Here shift the scene to represent Poor Pope will grieve a month, and Gay We may add a few words upon a work by Swift's friend JOHN ARBUTHNOT (1667-1735), the title of which at least everybody knows, The History of John Bull (1713), a political allegory after the manner of Swift's Tale of a Tub. John Bull is, of course, the Englishman, the name by which he has ever since been known; he and his friend Nicolas Frog (a Dutchman) are bringing a lawsuit against old Lewis Baboon (Louis XIV.), for the right of supplying Lord Strutt (Spain) with their wares. The course of this suit is an extremely witty satire on the Spanish War of Succession and the Peace of Utrecht. Without explanatory notes, the satire cannot be completely understood at the present day. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Complete edition of SWIFT's works by Walter Scott (new edition, 1883); smaller edition by Roscoe; Letters to Stella, in German by Claire von Glümer; SwiftBüchlein by Regis, the translator of Rabelais; Forster, Life of Jonathan Swift; L. Stephen, Swift (in English Men of Letters); Collins, Swift, a Biographical and Critical Study; Simon, Swift, étude psychologique et littéraire; selections, with life, by Craik; with preface and notes, by S. Lane-Poole; prose works, edited by Temple Scott, with biographical introduction by W. E. H. Lecky. I CHAPTER I OSSIAN-CHATTERTON-COWPER N England, as we have shown, the victory of false classicism had never been so undisputed as it had been for two hundred years in France. Even in the time of Pope, the most classic of the classicists, poetical awakenings of the genuine English love of nature may be discerned. The old well of the "Beautiful" was never at any time completely choked up in England; Dryden knew and honoured Shakespeare; Pope read Chaucer and adapted some of his tales in modern English; Thomson had studied Spenser's Fairy Queen with profit, and imitated him in his Castle of Indolence. In Boileau's time, on the other hand, hardly anything was known in France of its own splendid ancient literature. In Scotland, as early as 1721, Allan Ramsay had attempted to collect the popular ballads, and, in his Gentle Shepherd, had shown how a beginning should be made in describing the real life of the people. However, a complete change was impossible as long as there existed an authority like Pope. The question of the continued existence of this intrinsically spurious poetastry was, as was also the case in France during the twenties of the present century, a question of age: the struggle was between the young and the old. It has ever been so: we have only to think of Klopstock, Lessing, and Goethe against Gottsched! The fresh growth of English poetry is generally represented as due to such sudden events as the publication of the Songs of Ossian and the Percy Collection. But anyone who regards poetry not as something external but as the inmost life of a people will know that it is not a case of sudden bursting into bloom. Flowers require germs, roots, and buds. The Percy Collection was not the first of its kind, nor Robert Burns the earliest Scottish lyric poet: nor did the study of Shakespeare, that most powerful corrective of the taste of the public, make its appearance in a moment. During the entire first half of the |