COPYRIGHT, 1903,

BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1903. Reprinted
October, 1905; September, 1906; October, 1908.

Norwood Press

7. S. Cushing & Co.
- Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

GARTH: LADY WINCHELSEA

179

Sir Samuel Garth (1661-1719) was the son of William Garth, and was born at Bowland Forest, in Yorkshire, in 1661. He was educated at Ingleton, and then at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he stayed from 1676 until he went in 1687 to study medicine at Leyden. He settled

in London as a doctor, and took a considerable part, as a Whig, in current politics. Garth published in 1699 a heroic poem called The Dispensary, describing with farcical solemnity a controversy between the doctors and the apothecaries on the subject of medical relief for out-patients. This poem enjoyed a very great success. It was Garth who, in 1700, secured dignified burial for Dryden. He was one of the early members of the Kit-Cat Club, and wrote the verses which were engraved on its toasting-glasses.

Sir Samuel Garth

Of his other not very numerous
productions, the topographical
poem of Claremont (1715) de-
serves notice. Garth became
a very rich man; he died after
a short illness, on the 18th of
January 1719. He was buried at Harrow. Pope said that "his death was very
heroical, and yet unaffected enough to have made a saint or a philosopher famous."

After the Portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller at Bayfordbury

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea (1660-1720), was the daughter of a Hampshire baronet. She became maid of honour to the Duchess of York, Mary of Modena, and at Court she met Heneage Finch, who was the Duke's gentleman of the bedchamber. They married in 1685, and when the flight of James II. took place, they withdrew to Eastwell Park. They lived here together in retirem nt for the rest of their lives. In 1712, through the death of a nephew, Finch became fourth Earl of Winchelsea. In 1713 the Countess published her Miscellany Foems, the occasional writings of thirty years. At Eastwell, Lady Winchelsea studied the phenomena of nature more closely than any of her contemporaries; in the contemplation of the physical world she sought and found relief from a constitutional melancholia, which greatly depressed her spirits. In her park there was a hill, called Parnassus, to which she was particularly partial, and here she wrote many of her poems. She and her husband-they called themselves "Daphnis" and "Ardelia" - lived in great contentment together in their country home until 1720, when the Countess died. The Earl survived until 1726. Lady Winchelsea's poems were first collected in 1902.

Sir Samuel
Garth
(1661-1719)

Anne Finch (1660-1720)

FROM LADY WINCHELSEA'S "NOCTURNAL REVERIE."

In such a night, when passing clouds give place,
Or thinly view the heaven's mysterious face;
When, in some river, overhung with green,
The waving moon and trembling leaves are seen ;
When freshened grass now bears itself upright,
And makes cool banks to pleasing rest invite,
Whence spring the woodbind and the bramble-rose,
And where the sleepy cowslip sheltered grows,
Whilst now a paler hue the fox-glove takes,
Yet chequers still with red the dusky brakes;
Where scattered glow-worms--but in twilight fine-
Show trivial beauties, watch their hour to shine;
While Salisbury stands the test of every light,
In perfect charm and perfect beauty bright; .
When the loosed horse now, as his pasture leads,
Comes slowly grazing thro' the adjoining meads,
Whose stealing pace and lengthened shade we fear,
Till torn-up forage in his teeth we hear;
While nibbling sheep at large pursue their food,
And unmolested kine rechew the cud ;
When curlews cry beneath the village-walls,
And to her straggling brood the partridge calls;

Their short-lived jubilee the creatures keep,

Which but endures whilst tyrant Man doth sleep.

In this dead period Philips and Watts seemed poets, and were undoubtedly men of

John Philips

Knelier

individual talent. Jchn Philips (16761709), was born at Bampton on the 30th of December 1676. He made a special study of the versification of Milton, and published, imperfectly in 1701, completely in 1703, The Splendid Shilling, an admirable study in parody of the blank verse of his master. His other works were serious-Blenheim in 1705 and Cider in 1708, the latter being the earliest and one of the best of the closelyobserved, semi-didactic, semi-descriptive poems for which the eighteenth century was later on to be conspicuous. Philips, whose constitution was consumptive and asthmatical, died prematurely on the 15th of February 1709. He lacked no honour, being buried in Hereford Cathedral, with a monument, the inscription on which was composed by Atterbury, in Westminster Abbey.

Less of a poet than Philips, Isaac Watts (1674-1748), "a man who never wrote but for a good purpose," is far better known to the public. He was born at Southampton on the 17th of July 1674,

and was precocious from his infancy. His father was a Dissenter, and Isaac, though

Isaac Watts

From an original Portrait

tempted to go to Oxford, chose to take
his lot with his own people. His famous
hymns originally appeared as Hora Lyrica
in 1705; his no less famous Psalms of
David in 1719. In prose he published a
treatise on Logic and another on The Im-
provement of the Mind. In opening the
doors of easy and graceful literature to the
lower middle-class public the services of
Watts were inestimable, and his name, al-
though certain associations with it may
provoke a smile, should always be men-
tioned with honour in connection with
the popularisation of English letters. The
laborious and useful life of Isaac Watts
closed on the 25th of November 1748.
Twenty years earlier he had been made a
D.D. by the universities of Edinburgh and

Aberdeen.

John Dennis (1657-1734) was the son John Dennis

of a wealthy London saddler, who sent him to school at Harrow, and in 1675 to Caius (1057-1734)

College, Cambridge. He took his bachelor's degree, but was dismissed from the university before he had proceeded to his master's degree, for stabbing a fellow-graduate, in March 1680. He spent several years in France and Italy. In 1691 his first poem was published, an Ode to the King. His Miscellanies, in 1693, opened to Dennis the world of letters, and he became intimate with Wycherley, Dryden, and the youthful Congreve. The violence of his temper and his want of practical judgment were always bringing him into difficulties. In 1696 he first came forward in his proper capacity, as a critic of poetry, and for some time after the death of Dryden, Dennis was incontestably the best judge of literature living in England. In 1702 he lost his private fortune, but, on Lord Halifax's advice, managed to save enough to buy himself a small annuity. His position in society, however, was gone, and his work soon began to show an acerbity and peevishness which were doubtless the results of misfortune. He made mistake upon mistake, and his crowning error of judgment was his attempt to browbeat Pope, in the

flush of his youthful success. For this he was punished with the deathless satire on