Sir Samuel Garth (1661-1719) was the son of William Garth, and was horn at Sir Samuel

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 one of the early members of the Kit-Cat Club, and wrote the- verses which were engraved on its toasting-glasscs. Of his other not very numerous productions, the topographical poem of Claremont (1715) deserves 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 retirem nt for the rest of their lives. In 1712, through the death of a nephew, Finch bvrame fourth Earl of Winchelsea. In 1713 the Countess published her 3fisfellany 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 contemplation 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.

Garth (1661-1719)

Sir Samuel Garth

After the Portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller at BayJordbu ry

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, watcli 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

individual talent. Jchn Philips (16761709), was horn at Hampton on the 3oth 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 isth 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.

John Philips

After the Portrait by Sir Godfrey Knelter

known to the public.

Less of a poet than Philips, Isaac Watts (1674-1748), "a man who never wrote but for a good purpose," is far better He was born at Southampton on the I7th of July 1674,

and was precocious from his infancy. His father was a Dissenter, and Isaac, though

tempted to go to Oxford, chose to take his lot with his own people. His famous hymns originally appeared as Horce Lyriae in 1705; his no less famous Psalms of David in 1719. In prose he published a treatise on Logic and another on The Improvement 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, although certain associations with it may provoke a smile, should always be mentioned 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 Isaac Watts Aberdeen.

From an original Portrait

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 (I057-1734) 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 juJge 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 sh 'w an acerbity and peevishness which were doubtless

the results of misfortune. He made mistake John Dennis

upon mistake, and his crowning error of judg- From ,.an der Guch(s Engraving

ment was his attempt to browbeat Po:ie, in the flush of his youthful success. For this he was punished with the deathless satire on

" 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 he 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 until the end of 1688. He says that in the course of his life he published six hundred books, and repented of only seven of them. Of his various speculative projects, one,

John

DUNTON,

The Athenian Gazette or Mereury, 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 way look at a Queen, and The Pulfit 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, 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 i 700 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 ot Christ Church, again with circumstances of "imperious and despotic temper," which caused him to be greatly 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

Francis Atterbury

After the Portrait, by Sir Godfrey Kneller