toreign Powers, in particular that which resulted in the Treaty of Utrecht. His behaviour on this occasion exposed him, though it would appear unjustly, to heavy charges from the Whig ministry which came into power in 1714, and he was thrown into prison, and kept there for more than two years. His old associates probably considered him as a renegade, and dealt out to him an unusual measure of severity. There is much that is sprightly and pointed in Prior's loyal odes, which he designed to rival those which Boileau was composing at the same time in honour of the Grand Monarque, Louis XIV. But it is in his epigrams and verses of society' that Prior is most successful. How charmingly, for instance, has he turned the stanzas in which he describes his doubtful cure by Dr. Radcliffe, or those upon a lady refusing to continue a dispute with him, or the lines upon 'The Lady's Looking-glass'! How manly, English, and sensible is the advice to a jealous husband in the 'Padlock' not to immure his wife or set spies over her, as they did abroad, but give her free liberty to range over this wretched world and see how hollow and false it is! This poem ends with some far-famed lines: Be to her faults a little blind, Be to her virtues very kind; Let all her ways be unconfined, And clap your padlock-on her mind. In his longer poems Prior was less successful. His Henry and Emma, an amplified re-cast of the old ballad of The Nut-browne Mayde, is admirably versified, and contains at least one line which is a part of our current sententious or proverbial speech : That air and harmony of shape express, but most people would prefer to its artificial strains the greater brevity, directness, and distinctness of the old ballad. But the immense service which Dryden had rendered to English poetry, in imparting to the heroic couplet a smooth rapidity, as well as an air of lofty audacity, which it had not known before, is noticeable in all the best heroics of Prior and Addison. Alma, or The Progress of the Mind, in three cantos, is a satirical account in Hudibrastic verse of the vagaries with which the mind, at different periods of life, and acting through, or controlled by, different parts of the animal economy, troubles her possessor. There is something cynical, and tending to materialism, in the tone of this poem, which was written towards the close of Prior's life. His last and most ambitious effort was Solomon, a didactic poem in three parts. It is a soliloquy, and represents he royal sage as searching by turns through every province, and to the utmost bounds, of knowledge, pleasure, and power, and finding in the end that all was 'vanity and vexation of spirit.' Of 'well-natured Garth,' author of the mock-heroic poem, the Dispensary, the idea of which he took from Boileau's Lutrin, we can only say that he was a physician, and a staunch adherent to Revolution principles during the reign of Anne, for which he was rewarded with a due share of professional emolument, when his party came into power in 1714. He was an original member of the Kit-cat Club, 'generally mentioned as a set of wits; in reality, the patriots that saved Britain.'1 The Dispensary is about a bitter quarrel which broke out in the year 1687, between the College of Physicians and the apothecaries, concerning the erection of a dispensary in London. Perhaps the subject is somewhat dull; granting, however, that the conception was a good one, the execution lags considerably behind it; as a whole, the poem is heavy, and far too long. Sir Richard Blackmore was another patriotic poet. He was the city physician, and was knighted by King William. Blackmore has met, chiefly from his own faults, with harder measure than he deserves. The sarcasms of Pope and Dryden raise the impression that Blackmore can never have written anything but what was lumbering, inane, and in the worst possible taste. Yet let any one, without prejudice, take up The Creation, and read a couple of hundred lines, and he will probably own that it is a very different sort of poem from what he had expected. It is by no means dull, or heavy, or soporific; the lines spin along with great fluency and animation, though not exactly sparkling as they go. The plan is thoroughly conceived and digested, and the argument ably and lucidly, if not always cogently, sustained. But Blackmore was ruined, as a literary man, by his enormous self-confidence and utter want of measure or judgment. He attacked with indiscriminating fury the atheists, free-thinkers, wits, and critics of his day, as if these names were interchangeable; and naturally he met with no mercy from the two last. The characters of staunch Whig and somewhat narrow pietist are blended in him in the oddest manner. His lack of judgment is illustrated by his continuing to write and publish epic poems (Eliza, Alfred, Prince Arthur, etc.), long after the world had ceased to read them. Yet it would 1 Horace Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting, be unjust to judge by these of The Creation (1712), respecting which Addison's eulogy,' though it gives all the lights without the shadows, is not so entirely extravagant as it seems at first reading. Defoe must be named in this connection, on account of his once famous satire, The True-born Englishman. His motive for writing it was the indignation which he felt at what he called English ingratitude, as showing itself in the attacks continually made on William and his Dutch guards as foreigners, and in the peevish discontented air which most Englishmen wore after so great a deliverance. The composition is of a very coarse kind; and the satire stands to those of Dryden in about the same relation as the Morning Advertiser, the organ of the publicans, does to the Times. The strange opening is well known : Wherever God erects a house of prayer, The devil always builds a chapel there; This must be understood as ironical; for Defoe was himself a Dissenter. Thomas Tickell resided for many years at Oxford, being a fellow of Queen's College. Although a Whig and an adherent of Addison, he is the author of some spasmodic stanzas, worthy of the most uncompromising upholder of the divine right of kings, entitled 'Thoughts occasioned by a Picture of the Trial of Charles I.,' in which lines such as the following Occur, Such boding thoughts did guilty conscience dart, Tickell's version of the first book of the Iliad will be noticed when we come to speak of the complete translation by Pope. Among his other poems, which are not numerous, I find only two worth naming—the ballad of 'Colin and Lucy,' and the memorial lines upon Addison. The ballad is pretty, but the story improbable; Colin having jilted Lucy, she dies of a broken heart; the coffin containing her remains meets the marriage procession; the faithless Colin is struck with remorse, and dies immediately; they occupy the same grave. Do not these lines sound like an echo from our nurseries? I hear a voice you cannot hear, Which beckons me away. The unhappy history of Richard Savage has been detailed at length by Dr. Johnson in one of the longest and most masterly of his poetical bio The Spectator, No. 339. graphies. His life and character were blighted by the circumstances of his birth and rearing. To these he refers only too plainly and pointedly in his poem of The Bastard, a very forcible piece of writing containing a line often quoted :— He lives to build, not boast, a generous race; No tenth transmitter of a foolish face. His principal work was The Wanderer, a moral or didactic poem in five cantos (1729), containing many materials and rudiments of thought, half worked up as it were, which one recognises again, transformed after passing through the fiery crucible of a great mind, in Pope's Essay on Man. Savage, like most of the English poets of the eighteenth century, employed the heroic metre for the majority of his compositions, dazzled by the glory and success with which Dryden and Pope had employed it. John Dyer, who after failing as a painter became a clergyman late in life, is, or was, known as the author of Grongar Hill (1727), and The Fleece (1757). The latter is in blank verse, and totally worthless; the former, however, is a pretty poem of description and reflection, breathing that intoxicating sense of natural beauty which never fails to awaken in us some sympathy, and an answering feeling of reality. These lines may serve as a specimen : Ever charming, ever new, When will the landscape tire the view? The woody valleys warm and low, The windy summit, wild and high, The pleasant seat, the ruined tower, The town and village, dome and farm, As pearls upon an Ethiop's arm. Ambrose Philips, a Cambridge man and a zealous Whig, became a hack writer in London. His Six Pastorals are rubbish; nevertheless they were dogmatically praised, probably on party grounds, by Steele in the Guardian. This was in the year 1713. Pope, who some years before had published pastorals that were really worth something, but had attracted scarcely any notice, in a later Guardian, No. 40, ironically continued in the same tone, but by instituting a regular comparison between his own pastorals and those of Philips, exposed effectually the silliness and emptiness of the latter. Philips, when he had discovered the cheat, was exceedingly angry, and is said to have hung up a rod at Button's (the club frequented by Addison), with 1 Lives of the Poets. which he threatened to chastise Pope. Thereby he but increased his punishment; for Pope not only got Gay to write the burlesque mentioned above, in ridicule of the Six Pastorals, but affixed to his enemy the nickname of 'Namby-pamby Philips,' which is too just and appropriate ever to be forgotten while Philips himself is remembered. John Philips wrote the Splendid Shilling, a mock-heroic poem in blank verse, in which the design of parodying the Paradise Lost is apparent. Cider and Blenheim are also in blank verse, a preference due to the author's serious admiration of the English epic. In fact he seems to have been the earliest genuine literary admirer of Milton. Isaac Watts, educated as a Dissenter, was employed for some years as an Independent minister; but his health failed, and he was received into the house of a generous friend, Sir Thomas Abney of Stoke Newington, where he spent the last thirty-six years of his life. He is the author of three books of Lyric Poems, or Hora Lyricæ, mostly of a devotional and serious cast, though the friend of the Revolution and Hanoverian succession comes out strongly here and there; and of Divine Songs, for children. His Hymns and Spiritual Songs are the well-known Watts's Hymns.' Allan Ramsay, of Scotch extraction on his father's, of English on his mother's side, settled in Edinburgh as a wig-maker about the year 1710. He joined a society of wits and literary dilettanti, called the Easy Club; and many of his poems were composed to enliven their social gatherings. The work on which his reputation rests, The Gentle Shepherd, is a story of real country life in Scotland, in the form of a rhyming pastoral drama. The dialect is the Lowland Scotch, and the sentiments natural and suitable to the persons represented; the story is clearly told, and pleasing in itself; in short there is nothing to find fault with in the poem; the only thing wanting is that life-giving touch of genius, which, present alike in the artificial pastorals of Pope and the artless songs of Burns, forbids true poetry to die. The Drama, 1700-1745:-Addison, Rowe, Thomson, Young, Southern, Steele. Prose Comedy :-Farquhar, Vanbrugh, Cibber, Centlivre; 'The Beggars' Opera.' Since the appearance of Congreve's Mourning Bride, a tragedy of the old school, no tragic work had been produced deserving of mention up to the year 1713. By that time the classic drama of France, the masterpieces of Corneille and Racine, had become thoroughly known and appreciated in England; and, in the absence of any native writers of great original power, it was natural that our |