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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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.

CHAPTER IV

THE AGE OF JOHNSON

1740-1780

THE period which we have just quitted was one of effort concentrated in one middle-class coterie in London, an age of elegant persiflage and opti mistic generalisation marshalled by a group of highly civilised and "clubable" wits. That at which we have now arrived was the exact opposite. Its leading exponents were not associates, or, in most cases, even acquaintances; its labours were not in any large degree identified with London, but with places all over the English-speaking world. From 1712 to 1735 attention is riveted on the mutual intercourse of the men who are writing, and then upon their works. From 1740 to 1780 the movements of literature, rather than those of men of letters, are our theme. Solitary figures closely but unconsciously and accidentally related to other solitary figures, ships out of call of one another, but blown by the same wind-that is what the age of Johnson presents to us.

George II.

If the combination of personal communication, so interesting in the earlier age, is lacking now, it is made up for to us by the definition of the principal creative impulses, which prove, to our curiosity and surprise, independent of all personal bias. The similarity between Swift and Arbuthnot, between Pope and Parnell, is easily explained by their propinquity. But how are we to account for the close relation of Gray and Collins, who never met; of Fielding and Richardson, who hated one another at a distance; of Butler

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at Bristol, and Hume at Ninewells? This central period of the eighteenth century took a wider and more democratic colouring; its intellectual life was more general, we had almost said more imperial. Letters could no longer be governed by the dictatorship of a little group of sub-aristocratic wits met in a coffee-house to dazzle mankind. The love of literature had spread in all directions, and each province of the British realm contributed its genius to the larger movement.

In poetry, which must occupy us first, the forces which now attract our almost undivided attention are not those which appealed to contemporary

criticism. Pope and his school had given a perfect polish to the couplet, had revived a public interest in satire and philosophic speculation in verse, had canonised certain forms of smooth and optimistic convention, had, above all, rendered the technique of "heroic verse" a thing which could be studied like a language or a science. It was strictly in accordance with the traditions of literature that no sooner was the thing easy to do than the best poets lost interest in doing it. It was Thomson who made the first resistance to the new classical formula, and it is, in fact, Thomson who is the real pioneer of the whole romantic movement, with its return After the Portrait by Bartholomew Dandridge to nature and simplicity. This gift would be more widely recognised than it is if it had not been for the poet's timidity, his easy-going indolence. The Winter of Thomson, that epoch-making poem, was published earlier than the Dunciad and the Essay on Man, earlier than Gulliver's Travels and the Political History of the Devil; it belongs in time to the central "period of Queen Anne." But in spirit, in temper, in style, it has nothing whatever to do with that age, but inaugurates another, which, if we consider exactly, culminated, after a slow but direct ascent, in Wordsworth.

The positive interest which the poetry of the middle of the eighteenth century now possesses for us may be slight; its relative or historical interest