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Night Thoughts, Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination, and Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Their main current runs in the direction of sentimental reflection.

Thomson was contemplative, affectionate, sympathetic, and artless. He loved nature with those fresh feelings and glad impulses which all would wish to cherish, and he painted his love, in its smallest details, without being ashamed. His lines on the robin in Winter are in his best vein:

The fowls of heaven,

Tamed by the cruel season, crowd around
The winnowing store, and claim the little boon
Which Providence assigns them. One alone,
The redbreast, sacred to the household gods,
Wisely regardful of the embroiling sky,
In joyless fields and thorny thickets leaves
His shivering mates, and pays to trusted man
His annual visit. Half afraid, he first

Against the window beats; then, brisk, alights
On the warm hearth; then, hopping o'er the floor,
Eyes all the smiling family askance,

And pecks, and starts, and wonders where he is;
Till, more familiar grown, the table-crumbs

Attract his slender feet.'

A passage at the end of Spring contains a well-known line, and is characteristic:

'Delightful task! to rear the tender thought,
To teach the young idea how to shoot,
To pour the fresh instruction o'er the mind,
To breathe the enlivening spirit, and to fix
The generous purpose in the glowing breast.'

In his mode of thinking and of expressing his thought, he was original.

Young was a clergyman and a courtier, who had aspired in vain to a seat in Parliament, then to a bishopric in the Church; married, lost his wife and children, but made use of his disappointments and sufferings to write meditations on Life, Death, Immortality, Time, Friendship, and similar themes. He was a lover of gloom, of the imagery of the grave, of the awful mysteries of life. When he was writing a tragedy, Grafton sent him a human skull, with a candle in it, as a lamp; and he used it. His poem is a wilderness of reflection, through which his fertile fancy scatters flowers of every hue and odor. Its strength is in the vast number of noble and sublime passages, maxims of the highest practical value, everlasting truths,

'The glorious fragments of a fire immortal,
With rubbish mixed, and glittering in the dust.'

The following may suggest its general complexion:

'Too low they build, who build beneath the stars.'

'Procrastination is the thief of time.'

'In human hearts what bolder thought can rise
Than man's presumption on to-morrow's dawn?'

'Shall man be proud to wear his livery,

And souls in ermine scorn a soul without?

Can place or lessen us, or aggrandize?

Pygmies are pygmies still, though perched on Alps,
And pyramids are pyramids in vales.'

'Look nature through, 'tis revolution all!

All change, no death; day follows night, and night
The dying day; stars rise and set, and set and rise;
Earth takes the example. See, the Summer gay,
With her green chaplet and ambrosial flowers,

Droops into pallid autumn: Winter gray,

Horrid with frost and turbulent with storm,

Blows Autumn and his golden fruits away,

Then melts into the Spring: soft Spring, with breath
Favonian, from warm chambers of the south,

Recalls the first. All, to reflourish, fades;

As in a wheel, all sinks to reascend;
Emblems of man, who passes, not expires.'

Akenside, earnest and severe, believed he had a message to deliver to mankind, and wrote in blank verse a philosophical poem on the pleasures of the purified intellect, as it contemplates flourishing groves, murmuring streams, calm seas under moonlight, autumn mists slumbering on the gray sky, noble architecture, music, sculpture, painting. We look, if not for a vision, for something that suggests an element of progress,—at least, a disposition to cease chiselling, and to quarry the living rock :

'Say, why was man so eminently raised

Amid the vast creation; why ordained
Through life and death to dart his piercing eye,
With thoughts beyond the limit of his frame;
But that the Omnipotent might send him forth

In sight of mortal and immortal powers,

As on a boundless theatre, to run

The great career of justice; to exalt

His generous aim to all diviner deeds?

Who that, from Alpine heights, his labouring eye

Shoots round the wide horizon, to survey

Nilus or Ganges rolling his bright wave

Through mountains, plains, through empires black with shade,
And continents of sand, will turn his gaze

To mark the windings of a scanty rill

That murmurs at his feet? . . .

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For from the birth

Of mortal man, the sovereign Maker said,
That not in humble nor in brief delight,
Not in the fading echoes of Renown,

Power's purple robes, nor Pleasure's flowery lap,
The soul should find enjoyment; but from these
Turning disdainful to an equal good,

Through all the ascent of things enlarge her view,
Till every bound at length should disappear,
And infinite perfection close the scene.'

Gray, a man of vast and varied acquirements, felt, with a melancholy sweetness, the mystery of the world in its relation to universal humanity, and gave voice to his musings in verse whose audience-chamber is capacious as the soul of man; for it reflects, as in peaceful stream, images in which every mind has an interest, and expresses sentiments which find in every bosom an echo. On the eve of a decisive battle, silently gliding along the St. Lawrence, in view of the hostile heights pencilled upon the midnight sky, Wolf repeated the Elegy, in low tones, to the other officers in his boat. 'Now, gentlemen,' said he, at the close of the recitation, 'I would rather be the author of that poem than take Quebec!' One stanza, one noble line, must have been

fraught with a mournful meaning:

"The boast of Heraldry, the pomp of Power,

And all that Beauty, all that Wealth e'er gave,

Await alike th' inevitable hour:

The paths of glory lead but to the grave."

All four, however, while they denote a transition era, show the influence of the artificial school. The intellect triumphs over the emotions; their emotion is formal, their tears are academical. Thomson's muse is often dainty, formal, cold. He saw correctly what was before him, the outward show of things, but had no glimpse of

The light that never was on sea or land,
The inspiration, and the poet's dream.'

Young lashes himself into a never-ending series of antitheses, strikes attitudes, and assumes theatricals. Akenside is stiffly classical in manner, and gives us too much foliage for the fruit. He helps on his age chiefly by his subject. Gray cannot shake off the classical drapery. He is fastidious, scrupulously delicate and exact, rather than fiery, tender, or inventive.

Before any aspect of nature or fact of life is capable of poetic' treatment, it must have passed inward,— out of the mere region

of intellect into the warmer atmosphere of imaginative feeling,— there have flushed into glowing color, and kindled the soul to ‘a white heat.'

Drama. Of slight literary importance. In 1732, Gay brought society upon the stage, held up the mirror of nature, in which men and women could see themselves as others saw them,― see vice made vulgar,- see their most striking peculiarities and defects pass in gay review before them, then learn either to avoid or to conceal them. The Beggar's Opera was acted in London without interruption for sixty-three days. The characters are highwaymen, who wear,― such was the similitude between high and low, the manners and morality of fine gentlemen. Hear people of quality converse:

"If any of the ladies chuse gin, I hope they will be so free as to call for it." "Indeed, sir, I never drink strong waters but when I have the colic." "Just the excuse of the fine ladies! Why, a lady of quality is never without the colic."

Tragedy was marked rather by cold correctness and turgid declamation than by the freedom and warmth which lead captive the feelings and the imagination. As a reflection of the movement in literature, Shakespeare, who had been banished from the stage, began slowly to reappear. In 1741, the Merchant of Venice was produced in its original form, after an eclipse of one hundred years. In October of this year, Garrick appeared, for the first time on the London stage, in Richard III. It is worthy of notice that this great actor produced a revolution in the art of acting. He displaced the habit of slow, monotonous declamation, of unnatural pomp, by a more various and rapid intonation, and a more careful regard for the truth of nature and history. 'If,' said Quin, 'the young fellow is right, I and the rest of the players have been all wrong'; and he added, 'Garrick is a new religion,- Whitefield was followed for a time,- but they will all come to church again.' Garrick replied in a happy epigram, 'that it was not heresy but reformation.'

Periodical. The daily miscellany, which Addison's singular humor had made so popular, passed into inferior hands, and fell into disrepute. Johnson, in 1750, and again in 1760, vainly attempted to revive it.

The period is remarkable as the era of the commencement of

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magazines and reviews. In 1731, appeared the Gentleman's Magazine; and in 1749, the Monthly Review, devoted to criticism. These periodicals are evidence of the large increase of readers, and they show, by their contents, that authors had begun to 'intermeddle with all knowledge,'-criticism, politics, philosophy, poetry, fiction.

The press was now, for the first time in the history of the world, the exponent of public opinion. Said a member of Parliament in 1738:

'The people of Great Britain are governed by a power that never was heard of as a supreme authority in any age or country before. . . . It is the government of the press. The stuff which our weekly newspapers are filled with, is received with greater reverence than Acts of Parliament, and the sentiments of one of these scribblers have more weight with the multitude than the opinion of the best politician in the kingdom.' Said Johnson in 1758:

'No species of literary men has lately been so much multiplied as the writers of news. Not many years ago the nation was content with one Gazette, but now we have not only in the metropolis, papers of every morning and every evening, but almost every large town has its weekly historian.'

Novel.- Prose fiction, we first observe, is not a wandering maze of fancy, but a tale with more or less loftiness of style, fulness of detail, and unity of action. If the interest turns on supernatural, improbable, or marvellous incidents, the story is called a romance; if on pictures of life, showing the web and texture of society as it really exists, or has existed, it is called a novel. If the novel recreates the events and characters of history, putting us into living contact with a given phase of national life, it is historical; if it paints human nature and facts, with a moral effect or design, it is ethical. The ethical novel may convey its lesson in two principal ways,—it may inflict morality, or insinuate it; it may wall up the heart with discipline, subjecting its impulses uniformly to a severe ideal, or, less exacting, may adopt expansive and liberal measures, allowing a generous supply of air and sunshine. The first was the method of Richardson, the second, of Fielding. The one represents noble dreams, enthusiastic elevation; the other, noisy hilarity and frank benevolence. The heroine of the one is studious, loving, and pious; of the other, modest, loving, and-an excellent cook. Each is the complement of the other, and both are artists. In a literary, artistic view, the novels of Richardson and Fielding are the freshest feature of the period, and the most interesting. Few works yield richer profit