occasioned by a Picture of the Trial of Charles I.,' in which lines such as the following occur,— Such boding thoughts did guilty conscience dart, A pledge of hell to dying Cromwell's heart! Tickell's version of the first book of the Iliad has been already noticed. Among his other poems, which are not numerous, I find only two worth naming-the ballad of 'Colin and Lucy,' and the memorial lines upon Addison. The ballad is pretty, but the story improbable; Colin having jilted Lucy, she dies of a broken heart; the coffin containing her remains meets the marriage procession; the faithless Colin is struck with remorse, and dies immediately; they occupy the same grave. Do not these lines sound like an echo from our nurseries? I hear a voice you cannot hear, Which says I must not stay; 27. The unhappy history of Richard Savage has been detailed at length by Dr. Johnson in one of the longest and most masterly of his poetical biographies.1 His life and character were blighted by the circumstances of his birth and rearing. To these he refers only too plainly and pointedly in his poem of The Bastard, a very forcible piece of writing containing a line often quoted : He lives to build, not boast, a generous race; No tenth transmitter of a foolish face. His principal work was The Wanderer, a moral or didactic poem in five cantos (1729), containing many materials and rudiments of thought, half worked up as it were, which one recognizes again, transformed after passing through the fiery crucible of a great mind, in Pope's Essay on Man. Savage, like most of the English poets of the eighteenth century, employed the heroic metre for the majority of his compositions, dazzled by the glory and success with which Dryden and Pope had employed it. 28. John Dyer, who after failing as a painter became a clergyman late in life, is, or was, known as the author of Grongar Hill (1727) and The Fleece (1757). The latter is in blank verse, and totally worthless; the former, however, is a pretty poem of description and reflection, breathing that intoxicating sense of natural beauty which never fails to awaken in us some sympathy, and an answering feeling of reality. These lines may serve as a specimen :— Ever charming, ever new, When will the landscape tire the view? The fountain's fall, the river's flow, The woody valleys warm and low, 1 Lives of the Poets. The pleasant seat, the ruined tower, As pearls upon an Ethiop's arm. 29. Ambrose Philips, a Cambridge man and a zealous Whig, became a hack writer in London. His Six Pastorals are rubbish; nevertheless they were dogmatically praised, probably on party grounds, by Steele in the Guardian. This was in the year 1713. Pope, who some years before had published pastorals that were really worth something, but had attracted scarcely any notice, in a later Guardian, No. 40, ironically continued in the same tone, but by instituting a regular comparison between his own pastorals and those of Philips, exposed effectually the silliness and emptiness of the latter. Philips, when he had discovered the cheat, was exceedingly angry, and is said to have hung up a rod at Button's (the club frequented by Addison), with which he threatened to chastise Pope. Thereby he but increased his punishment; for Pope not only got Gay to write the burlesque mentioned above, in ridicule of the Six Pastorals, but affixed to his enemy the nickname of Nambypamby Philips,' which is too just and appropriate ever to be forgotten while Philips himself is remembered. Ambrose also wrote the tragedy of The Distressed Mother, founded on the Andromaque of Racine; this is named with partial praise by Addison in No. 335 of the Spectator; it is the play which Sir Roger de Coverley sees performed on the night of his visit to the theatre. 30. John Philips wrote the Splendid Shilling, a mock-heroic poem in blank verse, in which the design of parodying the Paradise Lost is apparent. Cider and Blenheim are also in blank verse, a preference due to the author's serious admiration of the English epic. In fact, he seems to have been the earliest genuine literary admirer of Milton 31. Isaac Watts, educated as a Dissenter, was employed for some years as an Independent minister; but his health failed, and he was received into the house of a generous friend, Sir Thomas Abney of Stoke Newington, where he spent the last thirty-six years of his life. He is the author of three books of Lyric Poems, or Hora Lyricæ, mostly of a devotional and serious cast, though the friend of the Revolution and Hanoverian succession comes out strongly here and there; and of Divine Songs, for children. His Hymns and Spiritual Songs are the well-known Watts's Hymns.' 32. Allan Ramsay, of Scotch extraction on his father's, of English on his mother's side, settled in Edinburgh as a wig-maker about the year 1710. He joined a society of wits and literary dilettanti, called the Easy Club; and many of his poems were composed to enliven their social gatherings. The work on which his reputation rests, The Gentle Shepherd, is a story of real country life in Scotland, in the form of a riming pastoral drama. The dialect is the Lowland Scotch, and the sentiments natural and suitable to the persons represented; the story is clearly told, and pleasing in itself; in short, there is nothing to find fault with in the poem; the only thing wanting is that lifegiving touch of genius, which, present alike in the artificial pastorals of Pope and the artless songs of Burns, forbids true poetry to die. Y The Drama, 1700-1745-Addison, Rowe, Thomson, Young, Southern, Steele. Prose Comedy :-Farquhar, Vanbrugh, Cibber, Centlivre; 'The Beggar's Opera.' 33. Since the appearance of Congreve's Mourning Bride, a tragedy of the old school, no tragic work had been produced deserving of mention up to the year 1713. By that time the classic drama of France, the masterpieces of Corneille and Racine, had become thoroughly known and appreciated in England; and, in the absence of any native writers of great original power, it was natural that our dramatists, both in tragedy and comedy, should model their plays upon the French pattern. This is the case with Addison's celebrated tragedy of Cato. It was projected and partly written in the year 1703; but Addison had laid it aside, and only finished and brought it on the stage in 1713, at the urgent request of his political associates. Cato is in form a strictly classic play; the unities are observed, and all admixture of comic matter is avoided, as carefully as in any play of Racine's. The brilliant prologue was written by Pope. The play met with signal success, because it was applauded by both political parties, the Whigs cheering the frequent allusions to liberty and patriotism, the Tories echoing back the cheers, because they did not choose to be thought more friendly to tyranny than their opponents. 34. Rowe produced several tolerable tragedies, one of which, the Fair Penitent (1703), is a re-cast of Massinger's Fatal Dowry. His Jane Shore is an attempt to write a tragedy in the manner of Shakspere. Ulysses and Lady Jane Grey, and a comedy named The Biter, were failures. Thomson, the author of the Seasons, wrote the tragedy of Sophonisba, in the style of Cato. The success of this play is said to have been marred by a ridiculous circumstance. There is an absurdly flat line, Oh Sophonisba ! Sophonisba, O! at the recital of which a wag in the pit called out 2 Oh Jemmy Thomson! Jemmy Thomson, O! The parody was for some days in everyone's mouth, and made the continued representation of the play impossible. Young, the author of the Night Thoughts, wrote several tragedies, 1 See Crit. Sect. ch. I. § 10. 2 Thomson also, wrote the tragedies of Agamemnon (1738) and Tancred and Sigismunda (1745). among which Revenge, produced in 1721, still keeps possession of the stage. 35. Southern, an Irishman, produced, near the beginning of his long career, two tragedies, The Fatal Secret and Oroonoko (1692), which for many years held their place on the stage. He was notorious for his adroitness in dealing with managers and booksellers, whence he is addressed by Pope as Tom, whom Heaven sent down to raise He is praised by Hallam for having been the first English writer to speak with abhorrence, in his Oroonoko, of the slave trade. However, neither the thoughts nor the style of his tragedies rise above the commonplace. 36. Steele's comedies of The Tender Husband and The Conscious Lovers (1721), produced at a long interval of time, achieved a marked success. The plot of the last-named play is slight, and has few or no turns; but there is a good recognition scene at the end. The humour of the editor of the Tatler is not wanting; take for instance this little passage from the fifth act : Myrtle. But is he directly a trader at this time? Cimberton. There is no hiding the disgrace, sir; he trades to all parts of the world. Myrtle. We never had one of our family before, who descended from persons that did anything. 37. The Comedy of Manners,' in prose, of which the first suggestion clearly came from the admirable works of Molière, had been successfully tried, as we have seen, by Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve, in the preceding period. To the same school of writers belonged, in this period, Farquhar, Vanbrugh, and Cibber. Farquhar, a native of Londonderry, is the author of The Constant Couple (1700), Sir Harry Wildair (1701), and The Beaux' Stratagem, the latter written on the bed of sickness to which neglect and want had brought him, and from which he sank into an untimely grave, in his thirtieth year. Sir John Vanbrugh wrote the famous comedies of The Provoked Wife and The Provoked Husband, the latter being left unfinished at his death and completed by Cibber. Colley Cibber, a German by extraction, was not only a dramatist, but an actor and theatrical manager. He has left us, in the Apology for his own Life, published in 1740, an amusing account of his own bustling, frivolous life, as well as of the state of the stage from the Restoration down to his own time, adding life-like sketches of the principal actors and actresses. His play of The Nonjuror (1718), altered by Bickersteth so as to assail the dissenters instead of the Nonjurors, and renamed The Hypocrite, contains the celebrated characters of Dr. Cantwell and Mawworm. Mrs. Centlivre produced a number of comedies in the same period, which commanded a temporary popularity. The best of these (and a truly excellent comedy it is), is A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718); in it first appears that well-known personage, thereal Simon Pure.' As an acting play, the Busy Body has also great merit; one of the characters is an inquisitive meddlesome blundering fellow called Marplot; hence comes that now familiar word. 38. In the work of Cibber just mentioned there is a complaint that the Continental taste for opera had lately extended to England, to the detriment of the legitimate drama. Gay's Beggar's Opera was a clever attempt to gratify this taste by an operatic production truly British in every sense. The subject is the unhappy loves of Captain Macheath, the chief of a gang of highwaymen, and Polly Peachum, the daughter of a worthy who combines the functions of thief-taker and receiver of stolen goods. The attractiveness of the piece was greatly enhanced by the introduction of a number of beautiful popular airs indeed, but for these, the coarseness of the plot and the grossness of much of the language would have ere now condemned it, in spite of all its wit and drollery. There is no recitative, as in a modern opera; its place is supplied by colloquial prose. The opera was first produced, with enormous applause, in 1727. Learning, 1700-1745 :-Bentley, Lardner. ; 39. The greatest of English scholars flourished at the same time with Pope and Swift, and fell under the satire of both. Richard Bentley was a native of Yorkshire, and received his education at Cambridge, where he rose to be Master of Trinity College in 1700. The famous controversy between him and Boyle on the Epistles of Phalaris occurred in the last years of the seventeenth century, but we delayed to notice it until we could present a general view of Bentley's literary career. The dispute arose in this way :-Sir William Temple, taking up the discussion which had been carried on between Boileau and Perrault on the comparative merits of ancient and modern authors, sided with Boileau against the moderns, and, amongst other things, adduced the Epistles of Phalaris (which he supposed to be the genuine production of the tyrant of Agrigentum, who roasted Perillus in a brazen bull) as an instance of a work which in its kind was unapproached by any modern writer. Dr. Aldrich, author of the well-known Treatise on Logic, who |