Chapter 9

FRANCIS ATTERBURY--LORD SHAFTESBURY--BERNARD DE MANDEVILLE--LORD BOLINGBROKE--BISHOP BERKELEY--WILLIAM LAW--BISHOP BUTLER--BISHOP WARBURTON.

[Sidenote: Francis Atterbury (1662-1732).]

During the first half of the eighteenth century the position held by Bishop Atterbury was one of high eminence. Addison ranked him with the most illustrious geniuses of his age; Pope said he was one of the greatest men in polite learning the nation ever possessed; Doddridge called him the glory of English orators; and Johnson said that for style his sermons are among the best.

Unfortunately Atterbury's literary gifts, like his oratory, lack the merit of permanence, and his sermons, more conspicuous for eloquence than for weightiness of matter, although extremely popular at the time, have long ceased to be read. His prominence among the Queen Anne wits,--and he was admired by them all,--is a sufficient reason for saying a few words about him in these pages.

He was born in 1662, and, like Prior, educated at Westminster under the famous Dr. Busby. Thence he went to Christ Church, Oxford, where he gained a good reputation. He undertook the tutorship of the Hon. C. Boyle, a young man of more spirit than judgment, who had the audacity to enter the lists with Bentley in a matter of scholarship. For this rash deed Atterbury must be held responsible. Sir William Temple had published a foolish but eloquently written essay in defence of the ancient writers in comparison with the modern. In this essay he praises warmly the _Letters of Phalaris_. Of these letters Boyle, with the help of Atterbury and other members of Christ Church, published a new edition to satisfy the demand caused by Temple's essay. Bentley, roused to reply by a remark of Boyle in his preface, proved that the _Letters_ were not only spurious but contemptible. Under his pupil's name Atterbury replied to Bentley's _Dissertations_, and to the discussion, as the reader will remember, Swift added wit if not argument.

For the moment Boyle's, or rather Atterbury's success, was great, for wit and rhetoric are powerful persuasives. The authors, too, had the Christ Church men to back them, the arch-critic having treated them with contempt. Atterbury's share in the work, as he tells Boyle, "consisted in writing more than half the book, in reviewing a great part of the rest, and in transcribing the whole." His _Examination of Dr. Bentley's Dissertations_ (1698) is a brilliant piece of work, and 'deserves the praise,' says Macaulay, 'whatever that praise may be worth, of being the best book ever written by any man on the wrong side of a question of which he was profoundly ignorant.' Having taken holy orders, Atterbury became a court preacher, and ample clerical honours fell to his share. In 1700 he published a book entitled, _The Rights, Powers, and Privileges of an English Convocation Stated and Vindicated_, which was warmly applauded by High Churchmen. In 1701 he was appointed Archdeacon of Totness, and afterwards Prebend of Exeter. He became the favourite chaplain of Queen Anne, and when Prince George died proved the power of his eloquence by representing 'his unassuming virtues in such high relief that his widow could not help feeling her irreparable loss.'

Atterbury was made successively Dean of Carlisle and of Christ Church, and in 1713 succeeded Sprat as Dean of Westminster and Bishop of Rochester. Before making Swift's acquaintance he recommended his friend Trelawney, Bishop of Exeter, to read the _Tale of a Tub_, a book which is to be valued, 'in spite of its profaneness,' as 'an original in its kind, full of wit, humour, good sense, and learning.' Atterbury's taste for literature was not always so discriminative. He advised Pope, as has been already stated, to 'polish' _Samson Agonistes_, declared that all verses should have instruction at the bottom of them, and told the poet, as though he had discovered a merit, that his poetry was 'all over morality from the beginning to the end of it.' He ventured occasionally into the verse-making field himself, and wrote a song to Silvia, in which, after admitting that he had loved before as men worship strange deities, he adds:

'My heart, 'tis true, has often ranged, Like bees on gaudy flowers, And many a thousand loves has changed, Till it was fixed on yours.

'But, Silvia, when I saw those eyes, 'Twas soon determined there; Stars might as well forsake the skies, And vanish into air.

'When I from this great rule do err, New beauties to adore, May I again turn wanderer, And never settle more.'

The close friendship between Atterbury and Pope did honour to both men, and when Pope went to London he would 'lie at the deanery.' There, unknown to his friend, the bishop carried on his Jacobite intrigues, and there may still be seen, in a residence made famous by more than one great name, a secret room in which Atterbury concealed his treasonable correspondence. The poet did not believe that his friend was guilty, but it has been well known since the publication of the Stuart papers, more than forty years ago, that the splendid defence made by Atterbury at his trial in the House of Lords was based upon a falsehood. For years the bishop appears to have corresponded, under feigned names and by the help of ciphers, with 'the king over the water;' but the plot which led to his imprisonment and ultimate exile was not discovered until 1722, when he was arrested for high treason. At his trial he called God to witness his innocence; and when Pope took leave of him in the Tower he told the poet he would allow him to call his sentence a just one if he should ever find that he had dealings with the Pretender in his exile. Pope gave evidence at his trial, and, as he told Spence, lost his self-possession and made two or three blunders.

Atterbury was exiled in June, 1723. On reaching Calais he heard that Bolingbroke had just arrived there on his way to England, having had a royal pardon. 'Then I am exchanged,' he said.

The pathetic story of his banishment, and of his devoted daughter's illness and voyage to the south of France, where after a union of a few hours, she died in her father's arms, is full of the most touching details, and may be read in Atterbury's correspondence. 'She is gone,' the bishop wrote, 'and I must follow her. When I do, may my latter end be like hers! It was my business to have taught her to die; instead of it, she has taught me.' Like Fielding's account of his _Voyage to Lisbon_, the letters give a picture of the time, and of travelling discomforts and difficulties of which we, in these more fortunate days, know nothing. The bishop, who did not long survive his daughter, died in 1732, but before the end came he defended himself admirably from the accusation of Oldmixon, a libeller who stands in the pillory of the _Dunciad_, that he had helped to garble Clarendon's _History_. The body was carried to England and privately buried by the side of his daughter in Westminster Abbey. The eloquence of Atterbury's sermons--there are four volumes of them in print--has not secured to them a lasting place in literature, but they are distinguished by purity of style, and have enough of _unction_ to make them highly effective as pulpit discourses. In book form, too, they were for a long time popular, and reached an eighth edition about thirty years after the bishop's death. The eloquent sermon on the death of Lady Cutts endows the lady with such an array of virtues, that one is inclined to wonder how so many rare qualities could have been exhibited in so brief a life:

'She excelled in all the characters that belonged to her, and was in a great measure equal to all the obligations that she lay under. She was devout without superstition; strict, without ill humour; good-natured, without weakness; cheerful, without levity; regular, without affectation. She was to her husband the best of wives, the most agreeable of companions, and most faithful of friends; to her servants the best of mistresses; to her relations extremely respectful; to her inferiors very obliging; and by all that knew her, either nearly or at a distance, she was reckoned and confessed to be one of the best of women. And yet all this goodness and all this excellence was bounded within the compass of eighteen years and as many days; for no longer was she allowed to live among us. She was snatched out of the world as soon almost as she had made her appearance in it, like a jewel of high price just shown a little, and then put up again, and we were deprived of her by that time we had learnt to value her. But circles may be complete though small; the perfection of life doth not consist in the length of it.'

As a friend of literature and of men of letters, Atterbury claims the student's recognition, and the five volumes of his correspondence deserve to be consulted.

[Sidenote: Anthony, third Lord Shaftesbury (1671-1713).]

'I will tell you,' writes the poet Gray, 'how Lord Shaftesbury came to be a philosopher in vogue: first, he was a lord; secondly, he was as vain as any of his readers; thirdly, men are very prone to believe what they do not understand; fourthly, they will believe anything at all provided they are under no obligation to believe it; fifthly, they love to take a new road, even when that road leads nowhere; sixthly, he was reckoned a fine writer, and seemed always to mean more than he said. Would you have any more reasons? An interval of above forty years has pretty well destroyed the charm.'

One hundred and thirty-five years have gone by since Gray wrote his estimate of Lord Shaftesbury, whose _Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times_ (1711) passed through several editions in the last century. The first volume consists of: _A Letter concerning Enthusiasm_, _An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour_ and _Advice to an Author_; Vol. ii. contains _An Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit_ (1699), and _The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody_ (1709), and Vol. iii. contains _Miscellaneous Reflections_ and the _Judgments of Hercules_.

Shaftesbury was a Deist, and while professing to honour the Christian faith, which he terms 'our holy religion,' exercises his wit and casuistry and command of English to undermine it. Pope, who shows in the _Essay on Man_ that he had read the _Characteristics_, said that to his knowledge 'the work had done more harm to revealed religion in England than all the works of infidelity,' a judgment which may seem extravagant, for Shaftesbury is too vague and rhetorical greatly to influence thoughtful readers, and too much of a 'virtuoso,' to use his own words, for readers of another class; yet the fact that the work passed, as we have said, through several editions, shows that the author had a considerable public to whom he could appeal. Moreover, it is clear that what Mr. Balfour calls 'the shallow optimism' of his creed was not deemed so inconsiderable then as it now appears, or Berkeley would not have deemed it necessary to controvert his arguments in the third Dialogue of his _Alciphron_. Like Berkeley, Shaftesbury occasionally makes use of the dialogue very effectively, but he has not the bishop's incisiveness. His style, though often faulty, and giving one the impression that the author is affected, and wishes to say fine things, is at its best fresh and lucid. The reader will observe that whatever be the topic Shaftesbury professes to discuss, his one aim is to assert his principles as a free-thinking and free-speaking philosopher. His inferences, his illustrations, his criticisms, and exaltation of the 'moral sense,' are all so many underhanded blows at the faith which he never openly opposes.

Thus his essay on the _Freedom of Wit and Humour_ is chiefly written in defence of raillery in the discussion of serious subjects, when managed 'with good breeding,' and for 'a liberty in decent language to question everything' amongst gentlemen and friends. He regards ridicule as the antidote to enthusiasm, believes in the harmony and perfection of nature, and considers that evil only exists in our ignorance. Mr. Leslie Stephen, whose impartiality in estimating an author like Shaftesbury will not be questioned, calls him a wearisome and perplexed writer, whose rhetoric is flimsy, but who has 'a true vigour and originality which redeems him from contempt.'

Judged by his influence on the age Shaftesbury's place in the history of literature and of philosophy is an important one. Seed springs up quickly when the soil is prepared for it, and Shaftesbury by his belief in the perfectibility of human nature through the aid of culture, appealed, as Mandeville also did from a lower and opposite platform, to the views current in polite society. According to Shaftesbury men have a natural instinct for virtue, and the sense of what is beautiful enables the virtuoso to reject what is evil and to cleave to what is good. Let a man once see that to be wicked is to be miserable, and virtue will be dear for its own sake apart from the fear of punishment or the hope of reward. He found salvation for the world in a cultivated taste, but had no gospel for the men whose tastes were not cultivated.

Voltaire sneered at the optimism of the _Essay on Man_ and of the _Characteristics_. 'Shaftesbury,' he says, 'who made the fable fashionable, was a very unhappy man. I have seen Bolingbroke a prey to vexation and rage, and Pope, whom he induced to put this sorry jest into verse, was as much to be pitied as any man I have ever known; mis-shapen in body, dissatisfied in mind, always ill, always a burden to himself, and harassed by a hundred enemies to his very last moment.'

[Sidenote: Bernard de Mandeville (1670?-1733).]

Bernard de Mandeville gained much notoriety by his _Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits_ (1723). The book opens with a poem in doggrel verse called _The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves turned honest_, the purport of which is to show that as the bees became virtuous, they ceased to be successful. He closes with the moral that

'To enjoy the world's conveniences, Be famed in war, yet live in ease, Without great vices is a vain Utopia, seated in the brain. Fraud, Luxury, and Pride must live, While we the benefits receive.'

In the prose which follows the fable, Mandeville may at least claim the credit of being outspoken, and he does not scruple to say that modesty is a sham and that what seems like virtue is nothing but self-love. 'I often,' he says, 'compare the virtues of good men to your large china jars; they make a fine show, but look into a thousand of them, and you will find nothing in them but dust and cobwebs.'

While declaring that he is far from encouraging vice, he regards it as essential to the well-being of society. The degradation of the race excites his amusement, and the fact that he cannot see a way of escape from it, causes no regret. Shaftesbury's arguments excited the mirth of a man who believed neither in present nor future good 'Two systems,' he says, 'cannot be more opposite than his lordship's and mine. His notions, I confess, are generous and refined. They are a high compliment to human kind, and capable, by the help of a little enthusiasm, of inspiring us with the most noble sentiments concerning the dignity of our exalted nature. What pity it is that they are not true.'

The author of the _Fable of the Bees_ writes coarsely for coarse readers, and the arguments by which he supports his graceless theory merit the infamy generally awarded to them.[57] The book was attacked by Warburton and Law, and with much force and humour by Berkeley, in the second Dialogue of _Alciphron_. But the bishop, to use a homely phrase, does not hit the right nail on the head. Instead of arguing that virtue and goodness are realities, while evil, being unreal and antagonistic to man's nature, is an enemy to be fought against and conquered, Berkeley takes a lower ground, and is content to show in his reply to Mandeville that virtue is more profitable to a state than vice. He annihilates many of Mandeville's arguments in a masterly style, but it was left to the author of the _Serious Call_ to strike at the root of Mandeville's fallacy, and to show how the seat of virtue, if I may apply Hooker's noble words with regard to law, 'is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world; all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power.'

[Sidenote: Lord Bolingbroke (1678-1751).]

The life of Henry St. John was a mass of contradictions. He was a brilliant politician who affected to be a wise statesman, a traitor to his country while pretending to be a patriot, an orator whose lips distilled honied phrases which his actions belied, a man of insatiable ambition who masked as a philosopher, a profligate without shame, a faithless friend, and an unscrupulous opponent. Blessed with every charm of manner, features, and voice, with a taste for literature and a large faculty of acquisition, he was a slave to the meanest vices. A Secretary of State at thirty-two, no man probably ever entered upon public life with brighter prospects, and the secret of all his failures was due to the want of character. 'Few people,' says Lord Hervey, 'ever believed him without being deceived or trusted him without being betrayed; he was one to whom prosperity was no advantage, and adversity no instruction.'

It is said that his genius as an orator was of a high order and this we can believe the more readily since the style of his works is distinctly oratorical. In speech so much depends upon voice and manner that it is possible for a shallow thinker to be an extremely attractive speaker; Bolingbroke's speeches have not been preserved, and we may therefore continue, if we please, to hold with Pitt, that they are the most desirable of all the lost fragments of literature; his writings, far more showy than solid, do not convey a lofty impression of intellectual power. Obvious truths and well-worn truisms are uttered in high-sounding words, but in no department of thought can it be said that Bolingbroke breaks new ground. Much that he wrote was for the day and died with it, and if his more ambitious efforts, written with an eye to posterity, cannot justly be described as unreadable, they contain comparatively little which makes them worthy to be read.

His defence of his conduct in _A Letter to Sir William Windham_, written in 1717, but not published until after the author's death, though worthless as a defence, is a fine piece of special pleading in Bolingbroke's best style. It could deceive no one acquainted with the part played by the author before the death of Queen Anne, and afterwards in exile, but it afforded him an opportunity for attacking his former colleague, Oxford, with all the weapons available by an unscrupulous and powerful assailant. He declares in this letter that he preferred exile rather than to make common cause with the man whom he abhorred. Writing of Oxford as a colleague in the government of the country he observes in a skilfully turned passage:

'The ocean which environs us is an emblem of our government; and the pilot and the minister are in similar circumstances. It seldom happens that either of them can steer a direct course, and they both arrive at their port by means which frequently seem to carry them from it. But as the work advances the conduct of him who leads it on with real abilities clears up, the appearing inconsistencies are reconciled, and when it is once consummated, the whole shows itself so uniform, so plain, and so natural, that every dabbler in politics will be apt to think he could have done the same. But on the other hand the man who proposes no such object, who substitutes artifice in the place of ability, who, instead of leading parties and governing accidents, is eternally agitated backwards and forwards by both, who begins every day something new, and carries nothing on to perfection, may impose awhile on the world: but a little sooner or a little later the mystery will be revealed, and nothing will be found to be couched under it but a thread of pitiful expedients, the ultimate end of which never extended farther than living from day to day. Which of these pictures resembles Oxford most you will determine.'

It has been said with somewhat daring exaggeration, that Burke never produced anything nobler than this passage, and the writer regards the whole composition of the _Letter to Windham_ as almost faultless.[58]

That it is Bolingbroke's masterpiece may be readily admitted, but in this _Letter_, as elsewhere, the merits of Bolingbroke's style are those of the popular orator who conceals repetitions, contradictory statements, and emptiness of thought under a dazzling display of rhetoric. That he had splendid gifts and exhibited an extraordinary ingenuity of resource was acknowledged by friend and foe. At one time taking a distinguished part in European affairs, at another artfully intriguing, sometimes posing as a moralist and philosopher while a slave to debauchery, and at other times affecting a love of retirement while a slave to ambition--Bolingbroke acted a part which made him one of the most conspicuous figures of the time. He knew how to fascinate men of greater genius than he possessed, and how to guide men intellectually his superiors. The witchcraft of his wit and the charm of his manners no longer disturb the judgment. As a statesman Bolingbroke is now comparatively despised, as a man of letters he is generally regarded as a brilliant pretender, and if his name survives in the history of literature it is chiefly due to the friendship of Pope. Unfortunately the memory of this celebrated friendship is associated with one of the most ignoble acts of Bolingbroke's life. When Pope lay dying, Bolingbroke wept over his friend exclaiming, 'O great God, what is man!' and Spence relates that upon telling his lordship how Pope whenever he was sensible said something kindly of his friends as if his humanity outlasted his understanding, Bolingbroke replied, '"It has so! I never in my life knew a man that had so tender a heart for his particular friends or a more general friendship for mankind. I have known him these thirty years, and value myself more for that man's love than"--sinking his head and losing himself in tears.' His sorrow was speedily changed to anger. Pope, no doubt in admiration of his friend's genius, had privately printed 1,500 copies of his _Patriot King_, one of Bolingbroke's ablest but most sophistical works. The philosopher had only allowed a few copies to be printed for his friends, and the discovery of Pope's conduct roused his indignation. In 1749 he put a corrected copy of the work into Mallet's hands for publication with an advertisement in which Pope is treated with contempt. He had not the courage to assail the memory of his friend openly, and hired an unprincipled man to do it. The poet had acted trickily, after his wonted habit, though in all likelihood with the design of doing Bolingbroke a service. It was a fault to be forgiven by a friend, but Bolingbroke, after nursing his anger for five years, gave vent to it in this contemptible and underhand way. He died two years afterwards, and in 1754 the posthumous publication of Bolingbroke's _Philosophical Writings_ by Mallet, aroused a storm of indignation in the country, which his debauchery and political immorality had failed to excite. Johnson's saying on the occasion is well-known:

'Sir, he was a scoundrel and a coward; a scoundrel for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality; a coward because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half-a-crown to a beggarly Scotchman to draw the trigger after his death.'

The most noteworthy estimate of Bolingbroke's character made in our day comes from the pen of Mr. John Morley,[59] who describes as follows his position as a man of letters. 'He handled the great and difficult instrument of written language with such freedom and copiousness, such vivacity and ease, that in spite of much literary foppery and falsetto, he ranks in all that musicians call execution, only below the three or four highest masters of English prose. Yet of all the characters in our history Bolingbroke must be pronounced to be most of a charlatan; of all the writing in our literature, his is the hollowest, the flashiest, the most insincere.' This is true. By his 'execution,' consummate though it be, he is unable to conceal his insincerity and shallowness. 'Bolingbroke,' said Lord Shelburne, was 'all surface,' and in that sentence his character is written.

'People seem to think,' said Carlyle, 'that a style can be put off or put on, not like a skin, but like a coat. Is not a skin verily a product and close kinsfellow of all that lies under it,--exact type of the nature of the beast, not to be plucked off without flaying and death?'

Two years after the publication of the _Philosophical Writings_, Edmund Burke, then a young man of twenty-four, published _A Vindication of Natural Society_, in a _Letter to Lord----. By a late noble writer_, in which Lord Bolingbroke's style is imitated, and his arguments against revealed religion applied to exhibit 'the miseries and evils arising to mankind from every species of Artificial Society.' So close is the imitation of Bolingbroke's style and mode of argument in this piece of irony, that it was for a time believed to be a genuine production, and Mallet found it necessary to disavow it publicly.

Of Bolingbroke's Works, the _Dissertation on Parties_ appeared in 1735. _Letters on Patriotism_, and _Idea of a Patriot King_, in 1749; _Letters on the Study of History_, in 1752; _Letter to Sir W. Windham_, 1753, and the _Philosophical Writings_, as already stated, in 1754. Chronologically, therefore, he would belong to the Handbook which deals with the latter half of the century, were it not that his most important works were posthumous, and that Bolingbroke's intimate relations with Pope place him among the most conspicuous figures belonging to Pope's age.

[Sidenote: George Berkeley (1685-1753).]

Among the men of high intellect who flourished in the age of Pope, George Berkeley is one of the most distinguished. Born in 1685 of poor parents, in a cottage near Dysert Castle, in Kilkenny, he went up to Trinity College, Dublin, in 1700, and there, first as student, and afterwards as tutor, he remained for thirteen years. In the course of them he was ordained, and gained a fellowship. In 1709 he published his _Essay on Vision_, and in the following year the _Principles of Human Knowledge_, works which thus early made him famous as a philosopher, and a puzzle to many who failed to understand his 'new principle' with regard to the existence of matter.

In 1712 Berkeley visited England, probably for the first time, and was introduced to the London wits. Already in these youthful days there was in him much of that magic power which some men exercise unconsciously and irresistibly. Swift felt the spell, called Berkeley a great philosopher, and spoke of him to all the Ministers; while Atterbury, upon being asked what he thought of him, exclaimed: 'So much understanding, so much knowledge, so much innocence, and such humility, I did not think had been the portion of any but angels till I saw this gentleman.' An incident occurred, it is conjectured during the course of this visit, which led to memorable results. He dined once with Swift at Mrs. Vanhomrigh's, and met her daughter Hester. Many years later, _Vanessa_ destroyed the will she had made in Swift's favour, and left half of her property to Berkeley. While in London the future bishop was warmly welcomed by Steele, and wrote several essays for him in the _Guardian_ against the Freethinkers, and especially against Anthony Collins (1676-1729), whose arguments in his _Discourse on Freethinking_ (1713) are ridiculed in the _Scriblerus Memoirs_. Collins, it may be observed here, wrote a treatise several years later on the _Grounds of the Christian Religion_ (1724) which called forth thirty-five answers. During this visit Berkeley also published one of his most original works, _Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous_, a book marked by that consummate beauty of style for which he is distinguished.

In November, 1713, the Earl of Peterborough was sent on an embassage to the King of Sicily, and on Swift's recommendation took Berkeley with him as his chaplain and secretary. Ten months were spent on this occasion in France and Italy. Another continental tour followed, in the course of which Berkeley wrote to Arbuthnot of his ascent of Vesuvius, and to Pope of his life at Naples. Five years were spent abroad, and he returned to England to learn of the failure of the South Sea Scheme. In his _Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain_ (1721), the main argument is the obvious one, that national salvation is only to be secured by individual uprightness. He deplores 'the trifling vanity of apparel' which we have learned from France, advocates the revival of sumptuary laws, considers that we are 'doomed to be undone' by luxury, and by the want of public spirit, and declares that 'neither Venice nor Paris, nor any other town in any part of the world ever knew such an expensive ruinous folly as our masquerade.'

In the summer of this year he was again in London, and Pope asked him to spend a week in his 'Tusculum.' One promotion followed another until Berkeley became Dean of Derry, with an income of from £1,500 to £2,000 a year. He did not hold this dignified position long, having conceived the magnificent but Utopian idea of founding a Missionary College in the Bermudas--the 'Summer Isles' celebrated in the verse of Waller and of Marvell--for the conversion of America.

And now Berkeley exhibited his amazing power of influencing other men. The members of the Scriblerus Club laughed at the Dean's project, but so powerful was his eloquence, that 'those who came to scoff remained to subscribe.' Moreover, with Sir Robert Walpole as Prime Minister, he actually obtained a grant from the State of £20,000 in order to carry out the project, the king gave a charter, and to crown all, Sir Robert put his own name down for £200 on the list of subscribers. 'The scheme,' says Mr. Balfour, 'seems now so impracticable that we may well wonder how any single person, let alone the representatives of a whole nation, could be found to support it. In order that religion and learning might flourish in America, the seeds of them were to be cast in some rocky islets severed from America by nearly six hundred miles of stormy ocean. In order that the inhabitants of the mainland and of the West Indian colonies might equally benefit by the new university, it was to be placed in such a position that neither could conveniently reach it.'[60] Berkeley, who had recently married, left England for Rhode Island, where he stayed for about three years and wrote _Alciphron_ (1732), in which he attacks the freethinkers under the title of _Minute Philosophers_. Then on learning from Walpole that the promised money 'would most undoubtedly be paid as soon as suits public convenience' which would be never, he returned to England, and through the Queen's influence was made Bishop of Cloyne. In that diocese eighteen years of his life were spent. In the course of them he published the _Querist_ (1735-1737), an _Essay on the Social State of Ireland_ (1744), and, in the same year, _Siris_, which contains the bishop's famous recipe for the use of tar water followed by much philosophical disquisition. The remedy, which was afterwards praised by the poet Dyer in _The Fleece_, became instantly popular. 'We are now mad about the water,' Horace Walpole wrote; 'the book contains every subject from tar water to the Trinity; however, all the women read it, and understand it no more than if it were intelligible.' Editions of _Siris_ followed each other in rapid succession, and it was translated into French and German. The work is that of an enthusiast, and it should be read not for its argument, but for its wealth of suggestiveness, and for what Mr. Balfour calls 'a certain quality of moral elevation and speculative diffidence alien both to the literature and the life of the eighteenth century.' Berkeley had himself the profoundest faith in the panacea which he advocated. 'From my representing tar water,' he writes, 'as good for so many things, some, perhaps, many conclude it is good for nothing. But charity obligeth me to say what I know, and what I think, howsoever it may be taken. Men may conjecture and object as they please, but I appeal to time and experience.'

In his latter days Berkeley, feeling his health failing, desired to resign his bishopric and retire to Oxford, and there--while still bishop of Cloyne, for the king would not accept his resignation--the philosopher, who was blest, to use Shakespeare's fine epithet, with a 'tender-hefted nature,' passed away in 1753, leaving behind him one of the most fragrant of memories.

That Berkeley was a philosophical thinker from his earliest manhood is evident from his _Commonplace Book_ published for the first time in the Clarendon Press edition of his works (vol. iv., pp. 419-502).

He delighted in recondite thought as much as most young men delight in action, and as a philosopher he is said to have commenced his studies with Locke, whose famous _Essay_ appeared in 1690. Of Plato, too, Berkeley was an ardent admirer, and the spirit of Plato pervades his works. His _Essay towards a New Theory of Vision_ contains some intimations of the famous metaphysical theory which was developed a little later in the _Treatise on Human Knowledge_.

A good deal of foolish ridicule was excited by this book. Berkeley was supposed to maintain the absurd paradox that sensible things do not exist at all. The reader will remember how Dr. Johnson undertook to refute the postulate by striking his foot against a stone, while James Beattie (1735-1803), the poet and moral philosopher, in a volume for which he was rewarded with a pension of £200 a year, denounced Berkeley's philosophy as 'scandalously absurd.' 'If,' he writes, 'I were permitted to propose one clownish question, I would fain ask ... Where is the harm of my believing that if I were to fall down yonder precipice and break my neck, I should be no more a man of this world? My neck, Sir, may be an idea to you, but to me it is a reality, and a very important one too. Where is the harm of my believing that if in this severe weather I were to neglect to throw (what you call) the idea of a coat over the ideas of my shoulders, the idea of cold would produce the idea of such pain and disorder as might possibly terminate in my real death? What great offence shall I commit against God or man, church or state, philosophy or common sense if I continue to believe that material food will nourish me, though the idea of it will not, that the real sun will warm and enlighten me, though the liveliest idea of him will do neither; and that if I would obtain here peace of mind and self-approbation, I must not only form ideas of compassion, justice and generosity, but also really exert those virtues in external performance?'[61]

Beattie continues in this foolish strain to throw contempt upon a system which he had not taken the trouble to understand, and upon one of the sanest and noblest of English philosophers, and he does so without a thought that the absurdity is due to his own ignorance and not to the theory of Berkeley. The author of the _Minstrel_ was an honest man and a respectable poet, but he prided himself too much on what he called common sense, and failed to see that in the search after truth other and even higher faculties may be also needed. Moreover, Berkeley, so far from being an enemy to common sense, endeavours, as he says, to vindicate it, although in so doing, he 'may perhaps be obliged to use some _ambages_ and ways of speech not common.' A significant passage may be quoted from the _Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous_ (1713) in illustration of his method and style so far indeed as a short extract can illustrate an argument sustained by a long course of reasoning.

'_Phil._ As I am no sceptic with regard to the nature of things, so neither am I as to their existence. That a thing should be really perceived by my senses, and at the same time not really exist is to me a plain contradiction; since I cannot prescind or abstract even in thought, the existence of a sensible thing from its being perceived. Wood, stones, fire, water, flesh, iron, and the like things, which I name and discourse of, are things that I know. And I should not have known them but that I perceived them by my senses; and things perceived by the senses are immediately perceived; and things immediately perceived are ideas; and ideas cannot exist without the mind; their existence therefore consists in being perceived; when therefore they are actually perceived there can be no doubt of their existence.... I might as well doubt of my own being, as of the being of those things I actually see and feel.

'_Hyl._ Not so fast, _Philonous_; you say you cannot conceive how sensible things should exist without the mind. Do you not?

'_Phil._ I do.

'_Hyl._ Supposing you were annihilated, cannot you conceive it possible that things perceivable by sense may still exist?

'_Phil._ I can; but then it must be in another mind. When I deny sensible things an existence out of the mind, I do not mean my mind in particular, but all minds. Now, it is plain they have an existence exterior to my mind; since I find them by experience to be independent of it. There is therefore some other mind wherein they exist, during the intervals between the times of my perceiving them; as likewise they did before my birth, and would do after my supposed annihilation. And as the same is true with regard to all other finite created spirits, it necessarily follows there is an _omnipresent, eternal Mind_, which knows and comprehends all things, and exhibits them to our view in such a manner, and according to such rules, as He Himself hath ordained, and are by us termed the _Laws of Nature_.'

'Truth is the cry of all,' says Berkeley in the final paragraph of _Siris_, 'but the game of a few. Certainly, where it is the chief passion, it doth not give way to vulgar cares and views, nor is it contented with a little ardour, active perhaps to pursue, but not so fit to weigh and revise. He that would make a real progress in knowledge, must dedicate his age as well as youth, the latter growth as well as firstfruits at the altar of truth.'

Elsewhere in this famous treatise he writes:

'It cannot be denied that with respect to the universe of things we in this mortal state are like men educated in Plato's cave, looking on shadows with our backs turned to the light. But though our light be dim and our situation bad, yet if the best use be made of both, perhaps something may be seen. Proclus, in his commentary on the theology of Plato, observes there are two sorts of philosophers. The one placed body first in the order of beings, and made the faculty of thinking depend thereupon, supposing that the principles of all things are corporeal; that body most really or principally exists, and all other things in a secondary sense and by virtue of that. Others making all corporeal things to be dependent upon soul or mind, think this to exist in the first place, and primary senses and the being of bodies to be altogether derived from, and presuppose that of the mind.'

This was Berkeley's creed, and his great aim throughout is to prove the phenomenal nature of the things of sense, or in other words the non-existence of independent matter. He makes, he says, not the least question that the things we see and touch really exist, but what he does question is the existence of matter apart from its perception to the mind. Hobbes said that the body accounted for the mind, and that matter was the deepest thing in the universe, while to Berkeley the only true reality consists in what is spiritual and eternal.

'The great idealist,' says an able writer, 'certainly never denied the existence of matter in the sense in which Johnson understood it. As the touched, the seen, the heard, the smelled, the tasted, he admitted and maintained its existence as readily and completely as the most illiterate and unsophisticated of mankind,' and he adds that the peculiar endowment for which Berkeley was distinguished 'far beyond his predecessors and contemporaries, and far beyond almost every philosopher who has succeeded him, was the eye he had _for facts_, and the singular pertinacity with which he refused to be dislodged from his hold upon them.'[62]

Pope's age produced a few great masters of style, and among them Berkeley holds an undisputed place. He succeeded, too, in the most difficult department of intellectual labour, since to express abstruse thought in language as beautiful as it is clear is the rarest of gifts.

'His works are beyond dispute the finest models of philosophic style since Cicero. Perhaps they surpass those of the orator, in the wonderful art by which the fullest light is thrown on the most minute and evanescent parts of the most subtle of human conceptions.'[63]

[Sidenote: William Law (1686-1761).]

William Law was born in 1686 at King's Cliffe in Northamptonshire, and entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, as a Sizar in 1705. He obtained a Fellowship, and received holy orders in 1711, but having made a speech offensive to the heads of houses, he was degraded. Law believed in the divine right of kings, and on the death of Queen Anne, declared his principles as a non-juror. In 1717 he published his first controversial work, _Three Letters to the Bishop of Bangor_; Hoadly, the famous bishop, having, in his opponent's judgment, uttered lax and latitudinarian views with regard to the Church of which he was one of the chief pastors. These _Letters_ have been highly praised for wit as well as for argument, and Dean Hook, writing of the Bangorian Controversy in his _Church Dictionary_, states that 'Law's _Letters_ have never been answered and may, indeed, be regarded as unanswerable.' Law was also the most powerful assailant of Warburton's _Divine Legation_, which he opposed with a burning zeal that was not always wise. But as a controversialist he was an infinitely stronger man than his opponent, and unlike Warburton, he never debased controversy by scurrility, which the bishop generally found a more potent weapon than argument.

On the publication, in 1723, of Dr. Mandeville's _Fable of the Bees_, it was vigorously attacked by Law. In this masterly pamphlet, instead of attempting to refute the physician by showing that virtue is more profitable to the State than vice, and that, therefore, private vices are not public benefits, Law takes a higher ground, and asserts that morality is not a question of profit and loss, but of conscience. Mandeville maintains that man is a mere animal governed by his passions; his opponent, on the other hand, argues that man is created in the image of God, that virtue 'is a law to which even the divine nature is subject,' and that human nature is fitted to rise to the angels, while Mandeville would lower it to the brutes.

John Sterling, writing to F. D. Maurice of the first section of Law's remarks, says: 'I have never seen in our language the elementary grounds of a rational ideal philosophy, as opposed to empiricism, stated with nearly the same clearness, simplicity, and force,' and it was at Sterling's suggestion that Maurice published a new edition of Law's argument with an introductory essay (1844).

The following passage from the _Remarks on the Fable of the Bees_ will illustrate Law's method as a polemic:

'Deists and freethinkers are generally considered as unbelievers; but upon examination they will appear to be men of the most resigned and implicit faith in the world; they would believe _transubstantiation_, but that it implies a believing in God; for they never resign their reason, but when it is to yield to something that opposes salvation. For the Deist's creed has as many articles as the Christian's, and requires a much greater suspension of our reason to believe them. So that if to believe things upon no authority, or without any reason, be an argument of credulity, the freethinker will appear to be the most easy, credulous creature alive. In the first place, he is to believe almost all the same articles to be false which the Christian believes to be true.

'Now, it may easily be shown that it requires stronger acts of faith to believe these articles to be false, than to believe them to be true. For, taking faith to be an assent of the mind to some proposition, of which we have no certain knowledge, it will appear that the Deist's faith is much stronger, and has more of credulity in it, than the Christian's. For instance, the Christian believes the resurrection of the dead, because he finds it supported by such evidence and authority as cannot possibly be higher, supposing the thing was true; and he does no more violence to his reason in believing it, than in supposing that God may intend to do some things, which the reason of man cannot conceive how they will be effected.

'On the contrary, the Deist believes there will be no resurrection. And how great is his faith, for he pretends to no evidence or authority to support it; it is a pure naked assent of his mind to what he does not know to be true, and of which nobody has, or can give him, any full assurance. So that the difference between a Christian and a Deist does not consist in this, that the one assents to things unknown, and the other does not; but in this, that the Christian assents to things unknown on account of evidence; the other assents to things unknown without any evidence at all. Which shows that the Christian is the rational believer and the Deist the blind bigot.'

It is probable that Law, like other writers on the orthodox side, did not sufficiently take into account the service rendered by the Deists in arousing a spirit of inquiry. Free-thinking is right thinking, and 'it was a result of the Deistic controversy, which went far to make up many evils in it, that in the end it widened and enlarged Christian thought.'[64]

The author's next and weakest work, _On the Unlawfulness of Stage Entertainments_ (1726), is mentioned elsewhere.[65]

In the same year he published _Christian Perfection_, a profoundly earnest but puritanically narrow work, in which our earthly life is regarded simply as the road to another. 'There is nothing that deserves a serious thought,' he writes, 'but how to get out of the world and make it a right passage to our eternal state.' No man ever practised what he preached with more sincerity and persistency than William Law, but it can hardly be doubted that he narrowed the range of his influence by the views he expressed with regard to culture and to all human learning. He forgot that, without the logic, the wit, the irony, the singular force and lucidity of style displayed in his own writings, he would have lost the power as a religious teacher which he was so eager to exercise.

Literature _quâ_ literature Law regarded with contempt, and he is said to have looked upon the study even of Milton as waste of time. Yet his biographer states what seems likely enough, considering the fine qualities of Law's own writings, that 'no author was ever a favourite with him, unless he was a man of literary merit.'

In 1727, and probably before that date, Law held the position of tutor to Edward Gibbon, whose famous son, the historian, in his _Autobiography_, gives to him the high praise of having left in the family 'the reputation of a worthy and pious man, who believed all that he professed, and practised all that he enjoined.'

Law accompanied his pupil to Cambridge, and it is conjectured that during this residence at the university he wrote what Gibbon justly called his 'master work,' _A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life_ (1729), the most impressive book of its class produced in the eighteenth century. The historian's father was a man of feeble character. He left Cambridge without a degree, and went on his travels, the tutor meanwhile remaining in the family house at Putney, where he seems to have gathered round him a number of disciples.

The _Serious Call_ had an immediate and strong influence on many thoughtful men, and Law's book stimulated in no common measure the religious life of the country. John Wesley spoke of it as a treatise hardly to be excelled in the English tongue 'either for beauty of expression, or for justness and depth of thought.' Whitefield, Venn, and Thomas Scott, the commentator, acknowledged their indebtedness to the work, and Dr. Johnson, speaking of his youthful days, said: 'I became a sort of lax _talker_ against religion, for I did not much _think_ against it; and this lasted till I went to Oxford, when I took up Law's _Serious Call to a Holy Life_, expecting to find it a dull book (as such books generally are), but I found Law quite an over-match for me; and this was the first occasion of my thinking in earnest.' The first Lord Lyttelton, the historian and friend of Thomson, is said to have taken up the book one night at bed-time, and to have read it through before he went to bed; but, perhaps, the most unimpeachable evidence in its favour comes from the pen of Gibbon, who writes: 'Mr. Law's precepts are rigid, but they are founded on the Gospel. His satire is sharp, but it is drawn from the knowledge of human life, and many of his portraits are not unworthy of the pen of La Bruyère. If he finds a spark of piety in his reader's mind he will soon kindle it to a flame.'

Law's art as a portrait painter will be seen in the following sketch of Flavia:

'_Flavia_ would be a miracle of piety if she was but half so careful of her soul as she is of her body. The rising of a _pimple_ on her face, the sting of a gnat, will make her keep her room two or three days, and she thinks they are very rash people that do not take care of things in time. This makes her so over careful of her health that she never thinks she is well enough, and so over indulgent that she never can be really well. So that it costs her a great deal in sleeping draughts and waking draughts, in spirits for the head, in drops for the nerves, in cordials for the stomach, and in saffron for her tea.

'If you visit _Flavia_ on the Sunday, you will always meet good company, you will know what is doing in the world, you will hear the last lampoon, be told who wrote it, and who is meant by every name that is in it. You will hear what plays were acted that week, which is the finest song in the opera, who was intolerable at the last assembly, and what games are most in fashion. _Flavia_ thinks they are atheists who play at cards on the Sunday, but she will tell you the nicety of all the games, what cards she held, how she played them, and the history of all that happened at play, as soon as she comes from church. If you would know who is rude and ill-natured, who is vain and foppish, who lives too high and who is in debt; if you would know what is the quarrel at a certain house, or who and who are in love; if you would know how late Belinda comes home at night, what clothes she has bought, how she loves compliments, and what a long story she told at such a place; if you would know how cross Lucius is to his wife, what ill-natured things he says to her, when nobody hears him; if you would know how they hate one another in their hearts though they appear so kind in public; you must visit _Flavia_ on the Sunday. But still she has so great a regard for the holiness of the Sunday, that she has turned a poor old widow out of her house as a _profane wretch_, for having been found once mending her clothes on the Sunday night.'

Between the years 1733-37, owing to his acquaintance with the writings of the famous mystic, Jacob Boehme, Law became a mystic himself. The 'blessed Jacob' as he calls him exercised an influence which colours all his later writings and lasted till his death. In 1740 he retired to his native village and to solitude; but after a while two wealthy and devout ladies, one of them a widow, the other the historian's aunt, Miss Hester Gibbon, joined him in his retreat and devoted to charitable objects their labours and their fortunes. 'Out of a joint income of not less than three thousand pounds a year, only about three hundred pounds were spent upon the frugal expenses of the household and the simple personal wants of the three inhabitants. The whole of the remainder was spent upon the poor.'[66] Report says, let us hope it may be scandal, that after the master's death the love of earthly vanities revived in two of his pupils. His favourite niece had a new dress every month, and Miss Gibbon 'appeared resplendent in yellow stockings.' This is not the place to follow Law's self-denying career, neither are we concerned with the volumes which contain his later views. Admirably written though they be, these works do not belong to the field of literature. Law lived in vigour both of mind and body to a good old age, and died in 1761.

[Sidenote: Joseph Butler (1692-1752).]

Joseph Butler, whose _Sermons_ (1726), and _Analogy of Religion Natural and Revealed to the Constitution and Course of Nature_ (1736), are among the highest contributions to theology produced in the last century, called the imagination 'a forward, delusive faculty,' and he could have boasted that it was a faculty of which no trace is to be found in his works. Moreover, he is generally regarded as wholly destitute of style, and in a sense this is true, for Butler is so intent upon what he has to say that he cares little how he says it. His sense of beauty if he possessed it, was absorbed in a supreme allegiance to truth, and his life was that of a Christian philosopher intent upon one object. His sermons, preached at the Rolls Chapel, which contain the germ of his philosophy, are too closely packed with argument and too recondite in thought to fit them for pulpit discourses. The _Analogy_, which occupied seven years of Butler's life, is better known and more generally interesting. 'There is,' he says, 'a much more exact correspondence between the natural and the moral world than we are apt to take notice of.' His aim is to show that the difficulties which meet us in Revelation are to be found also in nature, that as our happiness or misery in this world largely depends upon conduct, so it is reasonable to suppose, apart from what Revelation teaches, that we are also in a state of probation with regard to a future life. As youth is an education for mature age, so may the whole of our earthly life be an education for a future existence.

'And if we were not able at all to discern how or in what way the present life could be our preparation for another, this would be no objection against the credibility of its being so. For we do not discern how food and sleep contribute to the growth of the body; nor could have any thought that they would before we had experience. Nor do children at all think on the one hand that the sports and exercises, to which they are so much addicted, contribute to their health and growth; nor, on the other, of the necessity which there is for their being restrained in them; nor are they capable of understanding the use of many parts of discipline, which, nevertheless, they must be made to go through in order to qualify them for the business of mature age. Were we not able, then, to discover in what respects the present life could form us for a future one, yet nothing would be more supposable than that it might, in some respects or other, from the general analogy of Providence. And this, for aught I see, might reasonably be said, even though we should not take in the consideration of God's moral government over the world. But, take in this consideration, and consequently, that the character of virtue and piety is a necessary qualification for the future state, and then we may distinctly see how and in what respects the present life may be a preparation for it.

Butler's style is uniform throughout, and if it have no other merit, may be praised for honesty. It is wholly free from the artifices of the rhetorician; if it is wanting in charm, it is never weak; if it is sometimes obscure, it must be remembered that the author does not write for readers who find it a trouble to think. The bishop's obscurity was not due to negligence. 'Confusion and perplexity in writing,' he says, 'is indeed without excuse; because anyone may, if he pleases, know whether he understands and sees through what he is about; and it is unpardonable for a man to lay his thoughts before others when he is conscious that he himself does not know whereabouts he is, or how the matter before him stands. It is coming abroad in disorder, which he ought to be dissatisfied to find himself in at home.'

Butler weighed his thoughts rather than his words in an age when many distinguished writers were tempted to regard form as of more consequence than substance. It must be admitted, however, that if the ideal of fine literature be the expression of beautiful and richly suggestive thoughts in a style elevated by the imagination, and by a sense of rhythmical harmony, Bishop Butler's place is not among men of letters. His profound sense of the seriousness of life limited his range; but as a thinker, what he lost in versatility he probably gained in depth. The _Analogy_ is a striking instance of a great work wholly without imagination, while full of the intellectual life which sustains the student's attention. There is not a dull page in the book, or one in which the author's meaning cannot be grasped by thoughtful readers. The work is full of weighty sayings on the power of conscience, the rule of right which a man has within him, the force of habit, the necessity of action in relation to belief, and the uselessness of passive impressions. It has been said that the defect of the eighteenth century theology 'was not in having too much good sense, but in having nothing besides,' and the straining after good sense, so prominent in Pope's age, affected alike, men of letters, philosophers, and theologians. The virtue was carried to excess and is conspicuous in Butler. He has his weaknesses both as a philosopher and a theologian, but the reader of the _Analogy_ and of the three sermons on Human Nature, will be conscious that he is in the presence of a great mind.

[Sidenote: William Warburton (1698-1779).]

William Warburton, Pope's commentator, was born at Newark-upon-Trent in 1698, and died as Bishop of Gloucester in 1779. The main argument of his principal work, _The Divine Legation of Moses_ (1738-41), is based upon the astounding paradox that the legation of Moses must have been divine because he never invoked the promises or threatenings of a future state. The book is remarkable for its arrogance and lack of 'sweet reasonableness.' It claims no attention from the student of English literature, neither would Warburton himself were it not for his association with Pope. Allusion has been already made to Crousaz's hostile criticism of the _Essay on Man_ (1737) on the ground that it led to fatalism, and was destructive of the foundations of natural religion. Warburton, who had previously denounced the 'rank atheism' of the poem, now endeavoured to defend it, and how effectually he did so in Pope's judgment is seen in his grateful acknowledgment of the critic's labours. 'I know I meant just what you explain,' he wrote, 'but I did not explain my own meaning as well as you. You understand me as well as I do myself, but you express me better than I could express myself.'

Dr. Conyers Middleton's estimate of what Warburton had done for Pope is more accurate: 'You have evinced the orthodoxy of Mr. Pope's principles,' he says, 'but, like the old commentators on his _Homer_, will be thought, perhaps, in some places to have provided a meaning for him that he himself never dreamt of.'[67]

The poet and Warburton met for the first time in 1740, and the bookseller, Dodsley, who was present at the interview, was astonished at the compliments which Pope lavished on his apologist. Henceforth, until the poet's death, Warburton, who, according to Bishop Hurd, 'found an image of himself in his new acquaintance,' became his counsellor and supporter, and among other achievements added, as Ricardus Aristarchus, to the confusion of the _Dunciad_. Ultimately, as Pope's annotator, he produced much laborious and comparatively worthless criticism, and contrived by his immense fighting qualities as a critic and polemic to make a considerable noise in the world. One incident in the friendship of the poet and of the divine is worth recording. In 1741 Pope and Warburton were at Oxford together, and while there the Vice-Chancellor offered to confer on the poet the degree of D.C.L., and on Warburton that of D.D. Some hesitation, however, on the part of the university having occurred with regard to the latter, Pope wrote to his friend saying, 'As for mine I will die before I receive one, in an art I am ignorant of, at a place where there remains any scruple of bestowing one on you, in a science of which you are so great a master. In short I will be doctored with you, or not at all.'

Warburton's stupendous self-assertion concealed to some extent his heavy style and poverty of thought. His aim was to startle by paradoxes, since he could not convince by argument. No one could call an opponent names in the Billingsgate style more effectively, and every man who ventured to differ from him was either a knave or a fool. 'Warburton's stock argument,' it has been said, 'is a threat to cudgel anyone who disputes his opinion.' He was a laborious student, and the mass of work he accomplished exhibits his robust energy, but he has left nothing which lives in literature or in theology. He was, however, a man of various acquisitions, and won, for that reason, the praise of Dr. Johnson. 'The table is always full, sir. He brings things from the north and the south and from every quarter. In his _Divine Legation_ you are always entertained. He carries you round and round without carrying you forward to the point, but then you have no wish to be carried forward.'

Bentley's more concise description of Warburton's attainments deserves to be recorded. He was, he says, 'a man of monstrous appetite, but bad digestion.'

Warburton's _Shakespeare_ appeared in 1747, his _Pope_ in 1751. It cannot be said that either poet has cause to be grateful to his commentator. Of his _Shakespeare_ a few words may be appropriately said here. In this pretentious and untrustworthy edition, Warburton accuses Theobald of plagiarism, treats him with contempt, and then uses his text to print from. In his Preface he declares that his own Notes 'take in the whole compass of Criticism,' and he professes to restore the poet's genuine Text. Yet, as the editors of the _Cambridge Shakespeare_ observe, there is no trace, so far as they have discovered, 'of his having collated for himself either the earlier Folios or any of the Quartos.' Warburton professed to observe the severe canons of literal criticism, and this suggested the title to Thomas Edwards of a volume in which the critic's editorial pretensions are attacked with some humour and much justice.[68]

We may add that Bishop Hurd, Warburton's most intimate friend, edited his works in seven volumes (1788), and six years later, by way of preface to a new edition, published an _Account of the Life, Writings, and Character of the Author_.

FOOTNOTES:

[57] Readers who remember Mr. Browning's estimate of 'sage Mandeville' in his _Parleyings with Certain Persons_ may deem this criticism unjust; but the De Mandeville who speaks in that poem is the creation of the poet's imagination, or rather he is Mr. Browning himself.

[58] _Bolingbroke: a Historical Study_, p. 133. By J. Churton Collins.

[59] _Walpole_, p. 79. By John Morley. Macmillan.

[60] _Works of George Berkeley._ Edited by George Sampson. With introduction by the Rt. Hon. Arthur J. Balfour, M.P. Vol. i., p. xxxi (London, 1897).

[61] _An Essay on Truth_, 2nd edit., p. 298. 1771.

[62] _Blackwood's Magazine_, June, 1842.

[63] Sir James Macintosh, _Encyclopædia Britannica_.

[64] _The English Church and its Bishops._ By Charles J. Abbey. Vol. i., p. 236.

[65] See p. 194.

[66] _The Life and Opinions of the Rev. William Law, M.A._ By J. H. Overton, M.A. P. 243.

[67] Middleton's _Miscellaneous Works_, vol. i., p. 402.

[68] The first edition of Edwards's work was entitled _Supplement_ to Mr. Warburton's edition of _Shakespeare_, 1747. The third edition (1750) was called _The Canons of Criticism and Glossary_ by Thomas Edwards. Of this volume seven editions were published. Edwards, who was born in 1699, died in 1757.

INDEX OF MINOR POETS AND PROSE WRITERS.

JOHN ARMSTRONG (1709-1779), a Scotchman by birth, practised in London as a physician after some surgical experience in the navy. Believing any subject suitable for poetry, he wrote in blank verse, reminding one of Thomson, _The Art of Preserving Health_ (1744), a poem containing some powerful passages, and many which are better fitted for a medical treatise than for poetry. An earlier and licentious poem _The Economy of Love_, which injured him in his profession, was 'revised and corrected by the author' in 1768.

If bulk were a sign of merit SIR RICHARD BLACKMORE (1650-1729) would not rank with the minor poets. He wrote several long and wearisome epics, his best work in Dr. Johnson's judgment being _The Creation_ (1712), which was praised by Addison in the _Spectator_ as 'one of the most useful and noble productions in our English verse,' a judgment the modern reader is not likely to endorse.

HENRY BROOKE (1706-1783), an Irishman, was the author of a poem entitled _Universal Beauty_ (1735). Four years later he published _Gustavus Vasa_, a tragedy, which was not allowed to be acted, the sentiments being too liberal for the government. His _Fool of Quality_ (1766) a novel in five volumes, delighted John Wesley, and in our day, Charles Kingsley, who praises its 'broad and genial humanity.' Brooke was a follower of William Law, whose mysticism is to be seen in the story.

WILLIAM BROOME (1689-1745) is chiefly known from his association with Pope in the translation of the _Odyssey_, of which enough has been said elsewhere (p. 38). His name suggested the following epigram to Henley:

'Pope came off clean with Homer; but they say _Broome_ went before and kindly swept the way.'

He entered holy orders, had two livings in Suffolk and one in Norfolk, and married a wealthy widow. His verses are mechanically correct, but are empty of poetry.

JOHN BYROM (1691-1763), the friend and disciple of William Law, the author of the _Serious Call_, is best remembered for his system of shorthand. In a characteristic, copious, and not very attractive journal, he describes, for the consolation of his fellow mortals, how he makes resolutions and breaks them. Byrom wrote rhyme with ease and on subjects with which poetry has nothing to do. His most successful achievement was a pastoral, _Colin and Phoebe_, which appeared in the _Spectator_ (Vol. viii., No. 603). It was written in honour of the daughter of Dr. Bentley, Master of Trinity, 'not,' it has been said, 'because he wished to win her affections, but because he desired to secure her father's interest for the Fellowship for which he was a candidate.' The plan was successful. The one verse of Byrom's that every one has read is the happy epigram:

'God bless the King!--I mean the faith's defender-- God bless (no harm in blessing!) the Pretender! But who Pretender is, or who is King-- God bless us all!--that's quite another thing.'

SAMUEL CLARKE (1675-1729), a man of large attainments in science and divinity, was the favourite theologian of Queen Caroline, who admired his latitudinarian views, and delighted in his conversation. His works, edited by Bishop Hoadly, were published in 1738 in four folio volumes. In 1704 he delivered the Boyle lectures on _The Being and Attributes of God_, and in 1705 _On Natural and Revealed Religion_. His _Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity_ (1712) was condemned by convocation. In defence of Sir Isaac Newton, Clarke had a controversy with Leibnitz, and having published the correspondence dedicated it to the Queen. His sermons, Mr. Leslie Stephen says, are 'for the most part not sermons at all, but lectures upon metaphysics.' In Addison's judgment Clarke was one of the most accurate, learned, and judicious writers the age had produced.

ELIJAH FENTON (1683-1730) wrote poems and _Mariamne_ a tragedy, in which, according to his friend Broome, 'great Sophocles revives and reappears.' It was acted with applause, and brought nearly one thousand pounds to its author. His name is now chiefly known as having assisted Pope in his translation of the _Odyssey_.

RICHARD GLOVER (1712-1785), the son of a London merchant, was himself a merchant of high reputation in the city. He also 'cultivated the Muses,' and his _Leonidas_ (1737), an elaborate poem in blank verse, preferred by some critics of the day to _Paradise Lost_, passed through several editions and was praised by Fielding and by Lord Chatham. Power is visible in this epic, which displays also a large amount of knowledge, but the salt of genius is wanting, and the poem, despite many estimable qualities, is now forgotten. _Leonidas_ was followed by _Boadicea_ (1758), and _The Atheniad_, published after his death in 1788. Glover was a politician as well as a verseman. His party feeling probably inspired _Admiral Hosier's Ghost_ (1739), a ballad still remembered and preserved in anthologies.

MATTHEW GREEN (1696-1737) is the author of _The Spleen_, an original and brightly written poem. _The Grotto_, printed but not published in 1732, is also marked by freshness of treatment. Green's poems, written in octosyllabic metre, were published after his death.

JAMES HAMMOND (1710-1742) produced many forlorn elegies on a lady who appears to have scorned him, and who lived in 'maiden meditation' for nearly forty years after the poet's death. His love is said to have affected his mind for a time. 'Sure Hammond has no right,' says Shenstone, 'to the least inventive merit. I do not think that there is a single thought in his elegies of any eminence that is not literally translated.'

NATHANIEL HOOKE (1690-1763), the author of a _Roman History_, is better known as the editor of _An Account of the conduct of the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough, from her first coming to Court in the year 1710, in a letter from herself to Lord ---- in 1742_. The duchess is said to have dictated this letter from her bed, and to have been so eager for its completion that she insisted on Hooke's not leaving the house till he had finished it. He was munificently rewarded for his labour by a present of £5,000. It was Hooke, a zealous Roman Catholic, who, when Pope was dying, asked him if he should not send for a priest, and received the poet's hearty thanks for putting him in mind of it.

JOHN HUGHES (1677-1719) was the author of poems, an opera, a masque, several translations, and a tragedy, _The Siege of Damascus_, which was well received, and kept its place on the stage for some years. He died on the first night's performance of the play. Several articles in the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_ are from his pen. In 1715 he published an edition of Spenser in six volumes. Hughes received warm praise from Steele, and enjoyed also the friendship of Addison.

CONYERS MIDDLETON (1683-1750) is now chiefly known for an extravagantly eulogistic life of _Cicero_ (1741), in which, as Macaulay observes, he 'resorted to the most disingenuous shifts, to unpardonable distortions and suppressions of facts.' The book is written in a forcible and lively style. A man of considerable learning, Middleton was a violent controversialist, who liked better to attack and to defend than to dwell in the serene atmosphere of literature or of practical divinity. He assailed the famous Richard Bentley with such rancour that he had to apologize and was fined £50 by the Court of King's Bench. Middleton was a doctor of divinity, but his controversial works, while never directly attacking the chief tenets of the religion he professed, lean far more to the side of the Deists than to the orthodox creed, and, indeed, it would not be uncharitable to class him among them. He appears, like Swift, to have chiefly regarded the Christian religion as an institution of service to the stability of the State. Of the _Miscellaneous Works_ which were published after his death in five volumes, the most elaborate and the most provocative of disputation is _A Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers which are supposed to have subsisted in the Christian Church through several successive centuries_ (1749). Middleton was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and in 1734 was elected librarian of the University.

RICHARD SAVAGE (1698-1743), whose fate is one of the most melancholy in the annals of versemen, lives in the admirable though neither impartial nor wholly accurate biography of Dr. Johnson. In 1719 he produced _Love in a Veil_, a comedy from the Spanish; and in 1723 his tragedy _Sir Thomas Overbury_ was acted, but with little success. In the same year he published _The Bastard_, a poem which is said to have driven his mother out of society. _The Wanderer_, in five cantos, appeared in 1729, and was regarded by the author as his masterpiece. It has some vigorous lines and several descriptive passages that are not conventional. Savage died in prison at Bristol, a city which recalls the equally painful story of Chatterton.

LEWIS THEOBALD (1688-1744), the original hero of the _Dunciad_, was a dramatist and translator, but is chiefly known as the author of _Shakespeare Restored; or specimens of blunders committed or unamended in Pope's edition of the poet_ (1726). This was followed two years later by _Proposals for Publishing Emendations and Remarks on Shakespeare_, and in 1733 by his edition of the dramatist in seven volumes. 'Theobald as an editor,' say the editors of the _Cambridge Shakespeare_, 'is incomparably superior to his predecessors and to his immediate successor Warburton, although the latter had the advantage of working on his materials. He was the first to recall a multitude of readings of the first Folio unquestionably right, but unnoticed by previous editors. Many most brilliant emendations ... are due to him.'

WILLIAM WALSH (1663-1708) has chronologically little claim to be noticed here, for his poems were published before the beginning of the century, but he is to be remembered as the early friend and wise counsellor of Pope, and also as the author, I believe, of the only English sonnet between Milton's in 1658, and Gray's, on Richard West, in 1742.

ANNE FINCH, Countess of Winchelsea (1660-1720), published a volume of verse in 1713 under the title of _Miscellany Poems on Several Occasions, Written by a Lady_. The book contains a _Nocturnal Reverie_, which has some lines showing a close and faithful observation of rural sounds and sights, as for example:

'When the loosed horse, now as his pasture leads, Comes slowly grazing through the adjoining meads, Whose stealing pace and lengthened shade we fear, Till torn-up forage in his teeth we hear; When nibbling sheep at large pursue their food, And unmolested kine rechew the cud; When curlews cry beneath the village walls, And to her straggling brood the partridge calls.'

The _Nocturnal Reverie_, however, is an exception to the general character of Lady Winchelsea's poems, which consist chiefly of odes (including the inevitable Pindaric), fables, songs, affectionate addresses to her husband, poetical epistles, and a tragedy, _Aristomenes; or the Royal Shepherd_. The _Petition for an Absolute Retreat_ is one of the best pieces in the volume. It displays great facility in versification, and a love of country delights.

THOMAS YALDEN (1670-1736), born in Exeter, and educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, entered into holy orders (1711), and was appointed lecturer of moral philosophy. 'Of his poems,' writes Dr. Johnson, 'many are of that irregular kind which, when he formed his poetical character, was supposed to be Pindaric.' Pindarics were indeed the bane of the age. Every minor poet, no matter however feeble his poetical wings might be, endeavoured to fly with Pindar. Like Gay, Yalden tried his skill as a writer of fables.

NOTE.

_Mrs. Veal's Ghost_ (see pp. 186-187). A curious discovery, made by Mr. G. A. Aitken (see _Nineteenth Century_, January, 1895), makes it certain, he thinks, that 'the whole narrative is literally true.' He even hopes that the receipt for scouring Mrs. Veal's gown may some day be found. Mr. Aitken seems to infer that Defoe's other tales will also turn out to be true histories, but Defoe avers, with all the seriousness he expends on Mrs. Veal, that he witnessed the great Plague of London, which it is needless to say he did not.

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE.

=1667.= =Swift born.= =1672.= =Steele born.= =1672.= =Addison born.= 1674. Milton died. =1688.= =Gay born.= =1688.= =Pope born.= 1688. Bunyan died. 1690. Locke's _Essay Concerning Human Understanding_. 1694. Voltaire born. 1699. Racine died. =1700.= =Thomson born.= =1700.= =Dryden died.= 1700. Fénelon's _Télémaque_. 1703. John Wesley born. 1704. Locke died. =1704.= =Addison's= _Campaign_. =1704.= =Swift's= _Tale of a Tub_ and _Battle of the Books_. 1707. Fielding born. 1709. Johnson born. =1709.= =Pope's= _Pastorals_. =1709-1711.= _The Tatler._ =1710.= =Berkeley's= _Principles of Human Knowledge_. =1711.= =Pope's= _Essay on Criticism_. 1711-1712,} _The Spectator._ and 1714. } 1711. Hume born. =1712.= =Pope's= _Rape of the Lock_. 1712. Rousseau born. =1713.= =Addison's= _Cato_. 1713. Sterne born. =1714.= =Mandeville's= _Fable of the Bees_. =1715.= =Gay's= _Trivia_. =1715-1720.= =Pope's= _Translation of Homer's Iliad_. 1715. Wycherley died. =1718.= =Prior's= _Poems on Several Occasions_ =(folio)=. =1719-1720.= =Defoe's= _Robinson Crusoe_ =(first part)=. =1719.= =Addison died.= =1721.= =Prior died.= 1721. Smollett born. =1723-1725.= =Pope's= _Translation of Homer's Odyssey_. =1724.= =Swift's= _Drapier's Letters_. 1724. Kant born. 1724. Klopstock born. =1725-1730.= =Thomson's= _Seasons_. =1725.= =Ramsay's= _Gentle Shepherd_. =1725.= =Young's= _Universal Passion_. =1726.= =Swift's= _Gulliver's Travels_. =1727.= =Gay's= _Fables_. =1728.= =Pope's= _Dunciad_. =1728.= =Gay's= _Beggar's Opera_. 1728. Goldsmith born. =1729.= =Law's= _Serious Call_. 1729. Burke born. 1729. Lessing born. =1729.= =Steele died.= =1731.= =Defoe died.= 1731. Cowper born. =1732-1735.= =Pope's= _Moral Essays_. =1732-1734.= =Pope's= _Essay on Man_. =1732.= =Gay died.= =1733-1737.= =Pope's= _Imitations of Horace_. =1735.= =Pope's= _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_. =1736.= =Butler's= _Analogy of Religion_. 1737. Gibbon born. =1738.= =Hume's= _Treatise of Human Nature_. =1740.= =Cibber's= _Apology for his Life_. 1740. Richardson's _Pamela_. 1742. Fielding's _Joseph Andrews_. =1742.= =Pope's= _Dunciad_ =(fourth book added)=. =1742.= =Young's= _Night Thoughts_. =1743.= =Blair's= _Grave_. =1744.= =Akenside's= _Pleasures of Imagination_. =1744.= =Pope died.= =1745.= =Swift died.= =1748.= =Thomson died.= 1748. Hume's _Inquiry concerning Human Understanding_. 1748. Richardson's _Clarissa Harlowe_. 1748. Smollett's _Roderick Random_. 1749. Goethe born. 1749. Fielding's _Tom Jones_.

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS

ADDISON, JOSEPH 1672-1719 AKENSIDE, MARK 1721-1770 ARBUTHNOT, JOHN 1667-1735 ARMSTRONG, JOHN 1709-1779 ATTERBURY, FRANCIS 1662-1732 BENTLEY, RICHARD 1662-1742 BERKELEY, GEORGE 1685-1753 BINNING, LORD 1696-1732 BLACKMORE, SIR RICHARD 1650-1729 BLAIR, ROBERT 1699-1746 BOLINGBROKE, LORD 1678-1751 BOYLE, CHARLES 1676-1731 BROOKE, HENRY 1706-1783 BROOME, WILLIAM 1689-1745 BUTLER, JOSEPH 1692-1752 BYROM, JOHN 1691-1763 CHESTERFIELD, LORD 1694-1773 CIBBER, COLLEY 1671-1757 CLARKE, SAMUEL 1675-1729 COLLINS, ANTHONY 1676-1729 CRAWFORD, ROBERT 1695?-1732 DEFOE, DANIEL 1661-1731 DENNIS, JOHN 1657-1733-4 DORSET, EARL OF 1637-1705-6 DYER, JOHN 1698?-1758 EDWARDS, THOMAS 1699-1757 FENTON, ELIJAH 1683-1730 GARTH, SIR SAMUEL 1660-1717-18 GAY, JOHN 1685-1732 GLOVER, RICHARD 1712-1785 GREEN, MATTHEW 1696-1737 HALIFAX, CHARLES MONTAGUE, EARL OF 1661-1715 HAMILTON, WILLIAM (OF BANGOUR) 1704-1754 HAMMOND, JAMES 1710-1742 HILL, AARON 1684-1749 HOOKE, NATHANIEL 1690-1763 HUGHES, JOHN 1677-1719 KING, ARCHBISHOP 1650-1729 LAW, WILLIAM 1686-1761 LILLO, GEORGE 1693-1739 LYTTELTON, GEORGE, LORD 1708-1773 MALLET, DAVID 1700-1765 MANDEVILLE, BERNARD DE 1670?-1733 MIDDLETON, CONYERS 1683-1750 MONTAGU, LADY MARY WORTLEY 1689-1762 PARNELL, THOMAS 1679-1718 PHILIPS, AMBROSE 1671-1749 PHILIPS, JOHN 1676-1708 POPE, ALEXANDER 1688-1744 PRIOR, MATTHEW 1664-1721 RAMSAY, ALLAN 1686-1758 ROWE, NICHOLAS 1673-1718 SAVAGE, RICHARD 1698-1743 SHAFTESBURY, LORD 1671-1713 SHENSTONE, WILLIAM 1714-1764 SOMERVILLE, WILLIAM 1692-1742 SPENCE, JOSEPH 1698-1768 STEELE, SIR RICHARD 1672-1729 SWIFT, JONATHAN 1667-1745 THEOBALD, LEWIS 1688-1744 THOMSON, JAMES 1700-1748 TICKELL, THOMAS 1686-1740 WALSH, WILLIAM 1663-1708 WARBURTON, WILLIAM 1698-1779 WARDLAW, LADY 1677-1727 WATTS, ISAAC 1674-1748 WESLEY, CHARLES 1708-1788 WINCHELSEA, COUNTESS OF 1660-1720 YALDEN, THOMAS 1670-1736 YOUNG, EDWARD 1684-1765

INDEX.

Addison, Joseph, 4, 5, 15, 16, 19, 20, 35, 59, 62, 125-136, 145, 146.

_Addison, Address to Mr._, 112.

_Admiral Hosier's Ghost_, 244.

_Agamemnon_, 88.

Akenside, Mark, 117.

_Alciphron_, 216, 224.

_Alfred, Masque of_, 88, 119.

_Alma_, 67, 71.

_Ambitious Step-mother, the_, 103.

_Amyntor and Theodora_, 119.

_Analogy of Religion_, 236.

_Appius and Virginia_, 191, 193.

Arbuthnot, John, 45, 49, 175-179.

_Arbuthnot, Epistle to Dr._, 59.

Armstrong, John, 242.

_Art of Political Lying, the_, 177.

_Art of Preserving Health, the_, 242.

_Atheniad, the_, 244.

Atterbury, Bishop, 45, 70, 207-212.

Atticus, character of, 59.

Augustan Age, origin of the term, 10.

_Baucis and Philemon_, 157.

_Bangor, three Letters to the Bishop of_, 230.

Bangorian Controversy, the, 9.

_Bathos, treatise on the_, 39.

Bathurst, Lord, 46, 49.

_Battle of Blenheim, the_, 192.

_Battle of the Books, the_, 160.

_Beggar's Opera, the_, 73, 74.

Bentley, Richard, 36, 48, 160, 207, 208, 243.

_Bentley's Dissertations, Examination of_, 208.

Berkeley, Bishop, 46, 215, 221-229.

Bickerstaff, Isaac, 161; _Lucubrations of_ 140, 141.

Binning, Lord, 121.

_Black-eyed Susan_, 74.

Blackmore, Sir Richard, 47, 242.

Blair, Robert, 84.

_Blenheim_, 101.

Blount, Martha and Teresa, 44, 56.

_Boadicea_, 244.

Boehme, Jacob, 235.

Boileau and Pope compared, 4, 47; his _Art Poétique_, 29.

Bolingbroke, Lord, 8, 44, 51, 52, 59, 216-221.

Boyle, Charles, 160, 207, 208.

_Braes of Yarrow, the_, 121.

Bribery, prevalence of, 19.

_Britannia_ (Thomson's), 87; (Mallet's), 119.

Brooke, Henry, 242.

Broome, William, 38, 243.

_Brothers, the_, 79.

Buckingham, Duke of, 57, 70.

_Busiris_, 79.

Butler, Bishop, 236.

Byrom, John, 243.

_Cadenus and Vanessa_, 154, 165.

_Campaign, the_, 126.

_Captain Singleton_, 188.

_Careless Husband, the_, 196, 197.

Caroline, Queen, 9.

_Castle of Indolence, the_, 93.

_Cato_, 128, _et seq._

Chandos, Duke of, 57.

_Characteristics of Men, Manners, etc._, 19, 52, 212.

Charke, Mrs., _Narrative of her Life_, 11.

_Chase, the_, 112.

Chesterfield, Lord, 202-204.

_Chit-Chat_, 144.

_Christian Hero, the_, 137.

_Christianity, argument against abolishing_, 161.

_Christian Perfection_, 232.

_Christian Religion, Grounds of the_, 222.

Cibber, Colley, 48, 196-198; _Apology for the Life of_, 198.

_Cider_, 101.

Clarke, Dr. Samuel, 9, 243.

_Colin and Lucy_, 110.

_Colin and Phoebe_, 243.

Collier, Jeremy, 137.

Collins, Anthony, 222.

_Colonel Jack_, 187, 188.

_Conscious Lovers, the_, 137.

_Contentment, Hymn to_, 107.

_Conversion of St. Paul, Dissertation on the_, 205.

_Coriolanus_, 88.

_Country Mouse and City Mouse, the_, 66.

_Country Walk, the_, 114.

Craggs, James, 45, 56.

Crawford, Robert, 121.

_Creation, the_, 242.

_Crisis, the_, 143, 144.

_Criticism, the Essay on_, 29, 191.

_Criticism in Poetry, grounds of_, 192.

Crousaz, M., 54, 238.

Cruelty of the age, 18.

Curll, Edmund, 42.

Defoe, Daniel, 180-191.

Delany, Mrs., _Life and Correspondence of_, 12, 164.

Dennis, John, 191-196.

_Dialogues of the Dead_, 205.

_Dispensary, the_, 96.

_Distrest Mother, the_, 98.

_Divine Legation of Moses, the_, 230, 239.

Dorset, Earl of, 65.

_Drapier's Letters_, 170.

Drelincourt's _Christian's Defence, etc._, 187.

Dryden, John, death of, 1; and Pope, 28, 58.

_Dryden, Ode to_, 193.

_Drummer, the_, 134.

Drunkenness, prevalence of, 17.

Duelling, 13.

_Dunciad, the_, 39, 48, _et seq._, 240.

Dyer, John, 113, 224.

_Edward and Eleanora_, 88.

Edwards, Thomas, 241.

_Edwin and Emma_, 118.

_Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady_, 33.

_Eloisa to Abelard_, 33.

_Elvira_, 119.

_English Convocation, Rights, Powers and Privileges of_, 208.

_Englishman, the_, 144.

_English Poets, Account of the greatest_, 131.

_Epistle to a Friend in Town_, 114.

_Epistles of Phalaris, Dissertations on the_, 160, 208.

_Essay on Man, the_, 51, 238.

_Eurydice_, 119.

Eusden, Lawrence, 47.

_Evergreen, the_, 120.

_Examiner, the_, 162.

_Excursion, the_, 118.

_Fable of the Bees, the_, 214, 230; _Remarks on the_, 231.

_Fables_ (Gay's), 73.

_Fair Penitent, the_, 103.

_Fatal Curiosity, the_, 138.

Fenton, Elijah, 38, 244.

_Fleece, the_, 113, 224.

_Fool of Quality, the_, 243.

_Force of Religion, the_, 78.

_Freedom of Wit and Humour, the_, 213.

_Freeholder, the_, 132.

_Freethinking, Discourse on_, 222.

French Literature, influence of, 3, 4, 5.

French Customs, 14.

_Funeral, the_, 137.

Gambling, 21, 22.

Garth, Sir Samuel, 96.

Gay, John, 40, 49, 72-76.

_Gentle Shepherd, the_, 120.

_George Barnwell_, 138.

_Gideon_, 104.

Glover, Richard, 244.

_God, the Being and Attributes of_, 244.

Granville, George, Lord Lansdowne, 40.

_Grave, the_, 84.

Green, Matthew, 245.

_Grongar Hill_, 113.

_Grotto, the_, 244.

_Grub Street Journal, the_, 51.

_Grumbling Hive, the_, 214.

_Guardian, the_, 125, 142.

_Gulliver's Travels_, 167.

_Gustavus Vasa_, 243.

Halifax, Montague, Earl of, 65, 66.

Hamilton, William, of Bangour, 121.

Hammond, James, 245.

_Health, an Eclogue_, 108.

_Henry and Emma_, 67.

_Hermit, the_, 107.

Hervey, Lord, 47, 59, 61.

Hill, Aaron, 104-106, 195.

Hoadly, Bishop, 9, 230.

Homer, Pope's Translation of, 34, _et seq._, 206, 243, 244. Tickell's translation, 35, 111.

Hooke, Nathaniel, 245.

Horace, _Ars Poetica_, 29.

_Horace, Imitations from_, 55, 59, 60.

Hughes, John, 40, 245.

_Human Knowledge, Treatise on_, 221, 225.

_Hylas and Philonous, Dialogue between_, 222, 227.

_Hymn to Contentment_, 107.

_Hymn to the Naiads_, 118.

_Imperium Pelagi_, 76.

_Instalment, the_, 79.

_Iphigenia_, 193.

_Italy, Letter from_, 131.

_Italy, Remarks on Several Parts of_, 126.

_Jane Shore_, 103.

_John Bull, History of_, 177.

Johnson, Esther, 152, 164, 166, 172.

_Judgment Day, the_, 104.

_Judgment of Hercules, the_, 116.

_Kensington Gardens_, 111.

King, _on the Origin of Evil_, 52.

_Lady Jane Grey_, 103.

_Lansdowne, Epistle to Lord_, 77.

_Last Day, the_, 77.

Law, William, 194, 230-236, 243.

_Law, Elegy in Memory of William_, 85.

Leibnitz, _Essais de Théodicée_, 52.

_Leonidas_, 244.

_Liberty Asserted_, 193.

Lillo, George, 138.

_Love in a Veil_, 246.

_Lover, the_, 144.

_Love's Last Shift_, 196.

_Lying Lover, the_, 137.

Lyttelton, George, Lord, 204.

Mallet, David, 88, 118, 219, 220.

_Man, Allegory on_, 107.

Mandeville, Bernard de, 214, 230.

_Mariamne_, 244.

Marlborough, Duchess of, 13, 57.

_Marlborough, Duchess of, Account of the Conduct of_, 245.

Marriages in the Fleet, 11, 12.

_Mathematical Learning, Essay on the Usefulness of_, 175.

_Memoirs of a Cavalier_, 188.

_Merope_, 106.

Middleton, Conyers, 246.

_Modest Proposal, etc._, 172, 184.

Mohocks, the, 11.

_Moll Flanders_, 188, 190.

Montagu, Lady M. W., 14, 42, 44, 57, 198-202.

Montague, Charles, Earl of Halifax, 65, 66.

_Monument, the_, 192.

_Moral Essays, the_, 55, _et seq._

_Moralties or Essays, Letters, etc._, 206.

_Mrs. Veal, Apparition of_, 186.

_Namur, Taking of_, 70.

_Night Piece on Death_, 107, 108.

_Night Thoughts_, 76, 81.

_Northern Star, the_, 104.

_Ocean_, 76.

_Ode on St. Cecilia's day_, 40.

Opera, Italian, 127.

Oxford, Harley, Earl of, 49.

_Parallel in the Manner of Plutarch_, 206.

Parnell, Thomas, 107.

_Parties, Dissertation on_, 221.

Partridge, John, 161.

Party feeling, excess of, 19, 20.

_Pastoral Ballad_, 116.

_Pastorals_ (Pope's), 29, 191; (Philips'), 98.

_Patriotism, Letters on_, 221.

_Patriot King, the_, 219, 221.

Patronage of Literature, 5, 6.

_Peace of Ryswick, the_, 126.

_Persian Tales, the_, 100.

Peterborough, Earl of, 45.

_Phalaris, Dissertation on the Epistle of_, 160, 208.

Philips, Ambrose, 11, 98.

Philips, John, 101.

_Plague, History of the_, 189.

_Pleasures of Imagination, the_, 117.

_Plot and No Plot, a_, 193.

_Poetry, Rhapsody on_, 157.

_Polly_, 74.

_Polymetis_, 206.

Pope, Alexander, a representative poet, 27; his life, 28-64; and Dennis, 191, 195; and Cibber, 96; and Lady M. W. Montagu, 14, 42, 44, 57, 199; and Spence, 205; and Arbuthnot, 209.

_Pope, Epistle to_, 81.

_Pope's Translation of Homer_, Spence's Essay on, 206.

Pope, Mrs., 44, 59.

Prior, Matthew, 5, 65-72.

_Progress of Wit, the_, 105.

_Projects, Essay on_, 182.

_Prospect of Peace, the_, 109.

_Public Spirit of the Whigs, the_, 143.

_Querist, the_, 224.

Ramsay, Allan, 120.

_Rape of the Lock, the_, 31.

_Reader, the_, 144.

Religion, Condition of, 9.

_Religion, Natural and Revealed_, 244.

_Religious Courtship, the_, 189.

_Remarks on Several Parts of Italy_, 126.

_Revenge, the_, 79.

_Review, the_ (Defoe's), 185.

_Rise of Women, the_, 108.

_Robinson Crusoe_, 180, 187, 189.

_Rosamond_, 128.

Roscommon's _Essay on Translated Verse_, 29.

Rowe, Nicholas, 102.

_Roxana_, 188, 189.

_Royal Convert, the_, 103.

_Ruin of Great Britain, Essay towards Preventing the_, 223.

_Ruins of Rome, the_, 115.

_Rule Britannia_, 95.

Savage, Richard, 246.

_Schoolmistress, the_, 115, 116.

_Scriblerus, Martin, Memoirs of_, 178, 222.

_Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity, the_, 244.

_Seasons, the_, 86, 87, 88-92.

_Sentiments of a Church of England Man_, 162.

_Serious Call_, 216, 233.

Shaftesbury, Lord, 19, 52, 212-215.

Shakespeare, Pope and Theobald's Editions of, 39; Rowe's Edition, 132; Warburton's Edition, 241.

Sheffield, John, Earl of, 29, 40.

Shenstone, William, 115, 205.

_Shepherd's Week, the_, 73.

_Shortest Way with Dissenters, the_, 184.

_Siege of Damascus, the_, 245.

_Siris_, 224, 228.

_Sir Thomas Overbury_, 246.

Social Condition of the time, 10.

_Social State of Ireland, Essay on the_, 224.

_Solomon_, 67, 71.

Somerville, William, 40, 112.

_Sophonisba_, 87.

South Sea Company, the, 21.

_Spectator, the_, 11, 14, 16, 19, 20, 98, 117, 125, 127, 128, 141, 142.

Spence, Joseph, 59, 205.

_Spleen, the_, 244.

_Splendid Shilling, the_, 101.

_Stage defended from Scripture, etc., the_, 194.

_Stage Entertainments, Absolute Unlawfulness of_, 194, 232.

Steele, Sir Richard, 125, 136-150.

_Stella, Journal to_, 164, 166.

_Study of History, Letters on the_, 221.

Swift, Jonathan, 34, 42, 44, 48, 49, 50, 51, 62, 151-175.

_Swift, on the Death of Dr._, 154.

_Tale of a Tub, the_, 153, 158, 209.

_Tales of the Genii_, 206.

_Tamerlane_, 103.

_Tancred and Sigismunda_, 88.

_Tatler, the_, 125, 140, 148, 162.

_Tea Table, the_, 144.

_Tea Table Miscellany, the_, 120.

Temple, Sir William, 152, 160, 208.

_Temple of Fame, the_, 33.

_Tender Husband, the_, 137.

_Theatre, the_, 144.

Theobald, Lewis, 39, 47, 48.

_Theory of Vision, Essay towards a new_, 221, 225.

Thomson, James, 44, 47, 85-95.

Tickell, Thomas, 35, 109-111, 135.

_Tour through Great Britain_, 190.

_Town Talk_, 144.

_Trivia_, 11, 73.

_True Born Englishman, the_, 184.

Trumbull, Sir William, 29, 34.

_Ulysses_, 103.

_Ungrateful Nanny_, 121.

_Universal Passion_, 80.

Vanhomrigh, Hester, 164, 222.

_Verbal Criticism_, 118.

Vida's _Scacchia Ludus_, 32.

_Vision of Mirza, the_, 146.

_Voltaire_, 5, 41.

Walpole, Sir Robert, 6, 8, 21, 41, 79.

Walsh, William, 28, 247.

_Wanderer, the_, 247.

Warburton, Bishop, 55, 56, 62, 230, 239-241.

Wardlaw, Lady, 120.

Warton, Joseph, 63.

Watts, Isaac, 131.

_Welcome from Greece, a_, 75.

Welsted, Leonard, 47.

Wesley, Charles, 131.

Wesley, John, 67.

_Whig Examiner, the_, 162.

_William and Margaret_, 118.

Winchelsea, Countess of, 247.

_Windham, Sir W., Letter to_, 217, 221.

_Windsor Forest_, 30.

Women, position of, 14, 15.

Wood's Halfpence, 169, 170.

_World, the_, 203.

Wycherley, William, 28.

Yalden, Thomas, 248.

Young, Edward, 15, 76-83.

_Zara_, 106.

HANDBOOKS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

EDITED BY PROFESSOR HALES

"The admirable series of handbooks edited by Professor Hales is rapidly taking shape as one of the best histories of our literature that are at the disposal of the student.... [When complete] there is little doubt that we shall have a history of English literature which, holding a middle course between the rapid general survey and the minute examination of particular periods, will long remain a standard work."--_Manchester Guardian._

_Crown 8vo, 5s. net each._

THE AGE OF ALFRED (664-1154). By F. J. SNELL, M.A.

THE AGE OF CHAUCER (1346-1400). By F. J. SNELL, M.A., with an Introduction by PROFESSOR HALES. 3rd edition.

THE AGE OF TRANSITION (1400-1580). By F. J. SNELL, M.A. In 2 vols. Vol. I.: The Poets. Vol. II.: The Dramatists and Prose Writers. With an Introduction by PROFESSOR HALES. 3rd edition.

THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE (1579-1631). By THOMAS SECCOMBE and J. W. ALLEN. In 2 vols. Vol. I.: Poetry and Prose, with an Introduction by PROFESSOR HALES. Vol. II: Drama. 7th edition.

THE AGE OF MILTON (1632-1660). By the REV. J. H. B. MASTERMAN, M.A., with an Introduction, etc., by J. BASS MULLINGER, M.A. 8th edition.

THE AGE OF DRYDEN (1660-1700). By RICHARD GARNETT, C.B., LL.D. 8th edition.

THE AGE OF POPE (1700-1744). By JOHN DENNIS. 11th edition.

THE AGE OF JOHNSON (1744-1798). By THOMAS SECCOMBE. 7th edition.

THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH (1798-1832). By PROFESSOR C. H. HERFORD, Litt.D. 12th edition.

THE AGE OF TENNYSON (1830-1870). By PROFESSOR HUGH WALKER, M.A. 9th edition.

OPINIONS OF THE PRESS

THE AGE OF CHAUCER

"This little monograph may lay fair claim to be regarded as complete, acute, stimulating, and scholarly."--_School World._

"The book is thoroughly up-to-date, an important consideration in dealing with Middle English literature, and does not lose itself in too minute a consideration of those works which are only of philological and not of literary value. The accounts of the W. Midland alliterative poetry, of the development of prose, and the work of the poet Gower, are specially good. The treatment of Chaucer is thorough and scholarly."--_University Correspondent._

"An admirable handbook, dealing in a lucid style and in a highly critical spirit with one of the most important periods in the history of English literature."--_Westminster Review._

THE AGE OF DRYDEN

"This scholarly little volume from the learned pen of Dr. Garnett.... Within the limits of his space Dr. Garnett surveys the several departments of literature in this period with singular comprehensiveness, broad sympathy, and fine critical sagacity."--_Times._

"The series which Professor Hales is editing aims at being that very difficult and important something between the text-book for schools and the gracefully allusive literary essay. Dr. Garnett has done his part of the work admirably. Most readable is his book, written with a fine sense of proportion, and containing many independent judgements, yet even, so far as minor names and dates and facts are concerned, complete enough for all save a searcher after minutiae."--_Bookman._

"Though planned on the scale of the manual, this book is actually the first attempt worth naming to grasp in one separate review the literature of the last forty years of the seventeenth century, a time which, as Dr. Garnett well says, 'with all its defects, had a faculty for producing masterpieces.' Dr. Garnett's name is a warrant for his acquaintance not only with the masterpieces but with much besides, and with more than all that need be named in the kind of survey he undertakes."--_Manchester Guardian._

THE AGE OF POPE

"A 'handbook' is scarcely a fair description of so readable and companionable a volume, which aims not only at giving accurate information, but at directing the reader's steps 'through a country exhaustless in variety and interest.'"--_Spectator._

"The biographical portion of Mr. Dennis's book is really admirable. The accuracy of the details and the knowledge exhibited by the author of the social and political life of the period show how thoroughly he has mastered his subject."--_Westminster Review._

"Mr. Dennis writes freely and simply, and with a thorough knowledge of the period with which he deals, and goes straight to the point without revelling in circumambient fancies. The result of this is that in 250 pages of good print we have as concise a history of Queen Anne literature as we could wish."--_Cambridge Review._

"An excellent little volume."--_Athenæum._

THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE

"Both volumes are excellently done, with knowledge, judgement, and a pleasant touch of vivacity. It is no easy matter to make a text-book both informing and readable; but here the feat is accomplished. I have read 'The Age of Shakespeare' with unflagging interest and pleasure.... Everywhere one has the restful sensation of dealing with men of competent scholarship and sound critical instinct. Especially valuable, to my thinking, is the chronological table of the chief publications of each year from 1579 to 1630."--Mr. William Archer in the _Morning Leader_.

"These two volumes are, in short, a notable accession to the useful series to which they belong, and they constitute a luminous aid to the interpretation alike of the scope and quality of the literary activity which has rendered the 'Age of Shakespeare' classic in the annals of English literature."--_Standard._

"The book is a well-informed and well-connected and intelligent exposition of its subject. It is more than a mere handbook. It is a _history_, though on a small scale."--_Journal of Education._

THE AGE OF MILTON

"A very readable and serviceable manual of English literature during the central years of the seventeenth century."--_Glasgow Herald._

"Mr. Masterman has written a book which combines the preciseness of a text-book with the fullness of thought of a monograph. Indeed, this compact little work will be studied with as much earnestness by the student as it will be read with pleasure by the lover of _belles lettres_.... We lay down the book delighted with what we have read."--_Birmingham Daily Gazette._

"A work which reflects the utmost credit on its author ... luminous and at the same time impartial."--_Westminster Review._

"This excellent epitome ... very happily indicates the golden afterglow of the Elizabethan sun."--_Daily Chronicle._

THE AGE OF JOHNSON

"The uniform excellence of Mr. Seccombe's manual of English literary history from 1748 to 1798 affords scarcely any opening for detailed criticism. Little can be said, except that everything is just as it ought to be: the arrangement perfect, the length of the notices justly proportioned, the literary judgements sound and illuminating; while the main purpose of conveying information is kept so steadily in view that, while the book is worthy of a place in the library, the student could desire no better guide for an examination."--_Bookman._

"He has knowledge, he is eminently careful, and, best of all in a handbook-maker of this kind, he is judicial. We like Mr. Seccombe's arrangement. There is a capital introduction, solid and grave rather than brilliant, on which the student may stand in confidence before he dives off into the stream of his tutor's survey. Briefly, we have here a thorough, almost encyclopaedic, review of a great literary period--stimulating to the younger student, and to his elder refreshing by its perception."--_Outlook._

"This book is one of the best of its kind, and we heartily recommend it to our readers."--_Journal of Education._

"The young student could not read a better book to get a comprehensive and yet detailed account of the literary history of the latter half of the eighteenth century."--_Morning Post._

THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH

"It is an admirable little work all the way through and one which the ripest students of the period may read with interest and profit."--_Guardian._

"The desiderated text-book of the period 1798 to 1830 A.D. is no longer to seek. More than that, it has been written by the one Englishman most competent to deal with it. Whatever Professor Herford does he does well; but he has given us nothing at once so good and so helpful as this book."--_University Correspondent._

"The introductory essay on Romanticism in our literature is an admirable piece of work, full of suggestive thought, but Professor Herford is at his best--and a very fine best it is--in his brief summaries of the lives and works of individual writers. His Cobbett, his Lamb, and others that might be instanced, are veritable gems of biographical and critical compression presented with true literary finish."--_Literary World._

"A book which is remarkable for freshness and distinction of style, philosophic grasp of first principles, and critical insight.... When we add that the book is also conspicuous for delicacy of literary appreciation and ripe judgement, both of men and movements, we have said enough to show that we consider its claims are unusual."--_Speaker._

THE AGE OF TENNYSON

"A capital little handbook of modern English literature."--_Times._

"An instructive and readable manual ... an admirable first text-book on the subject."--_Scotsman._

"Professor Walker has done his allotted task with singular skill, wonderful judiciousness, critical insight, adequate knowledge and mastery of facts, keen discernment of qualities and effectiveness of grouping.... We have read no review of the whole of the Tennysonian age so genuinely fresh in matter, method, style, critical canons, and selectedness of phrase. As a small book on a great subject, it is a special treasure."--_Educational News._

* * * * *

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INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH LITERATURE

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TRANSCRIBERS' NOTES

General: Corrections to punctuation have not been individually noted.

General: Bold text in the original is marked with ==. Italic text is marked with __

Pages 57, 159: Variable hyphenation of death-bed as in the original.

Pages 222, 232, 257: Variable hyphenation of Free(-)thinking as in the original.