In many a vain attempt. How sinks his Wide-flush the fields; the softening air is

MINOR POETS-YOUNG TO CHATTERTON

Before the Augustan age' of wit and common-sense had completed its course a departure from its precepts and fashions had begun. The complex of tendencies which gradually transformed literature in the course of the eighteenth century is usually referred to as 'the romantic movement.' Some, however, prefer to conserve this term for a more restricted application to the revival of medievalism which was a part of the broader movement; while still others prefer to think of these changes as the result of two related tendencies, the return to nature' and the revival of the past.' The English genius could not long content itself with the equably ironic view of human fate which found expression in the essays of Addison, or with the jaunty commendations of God and the universe which capped Pope's essentially shallow and worldly philosophy. Even Pope's Essay on Man, it is worth while to notice, had been preceded by Thomson's Hymn on the Seasons. Three-quarters of a century were to elapse before any first-rate mind should survey life with that comprehensive sympathy and penetrate it with that fresh, imaginative insight which marks the truly great and original poet. In the meantime the useful work of our age of prose and reason,' 'our excellent and indispensable eighteenth century,' was being done. Meantime, also, chiefly among men of second-rate and thirdrate quality, we may detect evidences, stray and imperfect, of that longing to inquire into the mystery of this heart which beats so wild, so deep in us'— which always underlies literature of the finest power. Now, great literary changes are usually accompanied or heralded,' as Stevenson has phrased it, by a cast back to earlier and fresher models.' Thus, most of these minor writers were in some degree imitative. Discontented, first of all, with the subject-matter of poetry, its restriction to what they deemed superficial and trivial in town life, they sought the fields and the mountain's rugged brow.' And, just as they became interested in the solitudes and the untamed aspects of Nature, so they became interested in wild and primitive, or in simple and rustic society, where the elementary impulses of men have freer play. Discontented, too, with the artificial diction and rhetoric and the restricted couplet verse of the Pope school, they cast back' to the blank verse of Shakspere and Milton, to Milton's octo-syllabics, to the fluid stanza of Spenser, and to the free modulations of the old ballad stave. Emulating their models in subject, diction, rhythm,- they caught at times something of their spirit. There is hardly one of these men of slighter power, thinly descriptive or heavily didactic as they frequently are, who does not at some point flash for a moment with the loveliness, or mystery, or melancholy, or boldness, or fine frenzy,' of the earlier masters, or the wilding songs of the folk.

Edward Young, five years Pope's senior, an Oxford scholar of saturnine temper, a disappointed seeker after the bubble reputation,' first in the theater and then in the church, produced at three-score the poem for which he is remembered. The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality, a didactic poem in ten thousand lines of blank verse, is still impressive for its nervous aphoristic force and somber magnificence of imagery and music.

John Gay, the intimate friend of Swift and Pope, was a compliant creature of his age. His prime gift was for travesty and his greatest success in this kind, The Beggar's Opera, created a type. The Shepherd's Week was intended to burlesque the Pastorals then in vogue. But the effect of reality and truth became conspicuous,' says Johnson, the intention was to show them groveling and degraded.'

even when

Robert Blair was a Scotch minister. The Grave, in some eight hundred lines of blank verse, is an early example of the so-called 'grave-yard' school of poetry. It is somewhat singular among the poems of its time and class, in that its diction and versification suggest the influence of Elizabethan dramatic poets rather than that of Milton. John Dyer, a Welsh landscape painter, was also a landscape poet. His Grongar Hill was published the year of Thomson's Winter. Its likeness to Milton's L'Allegro is sufficiently obvious. The Ruins of Rome (1740) and The Fleece (1757) are didactico-descriptive poems in blank verse, suggestive of Milton and Thomson.

William Shenstone was a somewhat spiritless bachelor and recluse who amused himself with landscape-gardening on a small scale at the Leasowes, a modest estate adjoining Lord