dulging the romantic visions which seemed congenial to the retirement of the elder poet, he proposes to find time to discuss moral philosophy with Lyttelton, and to talk commonplaces about corruption with Chesterfield. Nature is not so much regarded as itself a living power, or animated by the forms projected from a poetic imagination, as the series of judicious arrangements which enabled the theologians of the day to confront sceptics. And, therefore, Thomson, though a most genuine lover of natural scenery, sees in it a comparatively lifeless series of phenomena. The pompous style is still more significant of the contemporary tendency; but it would be doing Thomson gross injustice to force him into the framework of a theory, or to overlook the fact that some men in the first half of the eighteenth century could feel the beauty of nature as deeply as Milton before them, or as Wordsworth afterwards. The rapture and the mystic glow is not, indeed, to be found, and too often we are jarred by conventional sentiment and mere prosaic argument. But a good healthy delight in natural beauty was never quite absent from our literature.

38. If Thomson's unfortunate tendency to didactic and bombastic declamation led to a lamentable waste of his powers in Liberty,' and injures parts of the 'Seasons,' it is unfortunately far more prominent in the other two writers I have named. Young was one of the cleverest men who ever wrote English verse, but the cleverness extinguishes the imagination. The 'Night Thoughts,' owing in great measure to its subject, has enjoyed a vast popularity, in spite of its offences against all literary canons of taste. It was intended by its author as a supplement to the Essay on Man :'

Man, too, he (Pope) sung; immortal man I sing.'

Young expresses, that is, those supplementary doctrines which constituted the difference between the religion of nature and Revelation. The design and form are equally characteristic of the time. Young sees no visions, but he argues with overstrained energy; he sets up an infidel man of straw in the ordinary fashion of the orthodox preacher; denounces him through several nights, and finally reclaims him ' Night the First.

by a battery of arguments for immortality. There is as little of really deep sentiment as of sincerity; for, in fact, Young's hatred of the world revealed the disappointed patronagehunter, rather than the religious enthusiast; and, instead of a uniform flow of poetry, or even of rhetoric, he lashes himself into a never-ending series of antitheses. The unnatural strain is felt in every line; each paragraph bristles with a number of points; witty epigrams take the place of imaginative images; and he resorts to an exuberant use of italics to enforce every smart saying upon the reluctant hearer. His ingenuity is so great, that we may fancy that he could have rivalled the farfetched conceits of Donne and Herbert; but the quaintness is not redeemed by simplicity, or a substratum of genuine earnestness. Every line shows us a very clever man labouring to be more clever than nature has made him, and eager to win applause by the skill with which he exposes the worthlessness of applause.

39. The substance is everywhere commonplace; and Young shows his inferiority to Pope by inventing phrases for copybooks, where Pope coins proverbs for cultivated thinkers. The love of gloom, of the imagery of the grave, and the awful mysteries of life, which animated our older writers, is not absent, but it is turned to account by this clever man of the world with such ingenuity, that we become aware of the shallowness of his feeling. How hollow are the enjoyments of this world, and how deep the surrounding mystery! is the ostensible sentiment. What a clever fellow I am, and what a shame it is that I was not made a bishop! is the sentiment plainly indicated in every line. Can I not say as many smart things about death and eternity as anybody that ever wrote ? Am I not a good orthodox reasoner, instead of a semi-deist like that sinner Pope? We see, as we read, the very type of the preacher of a period when the old mythology, no longer credible or really imposing to the imagination, is still regarded as capable of, at least, an ostensible demonstration, and may afford a sufficient excuse for any quantity of intellectual ingenuity. To serious minds, one would have thought, the exhibition must always have been repulsive, were it not that serious minds seem specially liable to be imposed upon by an affectation of religious unction; and are willing to

admit for genuine poetry, if disguised by a thin mask of orthodoxy, a kind of writing which reminds us of Pope's

Dissonance and captious art,

And snip-snap short and misconceptions smart,
And demonstration thin, and theses thick,

And major, minor, and conclusion quick.

Indeed, if Young is not capable of a noble melancholy, he is in a thoroughly bilious condition. This preacher among the tombs cannot rival the grim pathos of Hamlet with Yorick's skull; but he could have turned as many epigrams about it as would have thoroughly astonished the gravediggers, and excited the envy of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. If he cannot show Lorenzo heaven and hell, the angels harping in 'unexpressive quire,' and the devils defying the Almighty despot from the ocean of fire, he can fairly triumph over him when he exclaims

Hence a fifth proof arises, stronger still;

for poor Lorenzo is not allowed to have an innings-otherwise he might have remarked that a poet who no longer sees, but argues, has ceased to be either poetical or convincing. Young's parody of 'Othello,' called 'Revenge,' is a curious illustration of the view taken of the Shakesperean drama by the poets of the eighteenth century; and his satires, called 'The Love of Fame,' are a proof, to anyone who needs it, that something more than extreme cleverness was necessary to give to Pope's writings their enduring brilliance. And yet Young has talent enough to have made a mark in any age as a writer of the second order.

40. Akenside is a man of very different stamp. A certain force and dignity of thought is perceptible beneath a rather cumbrous style; he is prompted to write by a full mind instead of an empty purse. He has a certain message to deliver to mankind, and the difficulty of his utterance is characteristic. For, in fact, he is wrestling with the difficulty which perplexed Pope in the Essay on Man.' He has to make bricks without straw; to turn a philosophical system into poetry without the help of any symbolic imagery except a few hollow abstractions such as the Genius of the Human Race, Happiness, Virtue, and Remorse. The vision in which

these personages appear and declare their sentiments with amiable frankness displeased Akenside himself in later years, and he swept them away in recasting his poem, to be able to philosophise at his ease. The doctrine which Akenside undertook to expound had some natural charms for a poet. He stood in nearly the same relation to Shaftesbury which Pope occupied to Bolingbroke, though the inspiration was less direct, and the coincidence not so close. Parts of this philosophy-the doctrine especially that ridicule is the test of truth-were as little suited for poetical treatment as can well be imagined. But the general theory, the identification of the good, the true, and the beautiful, the belief in an all-o pervading harmony revealing itself to the purified intellect, was calculated to generate a poetical philosophy, if not a philosophical poetry. Akenside says1 that the separation of philosophy from the imagination has been an injury O to both; and congratulates himself on their closer approximation in recent years. At the time of the Revolution, he says, Locke was at the head of one party, Dryden at the head of the other. Now poets have taken to 'subjects of importance to society;' and philosophy must borrow of their embellishments, in order even to gain an audience with the public.' It would not be very easy to translate these generalities into particular instances; but the sentiment is characteristic. Akenside judged well in desiring a harmony between poetryand philosophy; but the attempt at a fusion was unfortunate. His formulas suffered a fate analogous to that of his master's writings. The rather stilted style and not very lucid thought have in both cases rendered the difficulty of penetrating to the real thought too great for cursory readers; and a poet suffers more than a philosopher for wrapping his meaning in sententious obscurity.

41. Thomson and Young had each their followers, though I do not know that anybody imitated more than the title of Akenside's poetry. Blair's 'Grave' is a kind of corollary to Young's Night Thoughts;' Mallet's 'Excursion' and Savage's 'Wanderer' are attempts to follow Thomson; and perhaps we might put in the same class such poems as Falconer's 'Shipwreck,' Somerville's 'Chase,' or Dyer's 'Fleece,'

See argument of Book ii. on the first form, and note.

so highly praised by Wordsworth. The second-rate performances are dead, while even the best have but a feeble vitality. The general source of weakness is abundantly evident. The philosophy and the passions of an age should be projected into concrete symbols by the poetical imagination. But the passions were too cool, and the philosophy too abstract `and frigid to be capable of symbolic representation. Nothing remained but didactic, or rather argumentative poetry, in which the feeble machinery' of mere abstractions, galvanised into some faint semblance of vitality by the free use of capital letters, mere shadows of shades, phantasmal images of ghosts long since laid, wandered dreamily through the mazes of consciously constructed allegories. No wonder that such a poetry gradually collapsed, after feebly trying to support itself above the solid ground of prose by help of an inflated phraseology. As the philosophy itself ceased to be interesting after the middle of the century, the poetry, which was but the philosophy versified, decayed still more rapidly, and expired altogether at the first touch of real passion. There are still imitations of Pope's satires, some of them of considerable force; there are some ponderous attempts at epics and classical drama by Glover, Wilkie, and Mason; but the didactic or philosophical poetry becomes extinct. Two poets, indeed, of very remarkable quality, may be regarded as in some sense belonging to the earlier school. The exquisite felicities of Gray's Elegy' and Goldsmith's 'Traveller' and 'Deserted Village' show the true polish desired by the disciples of the correct school. But Gray is more than half romantic in his temperament; and Goldsmith is deeply tinged with the senti mentalism of Rousseau. The influence of the older canons of taste is chiefly perceptible in diminishing the productiveness and stimulating the fastidious taste of these two admirable poets.

IV. GENERAL LITERATURE.

42. There is, however, another wide province of literature in which writers of the eighteenth century did work original in character and of permanent value. If the seventeenth century is the great age of dramatists and theologians, the