for Gilbert White, the first and greatest of our hedgerow philosophers. Johnson, a staunch upholder of the Popean concordat, did his utmost to smother with contempt the literary exhumations and the 'new-fangled tricks,' the ancient ballads, and the new-old sonnets which he saw springing into recognition :

'Wheresoe'er I turn my view,

All is strange yet nothing new;
Endless labour all along,
Endless labour to be wrong;
Phrase that time has flung away,

Uncouth words in disarray,

Tricked in antique ruff and bonnet,
Ode and elegy and sonnet.'

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He employed similar weapons against Percy, and threatened poor Ossian with the bludgeon; but the rising tide was too strong for him, though he did not live to see the flood. He could only express unqualified amazement at the performance of that extraordinary young whelp,' Thomas Chatterton. The infant genius of Chatterton was almost strangled by the false taste of the premature Gothic revival; but we hail with reverence such verses as these, expressing the aspiration of Elle's sprite :

'To hear the chantry-song sound in mine ear,
To hear the masses of our holy dame,

To view the cross-aisles and the arches fair!
Through the half-hidden silver twinkling glare

Of yon bright moon in foggy mantles dressed . . .

as a protest against Smollett's sour and contemptuous

I did not understand one word, but got it by heart and spoke it by rote from a master' (February, 1751-2). The current prejudice against Chesterfield is unfortunate, for he is not only the most elegant, but also the most diverting of the prose authors of the eighteenth century.

V

'disgust' at the melancholy gloom' of Lincoln and York Minster. Even within the limits of the classical

prose of our period we shall find a sufficiently marked contrast between the stately periods of Gibbon and the delicate porcelain of Sterne, that first of prose impressionists. Sterne's sentimentalism, again, is one of those diversities which must disconcert the serious belief of those who would regard the century as a lofty but uninteresting plateau. It was primarily, perhaps, a protest against the rationalizing tendencies that were prevalent-a plea for a morale de cœur in place of the enlightened self-interest of official orthodoxy. The same movement-to supply an antidote, as it were, to the prevailing common sense-was carried into other and further extremes by Ann Radcliffe and Clara Reeve, in Zeluco and in the Longsword of Thomas Leland. A more violent opposition still is that between the Epigoniads and the Athenaids of the period, or the lifeless. dogmatism of the rhetorical criticaster Blair and the exquisite lyrics of Burns and of Blake. The most robust believer in the miscreance of the eighteenth century can hardly fail to be staggered by such contradictions as these. Profounder still lies the fact that this age of the negation of spirituality, of Fielding and of Hume and of Horace Walpole (who compared Dante with a Methodist parson in Bedlam), was also the age of the Wesleys, of the revival of mysticism and spirituality in religion, of the most exquisite devotional hymns (such as those of Charles Wesley, Cowper, and Toplady), and (in Smart's Song to David) of the noblest poem which the ancient grandeur of the Hebrew psalmody has ever inspired.

The unshaken believer in the immensity of modern progress is fain to point to the brutality of the age of whippingposts, and hulks and gin-hells and debtors' prisons, and, if necessary, to base our claim to have attained a higher

plane of morality and civilization upon our emancipation from these evils alone. That great strides have been made not only in police and sanitary administration, but in general amenity of manners, since the days of Jonathan Wild and of John Wilkes, is a fact as satisfactory as it is undoubted; but if we come to take the measure of the general advance in the public sense of morality and of decency, we shall find that the progress made between Dryden's day and the close of the eighteenth century was considerably greater than that made during the hundred years that have elapsed since the death of Horace Walpole. All the really great steps that have been made in the direction of elevating the national conscience since the death of Dr. Johnson have been due to men trained at the close of our special period-among whom it suffices to name Howard and Wilberforce, Bentham and Romilly. So much is chattered to-day of progress, and so much importance attached to the unaided efforts of Time as a finisher and perfecter of the human species, that the modern Englishman is in some real danger of looking down upon his greatgreat-grandfather as a very rude and unsophisticated being.

Superficially the changes due to the growth of machinery, and consequently of population and production, have been very considerable; but the two great institutions which are in so many respects the backbone of our national life, the English Church and the English public school, are essentially the same; no less distinctive and persistent has been the disposition of England to abide by its old aristocratic polity of governance-the ideal constitution of Burke discernible to this day beneath all the trappings and disguises that the ingenuity of Whig doctrinaires has devised for its benefit. The old Venetian oligarchy' that owed its origin to 1688 is no doubt enlarged since the day when a few hundred people, secure of their position,

formed English society, and the atmosphere of a compact and intimate aristocracy is very greatly modified. Yet in spite of reform and franchise and education bills, the country, the army, the church, are governed hardly less. exclusively than in Johnson's day by the noblesse and the gentry, reinforced, not as then, by the nabobs, but by the organizers and chieftains of the subsequently developed industrial helotry-the second nation of Disraeli's Sybil ; now, as then, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say by wealth-wealth upon the condition of its being consolidated and extending over more generations than one. It is only necessary to scratch the surface of the average Englishman of to-day, and to scrape off a few affectations of the hour and a few habits due to his superior command of machinery, to reveal a man almost identical in all profounder respects with his Johnsonian ancestor. As a counterpoise to his increased power over nature he has lost some of the old individuality-the result of the beach pebble attrition with his kind which is an inevitable feature of the modern industrial life in our large towns. As a whole, however, the persistence of the type is that which is most palpable. The English now and then seem a race apart, silently but none the less superbly conscious of superiority, strongly insular, self-controlled and conservative, a nation of shop-keepers and colonists, envied (often very unreasonably) even more than disliked by their neighbours; a good deal less influential than they imagine in the evolution of the planet, yet very influential, largely by reason of a literature amazing in its richness and variety, a literature which has been judged by competent critics in respect of its intensity and originality to rival the shapelier, and in some respects maturer, literatures of Greece and of Gaul.

Elaborate refutation is scarcely perhaps needed in answer

to those who would pretend to ignore, or systematically to depreciate, the achievements of the eighteenth century. To affect not to perceive a century which of necessity looms so large in the receding past were about as sensible as to try to evade the laws of perspective: attempts to minimize the value of large and original work in literature, however well concerted and ingenious, can never attain permanent success. In this particular case it is only fair to say that the defects with which the eighteenth century is charged by a superficial criticism are not in any way distinctiveare not in reality peculiar to the eighteenth century at all. It is when we come to examine the great qualities of the period that we shall find its genuine and characteristic defects thrown into a proper relief.

Few would deny that the first twelve years of our period were not only decisive, but together form an epoch which in importance as regards results has scarcely been equalled in our annals. Then were firmly laid the foundations of our over-sea empire; then was perfected that new species of literary product, the novel, which in the hands of its greatest masters has exercised an empire even more worldwide over the minds and imaginations of men. It is certainly very curious to note that this great and germinal period was heralded by a literary forecast (not altogether devoid of skill and insight) in which scarcely a vestige of hope for the future is allowed to penetrate through the general atmosphere of gloom and depression. The author, John Brown (1715-1766), expounded his views in An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757), a book which in Cowper's verse 'rose like a paper kite and charmed the town,' and which in sober prose went through several editions.

6

Admitting that his countrymen have still some spirit of liberty, some humanity, and some equity, Brown argues that