John Dunton (1659-1733)

"tremendous Appius," a reference to a tragedy of Appius and Virginia that Dennis had brought out in 1709. He entered into a disastrous controversy with Pope, in which he was led to call that poet "a hunch-backed toad" who was ready to fasten his teeth and claws" into any one who attacked him. Dennis went on to attack Addison also, and in fact degenerated into a common scold. He outlived his annuity as well as his reputation, and died in poverty, on the 6th of January 1734, soon after a benefit performance; for this Pope had written a prologue, in which he had called Dennis, benevolently, "Belisarius old and blind," and the hatchet had at last been buried.

It is not to be supposed that critics of the prestige of Dennis or Rymer would address the public from a less dignified stage than that of a book, or, at worst, a sixpenny pamphlet. But at the close of the reign of William III. we meet with the earliest apparition of literary criticism in periodical publications. In other words, the newspaper was now beginning to take literary form, and the introduction of such a factor must not be left unmentioned here. The first reviews printed in an English newspaper were those appended by Dunton to The Athenian Gazette in 1691; but these were not original, they were simply translated out of the Journal des Savans. Notices of books, in the modern sense, began to be introduced very timidly into

some of the news-sheets about the year 1701. Nor was this the only direction in which literary journalism was started; men of real importance began to take part in newspaper-writing, and the English press may name among the earliest of its distinguished servants such personages as Atterbury, Kennet, Hoadley, and Defoe.

John Dunton (1659-1733) was born at Graffham, in Hunts, 4th May 1659. He was the son of a clergyman of the same name. His mother died before he was a year old, and his father threw up his living and went to Ireland. At the age of fourteen the son was apprenticed to a London bookseller. About 1680 Dunton set up in business as a printer and bookseller on his own account, and for the first five years was very successful. At the outburst of Monmouth's rebellion he went

for a year to America, and then wandered on the Continent, not returning to London He says that in the course of his life he published six hundred only seven of them. Of his various speculative projects, one,

until the end of 1688.
books, and repented of

The Athenian Gazette or Mercury, was remarkable. In 1705 he published an odd but curious and even valuable autobiography, called Life and Errors of John Dunton. He fell into poverty, and died, perhaps at St. Albans, about 1733. Dunton has been looked upon as the founder of the "higher journalism" in England. Some of his books have sensational titles, such as A Cat may look at a Queen, and The Pulpit Lunatics.

Francis Atterbury (1662-1731) was born at Milton Keynes, in Bucks, on the Francis 6th of March 1662. He was educated at Westminster, and at Christ Church College, Atterbury Oxford. His first publication

was a Latin version of Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel (1682). Atterbury stayed long at the university, until indeed he complained of his "hard luck to be pinned down to it." He was over thirty when he took orders, and became one of the chaplains to William and Mary. All this time Atterbury was actively engaged in controversy. In 1700 he was made Archdeacon of Totnes, and in 1704 Dean of Carlisle; in grabbing at the latter post he displayed an unseemly haste, which endangered his reputation. His promotion, however, continued without abatement, and in 1712 he became Dean of Christ Church, again with circumstances of "imperious and despotic temper," which

caused him to be greatly The Right Reverend Father in Gon, Francis

disliked. He made Oxford,

indeed, too hot to hold him,
and "'twas thought advisable
to move him" to be Bishop
of Rochester in 1713. He
aimed at the Primacy, but Queen Anne's death struck a fatal blow at his hopes.
George I. had a personal dislike to Atterbury, and made no scruple of showing it.
Atterbury grew more and more disaffected to the Government, and in 1722 was
thrown into the Tower, charged with high treason. His trial before the House of
Lords, in May 1723, was a very famous affair, and caused universal emotion in
the country. Atterbury was found guilty by his peers, and was sentenced by the
King to perpetual banishment. He passed to Brussels, and then to Paris, where
he gave himself, save for his work in the service of the Pretender, entirely to

(1662-131)

literature, and died on the 15th of February 1731. Atterbury was a man of commanding character and great activity of mind, but by nature devoted to intrigue, and the victim of violent political passion.

While, therefore, we cannot claim for the opening years of the century the production of any masterpieces, and while its appearance, from an intellectual point of view, is to us quiescent, yet without doubt the seeds of genius were swelling in the darkness. In all departments of thought and art, Englishmen were throwing off the last rags of the worn-out garments of the Renaissance, and were accustoming themselves to wear with comfort their new suit of classical formulas. In poetry, philosophy, history, religion, the age was learning the great lesson that the imagination was no longer to be a law unto itself, but was to follow closely a code dictated by reason and the tradition of the ancients. Enthusiasm was condemned as an irregularity, the daring use of imagery as an error against manners. The divines were careful to restrain their raptures, and to talk and write like lawyers. Philosophical writers gladly modelled themselves on Hobbes and Locke, the nakedness of whose unenthusiastic style was eminently sympathetic to them, although they conceived a greater elegance of delivery necessary. Their speculations became mainly ethical, and the elements of mystery and romance almost entirely died out. Neither the pursuit of pleasure nor the assuaging of conscience, no active force of any kind, became supreme with the larger class of readers; but the new bourgeois rank of educated persons, which the age of Queen Anne created, occupied itself in a passive analysis of human nature. It loved to sit still and watch the world go by; an appetite for realistic description, bounded by a decent code, and slipping neither up into enthusiasm nor down into scepticism, became the ruling passion of the age. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries common-sense had been by no means characteristic of the English race, which had struggled, flaunted, or aspired. It now went back to something like its earlier serenity, and in an age of comparatively feeble emotion and slight intensity took things as they In Shaftesbury, a writer of provisional but extraordinary influence, we see this common-sense taking the form of a mild and exuberant optimism; and perhaps what makes the dark figure of Swift stand out so vividly against the rose-grey background of the age is the incongruity of his violence and misanthropy in a world so easy-going.

were.

In chronological sequence, it should, perhaps, be the theology of the early part of the reign of Anne which should first attract us, but it need not detain us long. The golden age of Anglican theology had long passed away, and in the progress of latitudinarianism, culminating, through Locke, in the pronounced deists, literature as an art has little interest. A tolerant rationalism was not likely to encourage brilliant writing, the orthodox churchmen wrote like wrangling lawyers, and the non-jurors and dissenters, who produced some vigorous scholars later on, were now as dreary as their opponents. Of the early deists, Shaftesbury alone was a man of style, and him we shall presently meet with in another capacity. Among the theologians, the most

eminent writer was SAMUEL CLARKE, "the greatest English representative of the a priori method of constructing a system of theology." His once famous collection of Boyle Lectures long seemed a classic to admiring readers, and still affects our conventional notions of theology. Clarke, however, has few readers to-day, and his manner of statement, which resembles that of a mathematician propounding a theorem, is as tedious to us now as it was fascinating to the group of young controversialists who clustered round Clarke during his brief career at Cambridge. In the hands of Clarke and his school, theological writing followed the lines laid down for it by Tillotson, but with a greatly accentuated aridity and neatness. In the search for symmetry these authors neglected almost every other excellence and ornament of literary expression.

(1675-1729)

Samuel Clarke (1675-1729) was the son of an alderman and M.P. of Norwich, Samuel where he was born on the 11th of October 1675. He showed much precocity, and Clarke after being well grounded at the Norwich grammar-school, proceeded in 1691 to Caius College, Cambridge. He was one of the earliest to perceive the value of the "sublime discoveries" of Sir Isaac Newton, and he greatly contributed, at a very early age, to the establishment of the Newtonian philosophy. His original bent was for mathematics, but about 1696 he turned his attention to Hebrew, and determined to become a divine. He took holy orders, and in 1698 became chaplain to John Moore, Bishop of Norwich, in whose palace he mainly resided for nearly twelve years. Here he enjoyed every advantage for literary work, and the list of his numerous publications opens with the Three Practical Essays of 1699. His Boyle Lectures Cn the Being and Attributes of God, and The Evidences of Religion, were published in 1705 and 1706, and produced a great impres

Samuel Clarke

sion on contemporary thought. On the recommendation of the Bishop of Norwich, Queen Anne made Clarke one of her chaplains-in-ordinary, and gave him in 1709

the important living of St. James's, Westminster. The even tenor of Clarke's life was broken in 1712 by the controversy caused by his volume on the Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity. This work was accused of heresy, and in 1714 a formal charge against the author was brought before Convocation. From this time forth Clarke lay under a suspicion of heterodoxy, which he took little pains to remove, and his friends were unable to procure him any further promotion in the Church. He seems to have been a freethinker upon many points, although a sincere believer in the basal principles of Christianity. He continued to write much, and not to confine himself to theology. He published the Optics of his master Newton (1706), and the first twelve books of the Iliad (1729) in Latin versions on which he had expended great care. He collected his Sermons in 1724. He was invited to succeed Newton as Master of the Mint, and declined the offer. On the 17th of May 1729 Clarke died, with some suddenness, after preaching before the judges at Serjeant's Inn. He seems to have been an honest, modest, and amiable man, of quiet yet courtly manners, but subject to a certain timidity and reserve in the pushing of his thought to its logical conclusion. He was as less a divine than a mathematician, treating theology according to Newtonian formulas.

If philosophy at the opening of the eighteenth century could give a better account of itself than theology could, it was mainly because the leading philosopher was a born writer. The third Earl of SHAFTESBURY has been strangely neglected by the historians of our literature, partly because his scheme of thought has long been rejected, and partly because his style, in which some of the prolixity of the seventeenth century still lingered, was presently obliterated by the technical smartness of Addison and Swift. With the meaning of Shaftesbury's doctrine of virtue, and with the value of his optimism and plea for harmony, we have nothing here to do, but his influence on writing in his own age and down the entire eighteenth century is highly important to us. Commonly as the fact is overlooked, Shaftesbury was one of the literary forces of the time-he was, perhaps, the greatest between Dryden and Swift. He died in 1713, two years after his miscellaneous treatises, written at intervals during the fifteen years preceding, had been published in those handsome volumes of the Characteristics. Shaftesbury's long residences in Holland gave him the opportunity of becoming thoroughly acquainted with the movement of Continental thought to an extent doubtless beyond any previous writer of English prose. The effect is seen on his style and temper, which are less insular than those of any of the men with whom it is natural to compare him. It is to be noted also that Shaftesbury was the earliest English author whose works in the vernacular were promptly admired abroad, and he deserves remembrance as the first who really broke down the barrier which excluded England from taking her proper place in the civilisation of literary Europe.

The writers who were to shine in prose immediately after the death of Shaftesbury were distinguished for the limpid fluency and grace of their manner. In this Shaftesbury did not resemble them, but rather set an example for the kind of prose which was to mark the central years of the