CHAPTER IV.

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY (1700-1800).

Queen Anne's reign was the Augustan age of literature. Questions of party politics, society, li character were discussed; and wit, ridicule and satir employed as never before. The influence of the old of authors gave way to correctness of form and Pope's "Essay on Man" and "Essay on Criticism still admired. Addison and Steele in their perio the Tattler and the Spectator, popularized literatur "brought philosophy," as Steele expressed it, " libraries, schools, and colleges, to dwell in clubs, a tables, and in coffee-houses." Science now spread idly on every side; and the application of steam to machinery wrought a revolution in commerce, n factures, arts and social life.

A general coarseness existed in society; profanity common. Among the poorer classes, children of years of age were habitually put to work. In m women and children, crawling on their hands and fe the darkness, dragged wagons of coal fastened to waists by a chain. Military and naval discipline maintained by the lash, and in the streets of every port, the press-gang seized and carried off by force w it pleased to be sailors on the men-of-war.

In the country the roads were so bad that wi traveling was well-nigh impossible. The stage-coach tling along in good weather at the rate of four miles

hour was considered a wonderful instance of the progress of the times. In all England there were only about 3,000 schools, public and private, and so late as 1818 half of the children grew up destitute of education.

This eighteenth century was a period of repose in English political history. During the whole of this period, except in the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745, the nation enjoyed profound internal peace. This was the time, it might have been imagined, for the fructification of whatever germs of thought the philosophy and poetry of preceding ages had implanted. Such, however, was far from being the case. The rising of the clans in 1745 divides this into two nearly equal portions, of the first of which, Pope may be taken as the representative author; of the second, Johnson.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744).

"Pope's rhymes too often supply the defects of his reasons."

-Whately.

"The most striking characteristics of his poetry are lucid arrangement of matter, closeness of argument, marvellous conIdensation of thought and expression, brilliancy of fancy ever supplying the aptest illustrations and language elaborately finished almost beyond example."- Alex. Dyce.

Alexander Pope was born in London of Roman Catholic parents, in the year 1688. His father, a merchant, had acquired sufficient property to retire from business and to enjoy the leisure of his rural home near Windsor. Pope's physical deformity and feeble health forbade his attending the public schools and universities of England; his education was therefore privately conducted. states that a Mr. Walsh told him that there was one way of excelling left open to him, for though there had been many great poets, there was never one great poet who

He

had been correct. He advised me to make this my study and aim," Pope followed this advice and at sixteen years of age his "Pastorals " bore witness to a correctness, which no one, not even Dryden, had possessed. Taine says: "When people observed these choice words, these exquisite arrangements of melodious syllables, this science of division and rejection, this style so fluent and pure, these graceful images rendered still more graceful by the diction, and all this artificial and many-tinted garland of flowers which Pope called pastoral, they thought of the first eclogues of Virgil."

Pope was a man of leisure; his father had left him a fair fortune; he earned a large sum by translating the “Iliad " and "Odyssey; " he had an income of eight hundred pounds. Calmly seated in his pretty house at Twickenham, in his grotto, or in the fine garden which he had planned, he could polish his writings as long as he chose. When he had written a work, he kept it at least two years in his desk. From time to time he re-read and corrected it; took counsel of his friends, then of his enemies; no new edition was unamended; he altered without wearying. His first outburst became so recast and transformed that it could not be recognized in the final copy.

Constant ill-health made Pope's temper fretful and irritable. He was a man most peculiar in his appearance; not four feet high, so small that a high-chair was placed for him at table, hunchbacked and thin, so weak that he was scarce able to hold himself erect, so sensitive to cold that he was constantly wrapped in flannels and furs. But this unfortunate man had a fine face and a glowing eye; in dress he was fastidious, his manners, too, were elegant. He had to bear the constant reminder of his physical infirmities as he looked upon the stately figures of men