trials and difficulties, he succeeded in steering successfully for seventeen years. He died on the 31st of December

1826.

His

All his critical work bears the stamp of his powerful character and the circumstances of his early education. Its leading virtue is its entire sincerity. He had a passionate love of whatever was true and great in literature, and a corresponding hatred of imposture. Appreciating with intense sympathy the genius of the authors whom he admired, he devoted to their service a hero-worship marked by all the indomitable energy he had shown in his boyish struggle after knowledge. editions of Ben Jonson, Ford, and Massinger are admirable for the extent of their learning and for their scholarly appreciation of poetical work alien in its qualities to the spirit of his own age. His translation of Juvenal is, perhaps, the best in the language, while, as I have said, the imitation of Persius in The Baviad breathes the very air of its original. In his invectives against the Cruscans there is no trace of the personal animosity that inspired Pope in his war with the Dunces: he writes, like Juvenal, under the spur of an indignation produced, by the sight of social and artistic degeneracy, in a mind trained by difficulty and suffering to recognise the realities of life. After his death the many enemies created by the severity of his criticism ascribed this characteristic to his native malignity, but those who knew the real kindliness of his temper, with better reason recognised in his style the intensity of his convictions.1

His satire has indeed the defect of his qualities, warped as these were, to some extent, by the sufferings of his boyhood. His great fault is his deficient sense of proportion. Coming late to the study of letters, when the lines of his character had hardened, he did not assimilate the classical influence so fully as those who had experienced it while their minds were still in a flexible state. He surrendered himself at once to the dominion of the authors

1 On this point see the letter of R. W. Hay to Mr. Murray of July 7, 1856. Smiles' Memoir of John Murray, vol. ii. p. 177.

with whom he found himself in sympathy, and his thought on all occasions is steeped in colours derived from his early study of Juvenal. He never attained that air of light and well-bred raillery which so delightfully distinguishes the work of Canning and Frere, his colleagues in The Anti-Jacobin. Something of the "tremendous" appears in his indignation against such poor creatures as Merry and Jerningham, the mere ephemerides of fashion; while, in his Epistle to Peter Pindar, a sense of his own importance mingles, to a degree unusual in his satire, with affected scorn of his antagonist :

Unhappy dotard, see! thy hairs are grey-
In fitter lists thy waning strength display;
Go, dip thy trembling hands in coward gore,
And hew down Wests and Copleys by the score;
But touch not me,-or, to thy peril know,

I give no easy conquest to the foe.

Come then, all filth and venom as thou art,
Rage in thy eye and rancour in thy heart,
Come with thy boasted arms, spite, malice, lies,
Smut, scandal, execrations, blasphemies;
I brave them all. Lo, here I fix my stand,
And dare the utmost of thy tongue and hand;
Prepared each threat to baffle, or to spurn,
Each blow with tenfold vigour to return.1

The same man appears in his prose. In his edition of Ben Jonson he shows an almost personal hatred of Drummond of Hawthornden for his strictures on his author; and George Ellis writes to Murray about an article of his in The Quarterly Review on Sydney Smith's "Visitation Sermon."

2

Gifford, though the best-tempered man alive, is terribly severe with his pen; but S. S. would suffer ten times more by being turned into ridicule (and never did man expose himself so much as he did in that sermon) than from being slashed and cauterised in that manner.3

But when all deductions are made, the service that Gifford rendered to good literature ought to be duly

1 Epistle to Peter Pindar.

2 See Memoir prefixed to edition of Ben Jonson (1865), p. 34.
3 Smiles's Memoir of John Murray, vol. i. p. 184.

VOL. VI

E

recognised. England, on the eve of the French Revolu-
tion, had sunk into a state of apparent languor, in which
the Constitution seemed to lack strength to throw off the
diseases of the body politic. The advent of the younger
Pitt to power, supported by the declared voice of Public
Opinion, had indeed recovered for the Crown the same
just room for its prerogative as it had enjoyed in the
time of his father. But the coalition between the Rump
of Lord North's party and the great Whig Families, headed
by Fox, in a House of Commons largely influenced by
the latter, gave ample scope for the violence of faction;
and, with a prestige lowered by the disastrous results of
the American War, the nation, which alone in Europe
represented the cause of liberty, remained without any
visible goal towards which to direct its united energies.
This decay in the principle of action was necessarily
reflected in the sphere of poetry. Deprived of all definite
ideals which could be appropriately embodied in any of the
traditional forms of the art, the public taste began to dissolve
into as many sets and factions as prevailed in the world of
politics; nor was there any central authority qualified to
check the hosts of pretenders who thrust their claims for
a hearing on the good-natured ignorance of society.
was necessary for some one to show the public what the
classical spirit really meant. Gifford did this. As Scott
said of his Baviad and Maeviad: "He squashed at one
blow a set of coxcombs who might have humbugged
the world long enough." The feat needed courage as
well as ability, for the Cruscans had the control of an
anonymous press, and Gifford knew that Public Opinion
was timid as well as sceptical.

F. 'Tis well. Here let the indignant stricture cease,
And Leeds at length enjoy his fool in peace.

P. Come then, around their works a circle draw,
And near it plant the dragons of the law,
With labels writ "Critics, far hence remove,
Nor dare to censure what the great approve."
I go.
Yet Hall could lash with noble rage
This purblind patron of a former age;

It

And laugh to scorn the eternal sonneteer,
Who made goose pinions and white rags so dear;
Yet Oldham, in his rude unpolished strain,
Could hiss the clamorous and deride the vain,
Who bawled their rhymes incessant through the town,
Or bribed the hawkers for a day's renown.

Whate'er the theme, with honest warmth they wrote,
Nor cared what Mutius of their freedom thought;
Yet prose was venial in that happy time,
And life had other business than to rhyme.

And may not I—now this pernicious pest,
This metromania, creeps through every breast ;
Now fools and children void their brains by loads,
And itching grandams spawl lascivious odes;
Now lords and dukes, cursed with a sickly taste,
While Burns' pure healthful nurture runs to waste,
Lick up the spittle of the bed-rid muse,

And riot on the sweepings of the stews ;
Say may not I expose-

Prudence, my friend !

F. No 'tis unsafe.

P. What! not deride? not laugh?

Well! thought at least is free

F. O yet forbear

P. Nay, then, I'll dig a pit, and bury there

The dreadful truth which so alarms thy fears;

THE TOWN, THE TOWN, GOOD PIT, HAS ASSES' EARS.

Shamed by this just satire, the sound part of cultivated opinion roused itself, and-about the same time as the aristocracy, under the exhortations of Burke, were instinctively defining the national policy in opposition to the French Revolution-began to recognise that the true spirit of classical poetry was not to be found in mere forms-whether the impersonations and abstractions of Darwin or the drivelling affectations of the Cruscansbut in the energetic expression of civic ideas. The Baviad and The Maeviad prepared the way for the revival of the genuine classic manner, as illustrated in the poetry of The Anti-Jacobin, the patriotic Odes of Campbell, and the Tales of Crabbe.

CHAPTER IV

DEMOCRACY AND LYRIC POETRY, SCOTTISH AND

ENGLISH

SONGS OF THE PEOPLE-ROBERT BURNS: VISION PAINTINGWILLIAM BLAKE

IN the last quarter of the eighteenth century two poets, one English, one Scottish, appear, whose genius, in most respects strikingly contrasted, in others indicates a common external influence at work, and reflects the power exerted on the individual imagination by the rising spirit of Democracy. In both may be noted a strong centrifugal tendency carrying them away from the standards of faith and conduct recognised by the ruling classes of society, and an abrupt departure from the accepted form of poetical expression. But in the case of Burns this tendency seeks a national channel; his genius is in revolt against the despotism of the ecclesiastical order established in his country; the instrument he employs for the expression of his feelings is the vernacular dialect of the people. Blake's rebellion is purely personal, and is directed mainly against the aesthetic principles of the age: his poetry embodies an attempt to express abstract mystical sentiment in metrical language characterised, as far as possible, by the clear imagery and outlines proper to the art of painting.

As regards the poetry of Burns:-Scotland in the eighteenth century may be described as being under the rule of an oligarchical theocracy, combining the features of aristocratic feudalism with Calvinistic theology. Never