had been in correspondence. A violent friendship sprang up between them and blazed for awhile, but had died down when, about 1723, it ended in a great explosion of mutual rage and ill-breeding. In 1739 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu left her husband under circumstances which have never been lucidly explained, and was a resident abroad, mainly in Italy, for the next twenty-two years. She was in Venice in 1761 when the news of her husband's death reached her; she was in poor health, but she determined to return to England to settle his estate. She arrived in January 1762, and did not return, but died in her house in Montagu Square on the 21st August 1762. She is remarkable for having introduced into western Europe the practice of inoculation for small-pox, which she tried first on her own son, Edward, at Constantinople in 1715. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was a woman of a fiery spirit, penetrated with literature and curiosity, ardent and unabashed, insolent and generous. Her letters, which have neither the tenderness nor the eloquence of a Sevigné, testify to the ripeness of her judgment and the clearness of her eye.

FROM A LETTER FROM CONSTANTINOPLE.

The climate is delightful in the extremest degree. I am now sitting, this present fourth of January [1718], with the windows open, enjoying the warm shine of the sun, while you

of his class.

Benjamin Hoadly

After the Portrait by Mrs. Hoadly

are freezing over a sad sea-coal fire; and my chamber set out with carnations, roses and jonquils, fresh from my garden. I am also charmed with many points of the Turkish law, to our shame, be it spoken, better designed and better executed than ours; particularly the punishment of convicted liars (triumphant criminals in our country, God knows!) They are burnt in the forehead with a hot iron, being proved the authors of any notorious falsehood. How many white foreheads should we see disfigured, how many fine gentlemen would be forced to wear their wigs as low as their eyebrows, were this law in practice with us!

Theology, which had taken so prominent a place in the literature of the seventeenth century, fell into insignificance after the year 1700. We have already spoken of Clarke, a stiff and tiresome writer, but the best

To compare Hoadly with Massillon, or Sherlock with Saurin, is but to discover how great an advantage the French still preserved over us,

who had never, even in the palmy days of our theology, enjoyed a Bossuet. Perhaps the most spirited contribution to religious literature published in the early years of the century was Law's Serious Call, a book isolated from its compeers in all qualities of style and temper, the work of a Christian mystic who seemed to his contemporaries that hateful thing "an enthusiast."

Benjamin Hoadly (1676-1761) was born at Westerham, in Kent, on the 14th of November 1676. He was the second son of the Rev. Samuel Hoadly, who gave him his early education, and then sent him direct to St. Catherine Hall, Cambridge. He became an active and useful London clergyman, of advanced political and religious views. In 1715 he was made Bishop of Bangor, and it is recorded, as a singular proof of Hoadly's simplicity and absence of ambition, that "when he went to Court to kiss hands on being made a bishop, he did not know the way upstairs." His famous treatise on The Principles and Practices of the Non-Jurors, which caused a sort of earthquake in the Church of England, was published in 1716. Hoadly's brilliant sermon on The Nature of the Kingdom or Church of Christ was preached on the 31st of March 1717. The celebrated Bangorian Controversy was the result. In spite of the rage of his enemies, Hoadly was rapidly promoted, through Hereford and Salisbury, to the princely see of Winchester in 1734.

Throughout the storms which raged around him, Hoadly preserved a dignified and apostolic caim, and he was a man of undoubted greatness of character. He was the reputed author of more than fifty publications, mainly controversial. He reached his eighty-sixth year, and "was so happy as to live long enough to reap the full earthly reward of his labours, to see his Christian and moderate opinions prevail over the kingdom, and the Nonconformists at a very low ebb, for want of the opposition and persecution they were used to experience." Hoadly died in his palace at Chelsea, on the 17th of April 1761, having outlived all opposition, "beloved and revered by all good men."

Thomas Sherlock (1678-1761), the elder son of the famous divine, Dr.

Thomas Sherlock

William Sherlock, was born in London, where his father was rector of St. George's, Botolph Lane. He was educated at Eton and at St. Catherine Hall, Cambridge,

of which he became a fellow. At the early age of twenty-six, he was appointed to succeed his father as Master of the Temple, and soon became eminent as a preacher. In 1714 he was made Master of his College, in 1716 Dean of Chichester, and soon afterwards became prominent as a protagonist in the great Bangorian Controversy. Sherlock became successively Bishop of Bangor, Salisbury, and London, and refused Canterbury. He continued to hold the Mastership of the Temple for fifty years. Sherlock's Sermons were published, in four volumes, in 1755-6. He died July 18, 1761, after a very long and painful illness, and was buried at Fulham.

William Law (1686-1761) was the son of a grocer at King's Cliffe, in Northamptonshire. He was sent as a sizar, in 1705, to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and ultimately became a fellow. He was a strong non-juror, and gradually developed more and more austere religious views. In 1726 he made a certain stir with his treatises on Christian Perfection. In 1727 he became tutor to Edward Gibbon, who was twenty years of age, and it would perhaps be exacter to say, as the historian does, that Law was already "the much-honoured friend and spiritual director" of the Gibbon family. In 1728 the Serious Call was published, and he began to be surrounded

by disciples, among whom were the Wesleys. Law seems to have resided at Putney with the Gibbons from 1727 to 1738, after which he went back to his parental home at King's Cliffe, where he founded a semi-monastic settlement. His mystical and philanthropic schemes were enthusiastically supported by two ladies of mature years, Miss Hester Gibbon and Mrs. Hutcheson Law died, almost in the act of singing a hymn, in his interesting religious house at King's Cliffe, on the 9th of April 1761.

The earliest signs of impatience with the rigidity of literary rule came from Scotland, where a certain lyrical independence of Southern traditions had preserved all through the seventeenth century something of the old folk-song freshness. The actual value of these vernacular pieces-the knack of them was retained in one family, the Sempills of Beltrees, for three generations-was small, but they led on without a break to Allan Ramsay, and to such useful poetical antiquaries as Lady Wardlaw and, in England, Oldys.

Allan Ramsay (1686-1758) was born at Leadhills in Lanarkshire, on the 15th of October 1686. At the age of fifteen he came up to Edinburgh to be apprenticed

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267

to a wig-maker. His earliest publications were parochially humorous, and his first ambitious essay was a continuation of King James' Christ's Kirk on the Green, 1718. Ramsay did a great deal for the revival of Scottish song by his anthologies, The TeaTable Miscellany, 1724-27, and The Ever

green, 1724. In 1725 he published his best work, the excellently sustained pastoral play of The Gentle Shepherd, the life of Ramsay. He retired from the wig-making business, and bought a bookseller's shop, "at the sign of the Mercury, opposite to Niddry's Wynd," where for thirty years he was visited by every literary person who appeared in Edinburgh, and where, behind his counter, he broke into verse at the least excuse, "e'en at the shagging of a feather." In 1743 he built himself an eight-sided house on Castle Hill, but did not retire from business until 1755. Ramsay died in this his "goose-pie," as Edinburgh called it, on the 7th of January 1758. Ramsay completed that celebrated poetical hoax-the earliest of eighteenth-century forgeries the ballad of Hardy Knute, which had been begun by Elizabeth, Lady Wardlaw (1677-1727). One of the first who took an intelligent interest in the bibliography of British poetry was William Oldys (1696-1761), of Lincoln, who was Norroy king-at-arms. He was not only a pioneer in the study of texts and states, but the author of some very graceful verses.

William Oldys

From an Engraving by Balston

The period of English literature which we have now roughly sketched is one of the most clearly defined and homogeneous in our history. In its consideration we are not troubled by the variety and diversity of its aims, by the multitude of its proficients, or by the distribution of its parts. All is definite, exiguous; all, or almost all, is crystallised round a single point; that point is common-sense applied to the imagination, to the highest parts of man. In all the expressions of this definite spirit, whether in Pope or Clarke, in Addison or Berkeley, we find a tendency to the algebraic formula, rather than to colour, fancy, or fire. In other words, pure intelligence does the work of literature, intelligence applied alike to concrete forms and abstract ideas, actively and energetically applied, without sentimentality or enthusiasm. The age of Anne succeeded in raising this literature of mathematical intelligence to the highest pitch of elegant refinement. But before it closed there were manifest signs of the insufficiency of such a manner to support a complex artistic system.

What in the hands of Pope and Addison was so brilliant and novel

that all the world was charmed, could but prove in those of their disciples cold, mechanical, and vapid. There were very dangerous elements in the optimism of the time, in its profound confidence in the infallibility of its judgment, in the ease with which it had become accustomed to rigid rules of composition, in the dry light of formalism which by it was so prompt to observe art and nature. These might satisfy for a moment, might produce a single crop of splendid literature, but they bore no fruit for the morrow. Even the prevalent admiration of the authors of antiquity was a source of danger, for these great fountain-heads of imagination were regarded not as they really wrote, but as seen distorted through the spectacles of the French Jesuit critics. The poets of antiquity were cultivated as incomparable masters of rhetoric, and on the basis of Horace, and even of Homer, there was founded a poetry totally foreign to antique habits of thought.

We have not, however, to consider what dangers lay ahead of the system, but what it produced in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, and for this, within limits, we can have little but praise. England now joined, and even led, the movement of European nations from which she had hitherto been excluded as a barbarian. In a "polite" age the English writers became the most polite. Pope and Addison had nothing more to learn from their Continental contemporaries; they became teachers themselves. In their hands the English language, which had been a byword for furious individuality and unbridled imaginative oddity, became a polished and brilliant instrument in the hands of an elegant and well-bred race. So far, if we go no further, all was well. A little group of scholars and gentlemen, closely identified in their personal interests, had taken English literature under their care, and had taught it to express with exquisite exactitude their own limited and mundane sensations. These were paving the way for a frigid formalism which would become intolerable in the hands of their followers; but in their own day, in their brief Augustan age, the direct result was not merely brilliant in itself, but of an infinite benefit to English as a vehicle for an easy and rapid exercise of the intelligence.