of Wharton went further. In a copy of panegyrical verses he compares the preacher to Christ at Emmaus, and to Jove stilling the tempest, and ends with this joint compliment to Atterbury and Kneller : As in him another Paul we view, Neither aspiration has been quite fulfilled; though Atterbury's last biographer declares that, except Pope and Samuel Wesley, 'none of the bishop's contemporaries have left so agreeable and so vivid a recollection of him.'1 A less hyperbolical compliment is perhaps more impressive. Steele, in one of his Tatlers,' describes Atterbury as an exception to the general indifference of the English clergy to the art of speaking. The dean, he says, is an orator. We are told further that he learnt his sermons by heart, neglected no graces of manner, had an attractive person, and had the special virtue of never attempting the passions before he had convinced the reason." The eulogy accounts for the disappearance of the charm which it commemorates. 19. Reading the sermons in cold blood, and deprived of all the charm of delivery, we find them in substance wonderfully like other sermons of the time. The deists are refuted, and virtue is recommended in the ordinary method; though Hoadly discovered traces of the hated sacerdotal taint. The style is not unworthy of the friend and critic of the most brilliant writers of the day; and here and there, as in the sermon on the death of poor Lady Cutts, at the age of eighteen, the pathos has not entirely evaporated. But there are no traces of real power of thought or depth of emotion. They are the performances of a very able man, who is a politician before he is an ecclesiastic, and a Tory more distinctly than a HighChurchman. In other times, Atterbury might have been a Laud or a Wolsey; in the eighteenth century his ambition could end only by sacrificing his talents and energy to the most contemptible of all pretenders. The spirit of the age enervates his religious thought as well as his political principles. He has the objection to being righteous overmuch, common to nearly all his contemporaries. He warns us that 1 Williams, i. 315. 2 Tatler,' No. 6. 1 even charity may lead us into folly if we go as far as some Catholic Saints; 1 and he points out that we are not bound to spread Christianity at the risk of our lives, when we have no longer the power of working miracles; though, on the other hand, we need not deride men whose honest zeal had carried them further. The flame of priestly devotion was burning low when the most high-spirited of its leaders found it necessary to qualify his exhortations by these prudential provisos. These writers may be a sufficient specimen of a literary product which has become the rightful property of the library moth. A few other names might be mentioned which once enjoyed a certain celebrity. In Smalridge, the ordinary materials are coloured by academical pedantry; Foster's moral essays contain a still weaker infusion of Christian sentiment than Clarke's; and Seed has a certain smartness which might have made him a useful contributor to some of the successors of the 'Spectator,' whilst Secker pours forth a continuous stream of prosaic moralising. 20. But enough has been said to illustrate the general tone of thought. As the century went on, the eloquence became feebler; for all warmth of sentiment had passed to the side of Wesley and Whitefield. A preacher in the land of Knox obtained a great popularity, and the sermons of Hugh Blair may represent the last stage of theological decay. Five volumes appeared during the last quarter of the century; for the first he received 2001., for the second 500l., and for the third 6007.-a sufficient proof that he enjoyed a considerable popularity. He was praised by Johnson, who seems, however, to have doubted the permanent interest of his work;3 and George III. wished that every youth in the kingdom might possess a copy of the Bible and of Blair. And yet it is hard to say anything of Blair, except what Johnson said of Dodd's sermons, when somebody asked whether they were not 'addressed to the passions.' 'They were nothing, sir, be they addressed to what they may.' They are not so much sermons as essays, composed by a professor of rhetoric to illustrate the principles of his art. For unction there was mere mouthing; instead of the solid common sense of earlier writers, an infinite capacity for repeating the feeblest of platitudes; the style seems to be 1 1 Sermons, i. 62, iv. 52. 3 Boswell, ch. xxxiv. (1777). 2 Ib. i. 169. determined by an attempt at the easy flow of the Addisonian period, disturbed by a recollection of Johnsonian grandiloquence; the morality can scarcely be dignified by the name of prudential, unless all prudence be summed up in the great commandment, be respectable; the theology is retained rather to give a faint seasoning to the general insipidity of moral commonplace than seriously to influence the thought; and the nearest approach to philosophical argument is some feeble echo of Pope's ' Essay on Man.' Blair, in short, is in theology what Hayley was in poetry-a mere washed-out retailer of second-hand commonplaces, who gives us the impression that the real man has vanished, and left nothing but a wig and gown. Such was the phantom devised by the goddess Dulness in the 'Dunciad' : All as a partridge plump, full-fed and fair, And empty words she gave and sounding strain, 21. Is it worth while to dip into the pages of this solemn trifling? to quote prosings about adversity and prosperity, and the happiness of a middle station, or eulogies upon that most excellent of virtues, moderation; and warnings against ever running into extremes, or proofs that religion is, on the whole, productive of pleasure? 'We call you not to renounce pleasure,' he says to the young, 'but enjoy it in safety. Instead of abridging it, we exhort you to pursue it on an extensive plan. We propose measures for securing its possession and for prolonging its duration.'1 Christ, Blair says, is our great example; and Christ's special merit seems to have been that he indulged in no unnatural austerities, no affected singularities,' but practised the virtues 'for which we have most frequent occasion in ordinary life.' Christ's deportment was unimpeachable. Yet, at due intervals, Blair invites us to a higher strain. He knows that a preacher ought to have his rhetorical flights as well as his calm levels of moral advice. And here is a specimen. To thee, O Devotion! we owe the highest improvement of our nature, and the merit of 2 Ib. p. 520. 'Blair, p. 111. the enjoyment of our life. Thou art the support of our virtue and the rest of our souls in this turbulent world. Thou composest the thoughts, thou calmest the passions;' and, in short, givest me an excellent opportunity for finishing a paragraph with an admirable prosopopoeia, according to the approved rules of art. Nothing more need be said, unless, indeed, it may be as well to repudiate the hasty conclusion that Blair was a mere hypocrite. His creed, obviously, was a mere thing of shreds and patches; but, fortunately for us, men are frequently better than their creeds. III. THE POETS. 22. The preachers of an age should, I have said, find utterance for the real belief of their hearers, instead of the mere sham relics of extinct beliefs. The penalty for shortcoming is that the hearers will not be moved. But, unfortunately, this penalty has been so generally incurred, that the value of sermons as indications of the contemporary currents of thought is materially diminished. For a less questionable evidence we should turn to the natural channels of spontaneous emotions. The imaginative literature of an age must express the genuine feelings of the age, or it will perish stillborn. From Pope, and Swift, and Addison, we can often learn more safely than from Clarke, or Waterland, or Bentley, what were the deepest convictions of their age. 23. Many circumstances, I must once more repeat, contribute to determine the character of a literature, besides the logical relations of its dominant ideas. That which was once called the Augustan age of English literature was specially marked by the growing development of a distinct literary class. It was a period of transition from the early system of the patronage of authors to the later system of their professional independence. Patronage was being changed into influence. The system of subscription, by which Pope made his fortune, was a kind of joint-stock patronage. The noble did not support the poet, but induced his friends to subscribe. The noble, moreover, made another discovery. He found that he could dispense a cheaper and more effective patronage than of old by patronising at the public expense. During the reign of Queen Anne, the author of a successful poem or effective pamphlet might look forward to a comfortable place. The author had not to wear the livery, but to become the political follower, of the great man. Gradually a separation took place. The minister found it better to have a regular corps of politicians and scribblers in his pay than occasionally to recruit his ranks by enlisting men of literary taste. And, on the other hand, authors, by slow degrees, struggled into a more independent position as their public increased. In the earlier part of the century, however, we find a class of fairly cultivated people, sufficiently numerous to form a literary audience, and yet not so numerous as to split into entirely distinct fractions. The old religious and political warfare has softened; the statesman loses his place, but not his head; and though there is plenty of bitterness, there is little violence. We have thus a brilliant society of statesmen, authors, clergymen, and lawyers, forming social clubs, meeting at coffee-houses, talking scandal and politics, and intensely interested in the new social phenomena which emerge as the old order decays; more excitable, perhaps, than their fathers, but less desperately in earnest, and waging a constant pamphleteering warfare upon politics, literature, and theology, which is yet consistent with a certain degree of friendly intercourse. The essayist, the critic, and the novelist appear for the first time in their modern shape; and the journalist is slowly gaining some authority as the wielder of a political force. The whole character of contemporary literature, in short, is moulded by the social conditions of the class for which and by which it was written, still more distinctly than by the ideas current in contemporary speculation. Whilst tracing, therefore, the connection between the philosophy and the artistic literature of the time, it is necessary to bear in mind that we are dealing with only part of a highly complex phenomenon. 24. Pope is the typical representative of the poetical spirit of the day. He may or may not be regarded as the intellectual superior of Swift or Addison; and the most widely differing opinions may be formed of the intrinsic merits of his poetry. The mere fact, however, that his poetical dynasty was supreme |