with propriety. He talks of "cultivating our
thoughts," when he means "pruning our style";
he confounds the Muse with the laurel, or at any
rate makes her a plant, and then goes on with per-
fect equanimity to tell us that a nobler "rage
(that is, madness) than that of Greece would fol-
low the horticultural devices he recommends. It
never seems to have occurred to Waller that it is
the substance of what you polish, and not the polish
itself, that insures duration. Dryden, in his rough-
and-ready way, has hinted at this in his verses to
Congreve on the "Double Dealer." He begins by
stating the received theory about the improvement
of English literature under the new régime, but
the thin ice of sophistry over which Waller had
glided smoothly gives way under his greater weight,
and he finds himself in deep water ere he is aware.

"Well, then, the promised hour has come at last,
The present age in wit obscures the past;

Strong were our sires, and as they fought they writ,
Conquering with force of arm1 and dint of wit.
Theirs was the giant race before the Flood;
And thus when Charles returned our Empire stood;
Like Janus he the stubborn soil manured,
With rules of husbandry the rankness cured,
Tamed us to manners when the stage was rude,
And boisterous English wit with art endued;

Our age was cultivated thus at length,
But what we gained in skill we lost in strength;
Our builders were with want of genius curst,
The second temple was not like the first."

There would seem to be a manifest reminiscence of

1 Usually printed arms, but Dryden certainly wrote arm, to correspond with dint, which he used in its old meaning of a downright blow.

Waller's verse in the half-scornful emphasis which Dryden lays on "cultivated." Perhaps he was at first led to give greater weight to correctness and to the restraint of arbitrary rules from a consciousness that he had a tendency to hyperbole and extravagance. But he afterwards became convinced that the heightening of discourse by passion was a very different thing from the exaggeration which heaps phrase on phrase, and that genius, like beauty, can always plead its privilege. Dryden, by his powerful example, by the charm of his verse which combines vigor and fluency in a measure perhaps never reached by any other of our poets, and above all because it is never long before the sunshine of his cheerful good sense breaks through the clouds of rhetoric, and gilds the clipped hedges over which his thought clambers like an unpruned vine, Dryden, one of the most truly English of English authors, did more than all others combined to bring about the triumphs of French standards in taste and French principles in criticism. But he was always like a deserter who cannot feel happy in the victories of the alien arms, and who would go back if he could to the camp where he naturally belonged. Between 1660 and 1700 more French words, I believe, were directly transplanted into our language than in the century and a half since. What was of more consequence, French ideas came with them, shaping the form, and through that modifying the spirit, of our literature.

Voltaire, though he came later, was steeped in the theories of art which had been inherited as tradi

tions of classicism from the preceding generation. He had lived in England, and, I have no doubt, gives us a very good notion of the tone which was prevalent there in his time, an English version of the criticism imported from France. He tells us that Mr. Addison was the first Englishman who had written a reasonable tragedy. And in spite of the growling of poor old Dennis, whose sandy pedantry was not without an oasis of refreshing sound judgment here and there, this was the opinion of most persons at that day, except, it may be suspected, the judicious and modest Mr. Addison himself. Voltaire says of the English tragedians,

and it will be noticed that he is only putting, in another way, the opinion of Dryden, "Their productions, almost all barbarous, without polish, order, or probability, have astonishing gleams in the midst of their night; . . . it seems sometimes that nature is not made in England as it is elsewhere." Eh bien, the inference is that we must try and make it so! The world must be uniform in order to be comfortable, and what fashion so becoming as the one we have invented in Paris? It is not a little amusing that when Voltaire played master of ceremonies to introduce the bizarre Shakespeare among his countrymen, that other kind of nature made a profounder impression on them than quite pleased him. So he turned about presently and called his whilome protégé a buffoon.

The condition of the English mind at the close of the seventeenth century was such as to make it particularly sensitive to the magnetism which

tans.

streamed to it from Paris. The loyalty of everybody both in politics and religion had been put out of joint. A generation of materialists, by the natural rebound which inevitably follows over-tension, was to balance the ultra-spiritualism of the PuriAs always when a political revolution has been wrought by moral agencies, the plunder had fallen mainly to the share of the greedy, selfish, and unscrupulous, whose disgusting cant had given a taint of hypocrisy to piety itself. Religion, from a burning conviction of the soul, had grown to be with both parties a political badge, as little typical of the inward man as the scallop of a pilgrim. Sincerity is impossible, unless it pervade the whole being, and the pretence of it saps the very foundation of character. There seems to have been an universal scepticism, and in its worst form, that is, with an outward conformity in the interest of decorum and order. There was an unbelief that did not believe even in itself.

The difference between the leading minds of the former age and that which was supplanting it went to the very roots of the soul. Milton was willing to peril the success of his crowning work by making the poetry of it a stalking-horse for his theolog ical convictions. What was that Fame

"Which the clear spirit doth raise

To scorn delights and live laborious days," to the crown of a good preacher who sets

"The hearts of men on fire

To scorn the sordid world and unto heaven aspire"?

Dean Swift, who aspired to the mitre, could write

a book whose moral, if it had any, was that one religion was as good as another, since all were political devices, and accepted a cure of souls when it was more than doubtful whether he believed that his fellow-creatures had any souls to be saved, or, if they had, whether they were worth saving. The answer which Pulci's Margutte makes to Morgante, when asked if he believed in Christ or Mahomet, would have expressed well enough the creed of the majority of that generation:

"To tell thee truly,

My faith in black's no greater than in azure,

But I believe in capons, roast-meat, bouilli,

And in good wine my faith's beyond all measure." 1

It was a carnival of intellect without faith, when men could be Protestant or Catholic, both at once, or by turns, or neither, as suited their interest, when they could swear one allegiance and keep on safe terms with the other, when prime ministers and commanders-in-chief could be intelligencers of the Pretender, nay, when even Algernon Sidney himself could be a pensioner of France. What morality there was, was the morality of appearances, of the side that is turned toward men and not toward God. The very shamelessness of Congreve is refreshing in that age of sham.

It was impossible that anything truly great, that is, great on the moral and emotional as well as the intellectual side, should be produced by such a generation. But something intellectually great could be and was. The French mind, always 1 Morgante, xviii. 115.