party politics.

by the precepts of Boileau and the French classical school. Poetry remained chiefly didactic and satirical, and satire in Pope's hands was more personal even than in Dryden's, and addressed itself less to public issues. The literature of the "Augustan age" of Queen Anne (1702-1714) was still more a literature of the town and of fashionable society than that of the Restoration had been. It was also closely involved with party struggles of Whig and Tory, and the ablest pens on either side were taken into alliance by the political leaders. Swift was in high favor with the Literature and Tory ministers, Oxford and Bolingbroke, and his pamphlets, "The Public Spirit of the Whigs" and "The Conduct of the Allies," were rewarded with the deanery of St. Patrick's, Dublin. Addison became secretary of state under a Whig government. Prior was in the diplomatic service. Daniel Defoe, the author of "Robinson Crusoe," 1719, was a prolific political writer, conducted his "Review" in the interest of the Whigs, and was imprisoned and pilloried for his ironical pamphlet, "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters.' Steele, who was a violent writer on the Whig side, held various public offices, such as Commissioner of Stamps and Commissioner for Forfeited Estates, and sat in Parliament.

Manners and morals in

English society.

After the Revolution of 1688 the manners and morals of English society were somewhat on the mend. The court of William and Mary, and of their successor, Queen Anne, set no such example of open profligacy as that of Charles II. But there was much hard drinking, gambling, dueling, and intrigue in London, and vice was fashionable till Addison partly preached and partly laughed it down in the Spectator. The women were mostly frivolous and uneducated, and not unfre

quently fast. They are spoken of with systematic disrespect by nearly every writer of the time except Steele. "Every woman," wrote Pope, "is at heart a rake."

and the men

The reading public had now become large enough to make letters a profession. Dr. Johnson said that The public Pope was the first writer in whose case the bookseller of letters. took the place of the patron. His translation of Homer, published by subscription, brought him between eight and nine thousand pounds and made him independent. But the activity of the press produced a swarm of poorly-paid hack-writers, penny-a liners, who lived from hand to mouth and did small literary jobs to order. Many of these inhabited Grub Street, and their lampoons against Pope and others of their more successful rivals called out Pope's "Dunciad," or epic of the dunces, by way of retaliation. The politics of the time were sordid, and consisted mainly of an ignoble scramble for office. The Whigs were fighting to maintain the Act of Succession in favor of the House of Hanover, and the Tories were secretly intriguing with the exiled Stuarts. Many of the leaders, such as the great Whig champion, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, were without political principle or even personal honesty.

Condition of

The church, too, was in a condition of spiritual deadness. Bishoprics and livings were sold, and given to the church. political favorites. Clergymen, like Swift and Laurence Sterne, were worldly in their lives and immoral in their writings, and were practically unbelievers. The growing religious skepticism appeared in the Deist controversy. Numbers of men in high position were Deists; the Earl of Shaftesbury, for example, and Pope's brilliant friend, Henry St. John, Lord Boling

Alexander
Pope.

་་ The Dunciad."

broke, the head of the Tory ministry, whose political writings had much influence upon his young French acquaintance, Voltaire. Pope was a Roman Catholic, though there was little to show it in his writings, and the underlying thought of his famous "Essay on Man" was furnished him by Bolingbroke. The letters of the cold-hearted Chesterfield to his son were accepted as a manual of conduct, and La Rochefoucauld's cynical maxims were quoted as authority on life and human nature. Said Swift:

As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew

From nature, I believe them true.
They argue no corrupted mind
In him; the fault is in mankind.

The succession which Dryden had willed to Congreve was taken up by Alexander Pope. He was a man quite unlike Dryden-sickly, deformed, morbidly precocious, and spiteful; nevertheless he joined on to and continued Dryden. He was more careful in his literary workmanship than his great forerunner, and in his "Moral Essays" and "Satires" he brought the Horatian epistle in verse, the formal satire and that species of didactic poem of which Boileau had given the first example, to an exquisite perfection of finish and verbal art. Dryden had translated Vergil, and so Pope translated Homer. The throne of the dunces, which Dryden had conferred upon Shadwell, Pope, in his

Dunciad," passed on to two of his own literary foes, Theobald and Colley Cibber. There is a great waste of strength in this elaborate squib, and most of the petty writers whose names it has preserved, as has been said, like flies in amber, are now quite unknown. But, although we have to read it with notes to get the point of its allusions, it is easy to see what execution it