Warwick. He had for some time been a kind of tutor or guardian to her son, and he now took up his abode at Holland House. But the marriage does not seem to have been a very happy one, and Addison's health also was declining. He suffered much from attacks of asthma, and died June 17, 1719, in the calmness of a confident trust in God.

Steele survived his friend for ten years. He was now member of Parliament, had been knighted, was in the Commission of the Peace for Middlesex, and one of the deputylieutenants of the county. His opposition to the Peerage Bill brought on him the displeasure of the Government for a while, until Walpole's return to power; he was then restored to office, and brought out his last and most successful comedy, The Conscious Lovers. In 1726 he had an attack of palsy which weakened his constitution, and on September 1, 1729, he died at Carmarthen, where he was staying for his health, and where he had some property. It is said that he loved to be carried out of a summer's evening to watch the country folk upon the green, and would give an order for a new dress to the maiden who danced the best, thus showing the enduring freshness of a kindly human heart through life to death.

The influence of the Spectator in connection with a group of English novels must be mentioned before passing on to later writers. Its short papers, full of sympathy with human life, called into existence a large class of readers hitherto uninterested in literature. Country gentlemen, ladies, men carrying on a quiet trade in outof-the-way towns, persons of little school education, and shut out from the world, delighted in the human interest of the Spectator papers, which brought into their secluded homes the fuller life of more changing events and stronger emotion. A good deal of the Spectator was written in the form of letters from persons detailing

A A

events and asking counsel. Letter-writing became a kind of fashion. It was studied carefully, and made a means for display in composition and skill in expression. In 1740 Richardson produced a novel, called "Pamela," which consisted of a series of letters, professing to be written by a servant to her father and mother. The book was begun as a model of letter-writing for country people who wished to follow the fashion, and had not had education enough to write independently of some guide; but the story was kept up with interest, and the book became at once exceedingly popular. Every one was delighted in the history of the servant-maid, whom Richardson rewarded in the end by marrying her to her young master, a thorough scoundrel. Fielding saw that marriage to a bad man was certainly no reward for virtue, and, indeed, that virtue to be virtue must be independent of all reward. He therefore wrote a novel, which he called "Joseph Andrews," the hero of which he made the brother of Pamela Andrews; but this, too, was a story to be read for its own sake, and it established Fielding's success as a novelist. The success of Richardson's "Pamela" and of Fielding's "Joseph Andrews" brought another novelist into the field, Smollett, who in 1748 published "Roderick Random." These novels were soon followed by others; but Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett kept the lead as chief writers. In the same year as "Roderick Random" appeared, Richardson brought out "Clarissa Harlowe," which is generally considered his best novel. The next year Fielding published "Tom Jones," and again surpassed Richardson, having produced in this work a novel said to be the greatest in the English language. In 1751 appeared Smollett's "Peregrine Pickle" and Fielding's "Amelia." In "Amelia" Fielding represented his ideal of womanhood, and this was followed in 1753 by Richardson's "Sir Charles Grandison," which was

intended to be the picture of Richardson's idea of a perfect gentleman.

In a few years these novels had done much to interest the large body of the people in literature, and made them feel that they too had their part in it, both as readers and as the subjects of it. The English novels thus carried on the work begun by the short papers on characters, society, and life in the Spectator. The narrow reign of French classicism was passing away, and the sphere of literature was extending more and more into the real life of the people, and receiving new vigour from the contact with simple human sympathies and interests.

CHAPTER XVIII.

POPE (1688-1744).

EVERY poet must, by that large sympathy which is a part of his nature, reflect in himself the prevailing ideas and influences of his time; but while lesser poets receive and give expression to the characteristic thoughts and feelings of their age, the great poet goes further, and shows also how all these have meaning, and are working for the onward advance of the world. He sees the direction to which the currents of the time are tending, and can therefore point forward to the next step in human progress. Pope was thus chief poet of his time; he was much under its influences, and reflected its ideas; but we find him doing the great poet's work in sifting the true from the false, and in showing the meaning of the questions and conflicts with which the minds of men were exercised.

Alexander Pope was born in Lombard Street on the 21st of May, 1688. His father was a linendraper, and a Roman Catholic. At the accession of William and Mary severe laws were revived against Romanists, and very soon after his son's birth, Pope's father retired from business, and went to live at Binfield, on the borders of Windsor Forest. Alexander Pope's whole life was one long struggle of an active, keen intellect with physical weakness and pain. He was a small, sickly, deformed child, with an irritable, sensitive temperament; and we shall see how in later years of his deformity, his constant dread of ridicule, and his extreme irritability, often led him into a bitterness of feeling

his sense

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which was beyond his own control. But it must be remembered that while the proofs remain in his writings of occasions when he was overcome by the irritability of his natural temperament, the traces are lost of the hard struggles and well-fought victories through which alone he could have done his true work as poet, in spite of constant suffering and the painfulness of his deformity. Pope's first teacher was a Romanist priest; he was afterwards for a short time at a school at Twyford, and then he was sent to another school in London. While he was in London he saw, to his great delight, the old poet Dryden, who at that time was also a Romanist. Pope had already discovered his own skill in writing verse. He says of himself—

"As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,

I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came."

And on his return home to Binfield he made translations of Latin poets, and imitations of the older English poets. At sixteen he wrote his "Pastorals," though they were not published until five years later. He read a great deal during these younger years, and took special pleasure in Spenser's "Faerie Queene." The book was no doubt often his companion as he wandered through the glades of Windsor Forest, and he might fancy he could see Una and her lamb, or the Red Cross Knight riding down the green avenues. He began writing at this time his poem on Windsor Forest, which was finished later.

Pope's earliest published poems came out in "Tonson's Miscellany" when he was twenty, but his pastorals and other verses had been read in manuscript by many persons, and he was already becoming known as a rising poet. As such he had visited at the house of the Englefields, of Whiteknights Park, at Reading, and had been introduced to some of the literary men of the day. He there met another Roman Catholic family, the Blounts, of Maple Durham. One of the