Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/447

Rh 1700-1729.] ENGLISH LITEKATU 11 E 427 commonwealth by grants of land at the expense of the Irish. It was natural, therefore, that his political sympathies should be of an Orange hue, and that he should regard William IIT. as the greatest of deliverers, the most benefi cent of conquerors. For, but for the battle of the Boyne, it cannot be doubted that the confiscations of previous reigns would have been in great measure reversed, and the native Irish resettled on their own soil ; in which case families of English origin and of recent importation, like that of Steele, would have fared but badly. Hence in his Christian Hero (1701), written while he was in the army, and again in the Taller, Steele launches forth into glowing panegyrics on his Dutch hero, which would have satisfied Lord Macaulay himself. The foundations being secure, Steele, whose education was English (he was at the Charterhouse and at Oxford along with Addison), employed his voluble argumentative tongue and his racy Hibernian humour to improve the superstructure. Mild reasoning, gentle ridicule, harmless banter, might, he thought, be used with effect to assuage the rancour of old animosities, soften the asperity of party spirit, expose the weak side of vanity, and introduce a temper of &quot; sweet reasonableness &quot; into all social relations. Availing himself of the advantages which his position as conductor of the Government Gazette gave him for obtaining early news, Steele started the Taller in 1709, with the view of enter taining with instructive and amusing gossip the readers whom the promise of news from the seat of war had already attracted. The imaginary editor, Isaac Bickerstaff (the name was borrowed from Swift, who had employed it in his ironical controversy with Partridge the almanac-maker), dates his communications from various coffee-houses according to their subject matter. Addison, who was at the timo in Ireland, soon discovered the authorship of the Taller, and was enlisted with joy by Steele as a contributor. It was succeeded by the Spectator (1711-1713), planned by the two friends in concert, with the same general objects as the Taller, but with better machinery. Almost at the opening, in No. 3, Addison wrote a clever vindication of the revolution-compromise, which the Jacobite leanings of some among the ministry appeared at the time to place in jeopardy. With this exception, political questions are scarcely mentioned by the Spectator, who in his character of a mild censor of manners, &quot; pietate gravis ac mentis,&quot; affects to stand aloof from the strife of party, and by ex postulation and advice, undertakes to reform society. &quot; The Taller and Spectator were published,&quot; says Dr Johnson, &quot; at a time when two parties, loud, restless, and violent, each with plausible declarations, and each perhaps without any distinct termination of its views, were agitat ing the nation; to minds heated with political contest they supplied cooler and more inoffensive reflexions : and it is said by Addison that they had a perceptible influence upon the conversation of that time, and taught the frolic and the gay to unite merriment with decency.&quot; By turning to fresh intellectual fields the minds of the upper classes the people in good society to whom the theatre was now a forbidden or despised excitement, Addison and Steele did without doubt allay much restless ness, still or amuse many feverish longings. Its ideals discredited or found impracticable, the English mind, dis enchanted and in heavy cheer, took up with languid in terest these pleasant chatty discoursings about things in general, and allowed itself to be amused, and half forgot its spiritual perplexities. Nothing was settled by these papers, nothing really probed to the bottom; but they taught, with much light grace and humour, lessons of good sense and mutual tolerance ; and their popularity proved that the lesson was relished. The characterization which we meet with in the Spectator has been justly admired. Sir &quot;Roger de Coverley is an excellent type of the English country gentleman of that day unintelligent and full of prejudices, but manly, open-hearted, and conscientious. The mercan tile classes are represented, less adequately, yet in a digni fied and attractive manner, by Sir Andrew Freeport. Captain Sentry, as the representative of the army, is not so satisfactory ; compare him with Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim in Sterne s Tristram Shandy and the contrast between a dull, wooden figure, and personages who bring the life of the British army in Flanders exactly and vividly before our eyes, is immediately apparent. The theological controversies of the period were carried on chiefly between deists and churchmen on the one hand, and non jurors and oath-takers on the other. There will always be able men to whom revealed religion will not com mend itself, because demonstration of its truth is in the nature of things impossible, and the portal through which conviction must be reached is too lowly for many to enter. In this age of reasoning, the English writers who followed Hobbes in eliminating the supernatural from Christianity considered it to be their duty to exhibit their proofs in the clearest and most systematic manner. Thus arose the English school of English deists. Toland, the author of a good life Deists, of Milton, led the way with Christianity not Mysterious (1702). Tindal followed with Christianity as Old as the Creation, in which an attempt is made to identify Christ with Crishna, and to evaporate the Christian religion into a solar myth. Collins, in his Discourse on Free-Thinking^ took the line of impugning the trustworthiness of the text of Scripture. He was answered by Dr Richard Bentley hi a tract called Phileleutherus Lipsiensis, in which it is main tained that the text of the Greek Testament is on the whole in a sounder state than that of any of the Greek classical authors. Berkeley combated free-thinking in the philo sophical dialogue of Alciphron. Bishop Butler, and after wards Warburton, contributed important works to the same controversy. In philosophy the trains of thought which Hobbes and Leibnitz had pursued were either further developed, or led to opposing reactions. Hobbes s selfish theory of morals, and his disposition to leave out the idea of God from his system of the universe, found resolute opponents, not only in Clarke and Berkeley, but also in Shaftesbury, the noble author of the Characteristics. The treatises composing this work were published at various times between 1708 and 1713. Shaftesbury maintains the disinterested theory of Shaftes- morals, but rather in a rhetorical way than with much bury. solidity of argument. he derives virtue, beneficence, and compassion, not, as Hobbes had in each case done, from a source tainted by self interest, but from the delight which the mind naturally takes in actions and feelings conform able to its own unperverted nature. In his general reason ings on the constitution of nature and of man, Shaftesbury is an optimist; but his optimism acquires its serenity at the cost of surrendering the distinction between good and evil, virtue and vice. Like Pope (who, indeed, in the Essay on Man, versified and condensed freely the glowing rhetoric of the Characteristics}, Shaftesbury &quot; Accounts for moral as for natural things :&quot; the Deity whom lie celebrates in eloquent periods is not a being who hates moral evil while permitting it, but one from whose elevated point of view that which seems to us worthy of reprobation must appear as necessary to the working out of a vast scheme of paternal government. These views bear a considerable resemblance to the hypothesis more cautiously put forward by the late Professor Mansel,, and at once combated by Mr Mill and Professor Goldwin Smith, which suggested that man s ideas of justice and injustice, right and wrong, were per-