast sphere accounts for its vast production-its human interest for its vast numbers of readers.

SAMUEL RICHARDSON, 1689–1761, while Pope was yet alive, wrote in the form of letters, and in two months' time, Pamela, 1740, and afterwards Clarissa Harlowe, 1748, and Sir Charles Grandison. The second is the best, and all are celebrated for their subtile and tender drawing of the human heart. They are novels of Sentiment; and their intense minuteness of detail gives them reality. Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett followed him with the novel of Real life, full of events, adventures, fun, and vivid painting of various kinds of life in England.

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