two short poetical pieces of his, are well known; but his fervid character probably flashed out in conversation in a way of which we do not gather any notion from his writings. Atterbury, as the reader knows, was deprived and outlawed in 1722; and he died abroad, in 1731, in his sixty-ninth year.

Matthew Prior is another distinguished name in the band of the Tory writers of this age, and he was also an associate of Pope and Swift, although we hear less of him in their epistolary correspondence than of most of their other friends. Yet, perhaps,

1

In one of the passages in which he commemorates the friendship of Swift, Atterbury, and Bolingbroke, Pope records also the encouragement his earliest performances in rhyme received from a poet and man of wit of the opposite party, "well-natured Garth." Sir Samuel Garth, who was an eminent physician and a zealous Whig, is the author of various poetical pieces published in the reigns of William and Anne, of which the one of greatest pretension is that entitled The Dispensary, a mock epic, in six short cantos, on the quarrels of his professional brethren, which appeared in 1699. The wit of this slight performance has possibly somewhat evaporated with age, but it does not seem to have been at any time very pungent. A much more voluminous, and also more ambitious, Whig poet of this Augustan age, as it is sometimes called, of our literature, was another physician, Sir Richard

no one of the minor wits and poets of the time has continued to enjoy higher or more general favor with posterity. Much that he wrote, indeed, is now forgotten; but some of the best of his comic tales in verse will live as long as the language, which contains nothing that surpasses them in the union of ease and fluency with sprightliness and point, and in all that makes up the spirit of humor- | Blackmore. Blackmore made his debut as a poet ous and graceful narrative. They are our happiest examples of a style that has been cultivated with more frequent success by French writers than by our own. Prior, who was born in 1664, commenced poet before the Revolution, by the publication, in 1688, of his City Mouse and Country Mouse, written in concert with Charles Montagu, afterward Earl of Halifax, in ridicule of Dryden's Hind and Panther; and he continued a Whig nearly to the end of the reign of William; but he then joined the most extreme section of the Tories, and acted cordially with that party down to his death, in 1721.

so early as the year 1696, by the publication of his Prince Arthur, which was followed by a succession of other epics, or long poems of a serious kind, each in six, ten, or twelve books, under the names of King Arthur, King Alfred, Eliza, the Redeemer, the Creation, &c., besides a Paraphrase of the Book of Job, a new version of the Psalms, a Satire on Wit, and various shorter effusions both in verse and prose. The indefatigable rhymester-"the everlasting Blackmore,” as Pope calls him—died at last, in 1729. Nothing can be conceived exceeding in absurdity this incessant discharge of epics; but Blackmore, whom Dryden charged with writing to the rumbling of his coach's wheels," may be pronounced, without any undue severity, to have been not more a fool than a blockhead. His Creation, indeed, has been praised both by Addison and Johnson; but the politics of the author may be supposed to have blinded or mollified the one critic, and his piety the other; at least the only thing an ordinary reader will be apt to discover in this his chef d'œuvre, that is not the flattest commonplace, is an occasional outbreak of the most ludicrous extravagance and bombast. Altogether this knight, droning away at his epics for above a quarter of a century, is as absurd a phenomenon as is presented to us in the history of literature. Pope has done him no more than justice in assigning him the first place among the contending “brayers" at the immortal games instituted by the goddess of the Dunciad:

The mention of Prior naturally suggests that of his friend and patron, and also the friend of Swift and Pope-Henry St. John, better known by his title of the Lord Viscount Bolingbroke, although his era comes down to a much later date, for he was not born till 1678, and he lived to 1751. Bolingbroke wrote no poetry, but his collected prose works fill five quarto volumes (without including his letters), and would thus entitle him, by their quantity alone, to be ranked as one of the most considerable writers of his time; of which we have abundant testimony that he was one of the most brilliant orators and talkers, and in every species of mere cleverness one of the most distinguished figures. His writings, being principally on subjects of temporary politics, have lost much of their interest; but a few of them, especially his Letters on the Study and Use of History, his Idea of a Patriotic King, and his account and defense of his own conduct in his famous Letter to Sir William Wyndham, will still reward perusal even for the sake of their matter, while, in style and manner, almost every thing he has left is of very remarkable merit. Bolingbroke's style, as has been observed, "was a happy medium between that of the scholar and that of the man of society-or, rather, it was a happy combination of the best qualities of both, heightening the ease, freedom, fluency, and liveliness of elegant conversation with many of the deeper and richer tones of the eloquence of for-writer of prose fiction, if, indeed, one who, although mal orations and of books. The example he thus set has probably had a very considerable effect in molding the style of popular writing since his time."

Article on Bolingbroke, in Penny Cyclopædia, v., 78.

But far o'er all, sonorous Blackmore's strain;
Walls, steeples, skies, bray back to him again.
In Tot'ham fields the brethren, with amaze,
Prick all their ears up, and forget to graze;
Long Chancery-lane retentive rolls the sound,
And courts to courts return it round and round;
Thames wafts it thence to Rufus' roaring ball,
And Hungerford reëchoes bawl for bawl.
All hail him victor in both gifts of song,
Who sings so loudly, and who sings so long.

The Whigs, however, had to boast of one great

taking a frequent and warm part in the discussion of political subjects, really stood aloof from and above all parties, and may be said to have been, in 1 See Prologue to the Satires, 135, &c.

enlargement of view far in advance of all the public | proceeded from his pen with a rapidity evincing the men of his time, can be properly claimed by any easiest flow as well as the greatest fertility of imag party. Nor does Daniel Defoe seem to have been ination. Robinson Crusoe appeared in 1719; the recognized as one of themselves by the Whigs of || Dumb Philosopher, the same year; Captain Sinhis own day. He stood up, indeed, from first to gleton, in 1720; Duncan Campbell, the same year; last, for the principles of the Revolution against Moll Flanders, in 1721; Colonel Jacque, in 1722; those of the Jacobites; but in the alternating strug- the Journal of the Plague, and probably, also, the gle between the Whig and Tory parties for the Memoirs of a Cavalier (to which there is no date), possession of office he took little or no concern; he the same year; the Fortunate Mistress, or Roxana, served and opposed administrations of either color in 1724; the New Voyage Round the World, in without reference to any thing but their measures; 1725; and the Memoirs of Captain Carleton, in thus we find him in 1706 assisting Godolphin and 1728. But these effusions of his inventive faculty his colleagues to compass the union with Scotland; seem to have been, after all, little more than the and, in 1713, exerting himself with equal zeal in amusements of his leisure. In the course of the supporting Hawley and Bolingbroke in the attempt twelve years from 1719 to his death in 1731, beto carry through their commercial treaty with sides his novels, he produced about twenty miscellaFrance. He is believed to have first addressed neous works, many of them of considerable extent. himself to his countrymen through the press in It may be pretty safely affirmed that no one who 1683, when he was only in his twenty-third year. has written so much has written so well. No wriFrom this time, for a space of above thirty years, he │ter of fictitious narrative has ever excelled him in, may be said never to have laid down his pen as a at least, one prime excellence-the air of reality political writer: his publications in prose and verse, which he throws over the creations of his fancy; which are far too numerous to be here particular- an effect proceeding from the strength of concepized, embracing nearly every subject which either tion with which he enters into the scenes, adventthe progress of events made of prominent import-ures, and characters he undertakes to describe, and ance during that time, or which was of eminent his perfect reliance upon his power of interesting popular or social interest, independently of times the reader by the plainest possible manner of reand circumstances. Many of these productions, lating things essentially interesting. Truth and written for a temporary purpose, or on the spur of nature are never either heightened by flowers of some particular occasion, still retain a considerable speech in Defoe, or smothered under that sort of value even for their matter, either as directories of adornment. In some of his political writings there conduct or accounts of matters of fact; some, in-are not wanting passages of considerable height of deed, such as his History of the Union, are the style, in which, excited by a fit occasion, he employs works of highest authority we possess respecting to good purpose the artifices of rhetorical embellishthe transactions to which they relate; all of them ment and modulation; but in his works of imaginabear the traces of a sincere, earnest, manly charac- tion the almost constant characteristic of his style ter, and of an understanding unusually active, pene- is a simplicity and plainness, which, if there be any trating, and well-informed. Evidence enough there affectation about it at all, is chargeable only with often is, no doubt, of haste and precipitation, but it that of a homeliness sometimes approaching to rusis always the haste of a full mind; the subject may ticity. Yet it is full of idiomatic nerve, too, and in be rapidly and somewhat rudely sketched out, and a high degree graphic and expressive; and even its the matter not always very artificially disposed, or occasional slovenliness, whether the result of careset forth to the most advantage; but Defoe never lessness or design, aids the illusion by which the wrote for the mere sake of writing, or unless when fiction is made to read so like a matter of fact. The he really had something to state which he conceived truthful air of Defoe's fictions, we may justly reit important that the public should know. He was mark, is quite of a different character from that of too thoroughly honest for that. Defoe's course and Swift's, in which, although there is also much of character as a political writer bear a considerable the same vivid conception, and, therefore, minutely resemblance in some leading points to those of one accurate delineation, of every person and thing inof the most remarkable men of our own day, the troduced, a discerning reader will always perceive late William Cobbett, who, however, had certainly a smile lurking beneath the author's assumed gravmuch more passion and willfulness than Defoe, what-ity, telling him intelligibly enough that the whole is ever we may think of his claims to as much princi- a joke. It is said, indeed, that, as the Journal of ple. But Defoe's political writings make the small- the Plague is quoted as an authentic narrative by est part of his literary renown. At the age of fifty- Dr. Mead, and as Lord Chatham was, in all simeight-an age when other writers, without the tenth plicity, in the habit of recommending the Memoirs part of his amount of performance to boast of, have of a Cavalier to his friends as the best account of usually thought themselves entitled to close their the Civil Wars, and as those of Captain Carleton labors he commenced a new life of authorship were read even by Samuel Johnson without a suspiwith all the spirit and hopeful alacrity of five-and-cion of their being other than a true history, so some twenty. A succession of works of fiction, destined, Irish bishop was found with faith enough to believe some of them, to take and keep the highest rank in in Gulliver's Travels, although not a little amazed that department of our literature, and to become by some things stated in the book. But this must popular books in every language of Europe, now have been a bishop of a very rare order of intellect.

and other pieces of which he is the author, his Careless Husband and one or two others may be admitted to be lively and agreeable. Cibber, who was born in 1671, produced his first play, the comedy of Love's Last Shift, in 1696, and was still an occasional writer for the stage after the commence

ductions, indeed, his tragedy entitled Papal Tyranny, was brought out so late as the year 1745, when he himself performed one of the principal characters; and he lived till 1757. His well-known account of his own life, or his Apology for his Life, as he modestly or affectedly calls it, is an amusing piece of something higher than gossip; the sketches he gives of the various celebrated actors of his time are many of them executed, not perhaps with the deepest insight, but yet with much graphic skill in so far as regards those mere superficial characteristics that meet the ordinary eye. The chief tragic writer of this age was Nicholas Rowe, the author of the Fair Penitent and Jane Shore, of five other tragedies, one comedy, and a translation in rhyme of Lucan's Pharsalia. Rowe, who was born in 1673, and died in 1718, was esteemed in his own day a great master of the pathetic, but is now regarded as a little more than a smooth and occasion

To this age, too, belong three of the greatest of our comic dramatists. Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar were born in the order in which we have named them, and also, we believe, successively presented themselves before the public as writers for the stage in the same order, although they reversed it in making their exits from the stage of life-Farquhar dy-ment of the reign of George II.; one of his proing in 1707, at the age of twenty-nine; Vanbrugh, in 1726, at that of fifty-four; Congreve not till 1729, in his fifty-ninth or sixtieth year. Congreve's first play, the Old Bachelor, was brought out in 1693, the author having already, two or three years before, made himself known in the literary world by a novel called "The Incognita, or Love and Duty Reconciled." The Old Bachelor was followed by The Double Dealer, in 1694, and by Love for Love in 1696; the tragedy of the Mourning Bride was produced in 1697, and the comedy of The Way of the World in 1700; a masquerade and an opera, both of slight importance, were the only dramatic pieces he wrote during the rest of his life. The comedy of Congreve has not much character, still less humor, and no nature at all; but blazes and crackles with wit and repartee, for the most part of an unusually pure and brilliant species—not quaint, forced, and awkward, like what we find in some other attempts, in our dramatic literature and else-ally sounding versifier. where, at the same kind of display, but apparently Many other minor writers, both of verse and of as easy and spontaneous as it is pointed, polished, and exact. His plots are also constructed with much artifice. Sir John Vanbrugh is the author of ten or twelve comedies, of which the first, The Relapse, was produced in 1697, and of which The Provoked Wife, The Confederacy, and The Journey to London (which last, left unfinished by the author, was completed by Colley Cibber), are those of greatest merit. The wit of Vanbrugh flows rather than flashes; but its copious stream may vie in its own way with the dazzling fire-shower of Cougreve; and his characters have much more of real flesh and blood in their composition, coarse and vicious as almost all the more powerfully drawn among them are. George Farquhar, the author of the Constant Couple and the Beaux' Stratagem, and of five or six other comedies, was a native of Ireland, in which country Congreve also spent his child-ically an affected and false one; and of what force it hood and boyhood. Farquhar's first play, his Love seems to possess the greater part is the result, not in a Bottle, was brought out with great success at of any real principle of life within it, but of mere Drury-lane in 1698; the Beaux' Stratagem, his strutting and straining. Nothing can be more unlike last, was in the midst of its run when the illness the poetry of the Night Thoughts than that of the during which it had been written terminated in the Seasons. If Young is all art and effort, Thomson poor author's early death. The thoughtless and is all negligence and nature; so negligent, indeed, volatile, but good-natured and generous, character that he pours forth his unpremeditated song appaof Farquhar, is reflected in his comedies, which, rently without the thought ever occurring to him with less sparkle, have more natural life and airiness, that he could improve it by any study or elaboraand are animated by a finer spirit of whim, than tion, any more than if he were some winged warbler those of either Vanbrugh or Congreve. His moral- of the woodlands, seeking and caring for no other ity, like theirs, is abundantly free and easy; but listener except the universal air which the strain there is much more heart about his profligacy than made vocal. As he is the poet of nature, so his in theirs, as well as much less grossness or hard- poetry has all the intermingled rudeness and luxuness. To these names may be added that of Col-riance of its theme. There is no writer who has ley Cibber, who has, however, scarcely any preten- drank in more of the inmost soul of his subject. If sions to be ranked as one of our classic dramatists, it be the object of descriptive poetry to present us although, of about two dozen comedies, tragedies, with pictures and visions the effect of which shall -49

VOL. IV.

prose, we must pass over altogether; but two poetical writers still remain too eminent to be omitted. Dr. Edward Young, the celebrated author of the Night Thoughts, was born in 1681 and lived till 1765; but his works were all written and published within the present period. He may be shortly characterized as, at least in manner, a sort of successor, under the reign of Pope and the new style established by him and Dryden, of the Donnes and the Cowleys of a former age. He had nothing, however, of Donne's subtile fancy, and as little of the gayety and playfulness that occasionally break out among the quibbles and contortions of Cowley. On the other hand, he has much more passion and pathos than Cowley, and, with less elegance, perhaps makes a nearer approach in some of his greatest passages to the true sublime. But his style is rad

Ramsay's lyrics, though often coarse, have, many of them, considerable rustic hilarity and humor; and his well-known pastoral, though its dramatic pretensions otherwise are slender enough, has much nature and truth both in the characters and the manners.

vie with that of the originals from which they are | till 1758, when he died at the age of seventy-three. drawn, then Thomson is the greatest of all descriptive poets; for there is no other who surrounds us with so much of the truth of Nature, or makes us feel so intimately the actual presence and companionship of all her hues and fragrances. His spring blossoms and gives forth its beauty like a daisied meadow; and his summer landscapes have all the sultry warmth and green luxuriance of June; and his harvest fields and his orchards "hang the heavy head," as if their fruitage were indeed embrowning in the sun; and we see and hear the driving of his winter snows, as if the air around us was in confusion with their uproar. The beauty and purity of imagination, also, diffused over the melodious stanzas of the Castle of Indolence, make that poem one of the gems of the language. Thomson died in 1748, in his forty-eight year. His countryman and cotemporary, Allan Ramsay, the author of the Gentle Shepherd, and of many songs and other shorter poetical pieces written in his native dialect, survived

Our space will allow us barely to add the names of Parnell, Savage, Dyer, Robert Blair, Collins, Shenstone, Akenside, and Gray, in poetry; of Mandeville, Hutcheson, Berkeley, and Hartley, in philosophy; of Butler, Warburton, Hoadley, Middleton, Secker, and Watts, in theology; and of the novelists, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, and Smollet —as the most remarkable of the remaining writers belonging to this period. Several of these, however, survived the accession of George III., although their works were mostly produced before that epoch. Johnson, Hume, Smith, Burke, and others of the most distinguished writers of the next reign, had also already begun to court the public attention.

CHAPTER VI.

THE HISTORY OF MANNERS AND CUSTOMS.