form until Richard Steele started the Tatler, in 1709. In this he was soon joined by his friend, Joseph Addison; and in its successor, the Spectator, the first number of which was issued March 1, 1711, Addison's contributions outnumbered Steele's. The Tatler was published on three, the Spectator on six, days of the week. The Tatler gave political news, but each number of the Spectator consisted of a single essay. The object of these periodicals was to reflect the passing humors of the time, and to satirize the follies and minor immoralities of the town. "I shall endeavor," wrote Addison, in the tenth paper of the Spectator, "to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality. . . . It was said of Socrates that he brought Philosophy down from Heaven to inhabit among men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I have brought Philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffeehouses." Addison's satire was never personal. He was a

moderate man, and did what he could to restrain Steele's intemperate party zeal. His character was dignified and pure, and his strongest emotion seems to have been his religious feeling. One of his contemporaries called him "a parson in a tie wig," and he wrote several excellent hymns. His mission was that of censor of the public taste. Sometimes he lectured and sometimes he preached, and in his Saturday papers he brought his wide reading and nice scholarship into service for the instruction of his readers. Such was the series of essays in which he gave an elaborate review of Paradise Lost. Such also was his famous paper, the Vision of Mirza, an oriental allegory of human life. The adoption of this slightly pedagogic tone was justified by the prevalent ignorance and frivolity of the age. But the lighter portions of the Spectator are those which have worn the best. Their style is at once correct and easy, and it is as a humorist, a sly observer of manners, and, above all, a delightful talker, that Addison is best known to posterity. In the personal sketches of the mem

bers of the Spectator Club, of Will Honeycomb, Captain Sentry, Sir Andrew Freeport, and, above all, Sir Roger de Coverley, the quaint and honest country gentleman, may be found the nucleus of the modern prose fiction of character. Addison's humor is always a trifle grave. There is no whimsy, no frolic in it, as in Sterne or Lamb. "He thinks justly," said Dr. Johnson, "but he thinks faintly." The Spectator had a host of followers, from the somewhat heavy Rambler and Idler of Johnson, down to the Salmagundi papers of our own Irving, who was, perhaps, Addison's latest and best literary descendant. In his own age Addison made some figure as a poet and dramatist. His Campaign, celebrating the victory of Blenheim, had one much admired couplet, in which Marlborough was likened to the angel of tempest, who,

Pleased the Almighty's orders to perform,

Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm.

His stately, classical tragedy, Cato, which was acted at Drury Lane Theater in 1712, with immense applause, was pronounced by Dr. Johnson "unquestionably the noblest production of Addison's genius." Is is, notwithstanding, cold and tedious, as a whole, though it has some fine declamatory passages-in particular the soliloquy of Cato in the fifth act

It must be so: Plato, thou reasonest well, etc.

The greatest of the Queen Anne wits, and one of the most savage and powerful satirists that ever lived, was Jonathan Swift. As secretary in the family of Sir William Temple, and domestic chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley, he had known in youth the bitterness of poverty and dependence. Afterward he wrote himself into influence with the Tory ministry, and was promised a bishopric, but was put off with the deanery of St. Patrick's, and retired to Ireland to "die like a poisoned rat in a hole.” His life was made tragical by the forecast of the madness which finally overtook him. "The stage dark

ened," said Scott, "ere the curtain fell." Insanity deepened into idiocy and a hideous silence, and for three years before his death he spoke hardly ever a word. He had directed that his tombstone should bear the inscription, Ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit. "So great a man he seems to me," wrote Thackeray, "that thinking of him is like thinking of an empire falling." Swift's first noteworthy publication was his Tale of a Tub, 1704, a satire on religious differences. But his great work was Gulliver's Travels, 1726, the book in which his hate and scorn of mankind, and the long rage of mortified pride and thwarted ambition found their fullest expression. Children read the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag, to the flying island of Laputa and the country of the Houyhnhnms, as they read Robinson Crusoe, as stories of wonderful adventure. Swift had all of De Foe's realism, his power of giving veri-similitude to his narrative by the invention of a vast number of small, exact, consistent details. But underneath its fairy tales Gulliver's Travels is a satire, far more radical than any of Dryden's or Pope's, because directed, not against particular parties or persons, but against human nature. In his account of Lilliput and Brobdingnag, Swift tries to show that human greatness, goodness, beauty disappear if the scale be altered a little. If men were six inches high instead of six feet, their wars, governments, science, religion-all their institutions, in fine, and all the courage, wisdom, and virtue by which these have been built up, would appear laughable. On the other hand, if they were sixty feet high instead of six, they would become disgusting. The complexion of the finest ladies would show blotches, hairs, excrescences, and an overpowering effluvium would breathe from the pores of the skin. Finally, in his loathsome caricature of mankind, as Yahoos, he contrasts them, to their shame, with the beasts, and sets instinct above reason.

The method of Swift's satire was grave irony. Among his minor writings. in this kind are his Argument against

Abolishing Christianity, his Modest Proposal for utilizing the surplus population of Ireland by eating the babies of the poor, and his Predictions of Isaac Bickerstaff. In the last he predicted the death of one Partridge, an almanac maker, at a certain day and hour. When the time set was past, he. published a minute account of Partridge's last moments; and when the subject of this excellent fooling printed an indignant denial of his own death, Swift answered very temperately, proving that he was dead and remonstrating with him on the violence of his language. "To call a man a fool and villain, an impudent fellow, only for differing from him in a point merely speculative, is, in my humble opinion, a very improper style for a person of his education." Swift wrote verses as well as prose, but their motive was the reverse of poetical. His gross and cynical humor vulgarized whatever it touched. He leaves us no illusions, and not only strips his subject, but flays it and shows the raw muscles beneath the skin. He delighted to dwell upon the lowest bodily functions of human nature. "He saw bloodshot," said Thackeray.

1. History of Eighteenth Century Literature (1660–1780). Edmund Gosse. London: Macmillan & Co., 1889. 2. Macaulay's Essay, The Comic Dramatists of the Restoration.

3. The Poetical Works of John Dryden. Macmillan & Co., 1873. (Globe Edition.)

4. Thackeray's English Humorists of the last Century. 5. Sir Roger de Coverley. New York: Harpers, 1878. 6. Swift's Tale of a Tub, Gulliver's Travels, Directions to Servants, Polite Conversation, The Great Question Debated, Verses on the Death of Dean Swift.

7. The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope. London: Macmillan & Co., 1869. (Globe Edition.)

CHAPTER VI.

FROM THE DEATH OF POPE TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

1744-1789.

POPE's example continued potent for fifty years after his death. Especially was this so in satiric and didactic poetry. Not only Dr. Johnson's adaptations from Juvenal, London, 1738, and the Vanity of Human Wishes, 1749, but Gifford's Baviad, 1791, and Maeviad, 1795, and Byron's English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 1809, were in the verse and the manner of Pope. In Johnson's Lives of the Poets, 1781, Dryden and Pope are treated as the two greatest English poets. But long before this a revolution in literary taste had begun, a movement which is variously described as the Return to Nature or the Rise of the New Romantic School.

For nearly a hundred years poetry had dealt with manners and the life of towns-the gay, prosaic life of Congreve or of Pope. The sole concession to the life of nature was the old pastoral, which, in the hands of cockneys like Pope and Ambrose Philips, who merely repeated stock descriptions at second or third hand, became even more artificial than a Beggar's Opera or a Rape of the Lock. These at least were true to their environment, and were natural just because they were artificial. But the Seasons of James Thomson, published in installments from 1726-1730, had opened a new field. Their theme was the English landscape, as varied by the changes of the year, and they were written. by a true lover and observer of nature. Mark Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination, 1744, published the year of Pope's death, was written, like the Seasons, in blank verse;