The death of John Dryden, on the first of May, 1700, closed a period of no small significance in the history of English literature. His faults were many, both as a man and as a poet, but he belongs to the race of the giants, and the impress of greatness is stamped upon his works. No student of Dryden can fail to mark the force and sweep of an intellect impatient of restraint. His 'long-resounding march' reminds us of a turbulent river that overflows its banks, and if order and perfection of art are sometimes wanting in his verse, there is never the lack of power. Unfortunately many of the best years of his life were devoted to a craft in which he was working against the grain. His dramas, with one or two noble exceptions, are comparative failures, and in them he too often

In two prominent respects his influence on his successors is of no slight significance. As a satirist Pope acknowledged the master he was unable to excel, and so did many of the eighteenth century versemen, who appear to have looked upon satire as the beginning and the end of poetry. Moreover Dryden may be regarded, without much exaggeration, as the father of modern prose. Nothing can be more lucid than his style, which is at once bright and strong, idiomatic and direct. He knows precisely what he has to say, and says it in the simplest words. It is the form and not the substance of Dryden's prose to which attention is drawn here. There is a splendour of imagery, a largeness of thought, and a grasp of language in the prose of Hooker, of Jeremy Taylor, and of Milton which is beyond the reach of Dryden, but he has the merit of using a simple form of English free from prolonged periods and classical constructions, and fitted therefore for common use. The wealthy baggage of the prose Elizabethans and their immediate successors was too cumbersome for ordinary travel; Dryden's riches are less massive, but they can be easily carried, and are always ready for service.

In these respects he is the literary herald of a century which, in the earlier half at least, is remarkable in the use it makes of our mother tongue for the exercise of common sense. The Revolution of 1688 produced a change in English politics scarcely more remarkable than the change that took place a little later in English literature and is to be seen in the poets and wits who are known familiarly as the Queen Anne men. It will be obvious to the most superficial student that the gulf which separates the literary period, closing with the death of Milton in 1674, from the first half of the eighteenth century, is infinitely wider than that which divides us from the splendid band of poets and prose writers who made the first twenty years of the present century so famous. There is, for example, scarcely more than fifty years between the publication of Herrick's Hesperides and of Addison's Campaign, between the Holy Living of Taylor and the Tatler of Steele, and less than fifty years between Samson Agonistes, which Bishop Atterbury asked Pope to polish, and the poems of Prior. Yet in that short space not only is the form of verse changed but also the spirit.

Speaking broadly, and allowing for exceptions, the literary merits of the Queen Anne time are due to invention, fancy, and wit, to a genius for satire exhibited in verse and prose, to a regard for correctness of form and to the sensitive avoidance of extremes. The poets of the period are for the most part without enthusiasm, without passion, and without the 'fine madness' which, as Drayton says, should possess a poet's brain. Wit takes precedence of imagination, nature is concealed by artifice, and the delight afforded by these writers is not due to imaginative sensibility. Not even in the consummate genius of Pope is there aught of the magical charm which fascinates us in a Wordsworth and a Keats, in a Coleridge and a Shelley. The prose of the age, masterly though it be, stands also on a comparatively low level. There is much in it to attract, but little to inspire.

The difference between the Elizabethan and Jacobean authors, and the authors of the Queen Anne period cannot be accounted for by any single cause. The student will observe that while the inspiration is less, the technical skill is greater. There are passages in Addison which no seventeenth century author could have written; there are couplets in Pope beyond the reach of Cowley, and that even Dryden could not rival. In these respects the eighteenth century was indebted to the growing influence of French literature, to which the taste of Charles II. had in some degree contributed. One notable expression of this taste may be seen in the tragedies in rhyme that were for a time in vogue, of which the plots were borrowed from French romances. These colossal fictions, stupendous in length and heroic in style, delighted the young English ladies of the seventeenth century, and were not out of favour in the eighteenth, for Pope gave a copy of the Grand Cyrus to Martha Blount.

The return, as in Addison's Cato, to the classical unities, so faithfully preserved in the French drama, was another indication of an influence from which our literature has never been wholly free. That importations so alien to the spirit of English poetry should tend to the degeneration of the national drama was inevitable. For a time, however, the study of French models, both in the drama and in other departments of literature, may have been productive of benefit. Frenchmen knew before we did, how to say what they wanted to say in a lucid style. Dryden, who was open to every kind of influence, bad as well as good, caught a little of their fine tact and consummate workmanship without lessening his own originality; so also did Pope, who, if he was considerably indebted to Boileau, infinitely excelled him. That, in M. Taine's judgment, would have been no great difficulty. 'In Boileau,' he writes, 'there are, as a rule, two kinds of verse, as was said by a man of wit (M. Guillaume Guizot); most of which seem to be those of a sharp school-boy in the third class; the rest those of a good school-boy in the upper division.' And Mr. Swinburne, who holds a similar opinion of the famous French critic's merit, observes, that while Pope is the finest, Boileau is 'the dullest craftsman of their age and school.'[1]

With the author of the Lutrin Addison, unlike Pope, was personally acquainted. Boileau praised his Latin verses, and although his range was limited, like that of all critics lacking imagination, Addison, then a comparatively youthful scholar, was no doubt flattered by his compliments and learnt some lessons in his school. Prior, who acquired a mastery of the language, was also sensitive to French influence, and shows how it affected him by irony and satire. It would be difficult to estimate with any measure of accuracy the effect of French literature on the Queen Anne authors. There is no question that they were considerably attracted by it, but its sway was, I think, never strong enough to produce mere imitative art. While the most illustrious of these men acknowledged some measure of fealty to our 'sweet enemy France,' they were not enslaved by her, and French literature was but one of several influences which affected the literary character of the age. If Englishmen owed a debt to France the obligation was reciprocal. Voltaire affords a prominent illustration of the power wielded by our literature. He imitated Addison, he imitated, or caught suggestions from Swift, he borrowed largely from Vanbrugh, and although, in his judgment of English authors, he made many critical blunders, they were due to a want of taste rather than to a want of knowledge.

A striking contrast will be seen between the position of literary men in the reign of Queen Anne and under her Hanoverian successors. Literature was not thriving in the healthiest of ways in the earlier period, but from the commercial point of view it was singularly prosperous. Through its means men like Addison and Prior rose to some of the highest offices in the service of their country. Tickell became Under-Secretary of State. Steele held three or four official posts, and if he did not prosper like some men of less mark, had no one but himself to blame. Rowe, the author of the Fair Penitent, was for three years of Anne's reign Under-Secretary, and John Hughes, the friend of Addison, who is poet enough to have had his story told by Johnson, had 'a situation of great profit' as Secretary to the Commissions of the Peace. Prizes of greater or less value fell to some men whose abilities were not more than respectable, but under Walpole and the monarch whom he served literature was disregarded, and the Minister was content to make use of hireling writers for whatever dirty work he required; spending in this way, it is said, £50,000 in ten years.

It was far better in the long run for men of letters to be free from the servility of patronage, but there was a wearisome time, as Johnson and Goldsmith knew to their cost, during which authors lost their freedom in another way, and became the slaves of the booksellers. It is pleasant to observe that the last noteworthy act of patronage in the century was one that did honour to the patron without lessening the dignity and independence of the recipient. Literature owes much to the noblest of political philosophers for discovering and fostering the genius of one of the most original of English poets, and every reader of Crabbe will do honour to the generous friendship of Edmund Burke.

II.

The lowest stage in our national history was reached in the Restoration period. The idealists, who had aimed at marks it was not given to man to reach, were superseded by men with no ideal, whether in politics or religion. The extreme rigidity in morals enjoined by State authority in Cromwell's days, when theological pedantry discovered sin in what had hitherto been regarded as innocent, led, among the unsaintly mass of the people, to a hypocrisy even more corrupting than open vice, and the advent of the most publicly dissolute of English kings opened the floodgates of iniquity. The unbridled vice of the time is displayed in the Restoration dramatists, in the Grammont memoirs, in the diary of Pepys, and also in that of the admirable John Evelyn, 'faithful among the faithless.' Charles II. was considered good-natured because his manners, unlike those of his father, were sociable, and unrestrained by Court etiquette. Londoners liked a monarch who fed ducks in St. James's Park before breakfast; but an easy temper did not prevent the king from sanctioning the most unjust and cruel laws, and it allowed him to sell Dunkirk and basely to accept a pension from France. The corruption of the age pervaded politics as well as society, and the self-sacrificing spirit which is the salt of a nation's life seemed for the time extinct among public men.

When Dutch men-of-war appeared at the Nore the confusion was great, but there were few resources and few signs of energy in the men to whom the people looked for guidance. A man conversant with affairs expressed to Pepys his opinion that nothing could be done with 'a lazy Prince, no Council, no money, no reputation at home or abroad,' and Pepys also gives the damning statement which is in harmony with all we know of the king, that he 'took ten times more care and pains in making friends between my Lady Castlemaine and Mrs. Stewart, when they have fallen out, than ever he did to save his kingdom.'

There was nothing in the brief reign of James, a reign for ever made infamous by the atrocious cruelty of Jeffreys, that calls for comment here, but the Revolution, despite the undoubted advantages it brought with it, among which must be mentioned the abolition of the censorship of the press, brought also an element of discord and of political degradation. The change was a good one for the country, but it caused a large number of influential men to renounce on oath opinions which they secretly held, and it led, as every reader of history knows, to an unparalleled amount of double-dealing on the part of statesmen, which began with the accession of William and Mary and did not end until the last hopes of the Jacobites were defeated in 1746. The loss of principle among statesmen, and the bitterness of faction, which seemed to increase in proportion as the patriotic spirit declined, had a baleful influence on the latter days of the seventeenth century and on the entire period covered by the age of Pope. The low tone of the age is to be seen in the almost universal corruption which prevailed, in the scandalous tergiversation of Bolingbroke, and in the contempt for political principle openly avowed by Walpole, who, as Mr. Lecky observes, 'was altogether incapable of appreciating as an element of political calculation the force which moral sentiments exercise upon mankind.'[2]

The enthusiasm and strong passions of the first half of the seventeenth century, which had been crushed by the Restoration, were exchanged for a state of apathy that led to self-seeking in politics and to scepticism in religion. There was a strong profession of morality in words, but in conduct the most open immorality prevailed. Virtue was commended in the bulk of the churches, while Christianity, which gives a new life and aim to virtue, was practically ignored, and the principles of the Deists, whose opinions occupied much attention at the time, were scarcely more alien to the Christian revelation than the views often advocated in the national pulpits. The religion of Christ seems to have been regarded as little more than a useful kind of cement which held society together. The good sense advocated so constantly by Pope in poetry was also considered the principal requisite in the pulpit, and the careful avoidance of religious emotion in the earlier years of the century led to the fervid and too often ill-regulated enthusiasm that prevailed in the days of Whitefield and Wesley. At the same time there appears to have been no lack of religious controversy. 'The Church in danger' was a strong cry then, as it is still. The enormous excitement caused in 1709 by Sacheverell's sermon in St. Paul's Cathedral advocating passive obedience, denouncing toleration, and aspersing the Revolution settlement, forms a striking chapter in the reign of Queen Anne. Extraordinary interest was also felt in the Bangorian controversy raised by Bishop Hoadly, who, in a sermon preached before the king (1717), took a latitudinarian view of episcopal authority, and objected to the entire system of the High Church party.

Queen Caroline, whose keen intellect was allied to a coarseness which makes her a representative of the age, was considerably attracted by theological discussion. She obtained a bishopric for Berkeley, recommended Walpole to read Butler's Analogy, which was at one time her daily companion at the breakfast-table, and made the preferment of its author one of her last requests to the king. She liked well to reason with Dr. Samuel Clarke, 'of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate,' and wished to make him Archbishop of Canterbury, but was told that he was not sufficiently orthodox. Theology was not disregarded under the first and second Georges; it was only religion that had fallen into disrepute. The law itself was calculated to excite contempt for the most solemn of religious services. 'I was early,' Swift writes to Stella, 'with the Secretary (Bolingbroke), but he was gone to his devotions and to receive the sacrament. Several rakes did the same. It was not for piety, but for employment, according to Act of Parliament.'

A glance at some additional features in the social condition of the age will enable us to understand better the character of its literature.

III.

It is a platitude to say that authors are as much affected as other men by the atmosphere which they breathe. Now and then a consummate man of genius seems to stand so much above his age as for all high purposes of art to be untouched by it. Like Milton as a poet, though not as a prose writer, his 'soul is like a star and dwells apart;' but in general, imaginative writers, are intensely affected by the society from which they draw many of their intellectual resources. In the so-called 'Augustan age'[3] this influence would have been felt more strongly than in ours, since the range of men of letters was generally restricted to what was called the Town. They wrote for the critics in the coffee-houses, for the noblemen from whom they expected patronage, and for the political party they were pledged to support.

England during the first half of the eighteenth century was in many respects uncivilized. London was at that time separated from the country by roads that were often impassable and always dangerous. Travellers had to protect themselves as they best could from the attacks of highwaymen, who infested every thoroughfare leading from the metropolis, while the narrow area of the city was guarded by watchmen scarcely better fitted for its protection than Dogberry and Verges. Readers of the Spectator will remember how when Sir Roger de Coverley went to the play, his servants 'provided themselves with good oaken plants' to protect their master from the Mohocks, a set of dissolute young men, who, for sheer amusement, inflicted the most terrible punishments on their victims. Swift tells Stella how he came home early from his walk in the Park to avoid 'a race of rakes that play the devil about this town every night, and slit people's noses,' and he adds, as if party were at the root of every mischief in the country, that they were all Whigs. 'Who has not trembled at the Mohock's name?' is Gay's exclamation in his Trivia; and in that curious poem he also warns the citizens not to venture across Lincoln's Inn Fields in the evening. Colley Cibber's brazen-faced daughter, Mrs. Charke, in the Narrative of her life, describes also with sufficient precision the dangers of London after dark.

The infliction of personal injury was not confined to the desperadoes of the streets. Men of letters were in danger of chastisement from the poets or politicians whom they criticised or vilified. De Foe often mentions attempts upon his person. Pope, too, was threatened with a rod by Ambrose Philips, which was hung up for his chastisement in Button's Coffee-house; and at a later period, when his satires had stirred up a nest of hornets, the poet was in the habit of carrying pistols, and taking a large dog for his companion when walking out at Twickenham.

Weddings within the liberties of the Fleet by sham clergymen, or clergymen confined for debt, were the source of numberless evils. Every kind of deception was practised, and the victims once in the clutches of their reverend captors had to pay heavily for the illegal ceremony. Ladies were trepanned into matrimony, and Smollett in his History observes, that the Fleet parsons encouraged every kind of villainy. It is astonishing that so great an evil in the heart of London should have been allowed to exist so long, and it was not until the Marriage Act of Lord Hardwicke in 1753, which required the publication of banns, that the Fleet marriages ceased. On the day before the Act came into operation three hundred marriages are said to have taken place.[4]

Marriages of a more lawful kind were generally conducted on business principles. Young women were expected to accept the husband selected for them by their parents or guardians, and the main object considered was to gain a good settlement. It was for this that Mary Granville, who is better known as Mrs. Delany, was sacrificed at seventeen to a gouty old man of sixty, and when he died she was expected to marry again with the same object in view. Mrs. Delany detested, with good cause, the commercial estimate of matrimony. Writing, in 1739, to Lady Throckmorton, she says, 'Miss Campbell is to be married to-morrow to my Lord Bruce. Her father can give her no fortune; she is very pretty, modest, well-behaved, and just eighteen, has two thousand a year jointure, and four hundred pin-money; they say he is cross, covetous, and threescore years old, and this unsuitable match is the admiration of the old and the envy of the young! For my part I pity her, for if she has any notion of social pleasures that arise from true esteem and sensible conversation, how miserable must she be.'[5]

Girls dowered with beauty or with fortune were not always suffered to marry in this humdrum fashion. Abduction was by no means an imaginary peril. Mrs. Delany tells the story of a lady in Ireland, from whom she received the relation, who was entrapped in her uncle's house, carried off by four men in masks, and treated in the most brutal manner. And in 1711 the Duke of Newcastle, having become acquainted with a design for carrying off his daughter by force, was compelled to ask for a guard of dragoons.

Duelling, against which Steele, De Foe, and Fielding inveighed with courage and good sense, was a danger to which every gentleman was liable who wore a sword. Bullies were ready to provoke a quarrel, the slightest cause of offence was magnified into an affair of honour, and the lives of several of the most distinguished men of the century were imperilled in this way. 'A gentleman,' Lord Chesterfield writes, 'is every man who, with a tolerable suit of clothes, a sword by his side, and a watch and snuffbox in his pockets, asserts himself to be a gentleman, swears with energy that he will be treated as such, and that he will cut the throat of any man who presumes to say the contrary.'

The foolish and evil custom died out slowly in this kingdom. Even a great moralist like Dr. Johnson had something to say in its defence, and Sir Walter Scott, who might well have laughed to scorn any imputation of cowardice, was prepared to accept a challenge in his old age for a statement he had made in his Life of Napoleon.

Ladies had a different but equally doubtful mode of asserting their gentility. On one occasion the Duchess of Marlborough called on a lawyer without leaving her name. 'I could not make out who she was,' said the clerk afterwards, 'but she swore so dreadfully that she must be a lady of quality.'

There was a fashion which our wits followed at this time that was not of English growth, namely, the tone of gallantry in which they addressed ladies, no matter whether single or married. Their compliments seemed like downright love-making, and that frequently of a coarse kind, but such expressions meant nothing, and were understood to be a mere exercise of skill. Pope used them in writing to Judith Cowper, whom he professes to worship as much as any female saint in heaven; and in much ampler measure when addressing Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, but neither lady would have taken this amatory politeness seriously. Thus he writes after an evening spent in Lady Mary's society: 'Books have lost their effect upon me; and I was convinced since I saw you, that there is something more powerful than philosophy, and since I heard you, that there is one alive wiser than all the sages.' He tells her that he hates all other women for her sake; that none but her guardian angels can have her more constantly in mind; and that the sun has more reason to be proud of raising her spirits 'than of raising all the plants and ripening all the minerals in the earth.' He will fly to her in Italy at the least notice and 'from thence,' he adds, 'how far you might draw me and I might run after you, I no more know than the spouse in the song of Solomon.'

This was the foible of an age in which women were addressed as though they were totally devoid of understanding; and Pope, as might have been expected, carried the folly to excess.

Against another French custom Addison protests in the Spectator, namely, that of women of rank receiving gentlemen visitors in their bedrooms. He objects also to other foreign habits introduced by 'travelled ladies,' and fears that the peace, however much to be desired, may cause the importation of a number of French fopperies. But the proneness to follow the lead of France in matters of fashion is a folly not confined to the belles and beaux of the last century.

If a chivalric regard for women be an indication of high civilization, that sign is but faintly visible in the reigns of Anne and of the first Georges. Sir Richard Steele paid a noble tribute to Lady Elizabeth Hastings when he said that to know her was a liberal education, but his contemporaries usually treat women as pretty triflers, better fitted to amuse men than to elevate them. Young takes this view in his Satires:

and Chesterfield, writing to his son, treats women with similar contempt.... 'A man of sense,' he says, 'only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them as he does with a sprightly, forward child; but he neither consults them about, nor trusts them with, serious matters, though he often makes them believe that he does both, which is the thing in the world that they are proud of.... No flattery is either too high or too low for them. They will greedily swallow the highest and gratefully accept of the lowest.'

Nearly twenty years passed, and then Chesterfield wrote in the same contemptuous way of women in a letter to his godson, a 'dear little boy' of ten.

'In company every woman is every man's superior, and must be addressed with respect, nay, more, with flattery, and you need not fear making it too strong ... it will be greedily swallowed.'

Even Addison, while trying to instruct the 'Fair Sex' as he likes to call them, apparently regarded its members as an inferior order of beings. He delights to dwell upon their foibles, on their dress, and on the thousand little artifices practised by the flirt and the coquette. Here is the view the Queen Anne moralist takes of the 'female world' he was so eager to improve:

'I have often thought there has not been sufficient pains in finding out proper employments and diversions for the fair ones. Their amusements seem contrived for them, rather as they are women, than as they are reasonable creatures; and are more adapted to the sex than to the species. The toilet is their great scene of business, and the right adjustment of their hair the principal employment of their lives. The sorting of a suit of ribands is considered a very good morning's work; and if they make an excursion to a mercer's or a toy-shop, so great a fatigue makes them unfit for anything else all the day after. Their more serious occupations are sewing and embroidery, and their greatest drudgery the preparations of jellies and sweetmeats. This I say is the state of ordinary women; though I know there are multitudes of those that move in an exalted sphere of knowledge and virtue, that join all the beauties of the mind to the ornaments of dress, and inspire a kind of awe and respect as well as of love into their male beholders.'

The qualification made at the end of this description does not greatly lessen the significance of the earlier portion, which is Addison's picture, as he is careful to tell us of 'ordinary women.' Much must be allowed for the exaggeration of a humourist, but the frivolity of women is a theme upon which Addison harps continually. Indeed, were it not for this weakness in the 'feminine world' half his vocation as a moralist in the Spectator would be gone, and if the general estimate in his Essays of the women with whom he was acquainted be to any extent a correct one, the derogatory language used by men of letters, and especially by Swift, Prior, Pope, and Chesterfield may be almost forgiven.

It was the aim of Addison and Steele to represent, and in some degree to caricature, the follies of fashionable life in the Town. That life had also its vices, which, if less unblushingly displayed than under the 'merry Monarch,' were visible enough. 'In the eighteenth century,' says Victor Hugo, in his epigrammatic way, 'the wife bolts out her husband. She shuts herself up in Eden with Satan. Adam is left outside.'

Drunkenness was a habit familiar to the fine gentlemen of the town and to men occupying the highest position in the State. Harley went more than once into the queen's presence in a half-intoxicated condition; Carteret when Secretary of State, if Horace Walpole may be credited, was never sober; Bolingbroke, who practised every vice, is said to have been a 'four-bottle man;' and Swift found it perilous to dine with Ministers on account of the wine which circulated at their tables. 'Prince Eugene,' he writes, 'dines with the Secretary to-day with about seven or eight general officers or foreign Ministers. They will be all drunk I am sure.' Pope's frail body could not tolerate excess, and he is said to have hastened his end by good living. His friend Fenton 'died of a great chair and two bottles of port a day.' Parnell, who seems to have been in many respects a man of high character, is said to have shortened his life by intemperance; and Gay, who was cossetted like a favourite lapdog by the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry, died from indolence and good living.

It may be questioned whether there is a single Wit of the age who did not love port too well, like Addison and Fenton, or suffer from 'carnivoracity' like Arbuthnot. Every section of English society was infected with the 'devil drunkenness,' and the passion for gin created by the encouragement of home distilleries produced a state of crime, misery, and disease in London and in the country which excited public attention. 'Small as is the place,' writes Mr. Lecky, 'which this fact occupies in English history, it was probably, if we consider all the consequences that have flowed from it, the most momentous in that of the eighteenth century—incomparably more so than any event in the purely political or military annals of the country.'[6]

The cruelty of the age is seen in a contempt for the feelings of others, in the brutal punishments inflicted, in the amusements then popular, and in a general contempt for human suffering. Public executions were so frequent that they were disregarded; and criminals of any note, like Dr. Dodd, were exhibited in their cells for the gaolers' benefit prior to execution; mad people in Bedlam, chained in their cells, also formed one of the sights of London. As late as 1735 men were pressed to death who refused to plead on a capital charge; and women were publicly flogged, and were also burnt at the stake by a law that was not repealed until 1794. Of the heads on Temple Bar, daily exposed to Johnson's eyes in his beloved Fleet Street, we are reminded by an apposite quotation of Goldsmith; and Samuel Rogers, the banker-poet, who died as recently as 1855, remembered having seen one there in his childhood. The public exhibition of offenders in the pillory was not calculated to refine the manners of the people. It afforded a cruel entertainment to the mob, who may be said to have baited these poor victims as they were accustomed to bait bulls and bears. Every kind of offensive missile was thrown at them, and sometimes the strokes proved deadly.

Men who could thus torture a human being were not likely to abstain from cruelty to the lower animals. The poets indeed protested then, as poets had done before, and always have done since, against the unmanly treatment of the dumb fellow-creatures committed to our care, but their voices were little heeded, and even the Prince of Wales visited Hockley-in-the-Hole, in disguise, to witness the torturing of bulls. 'The gladiatorian and other sanguinary sports,' says the author of the Characteristics, 'which we allow our people, discover sufficiently our national taste. And the baitings and slaughters of so many sorts of creatures, tame as well as wild, for diversion merely, may witness the extraordinary inclination we have for amphitheatrical spectacles.'[7]

The majesty of the law was maintained by disembowelling traitors, by cutting off the ears, or branding the cheeks of political offenders, and by the penalties inflicted on Roman Catholics, and on Protestant dissenters. Men who deemed themselves honourable gained power through bribery and intrigue. It was through a king's mistress and a heavy bribe that Bolingbroke was enabled to return from exile; Chesterfield intrigued against Newcastle with the Duchess of Yarmouth; and clergymen eager for promotion had no scruple in paying court to women who had lost their virtue.

Never, unless perhaps during the Civil War, was the spirit of party more rampant in the country. Patriotism was a virtue more talked about than felt, and in the cause of faction private characters were assailed and libels circulated through the press. Addison, who did more than any other writer to humanize his age, saw the evil of the time and struck a blow at it with his inimitable humour. The Spectator discovers, on his journey to Sir Roger de Coverley's house, that the knight's Toryism grew with the miles that separated him from London:

'In all our journey from London to his house we did not so much as bait at a Whig inn; or if by chance the coachman stopped at a wrong place, one of Sir Roger's servants would ride up to his master full speed, and whisper to him that the master of the house was against such an one in the last election. This often betrayed us into hard beds and bad cheer; for we were not so inquisitive about the inn as the innkeeper; and provided our landlord's principles were sound did not take any notice of the staleness of his provisions. This I found still the more inconvenient, because the better the host was, the worse generally were his accommodations; the fellow knowing very well that those who were his friends would take up with coarse diet and hard lodging. For these reasons, all the while I was upon the road, I dreaded entering into an house of anyone that Sir Roger had applauded for an honest man.'[8]

Against the party zeal of female politicians Addison indulges frequently in humorous sallies. He assures them that it gives an ill-natured cast to the eye, and flushes the cheeks worse than brandy. Party rage, he says, is a male vice, and is altogether repugnant 'to the softness, the modesty, and those other endearing qualities which are natural to the fair sex.'

'When I have seen a pretty mouth uttering calumnies and invectives, what would I not have given to have stopt it? how have I been troubled to see some of the finest features in the world grow pale and tremble with party rage. Camilla is one of the greatest beauties in the British nation, and yet values herself more upon being the virago of one party than upon being the toast of both. The dear creature about a week ago encountered the fierce and beautiful Penthesilea across a tea-table; but in the height of her anger, as her hand chanced to shake with the earnestness of the dispute, she scalded her fingers, and spilt a dish of tea upon her petticoat. Had not this accident broke off the debate, nobody knows where it would have ended.'

The coffee-houses in which men aired their wit and discussed the news of the day were wholly dominated by party. 'A Whig,' says De Foe, 'will no more go to the Cocoa Tree or Ozinda's than a Tory will be seen at the coffee-house of St. James's.' Swift declared that the Whig and Tory animosity infected even the dogs and cats. It was inevitable that it should also infect literature. Books were seldom judged on their merits, the praise or blame being generally awarded according to the political principles of their authors. An impartial literary journal did not exist in the days when Addison 'gave his little senate laws' at Button's, and perhaps it does not exist now, but if critical injustice be done in our day it is rarely owing to political causes.

One of the most prominent vices of the time was gambling, which was largely encouraged by the public lotteries, and practised by all classes of the people. This evil was exhibited on a national scale by the establishment of the South Sea Company, which exploded in 1720, after creating a madness for speculation never known before or since. Even men who like Sir Robert Walpole kept their heads, and saw that the bubble would soon burst, invested in stock. Pope had his share in the speculation, and might, had he 'realized' in time, have been the 'lord of thousands;' in the end, however, he was a gainer, though not to a large extent. His friend Gay was less fortunate. He won £20,000, kept the stock too long and was reduced to beggary. The South Sea Bubble and the Mississippi scheme of Law which burst in the same year and ruined tens of thousands of French families, afford illustrations on a gigantic scale of the prevailing passion for speculation and for gambling.

'The Duke of Devonshire lost an estate at a game of basset. The fine intellect of Chesterfield was thoroughly enslaved by the vice. At Bath, which was then the centre of English fashion, it reigned supreme; and the physicians even recommended it to their patients as a form of distraction. In the green-rooms of the theatres, as Mrs. Bellamy assures us, thousands were often lost and won in a single night. Among fashionable ladies the passion was quite as strong as among men, and the professor of whist and quadrille became a regular attendant at their levees. Miss Pelham, the daughter of the prime minister, was one of the most notorious gamblers of her time, and Lady Cowper speaks in her Diary of sittings at Court, of which the lowest stake was 200 guineas. The public lotteries contributed very powerfully to diffuse the taste for gambling among all classes.'[9]

One of the most powerful exponents of the dark side of the century is Hogarth, who makes some of its worst features live before our eyes. So also do the novels of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. Differing as their works do in character, they have the common merit of presenting in indelible lines a picture of the time in its social aspects. It may have been, as Stuart Mill asserts, an age of strong men, but it was an age of coarse vices, an age wanting in the refinements and graces of life; an age of cruel punishments, cruel sports, and of a political corruption extending through all the departments of the State.

But it would be a narrow view of the age to dwell wholly on its gloomier features, which are always the easiest to detect. If the period under consideration had prominent vices, it had also distinguished merits. Under Queen Anne and her immediate successors, home-keeping Englishmen had more space to breathe in than they have now, and trade was not demoralized by excessive competition. No attempt was made to separate class from class, and population was not large enough to make the battle of life almost hopeless in the lowest section of the community. If there was less refinement than among ourselves, there was far less of nervous susceptibility, and the country was free from the half-educated class of men and women who know enough to make them dissatisfied, without attaining to the larger knowledge which yields wisdom and content. To say that the age was better than our own would be to deny a thousand signs of material and intellectual progress, but it had fewer dangers to contend with, and if there was far less of wealth in the country the people were probably more satisfied with their lot.[10]

To glance at the century as a whole does not fall within my province, but I may be permitted to observe that in the course of it science and invention made rapid strides; that under the inspiring sway of Handel the power of music was felt as it was never felt before; that in the latter half of the period the Novel, destined to be one of the noblest fruits of our imaginative literature, attained a robust life in the hands of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett; and that, with Reynolds and Gainsborough, with Romney and Wilson, a glorious school of landscape and portrait painters arose, which is still the pride of England. It will be remembered, too, that many of the great charitable institutions which make our own age illustrious, had their birth in the last. The military genius of England was displayed in Marlborough and in Clive, her mercy in John Howard, her spirit of enterprise in Cook, her self-sacrifice in Wesley and Whitefield, her statesmanship in Walpole, in Chatham, and in William Pitt. In oratory as everyone knows, the eighteenth century was surpassingly great, and never before or since has the country produced a political philosopher of the calibre of Burke. What England reaped in literature during the period of which Pope has been selected as the most striking figure, it will be my endeavour to show in the course of these pages.

[1] M. Sainte-Beuve, the greatest of French critics, frankly acknowledges his indebtedness to Boileau, whom he styles Louis the Fourteenth's 'ContrÔleur GÉnÉral du Parnasse.' 'S'il m'est permis de parler pour moi-mÊme,' he writes, 'Boileau est un des hommes qui m'ont le plus occupÉ depuis que je fais de la critique, et avec qui j'ai le plus vÉcu en idÉe.'—Causeries du Lundi, tome sixiÈme, p. 495.