The death of Queen Anne opens a new period in the history of literature and of politics. Under the first Georges we are in the very heart of the eighteenth century; the century, as its enemies used to say, of coarse utilitarian aims, of religious indifference and political corruption; or, as I prefer to say, the century of sound common sense and growing toleration, and of steady social and industrial development.

To us, to me at least, it presents something pleasant in retrospect. There were then no troublesome people with philanthropic or political or religious nostrums, proposing to turn the world upside down and introduce an impromptu millennium. The history of periods when people were cutting each other's throats for creeds is no doubt more exciting; but we, who profess toleration, ought surely to remember that you cannot have martyrs without bigots and persecutors; and that fanaticism, though it may have its heroic aspects, has also a very ugly side to it. At any rate, we who come after a century of revolutionary changes, and are often told that the whole order of things may be upset by some social earthquake, look back with regret to the days of quiet solid progress, when everything seemed to have settled down to a quiet, stable equilibrium. Wealth and comfort were growing—surely no bad things; and John Bull—he had just received that name from Arbuthnot—was waxing fat and complacently contemplating his own admirable qualities. It is the period of the composition of 'Rule Britannia' and 'The Roast Beef of Old England,' and of the settled belief that your lusty, cudgel-playing, beer-drinking Briton was worth three of the slaves who ate frogs and wore wooden shoes across the Channel. The British constitution was the embodiment of perfect wisdom, and, as such, was entitled to be the dread and envy of the world. To the political historian it is the era of Walpole; the huge mass of solid common sense, who combined the qualities of the sturdy country squire and the thorough man of business; whose great aim was to preserve the peace; to keep the country as much as might be out of the continental troubles which it did not understand, and in which it had no concern; and to carry on business upon sound commercial principles. It is of course undeniable that his rule not only meant regard for the solid material interests of the country, but too often appealed to the interests of the ruling class. Philosophical historians who deal with the might-have-been may argue that a man of higher character might have worked by better means and have done something to purify the political atmosphere. Walpole was not in advance of his day; but it is at least too clear to need any exposition that under the circumstances corruption was inevitable. When the House of Commons was the centre of political authority, when so many boroughs were virtually private property, when men were not stirred to the deeper issues by any great constitutional struggle—party government had to be carried on by methods which involved various degrees of jobbery and bribery. The disease was certainly not peculiar to Walpole's age; though perhaps the symptoms were more obvious and avowed more bluntly than usual. As Walpole's masterful ways drove his old allies into opposition, they denounced the system and himself; but unfortunately although they claimed to be patriots and patterns of political virtue, they were made pretty much of the same materials as the arch-corrupter. When the 'moneyed men,' upon whom he had relied, came to be in favour of a warlike policy and were roused by the story of Captain Jenkins' ear, Walpole fell, but no reign of purity followed. The growing dissatisfaction, however, with the Walpolean system implied some very serious conditions, and the cry against corruption, in which nearly all the leading writers of the time joined, had a very serious significance in literature and in the growth of public opinion.

First, however, let me glance at the change as it immediately affected the literary organ. The old club and coffee-house society broke up with remarkable rapidity. While Oxford was sent to the Tower, and Bolingbroke escaped to France, Swift retired to Dublin, and Prior, after being imprisoned, passed the remainder of his life in retirement. Pope settled down to translating Homer, and took up his abode at Twickenham, outside the exciting and noisy London world in which the poor invalid had been jostled. Addison soared into the loftier regions of politics and married his Countess, and ceased to preside at Buttons'. Steele held on for a time, but in declining prosperity and diminished literary activity, till his retirement to Wales. No one appeared to fill the gaps thus made in the ranks either of the Whigs' or the Tories' section of literature. The change was obviously connected with the systematic development of the party system. Swift bitterly denounced Walpole for his indifference to literature! 'Bob the poet's foe' was guided by other motives in disposing of his patronage. Places in the Customs were no longer to be given to writers of plays or complimentary epistles in verse, or even to promising young politicians, but to members of parliament or the constituents in whom they were interested. The placemen, who were denounced as one of the great abuses of the time, were rewarded for voting power not for literary merit. The patron, therefore, was disappearing; though one or two authors, such as Congreve and Gay, might be still petted by the nobility; and Young somehow got a pension out of Walpole, probably through Bubb Dodington, the very questionable parson who still wished to be a MÆcenas. Meanwhile there was a compensation. The bookseller was beginning to supersede the patron. Tonson and Lintot were making fortunes; the first Longman was founding the famous firm which still flourishes; and the career of the disreputable and piratical Curll shows that at least the demand for miscellaneous literature was growing. The anecdotes of the misery of authors, of the translators who lay three in a bed in Curll's garret, of Samuel Boyse, who had reduced his clothes to a single blanket, and Savage sleeping on a bulk, are sometimes adduced to show that literature was then specially depressed. But there never was a time when authors of dissolute habits were not on the brink of starvation, and the authorities of the Literary Fund could give us contemporary illustrations of the fact. The real inference is, I take it, that the demand which was springing up attracted a great many impecunious persons, who became the drudges of the rising class of booksellers. No doubt the journalist was often in a degrading position. The press was active in all political struggles. The great men, Walpole, Bolingbroke, and Pulteney, wrote pamphlets or contributed papers to the Craftsman, while they employed inferior scribes to do the drudgery. Walpole paid large sums to the 'Gazetters,' whom Pope denounces; and men like Amherst of the Craftsman or Gordon of the Independent Whig, carried on the ordinary warfare. The author by profession was beginning to be recognised. Thomson and Mallet came up from Scotland during this period to throw themselves upon literature; Ralph, friend of Franklin and collaborator of Fielding, came from New England; and Johnson was attracted from the country to become a contributor to the Gentleman's Magazine, started by Cave in 1731—an event which marked a new development of periodical literature. Though no one would then advise a young man who could do anything else to trust to authorship (it would be rash to give such advice now) the new career was being opened. There were hack authors of all varieties. The successful playwright gained a real prize in the lottery; and translations, satires, and essays on the Spectator model enabled the poor drudge to make both ends meet, though too often in bondage to his employer to be, as I take it, better off than in the previous period, when the choice lay between risking the pillory and selling yourself as a spy.

Before considering the effect produced under the changed conditions, I must note briefly the intellectual position. The period was that of the culmination of the deist controversy. In the previous period the rationalism of which Locke was the mouthpiece represented the dominant tendency. It was generally held on all sides that there was a religion of nature, capable of purely rational demonstration. The problem remained as to its relation to the revealed religion and the established creed. Locke himself was a sincere Christian, though he reduced the dogmatic element to a minimum. Some of his disciples, however, became freethinkers in the technical sense, and held that revelation was needless, and that in point of fact no supernatural revelation had been made. The orthodox, on the other hand, while admitting or declaring that faith should be founded on reason, and that reason could establish a 'religion of nature,' admitted in various ways that a supernatural revelation was an essential corollary or a useful addition to the simple rational doctrine. The controversies which arose upon this issue, after being carried on very vigorously for a time, caused less interest as time went on, and were beginning to die out at the end of this period. It is often said in explanation that deism or the religion of nature, as then understood, was too vague and colourless a system to have any strong vitality. It faded into a few abstract logical propositions which had no relation to fact, and led to the optimistic formula, 'Whatever is, is right,' which could in the long-run satisfy no one with any strong perception of the darker elements of the world and human nature. This view may be emphasised by the most remarkable writings of the period. Butler's Analogy (1736) has been regarded by many even of his strongest opponents as triumphant against the deistical optimism, and certainly emphasises the side of things to which that optimism is blind. Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, at the end of the period (1739), uttered the sceptical revolution which destroys the base of the deistical system. Another writer is notable: William Law's Serious Call is one of the books which has made a turning-point in many men's lives. It specially affected Samuel Johnson and John Wesley, and many of those who sympathised more or less with Wesley's movement. Law was driven by his sense of the aspects of the rationalist theories to adopt a different position. He became a follower of Behmen, and his mysticism ended by repelling the thoroughly practical Wesley, as indeed mysticism in general seems to be uncongenial to the English mind. Law's position shows a difficulty which was felt by others. It means that while he holds that religion must be in the highest sense 'reasonable' it cannot be (as another author put it) 'founded upon argument.' Faith must be identified with the inner light, the direct voice of God to man, which appeals to the soul, and is not built upon syllogisms or allowed to depend upon the result of historical criticism. This view, I need hardly say, is opposed to the whole rationalist theory, whether of the deist or the orthodox variety: it was so opposed that it could find scarcely any sympathy at the time; and for that reason it indicates one characteristic of the contemporary thought. To omit the mystical element is to be cold and unsatisfactory in religious philosophy, and to be radically prosaic and unpoetical in the sphere of literature. Englishmen could never become mystics in the technical sense, but they were beginning to be discontented with the bare logical system of the religion of nature. They were ready for some utterance of the emotional and imaginative element in religion and philosophy which was left out of account by the wits and rationalists. I do not myself believe that the intellectual weakness of abstract deism gives a sufficient explanation of its decay. In fact, as accepted by Rousseau and by some of his English followers, it could ally itself with the ardent revolutionary enthusiasm which was to be the marked peculiarity of the latter part of the century. We must add another consideration. Locke and his contemporaries had laid down political and religious principles which, if logically developed, would lead to the revolutionary doctrines of 1789. They did not develop them, and mainly, I take it, because the practical application excited no strong feeling. The spark did not find fuel ready to be lighted. The political and social conditions supply a sufficient explanation of the indifference. People were practically content with the existing order in Church and State. The deist controversies did not reach the enormous majority of the nation, who went quietly about their business in the old paths. The orthodox themselves were so rationalistic in principle that the whole discussion seemed to turn upon non-essential points. But moreover the Church was so thoroughly subordinated to the laity; it was so much a part of the regular comfortable system of things; so little able or inclined to set up as an independent power claiming special authority and enforcing discipline, that it excited no hostility. Parson and squire were part of the regular system which could not be attacked without upsetting the whole system; and there was as yet no general discontent with that system, or, indeed, any disposition whatever to reconstruct the machinery which was working so quietly and so thoroughly in accordance with the dumb instincts of the overwhelming majority.

Now let us pass to the literary manifestation of this order. The literary society, as it existed under Queen Anne, had been broken up; two or three of the men who had already made their mark continued their activity, especially Pope and Swift. Swift, however, was living apart from the world, though he was still to come to the front on more than one remarkable occasion. Pope, meanwhile, became the acknowledged dictator. The literary movement may be called after Pope, as distinctly as the political after Walpole. He established his dynasty so thoroughly that in later days the attempt to upset him was regarded as a daring revolution. What was Pope? Poet or not, for his title to the name has been disputed, he had one power or weakness in which he has scarcely been rivalled. No writer, that is, reflects so clearly and completely the spirit of his own day. His want of originality means the extreme and even morbid sensibility which enabled him to give the fullest utterance to the ideas of his class, and of the nation, so far as the nation was really represented by the class. But the literary class was going through a process of differentiation, as the alliance of authors and statesmen broke up. Pope represents mainly the aristocratic movement. He had become independent—a fact of which he was a little too proud—and moved on the most familiar terms with the great men of the age. The Tory leaders were, of course, his special friends; but in later days he became a friend of Frederick, Prince of Wales, and of the politicians who broke off from Walpole; while even with Walpole he was on terms of civility. His poems give a long catalogue of the great men of whose intimacy he was so proud. Besides Bolingbroke, his 'guide, philosopher, and friend,' he counts up nearly all the great men of his time. Somers and Halifax, and Granville and Congreve, Oxford and Atterbury, who had encouraged his first efforts; Pulteney, Chesterfield, Argyll, Wyndham, Cobham, Bathurst, Peterborough, Queensberry, who had become friends in later years, receive the delicate compliments which imply his excusable pride in their alliance. Pope, therefore, may be considered from one point of view as the authorised interpreter of the upper circle, which then took itself to embody the highest cultivation of the nation. We may appreciate Pope's poetry by comparing it with an independent manifestation of their morality. The most explicit summary of the general tone of the class-morality may, I think, be gathered from Chesterfield's Letters. Though written at a later period, they sum up the lesson he has imbibed from his experience at this time. Chesterfield was no mere fribble or rake. He was a singularly shrewd, impartial observer of life, who had studied men at first hand as well as from books. His letters deal with the problem: What are the conditions of success in public life? He treats it in the method of Machiavelli; that is to say, he inquires what actually succeeds, not what ought to succeed. An answer to that question given by a man of great ability is always worth studying. Even if it should appear that success in this world is not always won by virtue, the fact should be recognised, though we should get rid of the conclusion that virtue, when an encumbrance to success, should be discarded. Chesterfield's answer, however, is not simply cynical. His pupil is to study men and politics thoroughly; to know the constitutions of all European states, to read the history of modern times so far as it has a bearing upon business; to be thoroughly well informed as to the aims of kings and courts; to understand financial and diplomatic movements; briefly, as far as was then possible, to be an incarnate blue-book. He was to study literature and appreciate art, though he was carefully to avoid the excess which makes the pedant or the virtuoso. He was to cultivate a good style in writing and speaking, and even to learn German. Chesterfield's prophecy of a revolution in France (though, I fancy, a little overpraised) shows at least that he was a serious observer of political phenomena. But besides these solid attainments, the pupil, we know, is to study the Graces. The excessive insistence upon this is partly due to the peculiarities of his hearer and his own quaint illusion that the way to put a man at his ease is to be constantly insisting upon his hopeless awkwardness. The theory is pushed to excess when he says that Marlborough and Pitt succeeded by the Graces, not by supreme business capacity or force of character; and argues from recent examples that a fool may succeed by dint of good manners, while a man of ability without them must be a failure. The exaggeration illustrates the position. The game of politics, that is, has become mainly personal. The diplomatist must succeed by making himself popular in courts, and the politician by winning popularity in the House of Commons. Social success—that is, the power of making oneself agreeable to the ruling class—is the essential pre-condition to all other success. The statesman does not make himself known as the advocate of great principles when no great principles are at stake, and the ablest man of business cannot turn his abilities to account unless he commends himself to employers who themselves are too good and great to be bothered with accounts. You must first of all be acceptable to your environment; and the environment means the upper ten thousand who virtually govern the world. The social qualities, therefore, come into the foreground. Undoubtedly this implies a cynical tone. You can't respect the victims of your cajolery. Chesterfield's favourite author is Rochefoucauld of whom (not the Bible) his son is to read a chapter every day. Men, that is, are selfish. Happily also they are silly, and can be flattered into helping you, little as they may care for you. 'Wriggle yourself into power' he says more than once. That is especially true of women, of whom he always speaks with the true aristocratic contempt. A man of sense will humour them and flatter them; he will never consult them seriously, nor really trust them, but he will make them believe that he does both. They are invaluable as tools, though contemptible in themselves. This, of course, represents the tone too characteristic of the epicurean British nobleman. Yet with all this cynicism, Chesterfield's morality is perfectly genuine in its way. He has the sense of honour and the patriotic feeling of his class. He has the good nature which is compatible with, and even congenial to, a certain cynicism. He is said to have achieved the very unusual success of being an admirable Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. In fact he had the intellectual vigour which implies a real desire for good administration, less perhaps from purely philanthropic motives than from respect for efficiency.

says Pope, and that was Chesterfield's view. Like Frederick of Prussia, whom he admires above all rulers, he might not be over-scrupulous in his policy, but wishes the machinery for which he is responsible to be in thoroughly good working order. He most thoroughly sees the folly, if he does not sufficiently despise the motives, of the lower order of politicians to whom bribery and corruption represented the only political forces worth notice. In practice he might be forced to use such men, but he sees them to be contemptible, and appreciates the mischiefs resulting from their rule.

The development of this morality in the aristocratic class, which was still predominant although the growing importance of the House of Commons was tending to shift the centre of political gravity to a lower point, is, I think, sufficiently intelligible to be taken for granted. Pope, I have said, represents the literary version. The problem, then, is how this view of life is to be embodied in poetry. One answer is the Essay on Man, in which Pope versified the deism which he learned from Bolingbroke, and which was characteristic of the upper circle generally. I need not speak of its shortcomings; didactic poetry of that kind is dreary enough, and the smart couplets often offend one's taste. I may say that here and there Pope manages to be really impressive, and to utter sentiments which really ennobled the deist creed; the aversion to narrow superstition; to the bigotry which 'dealt damnation round the land'; and the conviction that the true religion must correspond to a cosmopolitan humanity. I remember hearing Carlyle quote with admiration the Universal Prayer—

and it is the worthy utterance of one good legacy which the deist bequeathed to posterity. Pope himself was alarmed when he discovered that he had slipped unawares into heterodoxy. His creed was not congenial to the average mind, though it was to that of his immediate circle. Meanwhile, his most characteristic and successful work was of a different order. The answer, in fact, to the problem which I have just stated, is that the only kind of poetry that was congenial to his environment was satire—if satire can be called poetry. Pope's satires, the 'Epistle to Arbuthnot,' the 'Epilogue,' and some of the 'Imitations of Horace,' represent his best and most lasting achievement. There he gives the fullest expression to the general sentiment in the most appropriate form. His singular command of language, and, within his own limits, of versification, was turned to account by conscientious and unceasing labour in polishing his style. Particular passages, like the famous satire upon Addison, have been slowly elaborated; he has brooded over them for years; and, if the result of such methods is sometimes a mosaic rather than a continuous current of discourse, the extraordinary brilliance of some passages has made them permanently interesting and enriched our literature with many proverbial phrases. The art was naturally cultivated and its results appreciated in the circle formed by such men as Congreve, Bolingbroke, and Chesterfield and the like, by whom witty conversation was cultivated as a fine art. Chesterfield tells us that he never spoke without trying to express himself as well as possible; and Pope carries out the principle in his poetry. The thorough polish has preserved the numerous phrases, still familiar, which have survived the general neglect of his work. Pope indeed manages to introduce genuine poetry, as in his famous compliments or his passage about his mother, in which we feel that he is really speaking from his heart. But no doubt Atterbury gave him judicious (if not very Christian) advice, when he told him to stick to the vein of the Addison verses. The main topic of the satires is a denunciation of an age when, as he puts it,

He ascribes his own indignation to the 'strong antipathy of good to bad,' which is a satisfactory explanation to himself. But he was still interpreting the general sentiment and expressing the general discontent caused by the Walpole system. His friends, Bolingbroke and Wyndham, and the whole opposition, partially recruited from Walpole's supporters, were insisting upon the same theme. If, as I have said, some of them were really sincere in recognising the evil, and, like Bolingbroke in the Patriot King, trying to ascertain its source—we are troubled in this even by the doubt as to whether they objected to corruption or only to the corrupt influence of their antagonists. But Pope, as a poet, living outside the political circle, can take the denunciations quite seriously and be not only pointed but really dignified. He sincerely believes that vice can be seriously discouraged by lashing at it with epigrams. So far, he represented a general feeling of the literary class, explained in various ways by such men as Thomson, Fielding, Glover, and Johnson, who were, from very different points of view, in opposition to Walpole. Satire can only flourish under some such conditions as then existed. It supposes, among other things, the existence of a small cultivated class, which will fully appreciate the personalities, the dexterity of insinuation, and the cutting sarcasm which gives the spice to much of Pope's satire. Young, a singularly clever writer, was eclipsed by Pope because he kept to denoting general types and was not intimate with the actors on the social stage. Johnson, still more of an outsider, wrote a most effective and sonorous poem with the help of Juvenal; but it becomes a moral disquisition upon human nature which has not the special sting and sparkle of Pope. No later satirist has approached Pope, and the art has now become obsolete, or is adopted merely as a literary amusement. One obvious reason is the absence of the peculiar social backing which composed Pope's audience and supplied him with his readers.

The growing sense that there was something wrong about the political system which Pope turned to account was significant of coming changes. The impression that the evil was entirely due to Walpole personally was one of the natural illusions of party warfare, and the disease was not extirpated when the supposed cause was removed. The most memorable embodiment of the sentiment was Swift. The concentrated scorn of corruption in the Drapier's Letters was followed by the intense misanthropy of Gulliver's Travels. The singular way in which Swift blends personal aversion with political conviction, and the strange humour which conceals the misanthropist under a superficial playfulness, veils to some extent his real aim. But Swift showed with unequalled power and in an exaggerated form the conviction that there was something wrong in the social order, which was suggested by the conditions of the time and was to bear fruit in later days. Satire, however, is by its nature negative; it does not present a positive ideal, and tends to degenerate into mere hopeless pessimism. Lofty poetry can only spring from some inner positive enthusiasm.

I turn to another characteristic of the literary movement. I have called attention to the fact that while the Queen Anne writers were never tired of appealing to nature, they came to be considered as prematurely 'artificial.' The commonest meaning of 'natural' is that in which it is identified with 'normal,' We call a thing natural when its existence appears to us to be a matter of course, which again may simply mean that we are so accustomed to certain conditions that we do not remember that they are really exceptional. We take ourselves with all our peculiarities to be the 'natural' type or standard. An English traveller in France remarked that it was unnatural for soldiers to be dressed in blue; and then, remembering certain British cases, added, 'except, indeed, for the Artillery or the Blue Horse.' The English model, with all its variations, appeared to him to be ordained by Nature. This unconscious method of usurping a general name so as to cover a general meaning produces many fallacies. In any case, however, it was of the essence of Pope's doctrine that we should, as he puts it, 'Look through Nature up to Nature's God.' God, that is, is known through Nature, if it would not be more correct to say that God and Nature are identical. This Nature often means the world as not modified by human action, and therefore sharing the divine workmanship unspoilt by man's interference. Thus in the common phrase, the 'love of Nature' is generally taken to mean the love of natural scenery, of sea and sky and mountains, which are not altered or alterable by any human art. Yet it is said the want of any such love describes one of the most obvious deficiencies in Pope's poetry, of which Wordsworth so often complained. His famous preface asserts the complete absence of any imagery from Nature in the writings of the time. It was, however, at the period of which I am speaking that a change was taking place which was worth considering.

One cause is obvious. The Wit utters the voice of the town. He agreed with the gentleman who preferred the smell of a flambeau in St. James Street to any abundance of violet and sweetbriar. But, as communications improved between town and country, the separation between the taste of classes became less marked. The great nobleman had always been in part an exalted squire, and had a taste for field-sports as well as for the opera. Bolingbroke and Walpole are both instances in point. Sir Roger de Coverley came up to town more frequently than his ancestors, but the Spectator recorded his visits as those of a simple rustic. After the peace, the country gentleman begins regularly to visit the Continent. The 'grand tour' mostly common in the preceding century becomes a normal fact of the education of the upper classes. The foundation of the Dilettante Club in 1734 marks the change. The qualifications, says Horace Walpole, were drunkenness and a visit to Italy. The founders of it seem to have been jovial young men who had met each other abroad, where, with obsequious tutors and out of sight of domestic authority, they often learned some very queer lessons. But many of them learned more, and by degrees the Dilettante Club took not only to encouraging the opera in England, but to making really valuable archÆological researches in Greece and elsewhere. The intelligent youth had great opportunities of mixing in the best foreign society, and began to bring home the pictures which adorn so many English country houses; to talk about the 'correggiosity of Correggio'; and in due time to patronise Reynolds and Gainsborough. The traveller began to take some interest even in the Alps, wrote stanzas to the 'Grande Chartreuse,' admired Salvator Rosa, and even visited Chamonix. Another characteristic change is more to the present purpose. A conspicuous mark of the time was a growing taste for gardening. The taste has, I suppose, existed ever since our ancestors were turned out of the Garden of Eden. Milton's description of that place of residence, and Bacon's famous essay, and Cowley's poems addressed to the great authority Evelyn, and most of all perhaps Maxwell's inimitable description of the very essence of garden, may remind us that it flourished in the seventeenth century. It is needless to say in Oxford how beautiful an old-fashioned garden might be. But at this time a change was taking place in the canons of taste. Temple in a well-known essay had praised the old-fashioned garden and had remarked how the regularity of English plantations seemed ridiculous to—of all people in the world—the Chinese. By the middle of the eighteenth century there had been what is called a 'reaction,' and the English garden, which was called 'natural,' was famous and often imitated in France. It is curious to remark how closely this taste was associated with the group of friends whom Pope has celebrated. The first, for example, of the four 'Moral Epistles,' is addressed to Cobham, who laid out the famous garden at Stowe, in which 'Capability Brown,' the most popular landscape gardener of the century, was brought up; the third is addressed to Bathurst, an enthusiastic gardener, who had shown his skill at his seat of Richings near Colnbrook; and the fourth to Burlington, whose house and gardens at Chiswick were laid out by Kent, the famous landscape gardener and architect—Brown's predecessor. In the same epistle Pope ridicules the formality of Chandos' grounds at Canons. A description of his own garden includes the familiar lines

Pope's own garden was itself a model. 'Pope,' says Horace Walpole, 'had twisted and twirled and rhymed and harmonised his little five acres till it appeared two or three sweet little lawns opening and opening beyond one another, and the whole surrounded with thick impenetrable woods.' The taste grew as the century advanced. Now one impulse towards the new style is said to have come from articles in the Spectator by Addison and in the Guardian by Pope, ridiculing the old-fashioned mode of clipping trees, and so forth. Nature, say both, is superior to art, and the man of genius, as Pope puts it, is the first to perceive that all art consists of 'imitation and study of nature.' Horace Walpole in his essay upon gardening remarks a point which may symbolise the principle. The modern style, he says, sprang from the invention of the ha-ha by Bridgeman, one of the first landscape gardeners. The 'ha-ha' meant that the garden, instead of being enclosed by a wall, was laid out so as to harmonise with the surrounding country, from which it was only separated by an invisible fence. That is the answer to the problem; is it not a solecism for a lover of gardens to prefer nature to art? A garden is essentially a product of art? and supplants the moor and desert made by unassisted nature. The love of Nature as understood in a later period, by Byron for example, went to this extreme, in words at least, and becomes misanthropical in admiring the savage for its own sake. But the landscape gardener only meant that his art must be in some sense subordinate to nature; that he must not shut out the wider scenery but include it in his designs. He was apt to look upon mountains as a background to parks, as Telford thought that rivers were created to supply canals. The excellent Gilpin, who became an expounder of what he calls 'the theory of the picturesque,' travelled on the Wye in the same year as Gray; and amusingly criticises nature from this point of view. Nature, he says, works in a cold and singular style of composition, but has the merit of never falling into 'mannerism.' Nature, that is, is a sublime landscape gardener whose work has to be accepted, and to whom the gardener must accommodate himself. A quaint instance of this theory may be found in the lecture which Henry Tilney in Mansfield Park delivers to Catherine Morland. In Horace Walpole's theory, the evolution of the ha-ha, means that man and nature, the landowner and the country, are gradually forming an alliance, and it comes to the same thing whether one or the other assimilates his opposite.

Briefly, this means one process by which the so-called love of nature was growing; it meant better roads and inns; the gradual reflux of town into country; and the growing sense already expressed by Cowley and Marvell, that overcrowded centres of population have their inconveniences, and that the citizen should have his periods of communion with unsophisticated nature. Squire and Wit are each learning to appreciate each other's tastes. The tourist is developed, and begins, as Gibbon tells us, to 'view the glaciers' now that he can view them without personal inconvenience. This, again, suggests that there is nothing radically new in the so-called love of nature. Any number of poets from Chaucer downwards may be cited to show that men were never insensible to natural beauty of scenery; to the outburst of spring, or the bloom of flowers, or the splendours of storms and sunsets. The indifference to nature of the Pope school was, so far, the temporary complacency of the new population focused in the metropolitan area in their own enlightenment and their contempt for the outside rustic. The love of field-sports was as strong as ever in the squire, and as soon as he began to receive some of the intellectual irradiation from the town Wit, he began to express the emotions which never found clearer utterance than in Walton's Compleat Angler. But there is a characteristic difference. With the old poets nature is in the background; it supplies the scenery for human action and is not itself consciously the object; they deal with concrete facts, with the delight of sport or rustic amusements: and they embody their feelings in the old conventions; they converse with imaginary shepherds: with Robin Hood or allegorical knights in romantic forests, who represent a love of nature but introduce description only as a set-off to the actors in masques or festivals. In Pope's time we have the abstract or metaphysical deity Nature, who can be worshipped with a distinct appreciation. The conventions have become obsolete, and if used at all, the poet himself is laughing in his sleeve. The serious aim of the poet is to give a philosophy of human nature; and the mere description of natural objects strikes him as silly unless tacked to a moral. Who could take offence, asks Pope, referring to his earlier poems, 'when pure description held the place of sense'? The poet, that is, who wishes to be 'sensible' above all, cannot condescend to give mere catalogues of trees and rivers and mountains. Nature, however, is beginning to put in a claim for attention, even in the sense in which Nature means the material world. In one sense this is a natural corollary from the philosophy of the time and of that religion of nature which it implied. Pope himself gives one version of it in the Essay on Man; and can expatiate eloquently upon the stars and upon the animal world. But the poem itself is essentially constructed out of a philosophical theory too purely argumentative to lend itself easily to poetry. A different, though allied, way of dealing with the subject appears elsewhere. If Pope learned mainly from Bolingbroke, he was also influenced by Shaftesbury of the Characteristics. I note, but cannot here insist upon, Shaftesbury's peculiar philosophical position. He inherited to some extent the doctrine of the Cambridge Platonists and repudiated the sensationalist doctrine of Locke and the metaphysical method of Clarke. He had a marked influence on Hutcheson, Butler, and the common-sense philosophers of his day. For us, it is enough to say that he worships Nature but takes rather the Æsthetic than the dialectical point of view. The Good, the True, and the Beautiful are all one, as he constantly insists, and the universe impresses us not as a set of mechanical contrivances but as an artistic embodiment of harmony. He therefore restores the universal element which is apt to pass out of sight in Pope's rhymed arguments. He indulges his philosophical enthusiasm in what he calls The Moralists, a Rhapsody. It culminates in a prose hymn to a 'glorious Nature, supremely fair and sovereignly good; all-loving and all-lovely, all divine,' which ends by a survey of the different climates, where even in the moonbeams and the shades of the forests we find intimations of the mysterious being who pervades the universe. A love of beauty was, in this sense, a thoroughly legitimate development of the 'Religion of Nature.' Akenside in his philosophical poem The Pleasures of Imagination, written a little later, professed himself to be a disciple of Shaftesbury, and his version supplied many quotations for Scottish professors of philosophy. Henry Brooke's Universal Beauty, a kind of appendix to Pope's essay, is upon the same theme, though he became rather mixed in physiological expositions, which suggested, it is said, Darwin's Botanic Garden. The religious sentiment embodied in his Fool of Quality charmed Wesley and was enthusiastically admired by Kingsley. Thomson, however, best illustrates this current of sentiment. The fine 'Hymn of Nature' appended to the Seasons, is precisely in the same vein as Shaftesbury's rhapsody. The descriptions of nature are supposed to suggest the commentary embodied in the hymn. He still describes the sea and sky and mountains with the more or less intention of preaching a sermon upon them. That is the justification of the 'pure description' which Pope condemned in principle, and which occupies the larger part of the poem. Thomson, when he wrote the sermons, was still fresh from Edinburgh and from Teviotdale. He had a real eye for scenery, and describes from observation. The English Wits had not, it seems, annexed Scotland, and Thomson had studied Milton and Spenser without being forced to look through Pope's spectacles. Still he cannot quite trust himself. He is still afraid, and not without reason, that pure description will fall into flat prose, and tries to 'raise his diction'—in the phrase of the day—by catching something of the Miltonic harmony and by speaking of fish as 'finny tribes' and birds as 'the feathered people.' The fact, however, that he could suspend his moralising to give realistic descriptions at full length, and that they became the most interesting parts of the poem, shows a growing interest in country life. The supremacy of the town Wit is no longer unquestioned; and there is an audience for the plain direct transcripts of natural objects for which the Wit had been too dignified and polished. Thomson had thus the merit of representing a growing sentiment—and yet he has not quite solved the problem. His philosophy is not quite fused with his observation. To make 'Nature' really interesting you must have a touch of Wordsworthian pantheism and of Shelley's 'pathetic fallacy.' Thomson's facts and his commentary lie in separate compartments. To him, apparently, the philosophy is more important than the simple description. His masterpiece was to be the didactic and now forgotten poem on Liberty. It gives an interesting application; for there already we have the sentiment which was to become more marked in later years. 'Liberty' crosses the Alps and they suggest a fine passage on the beauty of mountains. Nature has formed them as a rampart for the homely republics which worship 'plain Liberty'; and are free from the corruption typified by Walpole. That obviously is the germ of the true Rousseau version of Nature worship. On the whole, however, Nature, as interpreted by the author of 'Rule Britannia,' is still very well satisfied with the British Constitution and looks upon the Revolution of 1688 as the avatar of the true goddess. 'Nature,' that is, has not yet come to condemn civilisation in general as artificial and therefore corrupt. As in practice, a lover of Nature did not profess to prefer the wilderness to fields, and looked upon mountains rather as a background to the nobleman's park than as a shelter for republics; so in politics it reflected no revolutionary tendency but rather included the true British system which has grown up under its protection. Nature has taken to lecturing, but she only became frankly revolutionary with Rousseau and misanthropic with Byron.

I must touch one more characteristic. Pope, I have said, represents the aristocratic development of literature. Meanwhile the purely plebeian society was growing, and the toe of the clown beginning to gall the kibe of the courtier. Pope's 'war with the dunces' was the historical symptom of this most important social development. The Dunciad, which, whatever its occasional merits, one cannot read without spasms both of disgust and moral disapproval, is the literary outcome. Pope's morbid sensibility perverts his morals till he accepts the worst of aristocratic prejudices and treats poverty as in itself criminal. It led him, too, to attack some worthy people, and among others the 'earless' Defoe. Defoe's position is most significant. A journalist of supreme ability, he had an abnormally keen eye for the interesting. No one could feel the pulse of his audience with greater quickness. He had already learned by inference that nothing interests the ordinary reader so much as a straightforward narrative of contemporary facts. He added the remark that it did not in the least matter whether the facts had or had not happened; and secondly, that it saved a great deal of trouble to make your facts instead of finding them. The result was the inimitable Robinson Crusoe, which was, in that sense, a simple application of journalistic methods, not a conscious attempt to create a new variety of novel. Alexander Selkirk had very little to tell about his remarkable experience; and so Defoe, instead of confining himself like the ordinary interviewer to facts, proceeded to tell a most circumstantial and elaborate lie—for which we are all grateful. He was doing far more than he meant. Defoe, as the most thorough type of the English class to which he belonged, could not do otherwise than make his creation a perfect embodiment of his own qualities. Robinson Crusoe became, we know, a favourite of Rousseau, and has supplied innumerable illustrations to writers on Political Economy. One reason is that Crusoe is the very incarnation of individualism: thrown entirely upon his own resources, he takes the position with indomitable pluck; adapts himself to the inevitable as quietly and sturdily as may be; makes himself thoroughly at home in a desert island, and, as soon as he meets a native, summarily annexes him, and makes him thoroughly useful. He comes up smiling after many years as if he had been all the time in a shop in Cheapside without a hair turned. This exemplary person not only embodies the type of middle class Briton but represents his most romantic aspirations. In those days the civilised world was still surrounded by the dim mysterious regions, where geographers placed elephants instead of towns, but where the adventurous Briton was beginning to push his way into strange native confines and to oust the wretched foreigner, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, who had dared to anticipate him. Crusoe is the voice of the race which was to be stirred by the story of Jenkins' ear and lay the foundation of the Empire. Meanwhile, as a literary work, it showed most effectually the power of homely realism. There is no bother about dignity or attempt to reveal the eloquence of the polished Wit. It is precisely the plain downright English vernacular which is thoroughly intelligible to everybody who is capable of reading. The Wit, too, as Swift sufficiently proved, could be a consummate master of that kind of writing on occasion, and Gulliver probably showed something to Crusoe. But for us the interest is the development of a new class of readers, who won't bother about canons of taste or care for skill in working upon the old conventional methods, but can be profoundly interested in a straightforward narrative adapted to the simplest understandings. Pope's contempt for the dunces meant that the lower classes were the objects of supreme contempt to the aristocratic circle, whose culture they did not share. But Defoe was showing in a new sense of the word the advantage of an appeal to Nature; for the true life and vigour of the nation was coming to be embodied in the class which was spontaneously developing its own ideals and beginning to regard the culture of the upper circle as artificial in the objectionable sense. Outside the polished circle of wits we have the middle-class which is beginning to read, and will read, what it really likes without bothering about Aristotle or M. Bossu: as, in the other direction, the assimilation between town and country is incidentally suggesting a wider range of topics, and giving a new expression to conditions which had for some time been without expression.