plainly hinted by one who claims to belong to the ingenious Fraternity' of News-Writers, that when there was no news from Brussels or Lisbon to copy, it was manufactured ad hoc. 'The Case of these Gentlemen is, I think, more hard than that of the Soldiers, considering that they have taken more Towns, and fought more Battles. They have been upon Parlies and Skirmishes, when our Armies have lain still; and given the General Assault to many a Place, when the Besiegers were quiet in their Trenches. They have made us Masters of several strong Towns many weeks before our Generals could do it; and compleated Victories, when our greatest Captains have been glad to come off with a drawn Battle. Where Prince Eugene has slain his Thousands, Boyer [of the Post-Boy] has slain his Ten Thousands. This Gentleman can indeed be never enough commended for his Courage and Intrepidity during this whole War: He has laid about him with an inexpressible Fury, and, like the offended Marius of ancient Rome, made such Havock among his Countrymen, as must be the Work of two or three Ages to repair. It must be confessed, the Redoubted Mr Buckley [of the Daily Courant] has shed as much Blood as the former; but I cannot forbear saying, (and I hope it will not look like Envy) that we regard our Brother Buckley as a kind of Drawcansir, who spares neither Friend or Foe, but generally kills as many of his own Side as the Enemy's.' Whether this passage, with its distinction of phrasing and its delicate irony, revealed to any of its readers the fact that a new force had arisen in English Literature, is not recorded. But its length as an extract, and its appearance here, may be justified by the explanation that it is quoted word for word from No. 18 of the Tatler for Saturday, May 21, 1709, and, with its context, constitutes the first acknowledged contribution of Joseph Addison to the recently-established paper of his inventive friend and schoolmate Richard Steele. Moreover, it may even claim to be the first example of another gift of the Eighteenth Century to English Letters. When, five or six weeks earlier, Captain Steele, casting about for some literary project to combine the Latest Foreign News (of which, as Queen Anne's Gazetteer, he had a certain monopoly) with the Latest Gossip of the Coffee-Houses, had hit upon the idea of a little tri-weekly sheet about the size of the Courant, which should The be rather more critical and literary than the hand-to-mouth productions of your Boyers and Buckleys he had builded better than he knew. He was himself a clever man, with a warm heart and a ready pen, and his 'Letter of Intelligence,' even before its eighteenth number had been reached, fully deserved the credit of a fresh departure. But it was not until Addison became, as he did eventually, a regular contributor, that Steele's new enterprise grew to include a new form of writing. It was when the scholarly Secretary to Lord Wharton commenced to print in it the delightful La Bruyère-like studies of Tom Folio and Ned Softly and the Political Upholsterer, the Adventures of a Shilling, and the Rabelaisian Frozen Voices, that a new thing began to be born which was the Essay of Addison and Steele. finished and careful papers of Addison reacted upon those of his editor, whom they stimulated to a higher ambition, as well as to an elegance, a purity, and a correctness (the words are Steele's own) which, when he set out to 'observe upon the Manners of the Pleasurable, as well as the Busie Part of Mankind,' in addition to giving 'the ordinary Occurrences of common Journals of News,' had not formed part of his original project. Presently he himself went on to rival his friend upon his own ground; and, always a pioneer, to anticipate by some charming domestic scenes, of which he possessed the secret, the function of the Novel that was coming. In the Spectator, which followed the Tatler as a daily issue, the evolution of the Essay continued. In his graver Saturday papers Addison began to preach those admirable lay-sermons that justify Mandeville in calling him 'a parson in a tyewig,' and in his occasional discourses on Wit, Imagination, Milton, the Old Ballads, and so forth, to apply, in critical form, the results of those earlier studies of the classics and the French critics in which he had been serving an unsuspected apprenticeship to letters. Steele, too, digressed successfully in that ChristianHero vein of his days at the Tower Guard, producing, with a gravity which was perfectly genuine and sincere, numerous disquisitions upon Death, Devotion, Benevolence, Solitude, and Ambition; and exhibiting, but more rarely, his admirable gift as an impressionist critic of Art and the Stage. Finally, in endless sketches of contemporary manners and individual types, and particularly in the unrivalled Coverley series—which again foreshadows the coming fiction-the two friends contrived, with de lightful good-humour, to rally, ridicule, and instruct their age. The partnership was continued to the conclusion of a third paper, the Guardian, when it ceased. (October 1713) the Essay, as But by this date But by this date a branch of that 'ingenious way of Miscellaneous Writing' upon the introducer of which Lord Shaftesbury invokes ironic benediction, had found its special form, a form admirably adapted for short swallow-flights of criticism, for humorous character-drawing, and for social satire. It was produced, after Addison and Steele, by many inferior 'hands;' but, for the present, we may leave it until it was revived, with a personal note and renewed ability, under the pens of Goldsmith and Johnson. In the first years of Queen Anne, a hush seems to have fallen upon the poets; and, save for a rumbling epic or so by Blackmore, and a worthless miscellany by Wycherley, the Muses might have been in exile with the Stuarts. | Addison, indeed, put forth his over-praised Campaign. Prior, too, was forced by piracy into a premature appearance; but his full-dress revelation was not made until Anne had been for four years indubitably dead. Oddly enough, it is with the Spectator that is connected the first notable effort of that superlative artificer who, for more than three decades to come, held the first place in English verse, and influenced its voice for a longer period still. Towards the end of 1711, Addison reviewed, and certainly not, on this occasion, with 'faint praise,' what he termed a Master-piece in its Kind.' It was the work of a youth of twenty, named Alexander Pope, and aimed at occupying, in English, much the same ground as the Ars Poetica of Horace, or perhaps to speak more precisely-the Art Poétique of Boileau, with this difference, that while Horace and the French critic kept their precepts for their maturity, their English imitator, when he proceeded a metrical legislator, was only just out of his teens. Naturally enough, Pope's work was a cento, but it was a cento of extraordinary ingenuity; and Mr Spectator, from his fullbottomed wig, might justifiably nod Olympian approval of the skill with which the youthful poet's couplets were made to exemplify the errors they condemned. The lines These Equal Syllables alone require, been very much admired in an Ancient Poet'-praise which fully justified Mr Pope in offering to Steele's periodical his next performance, the 'sacred Eclogue' entitled The Messiah (Spectator, No. 378), which he had modelled upon Virgil's Pollio. Much of his subsequent work, of which it is not here the place to speak, was of this imitated or adapted kind. But the precocious Essay on Criticism must have made it abundantly clear to every reader of intelligence that its author had already entered the arena fully armed as a metrist, and needed nothing but a theme to his hand. During his long literary activity, he was fortunate enough, on more than one occasion, to find such a theme. He found it in the flawless jewel-work of the Rape of the Lock; he found it in the terrible Epic of the Dunces; he found it, unanswerably and triumphantly, in the Moral Essays and the Satires and Epistles. Lastly, with leave of all the Bentleys, alive or dead, he found it in that paraphrase of Homer, which has stimulated more Homer-lovers than the critics would care to count. It may be true that his version is 'a pretty poem, but must not be called Homer;' it may be true that it ishalf-pretence, Where Wits, not Heroes, prove their Skill in Fence, And great Achilles' Eloquence doth show As if no Centaur trained him, but Boileau !but it is, at least, a magnificent performance, which, as one of Pope's own rivals, Professor Conington, has admitted, by the 'calm, majestic flow' of its language, carries on its readers' as irresistibly as Homer's own could do, were they born readers of Greek;' and fills their minds 'with a conception of the heroic age, not indeed strictly true, but almost as near the truth as that which was entertained by Virgil himself.' It was in this prolonged and tedious task that Pope perfected the heroic couplet which he had caught from Dryden, and which is his chief present to his own time, and to posterity. Like Johnson, he has suffered from the public impatience begotten of imitators who only copied his defects; and it may perhaps be granted, even by a devotee, that his style, like the style of Macaulay, grows wearisome if taken in immoderate doses. But it is easy to select, from the Epistle to Arbuthnot alone, dozens of passages which, in spite of the apparently mechanic art of the metre, it would be difficult to better, either for conciseness, or directness, or curious felicity of phrase. Much of Pope's work is but a rhythmical exemplification of Addison's dictum (after Boileau) in the review of the Essay on Criticism, 'that Wit and Fine Writing doth not consist so much in advancing Things that are new, as in giving Things that are known an agreeable Turn-in other words, it is concerned less with the revelation of the unattempted or the unimagined in emotion, than with the expression, in a given form - of verse, and with faultless perspicuity and finish, of the ordinary ideas in circulation at the time. But this studiously-controlled ambition by no means precluded the production of very noble and dignified utterances, as the Epistle to Arbuthnot-to take that example again will readily testify. Indeed, it is difficult to read the closing paragraphs, or the splendid lines beginning, 'Not Fortune's Worshipper, nor Fashion's Fool' (quoted below at page 189), without wondering upon what ground it can ever have been debated whether Pope was really a poet. From Young to Cowper, the heroic couplet on the Pope model remained the recognised metre of the century, and, as might be expected, it was largely employed for the social satire in which he had won his greenest laurels. Among his contemporaries were more than one poet who, without being exactly imitative, certainly showed signs of subjection to the trick of the time. Prior, who was Pope's • senior, and a better scholar, followed the fashion of adaptation by versifying Exodus and Ecclesiastes, and by clothing in a straitlaced and high-heeled Queen Anne costume the fine old Not-Browne Maid. But his services to poetry were happily not limited to this. In his 'loose and hasty scribble' of Alma and in his Tales in the French manner, he added flexibility to the cramp Hudibrastics of Butler; his genuine Horatian note gave gaiety and grace to a dozen minor pieces; he reproduced in Down Hall and the Thief and the Cordelier with marked ability the anapestic ballad measure of the King and the Abbot of Canterbury, and he stands in the front rank of English epigrammatists. Moreover, in the lines To a Child of Quality, he set the tune of that half-gay, halfgrave familiar verse which, in this country-despite the depressing definition of M. Littré-we are content to class as vers de société. of Pope's contemporaries was Gay, Another a more sedulous disciple of his illustrious friend, but who, nevertheless, besides some pretty songs that sing, contrived to enrich his age with the long-popular Ballad-opera, and to equip it with a form of Fable which, while it fell short of the supreme art of La Fontaine, was still a convenient, workable vehicle. Nor must it be forgotten that, in Mr Pope's Welcome from Greece (i.e. from translating the Iliad), he anticipated and employed, with unexpected success, the ottava rima of Ariosto afterwards made popular by Frere and by Byron's Beppo. Who, for example, would imagine that the following octave, with its note of modernity, comes from the pen of the author of Trivia and the Shepherd's Week!— I see two lovely sisters, hand in hand, The fair haired Martha and Teresa brown; Madge Bellenden, the tallest of the land; And smiling Mary, soft and fair as down. Yonder I see the chearful Duchess stand, For friendship, zeal, and blithsome humours known: Whence that loud shout in such a hearty strain? Why, all the Hamiltons are in her train. Of the remaining Pope group (not school), none gave any new thing to English verse-craft, and their achievements may be left to the separate accounts which follow. Pope survived them all save Swift, and Swift's last years were deathin-life. It was with the Essay of Addison and Steele that more for the sake of continuity than of logic-we endeavoured to link the early poetry of Pope. But the connection of the first appearances of modern prose fiction with a paper in the Englishman stands less in need of apology. In December 1713 Steele gave an account from his own knowledge of a certain morose Alexander Selkirk or Selcraig of Largo, who had lived for more than four years alone in the island of Juan Fernandez. Similar cases, both real and feigned, were not unknown. Witness, as an instance of the former, Dampier's record of the Mosquito Indian whom Watling had left behind on the same island in 1681. But there is small doubt that to the story of Selkirk, as told by Steele, Captain Woodes Rogers, and others, Daniel Defoe, already referred to as the writer of the Review of the Affairs of France, was indebted for the germ of the remarkable book which he issued in April 1719, with the title of the Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. 1719 Defoe was in his sixtieth year. He had been many things-journalist, pamphleteer, political agent, traveller, tradesman, brickmaker, projector, and prisoner in Newgate. He had an inexhaustible store of miscellaneous reading; he delighted especially in travels and adventures; he had extraordinary aptitude for minute and realistic detail; he had an indefatigable habit of the pen. For all these gifts the experiences of Selkirk, as developed in Robinson Crusoe, afforded a favourable field, while its very limitations and restrictions tended to control and concentrate his 'thick-coming fancies.' Moreover, it is supposed that certain affinities-of which too much may easily be made, but which he certainly desired should be recognised -between the circumstances of his imagined castaway and his own solitary and self-reliant career, gave a subjective note to his work, which, save in the Farther Adventures and the Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, it does not attain elsewhere. It is certainly not equally It is certainly not equally perceptible in Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders, Roxana, and the rest of the fictitious narratives that followed his admitted masterpiece, books which are nevertheless characterised by the same exactitude of trivial particulars, the same intentional negligences and repetitions, the same homely, pedestrian, and even flat phraseology. For the most part, they are chronicles of such careers as, in real life, would have fallen to the recording pen of the Ordinary of Newgate, from whose historiographic efforts they differ mainly by their greater variety of incident, their practised pencraft, and their faculty (in their writer's own words) of forging a story.' In this last art Defoe is unrivalled. By the mental stenography and systematic stocktaking of a lifetime, he had accumulated so vast a reserve of facts and illustrations that, in the absence of anything to 'report,' in journalistic phrase, he could concoct a report of such astounding verisimilitude that to this day it remains debatable whether some of his performances are true, or partly true, or not true at all, in the sense that the events which they profess to narrate were never combined in the experiences of one and the same individual. From the fact that Hogarth makes Moll Flanders the chosen literature of his 'Idle Apprentice,' it may be presumed that many of what Lamb calls the 'secondary' fictions of Defoe, though professedly didactic in their intention, were directed at readers not more illustrious than the apple-woman whom Borrow's Lavengro found studying the same absorbing work on London Bridge. But there were other reasons why they might be expected to appeal to the people more than to the cultivated classes. It was Defoe's boast that his tales were true histories, always an additional attraction to the humbler reader; and that, being true, they had no connection with such novels and romances as then existed. It was not with the Oroonoko of the warm-blooded Aphra Behn, or the Cassandra of the sempiternal Sieur de la Calprenède, that he wished them to be compared: his fitter analogue in unrelieved veracity, had he sought for it, would have been more easily found in Bunyan's sombre and relentless Life and Death of Mr Badman. But if, in addition to his singular gift of 'lying like truth,' he had combined with his work any appreciable plot to be unravelled or problem to be solved; if he had included any material admixture of passion, or any delineation of the domestic life of his day, he might fairly have claimed-what is sometimes claimed for him-to rank as the Father of the English Novel. These things, however, he did not do. His invented biographies of rogues and pirates and bona robas differ from those which are not invented only in being fictitious as wholes; and they no more entitle their author to priority in fiction as we now understand it than if he had been the author of the wonderful book-not a little indebted to his own Robinson Crusoe-which seventeen years later was given to the world by the maimed and melancholy genius of Jonathan Swift. Gulliver's Travels, that unique and unclassable masterpiece, must be left for treatment in the special pages on Swift that follow. In tracing the history of the Novel, it is nevertheless impossible not to refer to it, if only on account of the circumstantiality in fiction in which Swift rivals Defoe; but it has little or nothing to do with the development of the form. But That development came suddenly and unexpectedly, nine years after Defoe had been laid to rest in the Dissenters' burial-ground at Bunhill Fields. And it came from a most unhopeful source. It would have been as easy to predict that a middle-aged printer should become the author of Pamela as that a sexagenarian journalist should sit down and write Robinson Crusoe. There are indeed certain superficial resemblances between Richardson and Defoe. Both belonged to the lower middle classes; both posed as moralists; both wrote the English of common speech; both were circumstantial in manner and copious in style. But there the likeness ends. If Defoe gives little evidence of constructive intention, Richardson, on the contrary (at his best), works steadily to a foregone conclusion; if Defoe cares nothing for the affections, Richardson, on his side, is intensely preoccupied with them; if Defoe eschews sentiment and tearful emotion, Richardson revels in both, and cries as he writes. The one discovered an uninhabited island, the other the very-much-inhabited female heart; and, as far as the modern novel is concerned, the latter is the more notable achievement. With his wonderfully sympathetic insight into feminine character, Richardson's success might have been more signal if the accidents of his early habits had not led him to conduct his tale by correspondence. His biographer, Mrs Barbauld, holding an honest brief for her author, contends that this is the 'most natural' way, which is arguable; but she is also constrained to admit that it is the 'least probable,' which can scarcely be denied, above all in our day, when letter-writing no longer flourishes. That, notwithstanding his insupportable vehicle -for Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, his remaining novels, are on the same plan as Pamela-Richardson was able to enchain his public, must be attributed partly to the fact that its appetites were more unjaded and less impatient than ours, and partly to the extraordinary manner in which the writer's prolix but cumulative minuteness insensibly and irresistibly compels and subjugates the student who fairly adventures upon the text. But it may safely be affirmed that if no better model of fiction had been found than what Fielding calls the 'epistolary Style,' the early Novel, in spite of its psychology, must have perished speedily of its own perverted method. With Fielding's Joseph Andrews, however, the new form quitted the confined (and slightly stuffy) atmosphere of Richardson's cedar-parlour for the open air and the cheery bustle of the Georgian high-road. The range of Richardson's characters is not great, and in his last two novels he scarcely travels beyond the personages of genteel comedy. But Fielding makes his draft upon Human Nature at large, and crowds his stage with men and women of all sorts and conditions, inclining by choice to the middle and lower classes rather than to 'the highest Life,' which he considers to present 'very little Humour or Entertainment.' With the precise connection of Pamela and Joseph Andrews it is not necessary to deal here, as it is sufficiently discussed hereafter. But, apart from mental analysis, the difference between Richardson and Fielding is practically the difference between Richardson and the modern Novel. Few now write novels in Richardson's fashion. But even to-day many books bear manifest traces of the form that Fielding gave to Tom Jones and Amelia. In the first place, he tells his story directly, in his own person, instead of letting his hero tell it, or allowing his characters to unravel themselves in letters. He pays minute attention to the construction and evolution of his plot, carefully excluding characters and episodes which do not advance the fable or contribute to the end to be attained. Rejecting Sensibility, which he regards as more or less unmanly, he substitutes for it Humour and Irony, in the latter of which attributes he is as great a master as Swift. In his character-drawing he puts forth his full strength. Without much parade of psychology, he manages to make his dramatis personæ extraordinarily real and vivid, placing them before us in their habit as they lived, and with their fitting accessories. Finally, while painting Humanity as he finds it, by no means composed of 'Models of Perfection,' but rather of very frail and fallible personalities, he is careful no doubt with perfect sincerity-to proclaim a moral purpose. The main objects. of his satire, he declares, are Vanity and Hypocrisy. It is his intention to exhibit Vice as detestable, and never successful. It is his proclaim a moral purpose. sincere endeavour,' he affirms in the Dedication of Tom Jones, 'to recommend Goodness and Innocence,' and to promote the cause of religion and virtue. Perhaps, in these more decorous days, it is sometimes difficult to see that he has rigorously adhered to his principles; but, in any case, when fair allowance is made for altered times and manners, his programme differs but little, in plan and purpose, from the plan and purpose of the modern novel. There are, indeed, but two characteristics in which he has not always been imitated by later practitioners of the art. In the first place, he writes, in general, most excellent, unlaboured English-simple and clear and strong the English of a gentleman and a scholar. Secondly, it is his peculiarity to introduce each fresh division of his book by an initial chapter (probably suggested by the Chorus of Greek drama), in which, in his own person, he gossips pleasantly about his method and his characters. To his admirers these pro |