threw away the tardy courtesies of Chesterfield. Among frivolous men, he was serious; among scoffers, he was reverent; among insincere men, he was sincere; among selfish men, he was generous. Of him Carlyle says, "As for Johnson, I have always considered him to be by nature, one of the great English souls." In common breeding he was utterly wanting; his dress, his motion, his voice, his face, his eating,—all were offensive. We think of him as a most ill-mannered man. The blending of greatness and meanness puzzles us until we remind ourselves that his severe schooling in poverty developed the noble and the boorish traits together. When weary and lame he reached the top of the ladder by which he had climbed from poverty and obscurity to competence and fame, he had brought with him the begrimed and offensive manners of his underground life. He was thoroughly a man of letters. No better specimen of the type appears in the eighteenth century.

Consult Carlyle's Essays. Walpole's Men of the Reign of George III. Albert Barnes's Miscellaneous Essays. Hazlitt On the Periodical Essayists. Macaulay's Essay on Samuel Johnson. Macaulay's Essay on Croker's Edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson, and Boswell's Life of Johnson.

Edmund Burke (1730-1797) was a man of such powerful and versatile genius that he has been likened to Bacon. He stands foremost among English political writers and orators. The fervor and imagery of oratory are found in his philosophical discussions, and the highest qualities of the statesman and the man of letters appear in all of his pages. He had a becoming enthusiasm for whatever object attracted his sympathies, and into the service of this enthusiasm he impressed all the disciplined forces of his learning, his logic, and his historical and political knowledge. He was the son of an Irish attorney, and spent many of his early days near the ruins of Spenser's famous castle of Kilcolman. Early in life he went to England to study law, but his tastes soon led him into literary work, and he became a regular writer for the magazines. His first reputation was gained by The Vindication of Natu ral Society, an ironical imitation of the style and sentiments of

Lord Bolingbroke. In pursuing Bolingbroke's course of reasoning he reached the conclusion, that. as wickedness has prevailed under every form of government, society itself is evil, and therefore, that only the savage state is conducive to virtue and happiness. The work was published anonymously; but so perfect was it as an imitation of the style and sentiment of Bolingbroke that the most eminent critics of the day, among them Samuel Johnson, did not detect its intense and delicate irony, and pronounced it a genuine posthumous work of the earlier philosopher and statesman.

A few months afterwards Burke published An Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful (218), which has since been regarded as one of the classics in our literature. This work gained him a high place in the public esteem, and introduced him into the most brilliant literary circles.

He began his political career as secretary to the Chief Secretary of Ireland. The position was not pleasing to him. He soon received an appointment from the Marquis of Rockingham, the Prime Minister, and at once began his long public life of honor and activity. He sat in the House of Commons, and was one of the most prominent debaters during the agitated periods of the American and the French Revolutions. The Reign of Terror in France transformed Burke from a constitutional Whig into a Tory, but at the same time animated his genius to some of its noblest bursts of eloquence. His Reflections on the French Revolution (220) was written with the most anxious care, and with the most masterly skill. In going through the press its proofs were patiently critieised eleven times before he was satisfied to publish the work. When it appeared its success amply repaid his labor, for it was read far and wide, and was most influential throughout Europe in checking the dangerous tendencies of that age. His Letter to a Noble Lord (222), provoked by an ungenerous assault, deservedly ranks high among the products of his pen. The culminating point of his political life was the part he played in the trial of Warren Hastings (221). In that majestic and solemn scene, where a great nation sat in judgment upon a great man, Burke played the most prominent part. He was among the managers of the impeachment, and acting in the name of the House of Commons he pronounced one of the sublimest philippics that ancient or modern oratory can show.

JUNIUS, SMITH, BLACKSTONE.

263

From 1769, with occasional interruptions down to 1772, there appeared in the Public Advertiser, one of the leading London journals, a series of brilliantly sarcastic letters, for the most part signed : JUNIUS (223). Their attack was directed against the great public men of the day. They exhibited so much weight and dignity of style, and so minute an acquaintaince with the details of party tactics, and breathed such a lofty tone of constitutional principle, combined with such bitterness, and even ferocity of personal invective, that their influence was unbounded. The annals of political controversy show nothing so fierce and terrible as these invectives. They will ever be regarded as master-pieces in their particular style. Who Junius was still remains a mystery. Burke, Hamilton, Francis, Lyttleton, and Lord George Sackville have been fixed upon successively as their writer. The preponderance of evidence points towards Sir Philip Francis.

Adam Smith (1723–1790) was the founder, in England, of the science of Political Economy. He was a Scotchman, a Professor of Logic and of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow. His most important work is the Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (224). This discussion was the result of ten years of study and investigation. Upon the fact that the only natural process by which a nation can acquire wealth is by labor, he laid the foundation for modern economic science. His clear and logical reasoning, and his abundant and popular illustration attracted much attention to his teachings, and exerted a beneficial influence on legislation and commerce. His moral and metaphysical theories are now forgotten, but his Wealth of Nations still presents the general principles of political economy in their most attractive form.

What Adam Smith did for the students of Political Economy, Sir William Blackstone (1723-1780) did for the students of the Constitution and Laws of England. He was a lawyer who mingled a strong taste for elegant literature with the graver studies of his profession. His Commentaries on the Laws of England was the first systematic work which gave the elementary and historical knowledge requisite for the study. The book is written in an easy and pleasant style, with a masterly analysis, and still is the best outline of the history and the principles of the subject he discusses

The most prominent names in the English theological literature of the eighteenth century are those of Bishop Butler (1692–1752) and William Paley (1743–1805). The former is more remarkable for the severe and coherent logic with which he demonstrates his conclusions; the latter for his consummate skill in popularizing the abstruser arguments of his predecessor. Butler's principal work is The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (181). In it he examines the resemblance between the existence and attributes of God as proved by arguments drawn from the works of nature, and shows that existence, and those attributes to be in no way incompatible with the notions conveyed to us by revelation.

Paley's books are numerous, and all excellent; the principal of them are Elements of Moral and Political Philosophy, the Hora Paulina (225), the Evidences of Christianity, and the production of his old age, the Treatise on Natural Theology. It will be seen from the titles of these works, over what an extent of moral and theological philosophy Paley's mind had travelled. For clearness, animation, and easy grace, his style has rarely been equalled.

Among the crowd of less noticeable writers whose names might be mentioned in this chapter, but few produced works that still have peculiar value. Lord Lyttleton published A History of Henry II. which is noteworthy as being the most elaborate work yet written on one of the most momentous reigns in English history. The Elements of Criticism by Henry Home, Lord Kames, and The Philosophy of Rhetoric by George Campbell, in spite of many publications on the same subjects since their time, continue to be standard authorities in their respective departments.

THE

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE DAWN OF ROMANTIC POETRY.

HE mechanical perfection of the poetry of Pope and his school was so generally applauded that every common versifier imitated its tricks of melody and its neat antitheses. But a thoroughly artificial spirit cannot satisfy the demands of poetry. Even while Pope swayed the sceptre, there were indications of a disposition to seek for themes in a wider sphere. Fancy was yearning for exercise in the fields of nature, and for the excitement of emotions. In Matthew Greene's poem The Spleen, in The Minstrel of James Beattie, and in The Grave, by Robert Blair, this tendency is perceptible, and may be ascribed to a weariness coming from repetitions of far-off echoes of Pope.

James Thomson (1700-1748) was an unconscious leader in that great revolution of popular taste and sentiment which supplanted the artificial by what is known as the romantic type in literature. He stands between the poets of the first and the poets of the third generation in the eighteenth century. In his fervid descriptions he enters a realm of poetry unknown to Pope; but he does not reach the poetry of emotion and passion in which Burns and later poets found their inspiration. Thomson was born in a rural corner of Scotland. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh, and it was intended that he should be a preacher; but in the theological class-room he was so imaginative in his interpretation and paraphrase of scripture that he was cautioned by his professor against the danger of exercising his poetic faculty in the pulpit. This caution diverted him from his calling, and turned him into the paths of literature. In 1725 he went to London, carrying with him an unfinished sketch of his poem on Winter (228). After much discouragement he succeeded in selling it for three guineas, and in winning a handsome purse from the gentleman to whom he had dedicated it with flattering phrases. The poem was received with favor. Summer was published in 1727; and Thom、 son then issued proposals for the completion of the cycle of The Sea