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Dutch faithfulness the drinking customs of the time, and,

with more epigram than he ever afterwards used, satirises

the upper classes, and especially the clergy, for their

indulgence. (4) The second The Candidate, is enslaved

to Pope. (5) His next, The Library, is as conventional

and dull as the worst of the didactic poems in vogue

during the eighteenth century. (6) The Village returned

to the manner of Goldsmith, and to realism, and gave

self-confidence to the naturalness of “ Burns”; (7) in the

first book, it is a running pessimistic comment on

Goldsmith's romantic picture, but in its second it lapses

into the Queen Anne style. (8) His next, The News-

paper, though Queen Anne in form, gives a picture of a

new phenomenon of the time that has not been

antiquated by a century of much-lauded journalistic

progress. (9) The Revolution made him feel belated

and remain silent for more than twenty years. (10)

The Parish Register, produced in 1807, is more realistic,

more careless of all the niceties of art, and more prosaic

than any of his eighteenth century poems. (11) The

new passion for story gradually mastered himn. (12) The

Borough is more intense in art and more psychological

than The Village, and yet it is true eighteenth century ;

(13) it consists of a long series of letters giving

descriptions of various characters, scenes, and institu-

tions ; (14) at the close he reveals that the secrets of

his art are sympathy with his themes, and first-hand

observation. (15) The Tales have little of the new

time in them, and still show him to be the representative

of the middle class churchman of the eighteenth century. 123–138

Section 4.-Campbell and Bloomfield belong to the nine-

teenth century, Rogers as much to the eighteenth as to

the nineteenth ; he is imitative, first of Gray, then of

Goldsmith, and lastly of Pope, but in his nineteenth

century poems follows the narrative and descriptive

styles of the time ; he was a revolutionist, yet shows no

revolutionism ; he had a satiric genius, yet never wrote

satire.

139-140

Section 5.—He is really a disciple of the school of blank

verse didactic poets, who appeared in the second quarter

of the century with the resurgence of the middle class

and their long acquaintance with metaphysical theology

and Paradise Lost.

141-142

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. 142-144
medley of the new and the old, and illustrates the

...

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

a poein 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. (2)

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

in it.

144-146

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

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.

152-154

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

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.

154-159

Section 11.-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

...

...

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. · 159-165

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.

165-171

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.

171--172

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

Frere, and others started a satirical journal called The

Anti-Jacobinin 1797 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

1

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.

172-180
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

...

...

to

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 new poets an 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.

184–186

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.

186–192

Section 18.4(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

literatures brought him into closer touch with the new

poetic movement; and his two great Pindaric odes, The

Progress of Poesie, and The Bard, along with half a

dozen other lyrical poems were the result.

. 192-197

Section 19.-(1) Collins also shows the revolt against the

heroic couplet, even when in his earlier poems he uses

it. (2) There is great variety of metre in his odes ; but

the best are those that have Miltonic echoes. (3) He

most anticipates the new time in his Ode on the Popular

Superstitions of the Highlands ; but neither Gray nor he

had sufficient strength to develop the new elements.

(4) The nation was about to return to primitive sources

of national feeling.

197—201

Section 20.-(1) Macpherson's Ossian is an instance of

this. (2) It had great influence all over Europe last

century. (3) It originated careful research into Celtic

literature. (4) It was of the eighteenth century in its

method of treatment of the past. (5) In it he confused

various ages and cycles of legend. (6) It is full of the

eighteenth century, its nakedness of religion, its humani.

tarian morality, and its sentimentalism. (7) Eighteenth

century ghosts abound in it. (8) It shows a careful

study of Homer. (9) It adopts the diction and imagery

of the authorised version of the Bible. (10) It avoids

anachronisms, adopts figures from the scenery of the

Highlands, and often attains genuine poetry. (11.)

There is much of the stucco of the eighteenth century

in the edifice. (12) Yet it gave a fresh impulse to the

period.

201--211

Section 21.-(1) Percy's Reliques followed. (2) It was

taken from various manuscript and printed sources, and,

though despised by the culture of London, became

popular. (3) The ballads had greatly deteriorated by

transmission and transcription and printing ; and Percy

still more changed them by revision and addition. (4)

In their original form they would not have commended

themselves to eighteenth century taste. (5) His book is

as much an anthology from known poets as a collection

of ballads. (6) The ballads given are from various

periods. (7) Their resemblances to ballads of other

nations do not all imply community of descent. (8)

There is little of fairy lore or the supernatural in them.

(9) As the products of the popular imagination, they

express the primitive passions, and with the

people they

were to enter into literature again. (10) The ballads

of war and adventure predominate as they suited the

time best. Some of them Percy rewrote so as to adapt

them to the eighteenth century ; Sir Cauline e.g. is made

less supernatural, less rude, and more sentimental. (11)

The copious tears and romance of the new versions were

needed for the sensibility of the new time; the emotions

of the originals are pre-Christian, tinged sometimes by

the age of chivalry, sometimes by the popular fancy ;

many collections followed. (12) It is always the Border

version of an incident, whether Scotch or English, that

is the best, and it was out of the ballad districts of the

Border that the post-revolutionary renaissance of English

poetry and fiction came.

211.-225

Section 22. -(1) The Lowlands of Scotland had mingled

the qualities of various races, and, after having been the
arena of history, was to be the arena of literature. (2)
The history of the district prepared it for literary success
in English, and lyrical triumphs in the local dialect by the

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