But she, howe'er of victory sure,

Contemns the wreath too long delayed; And, armed with more immediate power, Calls cruel silence to her aid.

Deeper to wound she shuns the fight;

She drops her arms to gain the field: Secures her conquest by her flight;

And triumphs when she seems to yield.

So when the Parthian turned his steed,
And from the hostile camp withdrew,
With cruel skill the backward reed
He sent, and as he fled he slew.

Theory of the Mind.

I say, whatever you maintain

Of Alma in the heart or brain,

The plainest man alive may tell ye

Her seat of empire is the belly.

From hence she sends out those supplies
Which make us either stout or wise: ...
Your stomach makes your fabric roll
Just as the bias rules the bowl.
That great Achilles might employ
The strength designed to ruin Troy,
He dined on lion's marrow, spread
On toasts of ammunition bread;
But, by his mother sent away
Amongst the Thracian girls to play,
Effeminate he sat and quiet-

Strange product of a cheese-cake diet! . .
Observe the various operations

Of food and drink in several nations.
Was ever Tartar fierce or cruel
Upon the strength of water-gruel?
But who shall stand his rage or force
If first he rides, then eats his horse?
Salads, and eggs, and lighter fare
Tune the Italian spark's guitar;
And, if I take Dan Congreve right,
Pudding and beef make Britons fight.
Tokay and coffee cause this work
Between the German and the Turk :

And both, as they provisions want,
Chicane, avoid, retire, and faint.
As, in a watch's fine machine,
Though many artful springs are seen ;
The added movements, which declare
How full the moon, how old the year,
Derive their secondary power

From that which simply points the hour;
For though these gimcracks were away—
Quare would not swear, but Quare would say—
However more reduced and plain,

The watch would still a watch remain :
But if the horal orbit ceases,

The whole stands still or breaks to pieces,

Is now no longer what it was,

And you may e'en go sell the case.

So if unprejudiced you scan
The goings of this clockwork, man,
You find a hundred movements made
By fine devices in his head;

But 'tis the stomach's solid stroke
That tells his being what's o'clock.
If you take off his rhetoric trigger,
He talks no more in trope and figure;
Or clog his mathematic wheel,
His buildings fall, his ship stands still;
Or, lastly, break his politic weight,
His voice no longer rules the state:
Yet, if these finer whims are gone,
Your clock, though plain, will still go on.
But spoil the organ of digestion,

And you entirely change the question,
Alma's affairs no power can mend ;

The jest, alas! is at an end;

Soon ceases all the worldly bustle,
And you consign the corpse to Russel.

(From Alma.)

Alma here symbolises the mind; Quare was a noted watchmaker of the day; Russel, an undertaker, mentioned in Garth's Dispensary. The best edition of Prior's Poems is by Mr Brimley Johnsor (2 vols. 1892), and there is a good selection by Mr Austin Dobson (1889). See also articles in the Contemporary Review for May 1890, and the Quarterly Review for October 1899.

THE AGE OF

QUEEN ANNE.

HE death of Dryden in 1700 and the appearance of Thomson's Winter in 1726 make the best boundary-marks for the so-called Augustan age of English literature, which is likewise styled the age of Queen Anne, although it really includes also the reign of George I. It is true that the activity and influence of the greatest poet of the period extended far beyond the latter limit, for Pope lived on till near the middle of the century, and his Dunciad, Essay on Man, and Satires were all produced during the reign of George II. The same is true in a measure of Swift, who died a month after the battle of Prestonpans, as well as of some minor men like Gay, whose Fables and Beggar's Opera in their dates of publication just overpass the line here drawn. Yet that line seems on the whole as little arbitrary as possible, since the appearance of Thomson marks the beginning of the slow return to nature in poetry, which, despite its lingering conventionalism, shows a nascent reaction against the limited ideals of correctness associated with the name of Pope. Moreover, the great bulk of the definitely Augustan literature had been produced before the end of 1726. All the work of Addison and Steele, and all the greatest work of Swift from the Tale of a Tub down to Gulliver's Travels, as well as Pope's Essay on Criticism, Rape of the Lock, and Homer, were given to the world within what is roughly the first quarter of the eighteenth century; and the same holds good of the novels of Defoe. It is perhaps not insignificant that the dividing line thus drawn in literature may be traced also in the sphere of public affairs, for in the few years before 1726 the generation of statesmen which had flourished under Queen Anne made way for their successors. Stanhope, Sunderland, Marlborough, and Cowper had died between 1720 and 1723: in that latter year Atterbury was exiled, and Bolingbroke extinguished by pardon and return from banishment, while Oxford ended his days in 1724. The close of the first twenty-six years of the eighteenth century may be said, indeed, to coin

cide with the critical point of the transition from Pope and Swift to Thomson and Richardson and Fielding, and also from the contemporaries of Harley and St John to those of Walpole and the Pelhams.

The epithet Augustan, so often applied to the period of Queen Anne, suggests a parallel with the age of Virgil and Horace which can only partially be justified. Assuredly there was no Virgil among the poets of eighteenth-century England, and if Pope may be accepted as all we have for an English Horace, he must be taken as but a maimed one at the best. With a sharper satiric genius than the Roman, and almost as shrewd a knowledge of human life and character, he has none of the geniality that delights us in the Epistles, and as little of the lyric charm that gives immortality to the Odes. The Horatian quality in the age of Queen Anne is to be sought rather in the work of Addison, and not in Addison's verse but in his prose. The papers of the Spectator, in their delightful and always genial mingling of humour, satire, and observation, show all the best of Horace's traits, except of course the purely poetical, while at the same time they are absolutely unstained by the characteristically Horatian blots. As for the sinister and solitary genius of Swift, there is no parallel to that in any literary age whatever. In the creator of the Struldbrugs and the Yahoos there was certainly little of that urbanity which is reckoned as a specially Augustan trait; and indeed the literary urbanity of the age of Anne is to be found less in the gracious tone of a polished civilisation than in an absorption in the artificial life of what had come to be called 'the town.' Virgil and Horace are always at home-and even most at home-in the country; but it is not so with Swift or Pope, or even, despite his Shepherd's Week of pastorals, with Gay. Here again, however, an exception must be made for Addison, who is as much at his ease in Worcestershire as in the Strand, and whose portrait of Sir Roger de Coverley recalls Horace's pictures of the farmers among the Samnite hills.

On the other hand, there are one or two

particulars in which the age of Queen Anne on the literary side did really resemble that of Augustus. It was an age of comparative repose and contentment and prosperity after civil disquiet, and an age too in which letters were splendidly encouraged by the great. The peculiar development of literary patronage due to the Revolution has been considered on a former page, and here it will suffice to say that in no other period has English literature owed so much to the imitators of Mæcenas; so that even Pope, who thanked Homer alone for his pecuniary independence, was indebted to Harley and St John for his social position, while Addison's essays procured him a Secretaryship of State. It has to be added, however, that the end of the period saw the decline of the political patronage of letters under Walpole's unromantic régime. That shrewd opportunist was quick to perceive that the consolidation of the Whig oligarchy had made literary aid superfluous to the administration. Not clever satire or pamphleteering but crafty political management was needed to sustain the Minister's majority, and so under Walpole English literature passed into those gloomy decades through which Fielding and Johnson struggled.

The statement that the age of Queen Anne was one of comparative repose and content may seem paradoxical in face of the fact that it was occupied by a long foreign war, by constant Jacobite intrigue, and by the conflict of fierce political factions. Yet the war, illustrated by the victories of Marlborough, was brilliantly successful, and served to overshadow the Jacobite intriguing, while the strife of Whigs and Tories, with all its bitterness, was far less violent than the civil broils of the later Stuart reigns or even of the time of William III. The great majority of the people were undoubtedly more contented with their political lot than they had been since the years immediately succeeding the Restoration. They were ruled now not by a real or suspected Papist, or a Dutch intruder, but by a native sovereign of the old line, fervently attached to the national Church. The constitution and the succession had been settled, the danger from Scotland was peacefully avoided by the Union of 1707, and every year the Tower guns were sounding the news of glorious victories over the French. It would seem that the nation was really very little troubled by fears of Jacobitism, and it is significant at least that, so far as its abiding literature gives evidence, there might almost have been no such

thing as Jacobitism at all. Of the Tory revivalpromoted largely perhaps by the publication of Lord Clarendon's great History in 1704-7there are traces in plenty, especially in the jeux d'esprit of Arbuthnot and the voluminous pamphleteering of Swift, though even this revival has left no such mark on our literature as the terrible factions of Charles II.'s time have done in the satires of Dryden. But for Jacobitism one must turn to the subterranean literature of the time-to secret memoirs and libellous broadsheets and clandestine correspondence, or at the best to such unread tracts of Defoe as And what if the Pretender should come? or Hannibal at the Gate. England in truth was almost as hopeful and as well satisfied with herself in the reign of Queen Anne as in the reign of Queen Victoria; and although her self-consciousness did not issue, as in the case of Augustan Rome, in a great national epic or history, it is sufficiently evident in the optimism of Pope, the easy good-humour of Addison, and even the mordant activity of Swift.

Passing from these general aspects to some of the particular features of the age, one may note that in poetry it consummated the effort after orderliness and correctness which had followed as a natural reaction upon the licentious degeneracy of Elizabethan vigour. Of that consummation Pope of course was the grand agent, and his influence is seen in all the minor poets (some of them little more than his satellites) from Gay and Parnell down to Fenton and Broome. A fresh reaction against the excess of convention and correctness was of course inevitable, and the return to nature, which at first and for long was made with reverent loyalty to the authority of Pope, has been discerned by some in the poems of the Countess of Winchilsea, who would thus be a very small and early herald of Thomson. In the drama the Restoration comic model lingered on in the work of Farquhar till 1707, but was gradually supplanted by the sentimental comedy, wherein Steele, the first effective moraliser of the stage, was succeeded by Colley Cibber. Tragedy was continued mainly by Nicholas Rowe, a very much weaker and purer Otway; but the entire lack of aptitude for the poetic drama was most signally shown in Addison's Cato, the production of which, in the year of the Treaty of Utrecht, was one of its conspicuous literary events. Rowe and Addison are far more notable in other regards the one as the first critical editor of Shakespeare (fol

lowed ere long by Pope himself and Theobald), and the other as the earliest popular and sympathetic critic of Milton. English literary criticism may almost be said to begin with the Spectator, which led the way in its attempt to show and explain to intelligent men and women at large the methods and merits of a classic English writer. The age, indeed, was essentially though crudely critical, as beseemed a generation that made correctness the main poetic virtue; and its bent in this direction is to be seen in the sallies of the Scriblerus Club, the bitter war of Pope against the dunces, and the frenzies of Mr John Dennis.

Swift is the greatest name of the period in prose, and infinitely the greatest master of satire in the language. His style shows the highest reach of that essentially pamphleteering manner which in its plain directness of appeal to the multitude had always maintained a contrast to the academic manner as developed in different varieties by Bacon, Hooker, and Browne. As an influence on English prose, however, he has been second to Addison, who simplified and perfected what one may call the gentlemanly style affected by Sir William Temple. Hardly any development in English literature has been so momentous as that which was begun by the Tatler in 1709, and continued by the more famous Spectator (1711) and the Guardian (1713). Not only did these papers mark the rise of periodical writing, and give a fresh start and a new form to the English essay, but they also did more than anything else to spread a knowledge and love of literature among the middle classes, to diffuse an atmosphere of politeness and culture, and offer a model of easy and unaffected expression. At the same time the art of epistolary writing made a great advance in the hands of Pope and Swift, and above all of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the first of whose charming letters from the East was written in 1717. Soon afterwards, between 1719 and 1724, came the tales of Daniel Defoe, beginning with Robinson Crusoe, and marking a preliminary stage in the evolution of the English novel.

A few other prose-writers in different fields deserve a word of notice. The works of Lord Bolingbroke, one of the great political figures of the age, were mostly written and published long afterwards; but his Letter to Sir William Wyndham, composed in 1717, shows his essentially oratorical style almost at its best.

In

1711 the third Lord Shaftesbury had published the Characteristics, a collection of philosophical essays in stately and somewhat too rhetorical prose. Shaftesbury has often been ranked as one of the Deists, an active and notable band of controversialists in their day, though now half-forgotten. Their leaders were such men as Toland, Tindal, Woolston, and Anthony Collins, and their attacks on revelation raised a fierce controversy, which was begun by the Nonjuror Leslie so early as 1697, and culminated perhaps in the encounter of Anthony Collins and Bentley in 1713. The polemical monuments of Deism are not of great literary interest, but the movement is noteworthy as showing the change of the ecclesiastical battleground from the old question of Papal supremacy which had occupied the attention of combatants in the century before. It is important also because of the effect it had on French speculation through the agency of Voltaire, whose memorable sojourn in England began just at the end of this period, in 1726. A loftier and rarer spirit than most of those engaged in the Deistical controversy was Bishop Berkeley, famous in metaphysics as the exponent of an extreme idealism, but mentionable here mainly for the literary grace of dialogues like Hylas and Philonous, which are the most successful adaptations in our language of the manner and method of Plato. Externally the Church was strong, prosperous, and even aggressive in the reign of Queen Anne, while among its ministers were some of the most brilliant intellects of the age-notably Atterbury and Swift. It was already, however, very largely affected by a practical if not a dogmatic rationalism, which was to prevail for more than a century, until the romantic and Tractarian movements had ended the reign of common-sense. An eccentric but not an insignificant phenomenon was the career of the wayward Whiston, who managed to combine Arianism with supernaturalism, and was in consequence deprived of the Cambridge professorship, in which he had succeeded Newton. Outside the bounds of the Establishment the same rationalising tendency is apparent; and it was in the reign of Queen Anne that the Unitarian sect in England (not then consciously rationalist) had its beginning out of the isolated congregations-many of them Presbyterianwhich in the preceding half-century had left the Anglican Church.

Jonathan Swift.

It is not at all uncommon for the lives of men of letters to be comparatively uninteresting, or to possess interest only or mainly in connection with their works. But there are certain notable exceptions, and perhaps the greatest of these exceptions is the case of Jonathan Swift. One of the greatest names in English or in any literature, he presents likewise a 'human document' of the most interesting and in part puzzling kind; while he also exercised no small influence upon the public fortunes of his country as well as upon the private fates of his friends. He was born in Hoey's Court, Dublin, on 30th November 1667; he spent by far the greater part of his life in Ireland, and was most intimately and momentously connected with its affairs; yet he was only an Irishman by the accident of the time and place of his birth, and his characteristics were not in the slightest degree Irish-in fact, few of the distinguished men of the three kingdoms have been more thoroughly Eng

own infancy was passed with a nurse at Whitehaven, but he returned to Ireland at three years old, and was educated by his uncle Godwin at Kilkenny Grammar-school (the best in Ireland, with Congreve for a schoolfellow, and then at Trinity College, Dublin. It is said (with the confirmation of his own admissions, or rather frank assertions) that he showed not only no cleverness as a boy or young man, but not even the scatterbrained idleness which sometimes preludes genius.

lish in blood. The Swifts themselves were of Yorkshire origin, but Jonathan's grandfather was a royalist parson in Herefordshire, most active in the king's cause during the rebellion, and sorely punished by the triumphant party. He married Elizabeth Dryden, first cousin to the poet's father, who brought Cumberland and Northants blood into the strain; and Swift's own mother was Abigail Erick or Herrick, a kinswoman of the author of the Hesperides, and of a Leicestershire family who traced themselves back to the most distinguished Saxon ancestry. In the generation before Swift's birth his uncles had established themselves chiefly in Ireland; and his father obtained the position of Steward of the King's Inns in Dublin, but died before his son's birth, leaving his wife and a baby girl in very poor circumstances. Part of Swift's

It is at least interesting to note that his two great kinsmen on different sides of the tree were also very late in showing what was in them. At any rate, the termination of Swift's career at college mortified himself very much.

At Easter 1685 he failed to satisfy the examiners in two out of three necessary subjects -a failure which in the ordinary course would have apparently kept him back a whole year. But a sort of back-door was

provided speciali gratiâ, as it was called, for unfortunates in this plight; and Swift, it seems, was allowed to avail himself of it in February 1686. He could hardly,

however, be said to be starting in life with flying colours, and some pecuniary misfortunes of his uncle Godwin's made things very black for him. He was therefore compelled to accept, towards the end of 1689, the offer of a position in the household of the well-known essayist and diplomatist Sir William Temple, whose wife, Dorothy Osborne, was a distant relation of Swift's mother, and who was now living in retirement at Moor Park in Surrey. The 'menial' character of this position has been much exaggerated. The practice by which men of gentle birth and the best education became 'servants' to men better fortuned, though not better born or bred, than themselves was of very old date, and had increased rather than diminished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries owing to the