order that, when one was exhausted, he might be succeeded by another. In 1670, from one pulpit in Edinburgh, thirty sermons were delivered weekly. When sacrament was administered, on Wednesday they fasted, with prayers and preaching for more than eight hours; on Saturday, they listened to two or three sermons; on Sunday, to so many that the congregation remained together more than twelve hours; on Monday, to three or four additional ones by way of thanksgiving. Still the people never wearied. Has history any parallel to such eagerness and such endurance?

Meanwhile, dissent had multiplied sects, and the Revolution established them,-Anabaptists, Quakers, Enthusiasts, Seekers, Arians, Socinians, Anti-Trinitarians, Deists, the list is interminable. No danger henceforward that Protestantism would be only a new edition of Catholicism. Divisions are at once the symptoms and the agents of progress. Uniformity of opinion is the airy good of emperors and popes, whose arguments are edicts, inquisitions, and flames.

Poetry. It is true, in general, of nations as of individuals, that as the reflective faculties develop, the imaginative are enfeebled. Memory, judgment, wit, supply their place. The mind, disciplined, retraces its steps. Criticism succeeds invention. But criticism is a science, and, like every other, is constantly tending towards perfection. It was now in a very imperfect state. The age of inspired intuition had passed; the age of agreeable imitation had not arrived; and the ascendancy was left to an inferior school of poetry—a school without the powers of the earlier and without the correctness of a later—a school which, blending bombasts and conceits, yet expressed a phase in the revolution of taste that was to issue in the neatness and finish of wellordered periods, in the truth of sentiment and the harmony of versification. Its absorbing care was not for the foundation, but for the outer shape. The prevailing immorality infected it. Gallantry held the chief rank. The literature and manners of polite France led the fashion. We have seen the change foreshadowed. We see it in the occasional rhymes of the palace and the college; in the lewd and lawless Earl of Rochester, who wrote a satire against Mankind, then an epistle on Nothing, and songs numberless, whose titles cannot be copied. Two or three are still to be

found in the expurgated books of extracts. A stanza or two will be a sufficient revelation of him:

'When, wearied with a world of woe,

To thy safe bosom I retire,

Where love and peace and honour flow,
May I contented there expire.'

And:

'My dear mistress has a heart

Soft as those kind looks she gave me;

When, with love's resistless art,
And her eyes, she did enslave me;
But her constancy's so weak,
She's so wild and apt to wander,

That my jealous heart would break
Should we live one day asunder.'

An adept in compliments and salutations. So are the others. Sedley, a charming talker, sings thus to Chloris:

And:

'My passion with your beauty grew,

And Cupid at my heart,

Still as his mother favoured you,

Threw a new flaming dart.'

'An hundred thousand oaths your fears
Perhaps would not remove,

And if I gazed a thousand years,

I could no deeper love.'

Dorset, at sea, on the eve of battle, addresses a song to the

But first would have you understand

How hard it is to write;

The Muses now, and Neptune too,
We must implore to write to you.'

Then for the sake of speaking:

While you, regardless of our woe,
Sit careless at a play,-

Perhaps permit some happier man

To kiss your hand or flirt your fan.'

And in the conventional language of the drawing-room:

Our tears we'll send a speedier way,

The tide shall waft them twice a day.'

There is courtesy here, but a lack of enthusiasm; elegance, but no weight; smoothness, but no depth. It is correct, or nearly so, but external and cold. It is the style, also, of Waller, a fashionable wit, in the front rank of worldlings and courtiers. His verses resemble the little events or little sentiments from which they spring:

'Go, lovely rose!

Tell her that wastes her time and me,

That now she knows

When I resemble her to thee,

How sweet and fair she seems to be....

Then die! that she

The common fate of all things rare

May read in thee,

How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and fair.`

Most of his verses are addressed to a lady whom he had long wooed. When she had ceased to be beautiful, she asked him if he would write others for her, and he replied, as one accustomed to murmur, with a soft voice, commonplaces which he could not be said to think: 'Yes, madam, when you are as young and as handsome as you were formerly.' A purely mechanical versifier, he survives mainly on the credit of a single couplet:

'The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,

Lets in new light. through chinks that Time hath made.'

Unlike the amorous poets around him, Denham has left not one copy of their vapid effusions. In the midst of insincerity, he is sincere, preoccupied by moral motives. His best poem, Cooper's Hill, is a description of natural scenery, blended with the grave reflections which the scene suggests, and which are fundamental to the English mind:

'My eye, descending from the hill, surveys

Where Thames among the wanton valleys strays;
Thames, the most loved of all the Ocean's sons

By his old sire, to his embraces runs,

Hasting to pay his tribute to the sea,

Like mortal life to meet eternity. ...

O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream

My great example, as it is my theme!
Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull;
Strong without rage; without o'erflowing, full..

But his proud head the airy mountain hides
Among the clouds; his shoulders and his sides
A shady mantle clothes; his curled brows
Frown on the gentle stream, which calmly flows,
While winds and storms his lofty forehead beat,
The common fate of all that's high or great

The reputation of the piece rests almost entirely upon the famous quatrain in italics. As for the rest, there is little adornment, less ardency, nothing to warm, or melt, or fascinate. It is argument in stately and regular verse, but, as such, is no ordinary perform

ance, and is nearly the first instance of manly and rhythmical. couplets.

It remains for Dryden to give to the critical spirit vigorous form, and for Pope to add to it perfection of artifice. Meanwhile, out of season, in penury, pain, and blindness, Milton produces, as we have seen, the greatest of modern epics, himself a benighted traveller on a dreary road. Near him, in sympathy with him, a kind of satellite, is another Puritan, Marvell, very unequal, but often melodious, graceful, and impressive. Thus after a badinage of courtesy and compliment to his coy mistres,' he adds:

But at my back I always hear

Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found:

Nor in thy marble vault shall sound

My echoing song.'

Unhappily, in common with the Cowleyan sect of writers, he is eminently afflicted with the gift of ingenuity:

Maria such and so doth hush

The world, and through the evening rush,

No new-born comet such a train

Draws through the sky, nor star new slain.
For straight those giddy rockets fail
Which from the putrid earth exhale,
But by her flames in heaven tried
Nature is wholly vitrified.'

This is a play of the intellectual fancy, in which an extravagant use of words aims to effect the results that living feeling had heretofore produced. The stamp of the age- - critical rather than emotional-is visible in his natural description, where he is most animated:

'Reform the errors of the spring:

Make that the tulips may have share

Of sweetness, seeing they are fair;

And roses of their thorns disarm:

But most procure

That violets may a longer age endure.

But oh, young beauty of the woods,

Whom nature courts with fruits and flowers,

Gather the flowers, but spare the buds;

Lest Flora, angry at thy crime

To kill her infants in their prime,

Should quickly make the example yours;
And, ere we see,

Nip in the blossom all our hopes in thee.'

And, in the Garden:

'Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence, thy sister dear?
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy companies of men.

Your sacred plants, if here below,
Only among the plants will grow;
Society is all but rude

To this delightful solitude.

No white nor red was ever seen

So amorous as this lovely green.'

This way of treating Nature suits the time,-merely to picture what the eye sees and the ear hears, to produce the forms and colors of things, the movements and the sounds which pervade them. It is the calm, unexcited manner of an inventory. For contrast, take an instance from Keats, when once more, across the next century, it is given to see into the life of things, and seeing, to make us share his insight:

Upon a tranced summer night

Those green-robed senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir,
Save from one gradual solitary gust

Which comes upon the silence, and dies off,
As if the ebbing air had but one wave.`

No eye can see deeply into the meaning of Nature, nor hence interpret her truly, unless it has also looked deeply into the moral heart, and sadly, sweetly, into the mystery of human life and human history.

Butler's Hudibras exhibits, in buffoonery, the style which Donne and Cowley practiced in its more serious form. Sir Hudibras is a Presbyterian knight who, with his squire, goes forth to redress all wrongs, and correct all abuses. He is beaten, set in stocks, pelted with rotten eggs, a ridiculous object from first to last, but serenely unconscious that he is laughed at. The author desires to make sport for a winning side, and the Puritans are caricatured, the terrible saints,—

Who built their faith upon

The holy text of pike and gun,

Decide all controversies by
Infallible artillery,

And prove their doctrine orthodox

By apostolic blows and knocks.'

We can imagine that the general hatred secured a hearing. No poem in fact rose at once to greater reputation. But fashions