spond to our sensations, or to affirm that the sensation is no proof of anything without, is Idealism. The first divides the mental from the physical, and believes that the mind has proof of both; the second resolves the mental into the physical; the third resolves the physical into the mental. The first is the underlying philosophy of religion and daily life; the second is the prevailing drift of English speculation; the third is a reaction against the second,―a noble but mistaken endeavor to rescue the hopes and beliefs of men.

Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume make up the line of materialistic succession. The first made seeing and hearing the conditions of thinking, and thus gave English thought a material bent. The second made this tendency excessive and one-sided. The third was peculiarly influential at one point, the origin of ideas. He asserted that the sole ground of knowledge was experience. The mind contributed nothing,—it was simply paper, on which the images of outward things, and the states they occasioned, were received. The fourth carried the views of his predecessor to startling consequences.

Résumé.-A new form of landscape gardening was introduced. Symmetry of design, so popular in the reign of Anne, was discarded for the variety and freedom of nature. Hogarth cultivated the taste for portrait-painting, as yet 'the only flourishing branch of the high tree of British art.' He translated the inward into the outward, exhibiting manners, with deep and various meaning, in color and form. The impulse given to sacred music, and the origin of the English opera, are the capital events in musical history. These facts indicate the tendencies of taste. Both literature and government were given a more popular turn. Instead of the vices, miseries, and frivolities of the great, the people now saw, in what they read, an account of themselves. The critical spirit of the age was at once formal and substantial, increasingly the latter.

Prose was preeminent, and spread far and wide into many realms. History was a favorite study. No literary labor was more remunerative, nor did any other so readily raise to distinction those who excelled in it.

The prevailing style was still classical; but to the nimble move

ment of Pope and the graceful pace of Addison, was now added the ponderous and stately gait of Johnson.

Poetry, open to petty and superficial criticism, conformed to the rules and proprieties, but was divorced from living nature.

Formalism and rationalism provoked reactionary efforts, disclosing far-off forces at work, promises of the coming spontaneity in which poetry should flow as lava from volcanoes, light from stars, or perfume from flowers.

RICHARDSON.

His power was his own in the strictest sense; not borrowed from books, little aided even by experience of life, derived almost solely from introspection of himself and communion with his own heart.-Craik.

Biography.-Born in Derbyshire, in 1689, son of a poor carpenter. Received a common-school education, and at the age of sixteen was apprenticed to a printer in London-a calling to which he was determined by its prospective opportunities for reading. Advanced rapidly by industry and good conduct, was taken into partnership, and ultimately became the head of an extensive business. At fifty, became an author, writing during his leisure moments in his shop parlor. Delicate, nervous, often ill, his disorders terminated fatally on the 4th of July, 1761.

Writings. Known from his youth as a fluent letter-writer, he had been engaged to prepare a manual of familiar letters on useful subjects, and it occurred to him, while executing the task, that the work would be greatly enlivened if the letters were made to tell a connected story. The result was Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740); published in order to cultivate the principles of virtue and religion in the minds of the

young.

Pamela is an artless and lovely child of fifteen, half servant and half favorite, who finds herself exposed to the wickedness of a rich and aristocratic young master, a justice of the peace, a sort of divinity to her. He insults her, but she is always timid and humble:

'It is for you, sir, to say what you please, and for me only to say, God bless your honor!

Again he is kind, and she is confused:

To be sure I did think nothing but curt'sy and cry, and was all confusion at his goodness."

He confines her for several months with a wicked creature'; threatens her, tries money, then gentleness. Everything is against her even her own heart, for she loves him secretly. The toils close around her, and she seems lost; but a grand sentiment saves her. Distinctions of soul are the only ones that I will live in Heaven:

My soul is of equal importance to the soul of a princess, though my quality is inferior to that of the meanest slave.'

He learns to respect her, wishes now to marry her, and, she answers him in a timid, troubled way:

...

'I fear not, sir, the grace of God supporting me, that any acts of kindness would make me forget what I owe to my virtue; but . . . my nature is too frank and open to make me wish to be ungrateful; and if I should be taught a lesson I never yet learnt, with what regret should I descend to the grave, to think that I could not hate my undoer; and that at the last great day, I must stand up as an accuser of the poor unhappy soul that I could wish it in my power to save.'

She is happy now, for she may trust him; and day by day her letters joyously and gratefully record the preparations for their marriage. For her wedding present, she obtains the pardon of those who have ill-treated her. As a wife, she prays to God that she may be enabled to discharge her duty; hopes her husband will be indulgent to the overflowings of her grateful heart; resolves to read in his absence, that she may polish her mind, and make herself worthier of his company and conversation.

Clarissa Harlowe (1748), his masterpiece. Like the other, a novel of conflict, but in which virtue, subjected to a severer test, is given its greatest prominence. The heroine is of noble mind, saintly purity, and never-failing sweetness of temper. A despotic father, with an ambition to found a house, wishes to marry her to a coarse and heartless fool; she rebels, is importuned by her mother, urged by a furious brother, stung by a venomous sister, growled at by two uncles, hounded by the whole family-aunt and nurse included. She offers to give up her property, never to marry at all, concedes, begs, implores, weeps, faints, but in vain. True, they are afraid of her tears, but the torture is obstinate, incessant. It is the sort of parental tyranny and stupidity that drives the victim to madness, dishonor, or death. When, at the last moment, she thinks to escape them, she is chased by another

more dangerous, a splendid and accomplished, a gay and smiling villain, who desires to possess her, only because she is hard to conquer: I always considered opposition and resistance as a challenge to do my worst.'

He spares no expense, scruples at no treachery, invents stories, forges letters, even gives the Harlowes servants of his own. Duty, humanity, prayers, entreaties, his own remorse, stay not the hand of the cruel executioner. She is vigilant, lives in the shadow of present and final judgment. Her life has been entrenched by precepts and principles. She reasons upon them, examines herself, and is conscientious where others are enthusiastic. With philosophic composure, she takes an inventory of character:

"That such a husband might unsettle me in all my own principles, and hazard my future hopes. That he has a very immoral character to women. That, knowing this, it is a high degree of impurity to think of joining in wedlock with such a man.' Though gentle, she has pride; defends every inch of ground, renews the struggle each day and loses,-breaks, but bends not. Pamela had too little dignity, Clarissa has too much; the former was too submissive, the latter is too sublime.

Sir Charles Grandison (1753), designed to represent the ideal of a perfect man, in whom the elegance of fashion combines with the virtues of piety. The hero is courteous, gallant, generous, delicate, good, irreproachable — through a thousand pages. His mild and gracious wife, whose tears are the 'dewdrops of heaven,' says so:

But could he be otherwise than the best of husbands, who was the most dutiful of sons, who is the most affectionate of brothers, the most faithful of friends; who is good upon principle in every relation of life?'

Style.- Epistolary, prolix, realistic, plain, business-like. He seems to have written utterly without artifice, using, on all occasions, the first words and the first incidents.

Rank.-De Foe had painted adventures rather than manners. To Richardson belongs the honor of having constructed the first epic of real life-the novel of character. Yet he was not of the world. He drew his inspiration less from observation than from introspection. Given the idea of a simple country girl, her ordinary situation, a fact or two from nature, he makes out all the rest by the mere force of reasoning imagination, as if nothing existed beyond the little room in which he writes. He describes

objects and events with the literal minuteness of a common diary, spinning the web and texture of his story from a myriad gossamer threads; yet never distracted, never forgetful of the single end; twining and linking the innumerable fibres to bring out a figure, an action, a lesson. While he twines, he colors. Unlike De Foe, who sees only the plain literal truth of things, he sees through an atmosphere of ideal light, sees things beautified, elevated above nature. His best paintings are pictures of the heart, expressions of the motives and feelings that make fellowship between man and man. Hence, apart from the story, a large element of the interest is in the sentiments uttered, in motives of action rather than modes.

We could wish that his characters were less circumspect, less calculating, less conscious. They preach too much. Pamela is a little too tame, Clarissa almost too heavenly. Sir Charles is proper as a wax figure - he never did a mean thing, nor made a wrong gesture. But we must not forget that idealization was Richardson's real excellence, as it was his necessity.

Character. As a writer he possessed original genius. He held in his hand almost all the moving strings of humanity, and made them vibrate in harmony. In the duties of morality and piety, regular and exemplary. Conscience, with its auxiliaries, religion, law, education, proprieties, was an armed sentinel guarding the way of life. Gentle, benevolent, and - vain. His vanity grew by what it fed upon,-the flattery of female friends. He was always partial to female society. At thirteen he was the confidant of three young women; conducted their love correspondence, without betraying to one the fact that he was secretary and adviser to the others.

'As a bashful and not forward boy, I was an early favorite with all young women of taste and reading in the neighborhood. Half a dozen of them, when met to work with their needles, used, when they got a book they liked, and thought I should, to borrow me to read to them; their mothers sometimes with them; and both mothers and daughters used to be pleased with the observations they put me upon making.'

He has portrayed himself in his novels. The following senjences are characteristic:

The power of doing good to worthy objects is the only enviable circumstance in the Ives of people of fortune.'

Nothing in human nature is so God-like as the disposition to do good to our fellowcreatures.'

A good person will rather choose to be censured for doing his duty than for a defect in it.'