Burnet and

North

he was offered the Bishopric of Bristol. He refused it, being determined to stay on at Trinity, and fight, and die. In 1734 he was sentenced by the court of the Bishop of Ely to be deprived of the Mastership. To the astonishment of every one he refused to go, saying: "Despoil others, but keep your hands off Hector." A compromise with the terrible man was effected, and in 1738 Bentley was finally left at peace. His Manilius, the last of his great critical productions, appeared the following year. On the 14th of July 1742, Bentley died of a pleuritic fever, in his eighty-first year, in the lodge of Trinity, and iies buried in the college chapel.

FROM BENTLEY'S "SERMONS."

Without society and government man would be found in a worse condition than the very beasts of the field. That divine ray of reason, which is his privilege above the brutes, would only serve in that case to make him more sensible of his wants, and more uneasy and melancholic under them. Now, if society and mutual friendship be so essential and necessary to the happiness of mankind, 'tis a clear consequence that all such obligations as are necessary to maintain society and friendship are incumbent on every man. No one, therefore, that lives in society, and expects his share in the benefits of it, can be said to live to himself.

No, he lives to his prince and his country; he lives to his parents and his family; he lives to his friends and to all under his trust; he lives even to foreigners, under the mutual sanctions and stipulations of alliance and commerce; nay, he lives to the whole race of mankind. Whatsoever has the character of man, and wears the same image of God that he does, is truly his brother, and, on account of that natural consanguinity, has a just claim to his kindness and benevolence. . . . The nearer one can arrive to this universal charity, this benevolence to all the human race, the more he has of the divine character imprinted on his soul; for God is love, says the apostle; he delights in the happiness of all his creatures. To this public principle we owe our thanks for the inventors of sciences and arts; for the founders of kingdoms, and first institutors of laws; for the heroes that hazard or abandon their own lives for the dearer love of their country; for the statesmen that generously sacrifice their private profit and ease to establish the public peace and prosperity for ages to come.

Certain writers towards the close of this period took a prominent part in political and social life, but were not perceived, until long after their deaths, to have been leaders in literature also. Of these one, Pepys, of whom we have already spoken, was not known to his contemporaries to be a writer at all; others, of whom GILBERT BURNET and ROGER NORTH were typical, published indeed small works which attracted some attention, but are now remembered mainly by their secret and posthumous contributions to letters. Imperfection of delivery, balanced by daring of thought and freshness of matter, is the quality which strikes us in these composers of memoirs and private histories, who added a certain freedom to style in their unaffected and untrammelled notes of contemporary events. But it is worth observing that in these men in Gilbert Burnet, in particular-we meet with a very early tendency towards a purely journalistic and non-literary form of expression, and that such a historian is really a sensational and highly polemical leader-writer born too soon, and forced to write history by the lack of a newspaper in which to air his prejudices.

Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715) was born at Edinburgh on the 18th of September 1643, and was educated at Marischal College, Aberdeen. He came to England, already

a brilliant scholar, in 1663, and made a short stay both at Cambridge and Oxford, before starting for Holland and France. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of twenty-one. In 1665 he received the Scotch living of Saltoun, and remained in Scotland until 1673, having

twice refused an English bishopric. At last, at the express wish of the King, he came up to London, and ultimately settled in court as a royal chaplain. From this time forward, Burnet took an unceasing part in the whirl of ecclesiastical politics, and was a witness of innumerable curious events in the history of his own times. In 1688 he became Bishop of Salisbury, and died in London on the 7th of March 1715. Burnet was a pamphleteer of unceasing energy, but of the works which he published in his life only two reward the general reader, The Life and Death of John [Wilmot], Earl of Rochester, 1680, and The Life and Death of Sir Matthew Hale, 1682, neither of them biographies in the ordinary sense, but specious introductions to fashionable

After the Portrait by John Riley

theology. It is not by these, however, but by his copious History of My Own Times that Burnet lives. This valuable, but not very exhilarating, storehouse of state facts was not printed until 1723, with a second volume in 1734.

FROM "THE LIFE AND DEATH OF ROCHESTER."

He told me of another odd presage that one had of his approaching death in the Lady Warre, his mother-in-law's house: the chaplain had dreamt that such a day he should die, but being by all the family put out of the belief of it, he had almost forgot it, till the evening before at supper, there being thirteen at table, according to a fond conceit that one of these must soon die, one of the young ladies pointed to him, that he was to die. He, remembering his dream, fell into some disorder, and the Lady Warre reproving him for his superstition, he said he was confident he was to die before morning, but he being in perfect health, it was not much minded. It was Saturday night, and he was to preach next day. He went to his chamber and sat up late, as it appeared by the burning candle, and he had been preparing his notes for his sermon, but was found dead in his bed next morning these things, he said, made him inclined to believe the soul was a substance distinct from matter, and this often returned into his thoughts. But that which perfected his persuasion about it, was, that in the sickness which brought him so near death before I first knew him, when his spirits were so low and spent that he could not move nor stir, and he did not think to live an hour; he said his reason and judgment were so clear and strong, that from thence he was fully persuaded that death was not the spending or dissolution of the soul, but only the separation of it from matter.

Roger North (1653-1734) was an antiquary and local historian of the eastern counties, who was an active lawyer until near the close of the century, and then, retiring to Rougham in Norfolk-where he died on the 1st of March 1734-devoted his leisure to local history, and to the biographies of his family. He published in his lifetime practically nothing, but after his death appeared in 1740 his Examen, and in 1742-44 his Lives of the Norths. Dr. Jessopp printed his Autobiography in 1877 and his Correspondence in 1890.

Throughout the period from 1660 to 1700 the word "criticism" has had incessantly to invade our narrative. Looked upon broadly, this was the least creative and the most critical of all the main divisions of our literary history. The Renaissance had finally departed; after a lingering illness, marked at first by fantastic conceits, then by utter insipidity, it had died. It was necessary to get hold of something quite living to take its place, and what France originally, and then England from 1660 onwards, chose, was the imitatio veterum, the literature, in prose and verse, which seemed most closely to copy the models of Latin style. Aristotle and Horace were taken not merely as patterns, but as arbiters. No feature was permitted unless classical authority for it could be produced, and it was needful at every step to test an innovation by the rules and the unities. Hence the temper of the age became essentially critical, and to discuss the machinery of the musical box more important than to listen to the music. Instead of the licentious use of any stanzaic form that might suit the whim of the poet, serious verse was practically tied down to the heroic couplet of two rhyming lines of five beats each. This had been mainly the creation of Waller in England, as the regular pendulous alexandrine was of Malherbe in France. Rhyme of this exact and balanced kind had been defended, even for plays, by Dryden, on the ground that it is that "which most regulates the fancy, and gives the judgment its busiest employment."

All this is much out of fashion nowadays, and to our impressionist critics, eager for sensations-for the "new note," for an "individual manner"-must seem preposterous and ridiculous. But a writer like Dryden, responsible for the movement of literature in the years immediately succeeding the Restoration, had a grave task before him. He was face to face with a bankruptcy; he had to float a new concern on the spot where the old had sunken. That uniformity of manner, that lack of salient and picturesque individuality, which annoy the hasty reader, were really unavoidable. Dryden and Tillotson, Locke and Otway, with their solicitude for lucidity of language, rigidity of form, and closeness of reasoning, were laying anew the foundations upon which literature might once more be built. It is better to build on Malherbe and Dryden, even if we think the ground-plan a little dull, than upon Marino and Gongora.

Unfortunately, in an age so closely set upon externals and the manipulation of language, it was likely that the inward part of literature might be neglected. Accordingly, while the subjects of the latest Stuarts were polishing their couplets and clarifying their sentences, they neglected the natural instincts of the heart. It was an age of active intellectual curiosity, but not of pathos or of passion.

THE CLASSICAL AGE

175

The stage was for ever protesting the nobility of its sentiments, yet, save in Venice Preserved, it is difficult to find a single Restoration play where there is any tenderness in the elevation, and real tears behind the pomp of the rhetoric. The theatre was so coarse that its printed relics remain a scandal to European civilisation, and that the comedies of Otway and Southerne (for the tragedians were the greatest sinners when they stooped to farce) could ever have been acted to mixed audiences, or to any audience at all, can hardly be conceived. It would, of course, be very narrow-minded to judge the whole age by its plays. It had its pure divines, its refined essayists and scholars, its austere philosophers. But we cannot go far wrong in taking that redoubtable gossip Pepys as a type of the whole. It was not an enthusiastic, nor a delicate, nor an impassioned age, and we must not look for intensity in its productions. What we should admire and should be grateful for are its good sense, its solidity of judgment, and its close attention to thoroughness and simplicity in workmanship.

CHAPTER III

THE AGE OF ANNE

DURING the final years of the

1700-1740

reign of William III., literature in England was in a stagnant condition. Almost the only department in which any vitality was visible was comic drama, represented by Congreve, Cibber, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar. A vast quantity of verse was poured forth,

mainly elegiac and occasional, but most of it of an appalling badness. At the death of Dryden, in 1700, only two prominent non-dramatic poets survived: Garth, who had just published a polished burlesque, The Dispensary, under the influence of Boileau's Le Lutrin; and Addison, whose hyperbolic compliments addressed to "godlike Nassau" were written in verse which took up the prosody of Waller as if Dryden had never existed. In criticism the wholesome precepts of Dryden seemed to have been utterly forgotten, and Rymer, a pedagogue upon Parnassus, was pushing the rules of the French Jesuits to an extreme which excluded Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Spenser from all consideration, and threatened the prestige of Dryden himself. In prose Bishop Burnet was writing, but he properly belongs to an earlier and again to a later age. Samuel Clarke and Defoe were beginning to write, Steele was beginning to feel his way, Shaftesbury was privately printing one short tract. whole, it was the lowest point reached by English literature during the last three hundred years. The cause of such sterility and languor can scarcely be determined. The forces which had been introduced in the first decade 176