Manual of English Literature

Section 6.-Akenside is the most important poet of the
school; his Pleasures of the Imagination (1744) is a
cross between Paradise Lost and The Essay on Man;
it was written at Edinburgh University and represents
the influx of Gallicism into the northern capital.

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139-140

141-142

142-144

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(2)

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144-146

Section 7.-(1) The Night Thoughts of Edward Young was

a poem published about the same time and addressed to

the same type of audience in Miltonic blank verse; but

it is perpetually marred by insincerities and bathos.

Blair's Grave has the same faults; but has true poetry

in it.

Section 8.—(1) John Dyer was as real a poet and followed

the Puritan secular poets in his Grongar Hill, whilst he

used Miltonic blank verse in his Ruins of Rome. (2) But it

was his Fleece (1757) that best showed how much the

new audience was to be found in the middle and industrial

classes. (3) Glover reveals in his blank verse poems the

middle class interest in commerce and passion for political

freedom. (4) Armstrong's blank verse poems come

closer in spirit to the Queen Anne age, and yet show

promise of the coming poetry. (5) Grainger's Sugar

Cane shows the drift of the new audience towards

industrialism. (6) Didacticism and blank verse changed

as the century advanced; the one became more

concrete, the other more like prose. (7) The history of

the heroic couplet is, on the contrary, one of decay; its

true period is the eighteenth century. (8) Its original

and proper use was either satiric or didactic; but later

on in the century it was used for all purposes; and in

the last quarter there was a distinct renaissance of it. 146-152

Section 9.—Its use for descriptive purposes is best illustrated
by Falconer's Shipwreck, one of the first indications of
an imaginative interest in the nautical pursuits of the
English nation; it is marked by the pedantic pseudo-
classicism of the Queen Anne period and the pedantic
technicalism of the new industrial era, by the stiff
rhetoric of the past age and the passion for nature of
the coming age.

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. 152-154

Section 10.-(1) Darwin's Botanic Garden shows a similar

medley of the new and the old, and illustrates the

didactic use of the heroic couplet for scientific purposes.

(2) The poem, especially in its third part The Economy

of Vegetation, is deeply tinged with revolutionism. (3)

The Anti-Jacobin set itself to ridicule the revolutionists,

and laughed at Darwin's Loves of the Plants in The

Loves of the Triangles. (4) He was the centre of

the Lichfield coterie, and had introduced into it advanced

Gallicism from Edinburgh University; he was material-

istic in his philosophy, and advocated a theory of

evolution by transformations.

...

Section II.-Satire was the true function of the heroic
couplet; but there was no great satirist in our period,
because the greater spirits were too earnest for it, and

154-159

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the lesser found new vent in journalism. (2) Churchill
was the chief satirist and wrote in the decade best suited
to satire (1760-1770); in politics he took the side of
Wilkes and reform against the king and Bute, and
attacked most of the eminent men of the time including
Garrick, Smollett, and Falconer, who replied. (3) He
quarrelled with Hogarth and Dr. Johnson, and in all his
satires was perhaps more personal than witty; yet the
news of his death killed his sister and her betrothed
Lloyd, and Cowper remained loyal to his memory.
Section 12.-(1) Chatterton in his satires caught his tone,
political, social, moral, and literary, and attacked without
any principle or personal reason many of the victims of
Churchill's. (2) He even followed him in his Voltairian
tone, and sneered at religion and morality. (3) He used
the heroic couplet for didactic purposes only in two or
three poems; and by far his best satirical production was
his ironical will.

Section 13.-(1) The mantle of Churchill fell upon John

Wolcot, who, however, preferred the ode to the heroic

couplet; another form of satire of the time was

represented by The New Bath Guide of Christopher

Anstey. (2) A serious rival to Wolcot for a time was

The Rolliad, a series of political satires from the side of

the Opposition....

Section 14.-(1) On the model of this Canning, Gifford,

Frere, and others started a satirical journal called The

Anti-Jacobin in 1797 to counteract revolutionary

principles. (2) It ran for less than a year, but was

followed by various dull imitations up till 1833. (3) It

satirises new experiments in verse with the same vigour

as it attacks the new humanitarianism and the new re-

publicanism; it is indiscriminate too in its ridicule of

writers, joining Charles Lamb with Coleridge and

Southey. (4) The New Morality is bitter against every

new phase of opinion and civilisation. (5) The poems

range through all literature for forms to parody. (6) The

longer efforts are the best and get at the very heart of

revolutionism; The Progress of Man, though in form a

burlesque of Payne Knight's Progress of Civil Society,

attacks all the phases of it, sentimental, romantic, utilita-

rian, socialistic. (7) The Loves of the Triangles adheres

more closely to its immediate purpose of ridiculing Darwin

and parodying his Loves of the Plants. (8) The Rovers

burlesques the new German plays with their sentimen-

talism and matrimonial intricacies.

...

Section 15.-(1) Gifford had already attacked these plays
in his Mæviad. (2) But an even more striking, though
more ephemeral, literary fashion was Dellacruscanism, a

159-165

165-171

171-172

172-180

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184-186

hybrid of Wertherism and falsetto lyricism. (3) Gifford
had little trouble in satirising it in his Baviad; for it was
ridiculous in most of its features, and a more wholesome
poetic taste was rising with Wordsworth and Coleridge. 180-184

Section 16.—(1) In his attacks, he joined the study of older

English literature with revolutionism; and to some

extent he was right; for in the new poets and prose-

writers all his poetry and his principles of criticism were

rejected. (2) English imagination was about to overleap

the Queen Anne period and its Cavalier and Restoration

predecessors, and find a more national inspiration in the

great national age of English history, the reign of

Elizabeth, and in the products of the great popular past,

the ballads.

Section 17.-(1) A false start was made by the new poetic
spirit with Spenserianism, of which Shenstone's School-
mistress was the first example; most of his other work
imitates the Queen Anne style; but some of his elegies
anticipate Gray's Elegy. (2) Thomson's Castle of
Indolence comes four years later (1746), and, though
tinged with burlesque, comes nearer to its model; it has
also more of the new time in it than the rest of Thomson's
poetry. (3) The other Spenserians were William Julius
Mickle in his Syr Martyn, and James Beattie in his
Minstrel; they also reveal the new poetic sentiment.

Section 18. (1) Gray came also of the Gothic revival; but,

as he addressed an academic audience, was naturally

conservative. (2) In his famous Elegy, he was ever con-

scious of the new audience through the maternal house-

hold, for which it was chiefly written; it is simple in

diction and melody, and expresses the simpler emotions

of the middle class. (3) His other poems are more

formal and more like the Queen Anne verse; his odes

and Collins's reveal a tendency to revolt against the

metaphysical didacticisms of the poetry of the time, and

yet show its effect in their use of personified abstractions.

(4) His later study of the older Celtic and Teutonic