Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/449

Rh 1729-1789.] ENGLISH LITE K A T U K E 429 am Inquiry into the Xature and Causes of the Wealth of -1 th - Nations appeared in 1776. It also produced several eminent historians and philosophers, of whose works some notice will be taken presently. In other departments of literature, after the death of Pope, it was but poorly distin guished. Gray will be long remembered for the beauty and melody of some of his pieces, the Elegy in a Country Churchyard, the Bard, and the Progress of Poesy. In the elegant poems of Goldsmith occur passages of sentiment, e.g., the famous lines &quot; 111 fares the land,&quot; itc., which read like anticipations of Rousseau. The satires of Churchill, though vigorous and pointed, are founded upon no intelli gible principle ; they have no universal character, like those of Pope, nor do they represent any definite political or religious view ; rather they are dictated by mere national prejudice (e.g., the Prophecy of Famine, a tirade against the Scotch), or by vulgar partisanship, the eternal animosity of the outs against the ins. The Jfosciad was a satire upon a stage sunk so low as not to be worth satirizing. There is much sweetness and grace in the verses of Shenstone ; they formed part of the intellectual food which nourished the strong soul of Burns. Collins s Ode to the Passions, so much praised by our grandfathers, is gradually passing out of ken. The Night Thoughts of Young demand our notice, as the work of a man of large intellectual capacity, though of ignoble character. His meditations, though they never pass into the mystical or transcendental stage, are just and edifying ; in applying them he displays a rich sermonizing vein ; but a flavour of cant hangs about his most ambitious efforts. Beattie s Minstrel, a poem in the Spenserian stanza, deserves a passing word of commendation ; it unites manly dignity to WJKM-. refinement and delicacy of feeling. Cowper, ever on the brink of insanity, resorted to literature in order to prevent his mind from preying on itself. An amiable piety makes his Task, a long moralizing poem in blank verse, attractive to many minds ; from the mere literary point of view, it must be allowed to be a feeble production. As he gained more confidence in himself, he developed a curious sort of mild feline humour, which appears in the delightful ballad of John Gilpin, and in several shorter pieces. The strength which had been wanting all his life came to him near its close, and inspired him to write those stanzas of wondrous majesty and beauty which have the title of The Castaway ; unhappily it was the strength of spiritual despair. .rin. Beyond the Tweed, as Johnson was sinking towards the grave, and when the voice of English poetry had almost ceased to sound, a man of genius was coming to maturity, whos~e direct and impassioned utterances, straight from the heart of nature, were to reduce the frigid imitators of Pope to their proper insignificance, to startle the dull worshippers of the conventional, and to prepare the English-speaking world for that general break-up of formulas which the tempest of the French Revolution was about to initiate. Robert Burns was a native force ; no foreign literature moulded him, no influence of Continental thought either made or marred him. He had the education of a Scottish peasant, and his self-culture does not appear to have con sisted in much more than reading Pope and Shenstone, the Spectator, Sterne s novels, and a few other popular books. His natural powers were of the finest and highest order. Truly writes his countryman, the late Professor Craik : &quot; Burns s head was as strong as his heart ; his natural sagacity, logical faculty, and judgment were of the first order ; no man, of poetical or prosaic temperament, ever had a more substantial intellectual character.&quot; The man being such, and such the equipment with which education and circumstance had furnished him, we observe with in terest that he came into serious collision, on becoming com plete master of his powers, with the religious system, that of the Presbyterian Kirk of Scotland, in w : hich he had been brought up. It neither awed, nor attracted, nor con vinced him. He never wrote more powerfully, or with a more searching humour, than when employed in exposing the hypocrisy and fanaticism of certain of its ministers. 1 If he had friends among them, it was among the &quot; Moderates,&quot; a party corresponding to the Broad Church clergy of the present day, whom their colleagues in the Presbyterian ministry regarded with undisguised abhorrence. Religion, therefore, established no control over him ; and unhappily this splendid nature found no resource in philo sophy, nor moral strength within, which could avail to save him from the tyranny of his passions. &quot; Vina, Venus,&quot; two out of the three banes spoken of by the Roman epigrammatist, undermined too soon that stalwart frame, and silvered that glorious head. He died in his thirty- seventh year in 1796, leaving behind him, besides a few longer pieces, more than 200 songs, among which may be found gems of pathos, melody, and beauty, which any nation might be proud to wear in its intellectual coronet. In the history of the drama during this period, the most The noteworthy feature is the return of Shakespeare to the stage, drama, brought about, soon after the middle of the century, by the reverent zeal of Garrick. When Drury Lane theatre was opened in 1747, chiefly for the performance of Shakespeare s plays, Johnson wrote the celebrated Prologue which was delivered on the occasion, describing the great dramatist as &quot; exhausting worlds and then imagining new,&quot; as spurning the &quot; bounded reign &quot; of real existence, and forcing time to &quot; pant after him in vain.&quot; Comedy, no longer gross, had become commonplace. From this reproach the two admir able plays of Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer and The Good-matured Man, temporarily freed it ; nor could it be justly imputed during the period of Sheridan s connection Sheri- with the stage, from 1775 to 1780. But the wit that dan. blazes, the fun that sparkles, in the scenes of the Rivals and the Critic, nre of no purely English growth. Sheridan s Irish birth and Celtic temperament must be largely credited with the brightness and permanent attrac tiveness of his plays. Prose fiction, which more and more came to supply that kind of intellectual distraction which had before been sought in the drama, and, aided by the printing press, to diffuse its blessings (if they are blessings) to strata of the population which the drama had never reached, was employed in this period by several writers of rare ability. Fielding s Tom Jones and Amelia, Richardson s Clarissa Harlowe and Sir Charles Grandison, made the same kind of stir in general society that had been caused by Dryden s heroic plays some eighty years before. An ingenious French critic (Philarete Chasles) has attempted to trsce in the works of these writers the conflict, though much trans formed, of the Puritans and Cavaliers of an earlier age. Lovelace, he thinks, represents the insolent temper and disregard for morality of the aristocratic Cavaliers ; Clarissa, his victim, the daughter of a virtuous middle class family, exhibits the substantial rectitude of that &quot; good old cause,&quot; which licentious courts could persecute but could not sub due. Fielding, the aristocrat, recalls nnd continues the jovial recklessness of the men of the Restoration ; Richardson, the plebeian, is in the line of Milton, Penn, Fox, Banyan, and other witnesses. Yet these resemblances are after all superficial. It is true that Fielding cannot help writing like a gentleman, and a member of an ancient house ; while Richardson, though he is fond of giving titles to his characters, betrays perhaps by his s?riousnetf his breeding among the upper and most respectable classes of the proletariate. But when we. look more closely, we find 1 &quot; Holy Willie s Prayer,&quot; &quot;The Holy Fair,&quot; &c.