which the little daughter of a fellow-lodger borrowed the coals in her eccentric scuttle), had published in the year after The Traveller three solid volumes of Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, the materials for which he obtained from an old manuscript collection, and which, of course, he polished and modernized lest they should offend the polite taste of his contemporaries. We differed with Johnson in our estimate of this work, for he ridiculed it as a useless resurrection of obsolete rubbish, while we thought it a rude but interesting monument of poetic antiquity. There were many things which Johnson could not comprehend— which the coarseness of his mind would not allow him to apprehend—and one of these things was poetry. If the tenor of his writings had not indicated this fact, if it was not apparent in his edition of Shakespeare, it would have been forced upon us-it would have been driven into us-by his Lives of the Poets. They could not have been written in any period that had not forfeited every claim to poetic criticism as well as poetic creation. No poet would have consented to begin a collection of English Poets with Cowley, or would have admitted into a collection of English Poets such dreary versifiers as Roscommon, and Sheffield, and Congreve, and Sprat, and Walsh, and no critic could have stultified himself as Johnson did when he penned his animadversions upon the sonnets of Milton. Criticism and poetry were fallen on evil days and evil tongues in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Poetry indeed-at any rate poetry of a high orderwas no longer written. Nor was there any reason why it ever should be again.

There was nothing that ap

pealed to it-nothing heroic that demanded it-no movement in the life of the time that did not find the fullest expression in prose-no seed of light in the darkness, no prophecy and promise of Morning, however remote, that might smite the silent lips of Memnon into Song.

But the darkest hour is just before day. It is so in nature, we are told, and it is sometimes so in art and letters. It was certainly so in poetry, for while Johnson was writing the last of his Lives of the Poets a new poet was writing the first of his grave and thoughtful strains. The son of a chaplain of George the Second, a Westminster scholar, and a solicitor of the Middle Temple, he had been crossed in love, had attempted his own life, and had been placed in the mad-house of a brother poet. Released from durance before he was quite sane (if he ever was quite sane), he retired to lodgings in the country, and became the inmate of a clergyman's family, first at Huntingdon, and afterward at Olney, where he had the misfortune to fall into the spiritual hands of a curate who had once been master of a slave-vessel, and who pressed him into religion and the writing of lugubrious hymns. Another attack of lunacy led to another attempt upon his life. He recovered, however, and, watched over by the clergyman's widow, was induced to divert his mind with gardening and the gambols of tame hares. To these rational amusements he was at last persuaded to add the composition of verse, and having up to this time learned nothing that was of value to himself, he naturally proceeded to instruct mankind. Such was William Cowper, when, at the age of forty-eight, he began to

sing of Truth and the Progress of Error, of Hope and Charity, of Conversation and Retirement. His themes and his method of handling them were not poetical, but they were not averse from the good sense with which he illustrated them, and which made readers for him among the serious classes of his countrymen. His didacticism was accepted for all it was worth. The writing of these poems confirmed Cowper in the literary habit, and revealed to him the natural direction of his talents. He cast them in the heroic couplet, which still maintained its ascendency in English Verse, though its most polished master had been dead nearly forty years, but with a force and freedom that would have startled the delicate sensibilities of Pope. He wrote all like a man, as Ben Jonson said of his poetic son Cartwright, but not like the man he was to prove himself in his next work. The Task, which was published in the year after the death of Dr. Johnson, placed him at once at the head of living English poets. A greater than he was singing, but his first volume was not published until a year later than The Task, when it stole into English Verse at Kilmarnock. The long and dreary reign of Pope and his followers, the reign of prose in the singing robes of poetry, was over when Cowper and Burns began to celebrate what they felt and what they saw-one pursuing a suggestion of Lady Austin, which led him from a sofa into the sober world of English thought and the charming world of English rural scenery, the other pursuing the inspiration of his own genius, which, while he followed the plough along the mountain side, led him into the canny world of Scottish wisdom and the stormy world

of Scottish passion and indulgence. Long hidden from the priests who had thronged her sanctuary and offered her their empty lip service, the Muse revealed herself to Cowper and Burns, and the face which smiled upon them as she lifted her veil was the face of the Sovereign Mother. Lesser poetic voices in the last two decades of the eighteenth century were Erasmus Darwin, who mistook a Botanic Garden for Tempe and the vales of Arcady Charlotte Smith and William Lisle Bowles, who prolonged their personal disappointments in indifferent sonnets: William Hayley, who placated the Triumphs of Temper: Samuel Rogers, who, walking in the steps of Akenside, sang The Pleasures of Memory; Thomas Campbell, who, walking in the steps of Rogers, sang The Pleasures of Hope; and Robert Bloomfield, who, trying to walk in the steps of Cowper and Thomson, sang The Farmer's Boy.

Looking back along the literature of the eighteenth century we see that English Verse was largely cultivated therein, but we do not see that the harvest was ever abundant. Looking upon it as we look upon the nineteenth century, or so much of the nineteenth century as lies behind us, and comparing the one with the other the sterility of the reigns of Queen Anne and the first two Georges with the fertility of the reigns of the fourth George and Victoria-we are disposed to pity our ancestors and to congratulate ourselves. From whatever point of view we compare ourselves with them we are struck with our own superiority. Waiving our knowledge of the natural sciences, the most advanced branches of which were the merest empiricism in their day, and our proficiency in philology, the

nature and extent of which were scarcely suspected then; and waiving, also, the perfection of our civilization, of which railways and steamships, the electric telegraph and the telephone, are the material manifestations; waiving, in short, everything except literature, which depends less than any other intellectual pursuit upon the social condition of the people among whom it is cultivated-what relation, we ask, does the literature of the eighteenth century bear to the literature of the nineteenth century? Let us take one department thereof in which both centuries have produced acknowledged masters; a department which is least liable to change in that it concerns itself with what is least changeable in man-his passions-what did the eighteenth century offer its readers in the shape of prose fiction? Tracing back the succession of English novelists we pass the names of Sophia and Harriet Lee, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliff, Frances Burney, and Henry Mackenzie. When we come to the name of Goldsmith we stop, and yawning over our early recollections of The Man of Feeling, Evelina, and The Mysteries of Udolpho, we take up The Vicar of Wakefield for the twentieth time, and find it as delightful as at the first reading. If we have a strong sense of humor, and are willing to follow it whithersoever it may lead, we can still be amused by Humphrey Clinker and Roderick Random, although they become rather tedious before we finish them. We enjoy portions of Tristram Shandy, but it is with a sort of protest, for we feel that we are being fooled with, and we resent the foolery. We try to read Richardson, but the more we try the less we read; for granting that