lowship, patriotism is the most frequent motive of his song. Of his national anthem, Scots wha hae wi Wallace bled, Carlyle said: "So long as there is warm blood in the heart of Scotchman, or man, it will move in fierce thrills under this war ode." Burns's politics were a singular mixture of sentimental toryism with practical democracy. A romantic glamour was thrown over the fortunes of the exiled Stuarts, and to have been "out" in '45 with the Young Pretender was a popular thing in parts of Scotland. To this purely poetic loyalty may be attributed such Jacobite ballads of Burns as Over the Water to Charlie. But his sober convictions were on the side of liberty and human brotherhood, and are expressed in the Twa Dogs, the First Epistle to Davie, and A Man's a Man for a' that. His sympathy with the Revolution led him to send four pieces of ordnance, taken from a captured smuggler, as a present to the French Convention, a piece of bravado which got him into difficulties with his superiors in the excise. The poetry which Burns wrote, not in dialect, but in the classical English, is in the stilted manner of his century, and his prose correspondence betrays his lack of culture by his constant lapse into rhetorical affectation and fine writing.

1. T. S. Perry's English Literature in the Eighteenth Century.

2. James Thomson. The Castle of Indolence. 3. The Poems of Thomas Gray.

5. The Six Chief Lives from Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Edited by Matthew Arnold. Macmillan, 1878.

6. Boswell's Life of Johnson [abridged]. Henry Holt & Co., 1878.

7. Samuel Richardson.

Clarissa Harlowe.

8. Henry Fielding. Tom Jones.

9. Tobias Smollett.

10. Lawrence Sterne.

11. Oliver Goldsmith.

Deserted Village.

Humphrey Clinker.

Tristram Shandy.

Vicar of Wakefield and

12. William Cowper. The Task and John Gilpin.

13. The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns.

CHAPTER VII.

FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE DEATH OF SCOTT.

1789-1832.

THE burst of creative activity at the opening of the 19th century has but one parallel in English literary history, namely, the somewhat similar flowering out of the national genius in the time of Elisabeth and the first two Stuart kings. The later age gave birth to no supreme poets, like Shakspere and Milton. It produced no Hamlet and no Paradise Lost; but it offers a greater number of important writers, a higher average of excellence, and a wider range and variety of literary work than any preceding era. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Keats are all great names; while Southey, Landor, Moore, Lamb, and De Quincey would be noteworthy figures at any period, and deserve a fuller mention than can be here accorded them. But in so crowded a generation, selection becomes increasingly needful, and in the present chapter, accordingly, the emphasis will be laid upon the firstnamed group as not only the most important, but the most representative of the various tendencies of their time.

The conditions of literary work in this century have been almost unduly stimulating. The rapid advance in population, wealth, education, and the means of comunication have vastly increased the number of readers. Every one who has any thing to say can say it in print, and is sure of some sort of a hearing. A special feature of the time is the multiplication of periodicals. The great London dailies, like the Times and the Morning Post, which were started during the last quarter of the 18th century, were something quite new in journalism. The first of the modern reviews, the Edinburgh, was established in 1802, as the organ of the Whig party in Scotland. This was followed by the London Quarterly, in 1808, and by Blackwood's Magazine, in 1817, both in the Tory interest. The first editor of the Edinburgh was Francis Jeffrey, who assembled about him a distinguished corps of contributors, including the versatile Henry Brougham, afterward a great parliamentary orator and lordchancellor of England, and the Rev. Sydney Smith, whose witty sayings are still current. The first editor of the Quarterly was William Gifford, a satirist, who wrote the Baviad and Mæviad in ridicule of literary affectations. He was succeeded in 1824 by James Gibson Lockhart, the son-in-law of Walter Scott, and the author of an excellent Life of Scott. Blackwood's was edited by John Wilson, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, who, under the pen-name of "Christopher North," contributed to his magazine a series

of brilliant, imaginary dialogues between famous characters of the day, entitled Noctes Ambrosianæ, because they were supposed to take place at Ambrose's tavern in Edinburgh. These papers were full of a profuse, headlong eloquence, of humor, literary criticism, and personalities interspersed with songs expressive of a roystering and convivial Toryism and an uproarious contempt for Whigs and cockneys. These reviews and magazines, and others which sprang up beside them, became the nuclei about which the wit and scholarship of both parties gathered. Political controversy under the Regency and the reign of George IV. was thus carried on more regularly by permanent organs, and no longer so largely by privateering, in the shape of pamphlets, like Swift's Public Spirit of the Allies, Johnson's Taxation No Tyranny, and Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. Nor did politics by any means usurp the columns of the reviews. Literature, art, science, the whole circle of human effort and achievement passed under review. Blackwood's, Fraser's, and the other monthlies, published stories, poetry, criticism, and correspondence- - every thing, in short, which enters into the make-up of our magazines to-day, except illustrations.

Two main influences, of foreign origin, have left their trace in the English writers of the first thirty years of the 19th century, the one communicated by contact with the new German literature of the latter half of the 18th century, and in particular