CRITICAL PERIOD: FIRST PHASE.

CHAPTER II.

FEATURES.

The literary importance of the eighteenth century lies mainly in its having wrought out a revolution begun in the seventeenth.-Matthew Arnold.

Politics. Tory and Whig had laid aside the sword, and though party spirit ran high, were conducting the competition for power by a parley of words and measures; the first the conservative, the second the progressive element; one the steadying, the other the propelling force,- both principles essential to the advance of nations.

France had been humbled, Spain had been all but torn from the house of Bourbon in the War of the Spanish Succession, England and Scotland had been united; and, leaving their country at the height of its material prosperity, the Whigs retired in 1710, to resume their ascendancy in 1715, and to continue it without intermission till the accession of George III.

Society.-Authors basked in the sunshine of royal patronage. Literary merit found easy admittance into the most distinguished society and to the highest honors of the state. Servility, however, was less marked than formerly, and the period may be regarded as a transition from the early system of patronage, when books had but few readers, to the later one of professional independence, when the public became the patron.

The Revolution of 1688 had indeed secured to the nation liberty of conscience and the right of property, but public interests were endangered by the low standard of political honor. politics, weapons were freely employed which we should now regard as in the highest degree dishonorable. The secrecy of the mails was habitually violated. Walpole, writing in 1725, confesses, without scruple, to opening the letters of a political rival.

The rich purchased their seats in Parliament, and Parliament sold its votes to the ministry.

General intelligence was scarcely more than a prophecy. The first daily paper appeared in the reign of Anne. In 1710, the papers, instead of merely communicating news as heretofore, began cautiously to take part in the discussion of political topics.

In the Restoration, the more excellent parts of human nature had disappeared, leaving but the animal; and there still existed. a wretched state of public tastes and morals. Steele, who aimed at reform, said that his play of The Lying Lover was 'damned for its piety.' The style of speaking and writing on common topics was vitiated by slang and profanity. Literary and scientific attainments were despised as pedantic and vulgar by the fashionable of both sexes. Scandal was almost the sole topic of conversation among the ladies. Three learned words would drive them out of doors for a mouthful of fresh air. Judge of their occupations: 'Young man,' said the wife of Marlborough to Lord Melcombe, 'you come from Italy. They tell me of a new invention there called caricature drawing. Can you find me somebody that will make me a caricature of Lady Masham, describing her covered with running sores and ulcers, that I may send it to the Queen to give her a right idea of her new favorite?

Bull-baiting was a popular amusement. In Queen Anne's time, it was performed in London regularly twice a week. Cockfighting was the favorite game of the schoolboys, the teachers taking the runaway cocks as their perquisites. Gambling was the bane of the nobility, and among the ladies the passion was quite as strong as among men.

Fashionable hours were becoming steadily later. The landmarks of our fathers,' wrote Steele in 1710, are removed, and planted farther up in the day. . . . In my own memory, the dinner hour has crept by degrees from twelve o'clock to three. Where it will fix nobody knows.' Coffee-houses were conspicuous centres of news, politics, and fashion. Their number in 1708, fifty years after the first had been established in the metropolis, was estimated at three thousand. Drunkenness and extravagance went hand in hand among the gentry. Officers of state sat up whole nights drinking, then hastened in the morning, without sleep, to their official business. Addison, the foremost

moralist of his day, was not entirely free from this vice. 'Come, Robert,' said Walpole, the minister, to his son, 'you shall drink twice while I drink once; for I will not permit the son in his sober senses to be witness of the intoxication of his father.' In 1724, the passion had spread among all classes with the violence of an epidemic. Retailers of gin hung out painted boards, announcing that their customers could be made drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence, and that cellars strewn with straw would be furnished, without cost, into which they might be dragged when they had become insensible.

Punishments were brutal. In 1726, a murderess was burned alive. Prisoners were still slowly pressed to death by weights of stone or iron, or cut down, when half hung, and disembowelled.

Riots were frequent, and robberies were numerous and bold. Addison's 'Sir Roger,' when he goes to the theatre, arms his servants with cudgels. In 1712, a club of young men of the higher classes were accustomed nightly to sally out drunk into the streets, to hunt the passers-by. One of their favorite amusements, called 'tipping the lion,' was to squeeze the nose of their victim flat upon his face, and to bore out his eyes with their fingers. Among them were 'the sweaters,' who encircled their prisoner, and pricked him with swords till he sank exhausted; and dancing masters,' who made men caper by thrusting swords into their legs.

Religion. The belief in witchcraft was still smouldering, but no longer received the sanction of the law. In 1712, the death of a suspected witch, who had been thrown into the water to see whether she would sink or swim, and who perished during the trial, was pronounced murder.

While the town rectors and the great church dignitaries were second to none in Europe in genius and learning, and occupied conspicuous social positions, the rural clergy were cringing, obsequious, and impoverished. While a high conception of duty was not unknown among them, as a whole they were unlettered and coarse, languid in zeal, but using their limited influence chiefly for good.

It was a season of conflict between the High Church party and the Dissenters, who sought to reconstruct and rationalize the theology of the Church. There was also a large amount of formal

scepticism abroad, directed against Christianity itself. But this was not the direction which the highest intellects usually took. The task which occupied them was to lighten the weight of dogma within the Church, to infuse a higher tone into the social and domestic spheres, to make men moderate in pleasure, charitable to the poor, dutiful in the relations of life, and to establish the truth of Christianity upon the basis of evidence-evidence differing in no essential respect from that required in ordinary history or science.

man.

But religious enthusiasm was dying out - I mean that earnest realization which searches the heart and moulds the character of The discussion of Christian evidences is generally the sign of defective Christian life. Traces of devotional activity, however, still existed. In 1696 was formed the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge; and in 1701, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Charity schools were established and multiplied rapidly under Anne. 'I have always looked on the institution of charity schools,' writes Addison, which of late years has so universally prevailed through the whole nation, as the glory of the age we live in.' Societies were organized to combat the corruption that had been general since the Restoration, dividing themselves into several distinct groups, and becoming a kind of voluntary police to enforce the laws against blasphemers, drunkards, and Sabbath-breakers.

The separation of theology from politics was proceeding rapidly, and the laymen were becoming increasingly prominent in the state. A high-church writer, in 1712, complains of the efforts that were being made to 'thrust the churchmen out of their places of power in the government.'

Poetry. When a heartless cynicism is fashionable, when brilliancy is preferred to sobriety, when morality tends to a system of abstract rules, when sermons become diagrams, theorems, and corollaries, what will be the character of poetry? Evidently, it must express the temper of the age, or it will perish still-born. It will satisfy the intellect, but starve the emotional The poet will become an artist of form. Instead of strong passions, elevated motives, and sublime aspirations, he will give us critical accuracy of thought, elegance of phrase, symmetry of parts, and measured harmonies of sound.

nature.

Pope was its representative product, and he expresses the peculiarities of his time with singular sharpness and fidelity.

Drama.-The drama of the Restoration had been so outrageously immoral that the intellect of the country became ashamed of the stage, and turned its strength to cultivate other branches of literature. Jeremy Collier, Steele, and Addison had shamed it into something like decency, though ladies of respectability and position still hesitated to appear at the first representation of a new comedy. In style, the dramatic literature, like the general poetry of the period, was polished and artificial. Addison's tragedy of Cato was too cold and classical to touch the passions. The prevailing taste called for faithful and witty delineations of manners, slight and coarse comedies, gaudy spectacles of rope dancers and ballets. 'I never heard of any plays,' said Parson Adams in a novel of that day, 'fit for a Christian to read, but Cato and the Conscious Lovers, and I must own in the latter there are some things almost solemn enough for a sermon.'

Periodical Miscellany. - Internal repose and national wealth occasioned the rise of that middle class of respectable persons, literary idlers, who have leisure to read and money to buy books, but who wish to be entertained, not roused to think, to be gently moved, not deeply excited. This condition developed a new and peculiar kind of literature consisting of essays on the social phenomena of the time, and scraps of public and political intelligence to conciliate the ordinary readers of news. The pioneer in this department was De Foe, who in 1704 began a tri-weekly journal called The Review, published on post nights,Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.

It was reserved for Steele and Addison, however, to make the Miscellany a true agent of social improvement. Their object was to popularize and diffuse knowledge, to adapt every question to the capacity of the idlest reader, to characterize men and women humorously, taking minutes of their dress, air, looks, words, thoughts, desires, actions, and thus to hold the mirror up to nature, showing the very age and body of the time. Sermons veiled in pleasantry were preached on every conceivable text, from the brevity of life to the extravagance of female toilets. The end was moral health-the means was sugar-coated pills.