after the Restoration were exhausted, and it was necessary to rest a little while before taking another start.

But in 1702 Queen Anne ascended the throne, and her brief reign is identified with a brilliant revival in English letters, in the hands of a group of men of the highest accomplishment and originality. It must be noted, however, that this revival did not take place until the Queen was near her end, and that of the writers of the age of Anne but few had published anything considerable until within three years of her death. It would be historically more exact to distinguish this period in literature as the age of George I., the years from 1714 to 1727 being those in which some of the most characteristic works of the school were published; but the other name has become hallowed by long practice, and George I. certainly deserves as little as any monarch who ever reigned the credit of being a judicious patron of letters. It is interesting, indeed, to note that by 1714 almost all the characteristic forces of the age were started. Pope had reached his Homer; Swift was pouring forth tracts;

Shaftesbury, Arbuthnot, Mandeville, and even Berkeley had published some of their most typical writings; while the Tatler and the Spectator had actually run their course. All this activity, however, dates from the very close of Queen Anne's life. Between 1711 and 1714 a great number of important works in prose and verse burst almost simultaneously from the London presses. It was as though a cloud which had long obscured the heavens had been swept away by a wind, which, in so doing, had revealed a splendid constellation. In 1702 no country in civilised Europe was in a more melancholy condition of intellectual emptiness than

VOL. III

M

*

England; in 1712 not France itself could compare with us for copious and vivid production.

Meanwhile, almost unperceived, the critic had begun to make his appearance, for the first time, in the form with which we have since been familiar. The French asserted that it was Castelvetro and Piccolomini, Italian writers of the end of the sixteenth century, who first taught that just comprehension of the Poetics of Aristotle in which modern criticism began. These scholars, however, were unknown in England, where it was the French critics, and, in particular, Rapin and Le Bossu, who introduced to us the Aristotelian criticism of imaginative literature. René Rapin, in particular, exercised an immense authority in this country, and was the practical law-giver from the last quarter of the seventeenth century onward. Rymer and Dennis founded their dogmas entirely on his Reflections, merely modifying to English convenience his code of rules. Rapin has been strangely forgotten; when he died in 1687, he was the leading critic of Europe, and he is the writer to whom more than to any other is due the line taken by English poetry for the next hundred years. The peculiarity of his Reflections, which were promptly translated into English, was, that they aimed at adapting the laws and theories of Aristotle to modern practice. As is often the case, Rapin was less rigid than his disciples; he frequently develops a surprisingly just conception of what the qualities of the highest literature should be.

The school of Rapin, who moulded the taste and practice of the young men who were to be the pioneers of the age of Anne, claimed for Aristotle the unbounded allegiance of all who entered the domain of verse. Every man of judgment was blindly to resign his own opinions to the dictates of Aristotle, and to do this because the reasons given for these rules are as convincing and as lucid as any demonstration in mathematics. But Aristotle had approached literature only as a philosopher; for Rapin they claimed the merit of having been the first to apply the Aristotelian principles to modern practice. The English disciples of Rapin accepted his formulas, and used them to give literature a new start, and thus Rapin came to be the father of eighteenth-century criticism. The first review of a book in the modern sense may be said to have been JOHN DENNIS's tract on a fashionable epic of the moment, published in 1696; here was a plea for sober judgment, something that should be neither gross praise nor wild abuse. The subject of this tract was negligible, but Dennis presently came forward with dissertations on more serious forms of literature. Dennis has been resolutely misjudged, in consequence of his foolish attitude towards his younger contemporaries in old age, but in his prime he was a writer of excellent judgment. He was the earliest English critic to do unstinted justice to Milton and to Molière, and he was a powerful factor in preparing public opinion for the literary verdicts of Addison.

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

Sir Samuel Garth

one of the early members of
the Kit-Cat Club, and wrote
the
verses which were en-
graved on its toasting-glasses.
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."
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 retirement 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 Poems,
the occasional writings of thirty years. At Eastwell, Lady Winchelsea studied the
phenomena of nature more closely than any of her contemporaries; in the contem-
plation 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.

After the Portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller at Bayfordbury

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

Kneller

individual talent. John 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 (1657-1734)

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 feilow-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