Addison.

reputation; in 1714, when she died, all five had done
enough to assure their permanence, and to fix the type of
literature for which their names collectively stand. Prose
they had brought to that deliberate, balanced, far from
passionate form which it was to retain for several genera-
tions; poetry they had cooled into that rational heroic
'couplet which was to survive in America until the last
days of Dr. Holmes. They had brought into being mean-
while a new form of publication,—the periodical,—destined
to indefinite development. From the time when the first
Tatler appeared in 1709 to the present day, a consid-
erable part of our lasting literature has been published in
periodicals; and periodicals bespeak, before all things
else, a permanent and increasing literary public. If any
one name can imply all this, it is surely that of the urbane
Joseph Addison (1672–1719).

In the middle of the century, when the reign of George II was two-thirds over, English literature was producing a good many works which have survived. Between 1748 and 1752, for example, there were published Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe, Smollett's Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle, Thomson's Castle of Indolence, Fielding's Tom Jones and Amelia, Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes and a considerable portion of his Rambler, Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard, and Goldsmith's Life of Nash. Sterne's work and Goldsmith's best writing came only a little later; and during these same five years appeared Wesley's Plain Account of the People Called Methodists, Hume's Inquiry into the Human Understanding, and his Inquiry concerning the Principles The Mid- of Morals and Political Discourses. The last two names deserve our notice because Wesley's recalls that strenuous

Century.

outburst against religious formalism which has bred the most potent body of modern English Dissenters, and Hume's that rational tendency in philosophy which during the eighteenth century was far more characteristic of. France than of England. Putting these aside, we may find in the literary record of this mid-century a state of things somewhat different from that which prevailed under Queen Anne. Another considerable form of English literature had come into existence,—the prose novel, whose germs were already evident in the character sketches of the Spectator, and in the vivacious incidents of Defoe. Poetry, preserving studied correctness of form, was beginning to tend back toward something more like romantic sentiment; the prose essay had grown heavier and less vital. For the moment the presiding genius of English letters was Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), Johnson. throughout whose work we can feel that the formalism which under Queen Anne had possessed the grace of freshness was becoming traditional. In conventional good sense his writings, like those which surrounded them, remained vigorous; but their vigor was very unlike the spontaneous, enthusiastic versatility of Elizabethan letters.

About twenty-five years later comes a date so memorable to Americans that a glance at its literary record in England can hardly help being suggestive. The year from which our national independence is officially dated came at the height of Burke's powers, and just between Sheridan's Rivals, published the year before, and his School for Scandal, of the year after. In the record of English publications, 1776 is marked by no important works of pure literature; but in that year Hume died, Jeremy Ben

The Close of the Century.

tham published his Fragment on Government, Gibbon the first volume of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Adam Smith his Wealth of Nations, and Thomas Paine his Common Sense; the second edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, too, appeared in ten volumes. In 1776, it seems, things literary in England, as well as things political in the British Empire, were taking a somewhat serious turn.

In the last ten years of the century, the years when the French Revolution was at its fiercest, there appeared in England works by Burke and by Mrs. Radcliffe, Boswell's Johnson, Cowper's Homer, Paine's Rights of Man, Rogers's Pleasures of Memory, poems by Burns, two or three books by Hannah More, the first poems of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Scott, and Landor, Godwin's Caleb Williams, Lewis's Monk, Miss Burney's Camilla, Roscoe's Life of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and Charles Lamb's Rosamund Gray. A curious contrast this shows to the state of things in contemporary France. Though in political matters the French had broken from tradition, their literature had to wait thirty years more for liberation from the tyranny of conventional form. England meanwhile, more tenacious of political tradition than ever before, had begun to disregard the rigid literary tradition which had lasted since the time of Dryden. The Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge, which may be regarded in literature as declaring the independence of the individual spirit, appeared in 1798, the year when Nelson fought the battle of the Nile; but at first they made no great impression. Fiction at the same time seemed less vital. In the last decade of the eighteenth century, though formal tradition was broken, the renewed

strength which was to animate English literature for the next thirty years was not yet quite evident. At the moment, too, no figure in English letters had even such predominance as that of Addison in Queen Anne's time, far less such as Johnson's had been in the later years of George II. Of the elder names mentioned in our last Burke. hasty list the most memorable seems that of Edmund Burke (1729-1797).

These names of Addison, Johnson, and Burke prove quite as significant of English literature in the eighteenth century as those of Shakspere, Milton, and Dryden proved of that literature a century before. Shakspere, Milton, and Dryden seem men of three different epochs; at least comparatively, Addison, Johnson, and Burke seem men of a single type. After all, the mere names tell enough. Think of Shakspere and Dryden together, and then of Addison and Burke. Think of Milton as the figure who intervenes between the first pair, and of Johnson similarly intervening between the second. You can hardly fail to perceive the trend of English literature. In 1600 it was alive with the spontaneity, the enthusiasm, and the versatility of the Elizabethan spirit. By Dryden's time this was already extinct; throughout the century which followed him it showed little symptom of revival. The romantic revival which in Burke's time was just beginning, had, to be sure, enthusiasm; but this was too conscious toseem spontaneous. And although the names of Rogers, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Landor, and Moore, who had all begun writing before 1800, suggest something like versatility, it is rather variety. They differ from one another, but compared with the Elizabethan poets each seems limited, inflexible. Versatility can hardly be held

to characterize any English man of letters who came to maturity in the eighteenth century.

So far as literature is concerned, accordingly, that century seems more and more a period of robustly formal tradition; rational, sensible, prejudiced, and toward the end restless; admirable and manly in a thousand ways, but even further, if possible, from the spontaneous, enthusiastic versatility of Elizabethan days than was the period of Dryden.