Majesty's Mistresses: if he was soldier-but perhaps there is no truth in the stories that they tell about Marlborough. It was not a high-minded century, but it was a successful one, for its master-spirits, wiser in their generation than the children of light, contrived to prosper in their double worship of God and Mam

mon.

That the literature of the nineteenth century should have grown out of the literature of the eighteenth century seems at the first sight impossible, so different are their forms and the spirit by which they are animated. But when we study them attentively we discover their relation to each other, and to the literature of the preceding centuries, for whether we see it or not, the whole Literature of England is distinguished by the same intellectual characteristics,-the qualities and energies which constitute the English Mind, and which run through it like the family likeness in a gallery of ancestral portraits. The chief defect which nineteenth century criticism finds in eighteenth century Verse is that it is prose in a metrical form. The quality which we feel in Chaucer, and Spenser, and Shakespeare, and Milton, among the older poets, and in Burns, and Byron, and Shelley, and Keats, among the poets of our own time, is not in it. Precisely what this quality is criticism has not determined, its manifestations are so multiform, and so colored by the personality of its possessors. It was a certain simplicity and freshness in Chaucer, who had a childlike delight in telling stories; a sense of spiritual purity and loveliness in Spenser, who was at once the most melodious and most picturesque of poets; an

intuitive comprehension of mankind in Shakespeare, from whom nature had no secrets; a reverence for austerity of conduct and sublimity of aspiration in Milton; a hunger and thirst of passion in Burns and Byron; a blind devotion to impossible ideals in Shelley, and in Keats the perpetual worship of the Beautiful. The faculty of selecting poetical actions,-actions, that is, which are poetical because they are heroic, or pathetic, and the rarer faculty of creating them when they are lacking in human annals,-neither was vouchsafed to the eighteenth century poets. They were not large enough, nor simple enough, to care for man as he came from the hand of nature,—the creature of impulse, or circumstance, a law unto himself: what interested them, so far as they could be interested, were men in their sophisticated condition, the entangling congeries of artificiality which they called the Town. Now and then they were on the eve of writing poetry, and in almost any other period than the prosaic one in which it was their misfortune to live, they would have written poetry, for among their number there were several men of genius. The penniless young Scotchman who went up to London in his twenty-fifth year, and had faith enough in himself, and in what he had observed of nature in his native land, to write a poem about it, in his own way, was a man of genius. And he was recognized as such by his contemporaries, against whose favorite poets and their methods of poetizing his simple, honest work was a protest, in that it dealt with nature, and not with society, with the pomps and shows of the Seasons, and not with powdered beaux and patched and painted belles. Nor was he

alone, for another Scotchman who was fifteen years his elder, who had worked in a lead mine in his childhood, and in his manhood at a barber's chair in Edinburgh,-instructed by the Muse, had gathered from the neglected gardens of Henryson, Dunbar, Lyndsay, and other of his country's early poets, a handful of wilding flowers, which were still in sturdy bloom, and which he fitly named The Evergreen. Following the departure which he had thus taken from the highway of popular poetry, he explored the lanes and byways of old balladry and song, and plucking in his haste the flowers and weeds that were alike abundant there, he modishly called his armfuls of both a Tea Table Miscellany. A year later he won the laurel which so many English poets had long and assiduously sought, which Spenser hoped to obtain by his Shepherd's Calendar, and Browne by his Britannia's Pastorals, which Pope snatched at, but missed, when he wrote his Pastorals, and which Gay also missed, although he did not snatch at it,-good, easy man !—the laurel of pastoral poetry, which he was the first British poet to be crowned with, and worthily crowned, not only by the Muse who inspired him to sing, but by the plain, simple country folk whom he sang, and who certainly knew whether he sang them truly or not. If ever poet reached the people, it was Allan Ramsay in The Gentle Shepherd. Whether Ramsay and Thomson were aware of the radical difference between their poetry and the poetry of the period, and were also aware of its significance as an intellectual movement, may fairly be questioned. That they had a circle of readers, and perhaps a large one, proves that they succeeded in

If

awakening poetical curiosity, but nothing more. their verse violated the existing canons of taste, it was from no deep-seated design on their part to overthrow those canons, but simply because their natural bent in writing happened to lie outside of them. If it had happened to lie within them, they would have followed it, at any rate the lettered Thomson would have followed it, as closely as Pope followed the artificial manner that he inherited from Dryden. Still they were not without influence upon English Verse, for tracing its main stream as it meanders along lazily through the eighteenth century we detect from time to time the pulsation of fresh currents therein. We are conscious of them in Somerville's Chace (1735), Shenstone's Schoolmistress (1742), Thomson's Castle of Indolence (1748), and Gray's Elegy (1751). Whether the contemporary readers of these poems compared them with other poems of the time, and accepted them, or rejected them, as they happened to like or dislike them, we have no positive means of knowing, for with the exception of the Elegy, which at once established itself in popular favor, they excited no critical comment. We find them in a poetic literature to which they are dissimilar, and we conclude that a change has come over this literature which accounts for their dissimilarity, and that they represent this change, whether they originated it or not. One need but glance at the history of English Verse to see that it was not the same in the seventeenth century as in the eighteenth, and that it was not quite the same in the second quarter of the latter as in the first. The decadence of the spirit of false classicism began with Thom

son's Winter, and closed with Cowper's Task. What the English poets learned in the intervening half century was to discard the practice of Pope and Boileau, who compounded poetry as apothecaries compounded medicines, after authoritative recipes, and trust to nature. They learned to shut their books, and look into themselves.

There was one book, however, of which they did not think much, but which was read with pleasure and profit by their children, and that was Percy's Reliques. Scott always remembered the spot where he read the volumes for the first time. It was beneath a huge plantanus-tree, in the ruins of what had been intended for an old-fashioned arbor in the garden of his Aunt Janet at Kelso. "The summer day sped onward so fast that, notwithstanding the sharp appetite of thirteen, I forgot the hour of dinner, was sought for with anxiety, and was still found entranced in my intellectual banquet. To read and to remember was in this instance the same thing, and henceforth I overwhelmed my school-fellows, and all who would hearken to me, with tragical recitations from the ballads of Bishop Percy. The first time, too, I could scrape a few shillings together, which were not common occurrences with me, I bought unto myself a copy of these beloved volumes; nor do I believe I ever read a book half so frequently, or with half the enthusiasm." Another English poet, whose family was settled in the reign of Edward the Third at Peniston, near Doncaster, the scene of the combat described in The Dragon of Wantley, and one of whose ancestors was stated in the Notes to have been a cousin of the Dragon (Sir Francis