Poetry, 1774-78, and in doing so gave fresh material to the poets. They began to take delight in the childlikeness and naturalness of Chaucer as distinguished from the artificial and critical verse of the school of Pope. Shakespeare was studied in a more accurate way. Pope's, Theobald's, Sir Thomas Hanmer's, and Warburton's editions of Shakespeare were succeeded by Johnson's in 1765; and Garrick, the actor, began the restoration of the genuine text of Shakespeare's plays for the stage.

Spenser formed the spirit and work of some poets, and T. Warton wrote an essay on the Faerie Queen. WILLIAM SHENSTONE'S Schoolmistress, 1742, was one of these Spenserian poems, and so was the Castle of Indolence, 1748, by JAMES THOMSON, author of the Seasons. JAMES BEATTIE, in the Minstrel, 1774, a didactic poem, followed the stanza and manner of Spenser.

3. A new element, interest in the romantic past, was added by the publication of Dr. Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 1765. The narrative ballad and the narrative romance, afterwards taken up and perfected by Sir Walter Scott, now struck their roots afresh in English poetry. Men began to seek among the ruder times of history for wild, natural stories of human life; and the pleasure in these increased and accompanied the growing love of lonely, even of savage, scenery. The Ossian, 1762, of JAMES MACPHERSON, which gave itself out as a translation of Gaelic epic poems, is an example of this new element.

Still more remarkable in this way were the poems of THOмAS CHATTERTON, the marvellous boy,' who died by his own hand in 1770, at the age of seventeen. They were imitations of old poetry. He pretended to have discovered, in a muniment room at Bristol, the Death of Sir Charles Bawdin and other poems by an imaginary monk named Thomas Rowley. Written with quaint spelling, and with a great deal of lyrical invention, they raised around them a great controversy. I

may mention as an instance of the same tendency, even before the Reliques, Gray's translations from the Norse and British poetry, and his poem of the Bard, in which the bards of Wales are celebrated.

CHANGE OF STYLE. -We have seen how the natural style of the Elizabethan poets had ended by producing an unnatural style. In reaction from this, the critical poets set aside natural feeling, as having nothing to do with the expression of thought in verse, and wrote according to rules of art which they had painfully worked out. Their style in doing this lost life and fire; and, losing these, lost art, which has its roots in emotion, and gained artifice, which has its roots in intellectual analysis. Being unwarmed by any natural feeling, it became as unnatural, considered as a poetic style, as that of the later Elizabethan poets. We may sum up, then, the whole history of the style of poetry from Elizabeth to George I.-the style of the first-rate poets being excepted-in these words: Nature without Art, and Art without Nature, had reached similar but not identical results in style.

But in the process two things had been learned. First, that artistic rules were necessary, and, secondly, that natural feeling was necessary in order that poetry should have a style fitted to express nobly the emotions and thoughts of man. The way was therefore now made ready for a style in which the Art should itself be Nature, and it sprang at once into being in the work of the poets of this time. The style of Gray and Collins is polished to the finest point, and yet is instinct with natural feeling. Goldsmith is natural even to simplicity, and yet his verse is even more accurate than Pope's. Cowper's style, in such poems as the Lines to his Mother's Picture, and in lyrics like the Loss of the Royal George, arises out of the simplest pathos, and yet is as pure in expression as Greek poetry. The work was then done; but as yet the element of fervent passion did not enter into poetry. We shall see how that came in after 1789.

CHANGE OF SUBJECT-NATURE. -Up to the age of Pope the subject of man was treated, and we have seen how many phases it went through. There remained the subject of Nature and of man's relation to it; that is, of the visible landscape, sea, and sky, and all that men feel in contact with them. Natural scenery had been hitherto used only as a background to the picture of human life. It now began to take a much larger place in poetry, and after a time grew to occupy a distinct place of its own apart from Man. \

The impulse given by Thomson to poetry of this kind was soon followed. Men left the town to visit the country and record their feelings. WILLIAM SOMERVILLE'S Chase, 1735, and JOHN DYER'S Grongar Hill, 1726, a description of a journey in South Wales, and his Fleece, 1757, are full of country sights and scenes: even Akenside mingled his spurious philosophy with pictures of solitary natural scenery.

Foreign travel now enlarged the love of nature. The Letters of GRAY, 1716-1771, some of the best in the English language, describe natural scenery with a minuteness quite new in English Literature. In his poetry he used the description of nature as its most graceful ornament,' but never made it the subject. In the Elegy in a Country Churchyard, and in the Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, natural scenery is interwoven with reflections on human life, and used to point its moral. COLLINS observes the same method in his Ode on the Passions and the Ode to Evening. There is, then, as yet no love of nature for its own sake.

A further step was made by OLIVER GOLDSMITH, 1728–74, in his Traveller, 1764, a sketch of national manners and governments, and in his Deserted Village, 1770. He describes natural scenery with less emotion than Collins, and does not moralize it like Gray. The scenes he paints are pure pictures, and he has no personal interest in them.

The next step was made by men like the two Wartons and by John Logan, 1782. Their poems do not speak of nature

and human life, but of nature and themselves. They see the reflection of their own joys and sorrows in the woods and streams, and for the first time the pleasure of being alone with nature apart from men became a distinct element in modern poetry. In the later poets it becomes one of their main subjects. These were the steps towards that love of nature for its own sake which we shall find in the poets who followed Cowper. One poem of the time almost anticipates it. It is the Minstrels, 1771, of JAMES BEATTIE. This poem represents a young poet educated almost altogether by lonely communion with and love of nature, and both in the spirit and in the treatment of the first part of the story resembles very closely Wordsworth's description of his own education by nature, in the beginning of the Prelude, and the history of the peddler in the first book of the Excursion."

"Goldsmith was peculiarly happy in writing bright and airy verses: the grace and lightness of his touch have rarely been approached. The Deserted Village is one of the most graceful and touching poems in the English language. It is clear bird-singing; but there is a pathetic note in it. No one better knew than himself the value of those finished and musical lines he was gradually adding to the beautiful poem, the grace and sweetness and tender pathetic charm of which make it one of the literary treasures of the English people."— William Black.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. GRAY.-Mitford's Life of; S. Johnson's Lives of Eng. Poets; Howitt's Homes of Brit. Poets; Ward's Anthology; Black. Mag., v. 75, 1854; N. A. Rev., v. 96, 1863; Quar. Rev., v. 94, 1854.

COLLINS.-Brydges' Imagin. Biog.; J. Coleman's Hist. Essays; N. Drake's Literary Hours; Ward's Anthology.

GOLDSMITH.-Irving's Life of; Forster's Life and Times of; De Quincey's Essays on the Poets; H. Giles' Lectures and Essays; Thack.'s Eng. Humorists; J. Timbs' Wits and Humorists; Eng. Men of Let. Series; Macaulay's Essays; Ecl. Mag., May, 1850, and Jan., 1855.

READINGS.-Gray's Elegy and Goldsmith's Deserted Village and Traveller, published in pamphlet form by Clark & Maynard.

LESSON 46.

FURTHER CHANGE OF SUBJECT-MAN.-"During this time the interest in Mankind, that is, in Man independent of nation, class, and caste, which we have seen in prose, and which was stimulated by the works of Voltaire and Rousseau, began to influence poetry. It broke out into a fierce extreme in the French Revolution, but long before that event it entered into poetry in various ways as it had entered into society and politics. One form of it appeared in the interest the poets began to take in men of other nations than England; another form of it—and this was increased by the Methodist revival—was the interest in the lives of the poor. Thomson speaks with sympathy of the Siberian exile and the Mecca pilgrim, and the Traveller of Goldsmith enters into foreign interests. His Deserted Village, Shenstone's Schoolmistress, Gray's Elegy celebrate the annals of the poor. Michael Bruce in his Lochleven praises the secret primrose path of rural life,' and Dr. John Langhorne in his Country Justice pleads the cause of the poor and paints their sorrows. Connected with this new element is the simple ballad of simple love, such as Shenstone's Jemmy Dawson, Mickle's Mariner's Wife, Goldsmith's Edwin and Angelina, poems which started a new type of human poetry, afterwards worked out more completely in the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth.

In a class apart I call attention to the Song of David, a long poem written by CHRISTOPHER SMART, a friend of Johnson's. It will be found in Chambers' Cyclopædia of English Literature.' Composed for the most part in a madhouse, the song has a touch here and there of the overforcefulness and the lapsing thoughts of a half insane brain. But its power of metre and of imaginative presentation of thoughts and things, and its mingling of sweet and grand religious poetry ought to make it better known. It is unique in style and in character