all the fine things which have been said of him are true, they count for nothing with us, he is such a tiresome old prig. We forgive him, however, as we forgive Southey for writing his Vision of Judgment, for without that we should not have had Byron's Vision of Judgment, as without Pamela we should not have had Joseph Andrews. Fielding is the only eighteenth century novelist whom it is possible to read with pleasure and profit now-with the pleasure that we always receive from masterly delineations of character, and the profit that we always receive from contemporary delineations of manners. We feel that we can trust him as we trust Shakespeare, for though we may never have met them or their kind before, the moment his personages appear they authenticate themselves. Byron summed up the world's verdict upon Fielding when he called him the Prose Homer of human nature. Thirty years before Fielding wrote Tom Jones, a much-writing Englishman, a Dissenter, who had been a hosier in Cornhill, a traitor with Monmouth, a trader in Spain and Portugal, a financial projector, and a political pamphleteer, and who had stood in the Pillory, as Pope took care to inform his polite readers-this restless, adventurous spirit, weary at last of persecutions and arrests, sat down in retirement, at the age of fifty-eight, with a wife and six children, and penned The Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner. Like nothing that had ever been written before, it was read with avidity by the common English people, who had not the least suspicion that they were reading fiction. It was so simple and natural indeed, so circumstantial in its enumeration of details, and so

thorough in its narration of incidents that it could not have been invented. There was the same air of verisimilitude in The Life and Piracies of Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders, and the Life and Adventures of Colonel Jack, which followed at intervals of a year each, and in The Memoirs of a Cavalier, Roxana, and The Life of Captain Carleton. The literary art of De Foe was so perfect that it deceived Dr. Johnson, who believed the last of these fictions to be a genuine contribution to history. Such, in brief, was English fiction in the eighteenth century, and, think as kindly of it as we may, we must confess that it was not worthy of the genius of the English people. There was something in the condition of that people during the greater portion of that century, which was not favorable to the exercise and development of their nobler qualities, which obstructed the operations of the mind, checked the excursions of the imagination, and suspended if it did not destroy the creative energy. They proved their patriotism by winning victories for Churchill in the Low Countries, and for Walpole in the House of Commons. They set up an idol they called Loyalty-an insular Janus of Church and State, which high and low alike worshipped. The Church upheld the State, and the State upheld the Church, and between the two the subject went to the wall. Authority demanded submission, and if it were refused enforced it. But it was not often refused, for the Englishman of the eighteenth century knew his place. He was Master, or he was man. If he was statesman, he kept himself in power by obeying the commands of His Majesty: if he was churchman, he kissed benefices out of the hands of His

Majesty's Mistresses: if he was soldier-but perhaps there is no truth in the stories that they tell about Marlborough. It was not a high-minded century, but it was a successful one, for its master-spirits, wiser in their generation than the children of light, contrived to prosper in their double worship of God and Mam

mon.

That the literature of the nineteenth century should have grown out of the literature of the eighteenth century seems at the first sight impossible, so different are their forms and the spirit by which they are animated. But when we study them attentively we discover their relation to each other, and to the literature of the preceding centuries, for whether we see it or not, the whole Literature of England is distinguished by the same intellectual characteristics,-the qualities and energies which constitute the English Mind, and which run through it like the family likeness in a gallery of ancestral portraits. The chief defect which nineteenth century criticism finds in eighteenth century Verse is that it is prose in a metrical form. The quality which we feel in Chaucer, and Spenser, and Shakespeare, and Milton, among the older poets, and in Burns, and Byron, and Shelley, and Keats, among the poets of our own time, is not in it. Precisely what this quality is criticism has not determined, its manifestations are so multiform, and so colored by the personality of its possessors. It was a certain simplicity and freshness in Chaucer, who had a childlike delight in telling stories; a sense of spiritual purity and loveliness in Spenser, who was at once the most melodious and most picturesque of poets; an

intuitive comprehension of mankind in Shakespeare, from whom nature had no secrets; a reverence for austerity of conduct and sublimity of aspiration in Milton; a hunger and thirst of passion in Burns and Byron; a blind devotion to impossible ideals in Shelley, and in Keats the perpetual worship of the Beautiful. The faculty of selecting poetical actions,-actions, that is, which are poetical because they are heroic, or pathetic, and the rarer faculty of creating them when they are lacking in human annals,-neither was vouchsafed to the eighteenth century poets. They were not large enough, nor simple enough, to care for man as he came from the hand of nature,—the creature of impulse, or circumstance, a law unto himself: what interested them, so far as they could be interested, were men in their sophisticated condition, the entangling congeries of artificiality which they called the Town. Now and then they were on the eve of writing poetry, and in almost any other period than the prosaic one in which it was their misfortune to live, they would have written poetry, for among their number there were several men of genius. The penniless young Scotchman who went up to London in his twenty-fifth year, and had faith enough in himself, and in what he had observed of nature in his native land, to write a poem about it, in his own way, was a man of genius. And he was recognized as such by his contemporaries, against whose favorite poets and their methods of poetizing his simple, honest work was a protest, in that it dealt with nature, and not with society, with the pomps and shows of the Seasons, and not with powdered beaux and patched and painted belles. Nor was he

alone, for another Scotchman who was fifteen years his elder, who had worked in a lead mine in his childhood, and in his manhood at a barber's chair in Edinburgh,-instructed by the Muse, had gathered from the neglected gardens of Henryson, Dunbar, Lyndsay, and other of his country's early poets, a handful of wilding flowers, which were still in sturdy bloom, and which he fitly named The Evergreen. Following the departure which he had thus taken from the highway of popular poetry, he explored the lanes and byways of old balladry and song, and plucking in his haste the flowers and weeds that were alike abundant there, he modishly called his armfuls of both a Tea Table Miscellany. A year later he won the laurel which so many English poets had long and assiduously sought, which Spenser hoped to obtain by his Shepherd's Calendar, and Browne by his Britannia's Pastorals, which Pope snatched at, but missed, when he wrote his Pastorals, and which Gay also missed, although he did not snatch at it,-good, easy man!-the laurel of pastoral poetry, which he was the first British poet to be crowned with, and worthily crowned, not only by the Muse who inspired him to sing, but by the plain, simple country folk whom he sang, and who certainly knew whether he sang them truly or not. If ever poet reached the people, it was Allan Ramsay in The Gentle Shepherd. Whether Ramsay and Thomson were aware of the radical difference between their poetry and the poetry of the period, and were also aware of its significance as an intellectual movement, may fairly be questioned. That they had a circle of readers, and perhaps a large one, proves that they succeeded in