treating of the Eighteenth Century, or to speak more exactly of the Eighteenth Century in English Literature, the historian is confronted at the outset by a difficulty of definition.

What is meant by the Eighteenth Century in English Literature? The natural (though possibly Boeotian) reply would be-from the end of the Seventeenth to the beginning of the Nineteenth. But this ingenuous answer will not serve-especially with certain modern critics. According to these, the literary Eighteenth Century cannot be confined within the limits indicated, but must rather be held to correspond with a different period of time, beginning earlier and ending earlier, and characterised throughout by specific features which distinguish it both from the period which precedes and the period which follows it. Some authorities date this period from the English Revolution of 1688, and close it with the French Revolution of 1789. Others, with equal show of reason, go farther back, and commence at the Restoration. In a philosophical essay these divisions are defensible,

and possibly useful, although they are always open to the commonplace objection that no great change in thought can be said to begin as invariably and inevitably as Grouse-shooting or the Law Terms. And even if they should be scientifically accurate, they present insuperable objections to matter-of-fact people, inasmuch as to name but one very intelligible drawback-they involve the assignment to the Eighteenth Century of events which took place before that century begins in the calendar. Furthermore, they involve the assignment to the Nineteenth Century of other events which demonstrably happened in the Eighteenth. For these reasons-and notwithstanding the fact that the present volume, for convenience, includes a portion of an earlier period-we shall take leave, in this survey, to regard the Eighteenth Century in Literature as concurrent with the Eighteenth Century in Chronology-that is to say, as extending from the end of 1700 (the year in which Dryden died) to the end of the year 1800 (the year of the death of Cowper).

The period intended having been thus defined, it will be well to indicate the nature of its special gift to letters-such gift, for

the moment, being understood to consist, not so much in the quality and amount of the thing produced, as in the disclosure of fresh methods or fashions of production. Of the actual work of the Eighteenth Century a sufficient report will be found in the biographies and extracts which follow; here, it is proposed to take note only of those new forms of literary > expression which distinguish the age from those ages which went before. That, on or about the date of the Restoration, a change began to be apparent both in the matter and manner of English Literature is admitted even by those who find its cause uncertain and its course obscure. Of this change, in the last decades of the seventeenth century, Dryden is allowed to have been the chief exponent; in the first decades of the eighteenth century, it was maintained and developed under Pope and his contemporaries. Broadly speaking, although its leaders were writers of verse, it consisted in the existence of a state of things which was more favourable to the perfecting of prose. The spirit of a new criticism was abroad, tempering imagination and repressing enthusiasm, endeavouring after symmetry and uniformity, averse alike from decoration and invention. To be direct and clear, to be logical, to regard right reason and plain sense, to be governed by the teaching of the Ancients (filtered through the medium of French criticism), became by degrees the unwritten code of the times. Working prosaically, its chief gifts were in prose. It gave us the first daily Newspaper; and, by the pen of Defoe and his humbler allies, an extraordinary and unprecedented development of Journalism; it gave us, by the pens of Addison and Steele, a form of Essay, which, differing as widely from the essay of Bacon as from the essay of Temple, set the model to its own day and to ours. Under Richardson and Fielding it gave us what was practically the modern Novel; under Hume and Robertson and Gibbon, what was practically the modern History. Finally, it gave us in its earlier years a Poetry of Convention unexampled in its mechanical accomplishment, which, while presenting many of the features of an age of Prose, was still Poetry, and which, exhausting itself after a career of exceptional vigour and brilliancy, left the soil prepared for the gradual but irresistible growth of a truer Poetry of Nature and Romance.

Among these Eighteenth Century innovations, Journalism, which has lasted the longest, begins

the first. There had been newspapers, no doubt, in the preceding century, even as there were brave men before Agamemnon. There was the Public Intelligencer of L'Estrange, and the still-existent London Gazette, which dates from November 7, 1665, when Charles II. was keeping Court at Oxford by reason of the plague. There were the News Letters of Dyer and Dawks (Steele's 'honest Ichabod') which had blank spaces left for any Gentleman, or others, to write their private Business to their Friends in the Country,' and both of which the great Mr Edmund Smith-one of Dr Johnson's poets, if you please-celebrated in Latin Sapphics:

Scribe securus, quid agit Senatus,

Quid caput stertit grave Lambethanum,

Quid Comes Guildford, quid habent novorum
DAWKSque DYERque.

But it was not until the first year of Anne's reign, and indeed but three days after King William died at Kensington, that the first daily paper made its modest appearance. This was the Daily Courant, a little double-columned sheet fourteen inches by eight, printed on one side only, and excusing its exiguity (or lack of advertisements) by a praiseworthy desire 'to save the Publick at least half the Impertinences of ordinary News-Papers.' Its news is exclusively derived from the Paris Gazette and the Haarlem and Amsterdam Courants, but it speedily grew into flourishing life, being promptly followed by a crowd of rivals and imitators, Posts, Post-Boys, Packets, Observators, Registers, Mercuries, Medleys, British Apollos, Athenian Oracles, and the like, not all of which were, in the strict sense, journals. One of the most remarkable of these latter was the Review of Daniel Defoe, a sheet of eight (afterwards four) small quarto pages, written in Newgate (where its author was confined), and, like the first Daily Courant, professing to be 'Purg'd from the Errors and Partiality of News-Writers and Petty-Statesmen, of all sides.' The full title was A Review of the Affairs of France; but it was, in reality, a history of the domestic and foreign affairs of Europe, while in a section entitled Mercure Scandale: or Advice from the Scandalous Club, which began in the second number, its author professed to collect contemporary gossip. As may be gathered from the description of Defoe's Review, a main feature of all these organs was their foreign intelligence, which, being easier to obtain than home news, naturally predominated. Indeed, it is pretty