While sallow autumn fills thy lap with leaves; And rudely rends thy robes; So long, sure-found beneath the sylvan shed, And hymn thy favourite name! Mark Akenside (1721-1770) was the son of a butcher at Newcastle-onTyne, where he was born on the 9th of November 1721. In his infancy his Mark Akenside After the Portrait by A. Pond father's cleaver fell upon his foot, producing a lifelong lameness, of which he had afterwards the weakness to be ashamed, as a sign of his low birth. He showed an early precocity, and his Virtuoso (written in 1737) was the earliest poem in which the stanza of Spenser was revived. All Akenside's poetic work of merit belongs to his youth; his Pleasures of Imagination were published in 1744; his Odes in 1745. By the age of five-and-twenty he was practically dead as a poet; but he lived long afterwards as a highly successful doctor of medicine. From 1759 onwards he was principal physician to Christ's Hospital, and enjoyed all the honours of the medical profession until his rather sudden death from fever on the 23rd of June 1770. Akenside was a very arrogant man, pompous, and devoid of all sense of humour; "he looked as if he could never be undressed." He wore a large white wig and carried a long sword; he terrified the patients at the hospital by the severity of his "pale, strumous countenance." He was accused of ordering the out-patients to be swept from before him with brooms by the hospital servants. He was, however, a learned and "sagacious" lecturer, and he preserved both in poetry and science a dignified austerity. AKENSIDE'S "ODE ON A SERMON AGAINST GLORY" (1747) Come then, tell me, sage divine, Is it an offence to own That our bosoms e'er incline Toward immortal Glory's throne? For with me nor pomp nor pleasure, As one approving word of her impartial voice. From 1740 to 1760 the Thomsonian and the Graian influences were predominant. About the latter date there was a relapse into something of the old Jesuit precision. In CHURCHILL and his companions, regardless of the more solemn and Latin satire which Johnson had been cultivating, a return was made to the lighter and more primitive forms which Pope had used. For a moment the sombre romantic school seemed swept out of existence, but the popularity of the savage couplets of Churchill was brief. All that was left of the reaction was soon seen in the modified classicism of Goldsmith, with its didactic couplets as smooth and as lucid as Pope's, its humanity and grace, its simplicity and picturesque sweetness. In the Deserted Village (1770) we have the old kind of starched poetry at its very best, and at its latest, since after Goldsmith the movement which had begun with Pope ceased to possess any real vitality. Charles Churchill (1731-1764) was the son of a curate in Westminster, where he was born in February 1731. He was a riotous boy, and a youth who failed at both universities. At the age of seventeen he made a reckless marriage, in 1753 he became a curate in Somersetshire, and was ordained in 1756. He came up to London in Charles Churchill After the Portrait by J. S. C. Schaak 1758, and his life became a tissue of rowdy irregularities. In 1761 he published anonymously the first of his poems, The Rosciad, a satire on the actors of his time. This enjoying an amazing success, Churchill flung his cassock to the winds, and adopted verse-writing as a profession. During the next three years he published an incredible number of violent personal satires, most of which were highly successful, since people "liked to see the bludgeon's dint, when Churchill wrote." He threw himself with vehemence into the cause of Wilkes, whom he followed to Boulogne-sur-Mer in October 1764. Here he caught a fever, and died on the 4th of November. In the hour of Churchill's highest popularity Johnson saw through him, and said that he was a tree that would never produce good fruit, but only crabs. The image admirably suits the profuse, tart, and peevish verse of Churchill. The close of this central period of the eighteenth century was stilted and inefficient in poetry. The rigidity of the classical system, now outworn after the exercise of one hundred years and more, strangled thought and expression, and forced those who desired to write to use mere centos of earlier and freer masters. The elegiac school had lasted but a very few years; its successes are dated almost exclusively between 1742 and 1760. The new poetic feeling, however, never fell into complete desuetude, for at the very moment when Gray and Young were becoming silent, several new forces asserted themselves, all moving in the direction of reform in taste. Of these the earliest was the revelation, between 1760 and 1763, of the mysterious paraphrases of Ossian; in 1765 Bishop Percy issued his Reliques of primitive English poetry; in 1770 the untimely death of CHATTERTON revealed an extraordinary genius of a novel kind; and from 1777 onwards Thomas Warton, in his History of English Poetry, was recalling readers to masterpieces of art and passion that were not bound down to the rules nor dwarfed by the classical tradition. Of all these elements the least genuine was undoubtedly the first mentioned, but it is equally certain that it was the strongest. The vogue of OSSIAN through all Europe became immense; no real British writer, not Shakespeare himself, enjoyed the respect of Europe so universally as the shadowy Ossian did at the close of the eighteenth century. Critics of high position gravely discussed the relative magnitude of Homer and of the author of Fingal, and by no means invariably gave the crown to the Greek. The key to the extraordinary success of these Caledonian forgeries is, that they boldly offered to release the spirit of Europe from its pedagogic bondage. No one, not even Goethe, was anxious to inquire too closely concerning the authority of fragments which professed to come to us from an extreme antiquity, tinged with moonlight and melancholy, exempt from all attention to the strained rules and laws of composition, dimly primitive and pathetically vague, full of all kinds of plaintive and lyrical suggestiveness. When Napoleon in 1804 desired to give the highest possible praise to a new, modern, brilliantly emancipated, literary production, he could find no better epithet for it than "vraiment Ossianique." And this suggests in what light we have to regard MacPherson's forgeries, so irritating to our cultivated taste in their bombastic pretentiousness. It was not what they were that fascinated Europe, it was what they suggested, and the product is what we read in Goethe, Byron, Chateaubriand. FROM GOLDSMITH'S "DESERTED VILLAGE." But now the sounds of population fail, All but yon widowed, solitary thing, That feebly bends beside the plashy spring ; She only left of all the harmless train, The sad historian of the pensive plain. Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) was the posthumous son of a writing-master and "sub-chaunter" in Bristol, where he was born, in extremely indigent circumstances, on the 20th of November 1752. His mother kept a small dame's school, close to the Thomas Chatterton church of St. Mary Redcliffe. Curiously enough, although Chatterton was to become the very type of precocious maturity, while a little child he was dull and backward; he could scarcely be taught his letters, and "a fear was aroused that he was deficient in intellect." At the age of eight a sudden change took place, and he began to read from. morning to night; in this year, 1760, he became a scholar at Colston's Hospital, the Blue-Coat School of Bristol. Here Chatterton remained for seven years, forming few friendships, living apart from the other boys, and cultivating in the great church of St. Mary-"that wonder of mansions," as he called it -a passion for all the neglected arts of the Middle Ages. In his mother's house were various mediaeval parchments without value, which had been stolen from the church, and others were From the authentic Portrait in Dix's "Life of Chatterton" left carelessly within his reach. It is not known exactly at what date he began to hoard these documents, to puzzle over their writing, and then to imitate it. Quite in early boyhood, however, he had created a group of imaginary fifteenth-century figures, clustered around a Thomas Rowley, priest and poet, and a William Canynge, merchant of Bristol. In illustration of the adventures of these dream-personages, Chatterton began to write prose and poetry in what he believed to be Early or Middle English. Extraordinary as it seems, there is no doubt that a great part of this complicated design had taken shape in his brain, without help or suggestion from a single associate, before Chatterton was eleven years of age. He was not twelve when he showed the MS. of his eclogue of Elinour and Juga to a friend. Not until 1767, however, did he begin to circulate his forgeries among adult persons, professing that he had found these writings in the muniment room of St. Mary Redcliffe. They were accepted by the antiquaries of Bristol with greedy credulity, and Chatterton continued to produce more and more "Rowley" papers. The best of these belong to the year 1768, when the poet was between fifteen and sixteen. He sent some copies, however, to Horace Walpole, who submitted them to Gray, and Gray instantly pronounced them forgeries. In 1769 the restless and unhappy boy formed the design of coming up to London to try his fortune as a journalist. He had been apprenticed in 1767 to an attorney, but he got his indentures cancelled, and in April 1770 he arrived in town. At first he obtained a little ill-paid work as a political writer, but the death of Beckford in June closed this source of revenue. He now produced a very lively burletta, The Revenge, for which he received five guineas, but these were soon exhausted. He found himself |